Tempest in a teacup

I am currently working on organizing the Thea van Oosten's reference collection of plastic artefacts. I was a superstar up until yesterday. I had completed assigning numbers to each object, inventorying the collection and taking simple "ID" photos with the limited camera setup. I began my next phase which was to enter the objects and their photos into the database, along with descriptions and measurements. Simple, right?

Wrong.

Things were just hunkydory until I got to this one particular blue teacup (yes CCMers, I know this is an atrocious photo, but I am doing the best I can with no tripod and bad lights).

I did not know it at the time, but this teacup would be the undoing of myself and the database. When I entered the photo, it showed up in the database like this.


Annoyed, I tried to re-enter the photo. This is an approximation of what happened.

There thought it was best to shut the program down and re-start. So far over 300 photos had been entered without any issue. So once the program was ready, I thought I'd try to enter the photo one last time.

Cursing my fate, I was very close to giving up. Then I realized... maybe the file was too large for the system to handle. Ha ha ha. Silly me, I just need to resize the photo. I did, and this is what happened.

This is an actual photo of the database screen. Yes. That is a tiny image of a teacup. I had to call my collegues over to make sure that I wasn't losing my mind. Anna quipped, "let me know if a bowl of soup shows up. Then we know it's time to go home and have dinner." I'm holding out for a wineglass, but a bowl of soup will do.

A Supposedly Delicious Thing I'll Never Eat Again

Today I ate my first croquette. A croquette is a small fried roll with a creamy, minced inside. Although croquettes originate from France, they have spread to the Netherlands, and apparently are a very popular Dutch fast food. They are in bizzarre fast food vending machines everywhere, and also in our cafeteria. I had watched the lovely Marleen (another intern, and the posterchild for Dutch good looks: tall, impossibly leggy, blond) eat a croquette for lunch several times. She smushes hers on a bread roll and tops it with mustard. She always looks very happy eating this "treat" of hers. Perhaps this was some sort of Dutch beauty secret. So today I thought I would give in and give it a try. Horrible idea.

I understand that there is no accounting for taste, and that I like a lot of things other people find weird. But imagine, if you will, cheap mushroom soup left to congeal to a luke warm mass. Wrap that in the greasiest mix of breadcrumbs and sorrow. Deepfry in oil that was used to deep fry old sneakers. This is the croquette.

Never again.

P.S. The moody picture of the croquette is NOT MINE. I stole it from the internet (sorry internet) because I was too hungry to take a picture of the one I ate.