Now I know why house-owners never have any money

After the electricians finished, I decided to take a shower.

Stella went downstairs into the cellar to turn on the water heater for me (since the one in the bathroom on our floor doesn't turn on), and the main fuse went.

Thank goodness it was one you could just flip back on rather than the old melty kind you had to replace.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't the fuse for the circuit but the mean breaker. And the socket worked since the washing machine didn't mind being plugged into it.

Stella called the electrician and they said the heater was probably faulty, no wonder given its age. (Though he said he would have expected the top one to fail first. But then, that one won't even switch on.)

So I went over to Sonja's and showered there. And we'll be ordering a new heater.

Other "little" things we're considering replacing: filling up the oil tank now that prices are fairly low; replacing the windows with ones with better insulation; putting in a proper stove since the one there is really rusty (though fortunately, the oven part of it still works); converting the oil heating to gas; converting the hot water supply to be heated by the main furnace rather than separate water heaters everywhere.

Ah well. Fortunately, we're made of money so none of this will be a problem.

Also, random observation: heating on 2 seems too cold, but just one notch over 2 is fine. I wouldn't have thought that such a small change could have such a perceived difference.

Your papers, please!

In Germany, everyone past a certain age must (as I understand it) have an identity card; this card shows not only your name and date of birth, but also your address.

When you move, you have to de-register at your old place of abode and register at the new place (though you can combine the two if you move within one municipality; then you just have to register at the new local office and they'll inform the local office responsible for your previous address). That will also update your identity card (they put a sticker with the new address on the appropriate area).

Since identity cards are compulsory and bear an address, they're occasionally used as proof that you live in a certain place (for example, people might take down your address when you rent a car or buy a mobile phone or something).

Since I'm not a German, I have no such address-bearing ID. When someone needs my address, I need to give them a "Meldebestätigung" - a confirmation that I'm registered at a particular address.

In the past, I'd typically get a new one whenever someone needed my address, since that didn't happen that frequently, but recently, I've taken to carrying a photocopy around with me along with my passport, so that I'll have both pieces together (photo ID + address).

Since we've moved, I also got a new confirmation of registration for the new address, and while putting a copy of the new one with my documents and removing the old one, I got a bit nostalgic: the old one is probably the last one where we have three different dates on it.

You see, the confirmation lists all of the people who live in a particular place, along with the date they moved in, and we moved in on three different days: I when the place was finished and ready to rent, Stella six weeks later after we had married, and Amy when she was born.

(Strictly, we all moved into our last flat together, but since it was one floor down from the previous one and the address didn't change, we didn't re-register. Nor do I think we could even have.)

But now, it says "18.10.2008" for all of us. Ah well.

Hm, and I just noticed that the new one only has one given name for all of us, while the old document had both of Amy's given names on it. Incorrectly, I suppose, since the title of that column is "Rufname"; that is, the name you're called by (typically the first given name, but in some cases, a later given name -- e.g. for my newest nephew, his third given name). And Amy isn't called by her full name, so just "Amy" is what it should say for "Rufname".

Speaking of which, apparently Stella's ID card is incorrect, since it doesn't list her maiden name. But it'll expire next May anyway, so she can get that fixed then.

I can haz warm water?

Apparently, the water heater at the top was fine all along -- it had just tripped the emergency low water thingy that prevented it from running dry.

When the electrician came to install the new heater, they opened the old one, found what had happened, and reset the thingy and apparently it works again.

So the one in the cellar is still on the fritz but that's not the primary shower anyway. And we should have warm water again now! And saved the money for a new heater!

Spell-checking Romansh

The other day, I dreamed that I studied linguistics of some kind or another and worked on a Romansh spell-checker as part of my work (perhaps an input file for myspell/hunspell or something like that).

I thought I'd ask to see whether something like that—or even simply a decently-sized list of correctly-spelled words—exists, so I asked the Lia Rumantscha.

Today, I got a response telling me that he only knew of Microsoft Office's spell checking function for Rumantsch Grischun which, he said, used the Pledari Grond (the "Big Dictionary" that's also available online) as a basis, and that he didn't know of any other systems. (And that he hadn't even heard of ispell/myspell/hunspell before; I had mentioned that OpenOffice.org uses hunspell, for example.)

Pity. Though I suppose that's par for the course for a language with a small native speaker base, unless you get an idealistic enthusiast or three who push forward the work themselves.

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Incidentally, his response to me was in Rumantsch Grischun, which was a wee but welcome surprise for me since the past few emails I had received in Romansh were in various idioms, which I don't understand as well as RG.