Middle-class bliss

As I am writing this blog, I am supposed to be writing a paper about the touristic potential of the South of the Netherlands, in respect of the future mining potential of the area for the following 50 years. Right....

It's sunny outside, the cats are frolicking around, the husband is screwing something or other in the garden (literally), and I am not getting anything done.

So I move on to the funner things in life: sending you some pictures of our very bourgeois, nothing to report life.


I’m back at home for a week now and the cats and I have become good friends. It took all of 5 minutes.
On the last day of fieldwork I decided to go out with my significantly younger classmates. I was physically and mentally exhausted, I was feeling blue, had had enough of not being at home and felt like dancing. Let’s just say that this is not the right frame to go out with students which are prone to binge-drinking. Ask me about that story next time we speak, online let’s just keep it at: when I got home next day around 16h, I was not in the best shape.
I want to take this opportunity to thanks my wonderful husband for meeting me halfway to trade the car earlier in the week, so I could drive myself and some of my classmates home instead of sitting in the bus and then train for many, many hours to get home. As I am very prone to carsickness, especially in busses, the last bit of decorum I could gather would have been lost in that trip home...We had Tiësto on the radio in the car, and the moment we pulled up from behind the bus, on the Autobahn in Germany and I could really step down on the gas, honk at the bus and glide away at 160 km/h is still one of my happy moments of that week.

Admittedly there were many happy moments, we had magnificent weather and this last fieldwork was good for realizing how much knowledge we have acquired over the last year. In as little as one week (if I don’t get myself to work on this paper, 2 weeks) I will be done with my first year, which I have passed rather successfully.

And to get home and having a fluffy warm cat crawling on your lap and falling asleep within seconds is awesome…

The garden is doing great, we have already eaten some homegrown vegetables, something I have to learn to do. As with fishing, after all the hassle, I have a bond with it and don’t want to eat it. Joris saying: ai! when I cut into my mini carrots or making little screaming noises when the peas go in the wok, does not help.

But enough lollygagging, I really need to get some work done, I have to write 10.000 words and this blog is now almost 500, which I should have spent more wisely.

Almost vacation time!!!



Here some other moments of bliss: the switching cats (they actually wiggle themselves in the nook of Joris' elbow, from the bottom up.) What is the fascination of cats with printers?