ront-mundu: 2014

Thursday, November 27, 2014

This is my life - Shirley Bassey

Aaand winter is back...how time flies! The last time I blogged, we were enjoying a fab Indian Summer and the first weeks of school were slowly unfolding.

Well, that's over, these have been the most intense weeks of university in my life so far. For 8 weeks, starting just after my birthday, I was going to try the impossible and cram 6 courses into one term.

I had all these plans of blogging and reading for fun before the crazy 8 started, but now as we are nearing the end of week 5, I only now finally got the inspiration for this post.

As I was procrastinating yesterday, cleaning out our closet, with some very special folding coaches (nope, that's not folded right, let me throw down the stack so you can do it all over again!) and some music on, Shirley Bassey came by with This is my life. You know it, it was used in this brilliant commercial: Apeldoorn

I was belting along at the top of my lungs (only way to go about this song): It's funny how a lonely day can make a person say: what good is my life?...[ ]...Sometimes when I feel afraid, I think of what a mess I made of my life. Crying over my mistakes, forgetting all the breaks I've had in my life. [ ]...Guess I'll just add up the score and count the things I'm grateful for in my life....

And I thought: Yes. I will count the things I am grateful for in my life. Everything else is fodder and will pass. All my problems are first world problems. So here goes, in no particular order.

I am grateful for Life. I wake up everyday on a bed, in a house, in a country not devastated by war. I did not have to do anything to deserve that, it just is and I am deeply grateful.

We have health, nothing can make up for that.
I have both my parents with me on this earth, albeit on the other side of it, but I can still call and speak to them any time I want and am lucky to see them every year. They have provided me with a home growing up and the skills to cope with everything that life throws my way and I am intensely grateful for that. And then double, because of Joris' side too.

I have two sisters that I love and miss, both of whom have given me nieces and a nephew to spoil and hug to pieces. And on top of that sisters in law, doubling up to make us aunt and uncle 5 times over (going on 6).

I have a large extended family that binds together like no one's business when push comes to shove.

I have friends I can count on and that count on me, with whom I share good food, good wine and good conversations.
Words can not express how thankful I am for having a husband, best friend, room mate and travelling companion like Joris, that challenges me and pushes me in all my endeavours (and does the dishes too). There is no better provider and baasje to our cats than my Soeks.

I am grateful to have choices in life, even if sometimes the choice is just the daily stuff like what to make for dinner.

I am thankful for a lot of stuff, give it a try, you will feel a lot better about your life when you really think about what you already have. Practice really does make perfect, I find I have to remind myself less and less of how blessed we are.

I wish you all a great Thanksgiving!

New family!

I love this picture!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We did it!

1 year in, growing a new donation!

Friday, September 19, 2014

Only Time - Enya

So, let’s get one thing out of the way. I apparently don’t do vacation well. I bitch and I moan and I basically am a huge pain in the ass. If anyone ever doubted the extent of the patience of my husband of 5 years (happy anniversary to us!), the fact that he did not push me into a ravine or left me on an abandoned stretch of road in Umbria, is a true attest to it.

This is the story: St. Antonius the Uncomplaining (aka Joris) and I finally got to take a vacation! In the 7 years we have known each other we have gone to and from between the family and have tagged along on business trips, but actually going somewhere we haven’t been before, for fun? This was the first. We took Onyx (our car) down to Italy for a week. It was so awesome!

But before I get to that story, it has been a few heavy weeks since the last blog. Our family suffered a loss and that was quite a shock. It opened our eyes to how fickle life can be and our generation took it as a wakeup call to keep each other in the loop more. Blood really is thicker than water and even though we don’t speak each other daily, we have to keep the lines open. And on that note, I went off Facebook.

The pretentiousness of it has been bugging me before I even joined and I must say, that since I quit, I am having such nice meets with real people, in real time! I try to actually call people more, to hear each other’s voices and giggles. We heart Skype.

There was the World Cup and lots of nice evenings outside with friends and family, the garden has been good to me again this year and we had our share of pets to babysit. We heart Bubbles.

We have been to an animal shelter Dierenthuis, amazing what they are doing there. Note to self: need to volunteer more. There Is no time for a Looup fundraising event this year, but it is still in the back of my mind, I really want to contribute something to their awesome efforts.

What I find definitely worth mentioning is that Joris has donated stem cells. We have been blood donors since we turned 18, each on our own side of the world, and we signed up for stem cells a while ago. What this entails: you do a cotton swab in your mouth, your info goes into a worldwide databank and the chances in Holland are 1:340 000 that you get called up as a match for someone, somewhere in the world, that needs bone marrow transplant for a shot on a chance of recovery. Looong story short, somewhere in the world, this last month, a lady of 61 got a chance at a chance of recovery, thanks to my fabulous husband. I hope that this inspires others to sign up as well (www.wordstamceldonor.nl).

Pales in comparison, but soon after that school started again for me. If all goes well (a lot of ifs and whens, though), this might be the year I get my university degree. The amount of work that needs to be done made me take my business facebook and webpage offline. So if you can’t find KiKi online, don’t panic, just send me an email. Good food is still available, just not during finals :o)

But back to our road trip, JorisMaps® and CindyTranslate® got in the car and drove 1600 km to Assisi. Rewind. Joris and Cindy hemmed and hawed for 4 months, finally just a week before double laptop searched a destination and got in the car soon after. It was fabulous. Every time we encounter a challenge like this, we keep realizing how well balanced a team we are. Joris hesitates, I push through. Joris researches the hell out of it beforehand and gets exactly where we need to be, and I figure it out once we get there and roll with the punches when things don’t go as planned. We have equally matched bladders. We both are more aware of being too prudent about stuff and push each other in doing silly stuff, just because we can. I do Autobahn, Joris does Milan.
We had a blast. We had many moments of ‘I never knew that about you!’ stories of our childhood and Joris now knows that I really, realllly like to sing along in the car (especially if we are in the car for 10+ hours. I think he learned to conjugate a few Spanish verbs along the way as well. We heart La India.

So annyhoo, we went to Binasco, just outside Milan for the first night. We went for a splendid dinner and our first of many bottles of Prosecco of our vacation and a quick run the next morning before pushing through to Assisi. Joris had managed to get the navigation system to the beginning of the road of where the B&B was that we were staying at (http://www.assisiresort.com/). According to Trivago the hotel was 2 km from the city center. NOT. After a looong day in the car, on scary roads with trucks barreling down like the own the road and you are not there, in your lane, minding your own business…..we still had to off road it into the Umbrian outback, being overtaken by 4x4 Panda’s and tractors carrying wood. The people who did the St. Christoffel Park roads, probably did their internships in Assisi. The potholes were the size of bathtubs and the smaller ones where filled with left over concrete, gravel or asphalt. Inclines of 30 degrees next around the bend of hairpin turns. (Here the bitching and moaning started I guess). And then we got to the B&B, in the middle of nowhere, no pool in sight, the check in lady barely understood English, no air conditioning and NO WIFI! Stress! The 20 hours in the car were getting to me. I was not even looking at how beautiful our surroundings were.

30 minutes, at the pool with a glass of cold bubbly….our third favorite P came sauntering up to us. Pool, Prosecco and pussycat, what more could we wish for!!! All was well with the world.

The road was bad enough that we did not leave in the evening, so we stayed in for dinner and dressed for it every night. Great food and fab wines, all from the lands right around us. The service was great and we would really recommend it to anyone looking for a break.
The second day we went into Assisi, what a precious place. We played where is Waldo (check out the pics) and had a great walk in the Bosque de San Francesco and had lunch on the land. Third day Perugia and then the weather turned for the worst. We really got the time to sleep in and lounge about and go exploring around the place. We made some great new friends we, we taught them about the WineApp and they taught us to read between the lines. We had dinner together and we laughed so much my cheeks hurt! Hope to see you gals next year! But who knows? Only time. (We heart Enya)

So we drove back through Switzerland and as we came north, the weather cleared up and we have been having an amazing Indian summer second week of vacation for Joris this week. Our anniversary week celebrations have been going on the whole week and will be concluded in a 16k run this Sunday, with 65000 others. Wish me luck!