The 150 day challenge or Fat-bottomed girls - Queen

Yeah... we make the rocking world go round....But that (or I should say huge butt) aside, there is not much else being fat-bottomed is good for in my book....(walking down the street in downtown Punda being above ideal weight, some men [you know the kind, the where-have-you-been-all-my-life-and-why-don't-you-go-back-there-kind] might try to persuade you otherwise).


I used to have a fairly healthy lifestyle. Lots of outdoor activities, many hours in the gym, good food, a whole lot of dancing and I drank mostly fruit juices (of the fermented grape kind and is sugarcane not technically a fruit?).

Since moving to Holland about 1500 days ago (ok, a bit more, but for the sake of the story it sounds good), after putting on the usual move to the other side of the world pounds and the freshman 20, I did some halfhearted attempts to get back into the rhythm of gym every morning, or running in our magnificent back yard Amsterdamse Bos. Somehow I just couldn't keep it up for more than 3 weeks at the time, before long it became a lower priority in my day and a few weeks went by without seeing the gym.


This not only resulted in a new wardrobe of stretchy pants and many awesome muffin-top pictures, but also a gnawing sense of disappointment. I have always had great discipline. Just not think about it, just do it, first thing of the day: get your exercise in! Why can't I find my rhythm?


But(t) anyhoo, to make a long, sad story short, last weekend Joris and I were taking procrastination to a new level (hey, we said we were upping the ante this year) and got stuck unable to tear ourselves away from to back to back episodes of I used to be fat on MTV. A just graduated high school senior, with weight issues, gets ambushed by a personal coach and they have 85 days to lose weight to make it to college in better shape. The stories are inspiring. Some of the kids lose up to 35 kilos, exercising every day for 4 hours and adapting their eating habits. Granted, they are 18 and at that age it is a bit less daunting to lose weight like it is when you are over 30.


In the back of my mind the premise of the show stuck with me. A fixed number of days, a fixed goal and a fixed meal and training program. So I thought up the 150 day challenge for myself.

150 days, 15 kilos, daily exercise and more dancing! 

We have been eating healthy for a while now and I have almost completely cut out the grape juice since the new year started, so I thought no time like the present and decided that today would be day 1. I am at 85 kilos now and will work towards 70 kilos over the period of 150 days. Every day I will exercise for at least 35 minutes (we love you, Jillian) and will be back in running shape for the 5K on March 30, and continue building up towards the 16K in September. I will be dancing at least 1 time a week, whether it is just me and my videoclips (I will nail that Run the world choreography and ALL of the Pussycat Dolls clips. Good thing we have curtains!) or actually going out to salsa or anything else! Every 10 days there will be a weigh-in.

So this morning at 6:30 the alarm went off (HOW DID I DO THIS AT 5:30 FOR YEARS???), I fought through the hail and snow (of all days!) and put my time in at the gym. And tomorrow we are doing it again. Until it doesn't feel like dying and murder all in one when I hear that beep.

I am sharing this with the world, so you can help keep me motivated. So give me a shout out in 3 weeks!

This magic moment - The Drifters

Today is my big sister Lisa's birthday, together with my twin aunts and our brother from another mother Terence. Happy birthday to all!

And tomorrow is another VIP birthday, my wonderful, patient, funny, smart and strong husband is finally catching up with me in age tomorrow.

And today was such and unusual day, that turned out so great, that I had to think of this song. And with this song, this clip:



There are some movies I can quote word for word. Not all of them are classics in the general view of the rest of the world, but within our household some movies have left their mark. Aaah, memories....

So, today. The plan was alarm clock, wake up, get crackin' in the shed and garden, do a few rounds to the dump and then do the rearranging of the furniture in the living room. Eeuuhh....that's not how it went. To start, we went to bed waaay to late to have the alarm go off on a Saturday at 8. So we did the wake, renegotiate and back to bed thing that only the blissfully childless can do. After checking the door to the living room that Looup was ramming since 6:45. Hmm, maybe her wiggle is from repeatedly hitting her head against the door, for such a tiny cat she can make some serious doors open by pure persistence....
So, an hour later, we started to get moving, basically that meant, into our robes and Joris to coffee, me to my laptop and there I got stuck in a Buzzfeed loop. You know what I mean, when you get stuck in the funny thing and cute picture slideshow vortex and realize only at least an hour later that you have been hungry the whole time and just forgot...
So yeah...a few hours later that planned, we moved into the shed. Did I mention that it was 2 degrees when we woke up? Most of what I have stored in the shed is baking molds, when are made to transfer heat evenly and quickly. That goes for cold too. So after getting some gloves, we cleaned out the shed, got the car full to go to the dump and I moved to the garden.
Still not feeling it though, so I sat there with my good music on, enjoying the quiet, before starting to haul gravel as was the plan. When my ample behind was numb from sitting on the ice cold steps, I started digging through the stones to fill the buckets. Bucket to back of the house, gravel under house and repeat.
So after 2 garden utensils broke doing this, I was ready to quit, so I dug out some plants that had been bugging me from the garden, waiting for Joris to come home. Bye bye rhododendrons and rhubarb. No more rh-plants for us.
Joris got back and we did some more shoveling, but I was done with that. We went in to have lunch and then it took no convincing at all to get Joris to nevermind our to do list and just go to Amsterdam and go shopping.

Which was so much fun! Sometimes you plan your shopping and EVERYTHING just goes wrong. You can't find what it is you went for, so you try finding something in a panic, nothing fits, or fits right and the store close sooner than you were expecting...
This was the complete opposite. This year we have allotted ourselves a clothing budget, so we had that covered.We got everything we went for within minutes, a lot cheaper than expected, had a lot of nice tryout sessions and there was sale EVERYWHERE and more stores stay open until 19h on Saturday now. And the magic moment when not only you stumble across your size in the sale (not once but several times) and then you are in the fitting room and it all fits.....MAGIC! So Joris got my birthday present today, new Vans:

I got some new stuff for school and we had some awesome quality time. (Joris shared his cookie with me, I'm keeping him!)

So we came back home, had our leftovers anyway and are now chilling with a crappy movie and good rum, with 2 out of 3 cats, waiting for midnight. Another magic moment!

Built to last - Melee

After a looong day after a looooooong week, yesterday I was turning off the highway into Amstelveen, after a trip of 1.5 hours to drop a personal hero off. The iPod had been shuffling in my favor for most of the way and after 3 nice latin variations (a Gloria Estefan I knew word for word, a great Marc Anthony slow starting cha cha cha and a baki number I never heard before but with  a baseline that probably scared the guy in the car next to me at the stoplights), Built to last came by on the final homestretch.
This song was one of the songs we picked for our wedding program/fan.  And yesterday it immediately inspired a blog.

This last week has been a intense one, filled with work and chores, but also with fun stuff. Friends of ours are moving and I had been helping throughout the week to get the little stuff over, so that yesterday we could get the big stuff over with a truck. The aforementioned hero [or (mini) Tante Emma minion, depending from which side you are looking at it] Arjan, slept over on Friday to help out. So Friday evening we had a Catan game going, both won by Arjan like a boss and it was wonderful to hear Joris relaxing after the week he had. A friend of Joris' from primary school from 25 years ago, that we stumbled across in the supermarket a while back, completed the group. It keeps amazing me how some friendships are instant and lasting, disregarding age and location...

So, to get back at other stuff that are built to last. The man of the house of the friends moving, likes to build things. Out of wood. Hard wood. In other words, heavy wood. So yesterday the guys lugged complete floors around, enough custom made cabinets to fill a library and just miscellaneous wood. Ah, the jokes were legendary. We stopped laughing a bit though, for a while.  Most people, as students or just starting out, have met BILLY. In all forms and sizes, cheap, dependable, 1 tool required, carry home yourself Billy. Meet William. Or better yet SIR William.

It took 4 men and a woman to move big Willy from the wall, flip over on the side, move through the living room, down slippery stairs, through the yard, through the guesthouse and into the truck. My hand were too full to take pictures, dangit! That is when the jokes became even better. About all the benefits of Ikea, about accidents happening during moving, about the limits of friendship and when to strike as minions...

Another new friend we made yesterday: Fred. A Saab 900i special Flintstone edition, that the guys pushed from the old house to our 'pit'. Fred is looking for a new owner, so contact all your architect friends and spread the word!

Giving you the best that I've got - Anita Baker

Forgive me Internet, for I have neglected my duty of documenting my every move online...(still hate Facebook), my last blog was October 2012 :S
This new year, once again, I will not be making new year resolutions: I will be keeping my old ones. So one of the thing I will be doing more of again, is blogging! As I have blogged before: I really do believe that we have been put on this earth to be good. Good to others, the planet and to ourselves. And I am recommitting to that. One day kindness will win over the world!

This has been the third holiday season in our own home here in Holland, fourth in total. And finally we are starting to get at the same level of us that we were when we left the island. Not to beat a dead horse, but ending up here unplanned has been really hard for our little family. Apart from constantly prioritizing our single income, our energy levels were sapped. And when you barely have enough to deal with your own lives, it is hard to give to others.

In 2013 I saw the return of some old parts of our lives. Funny enough I had the most to give through my company. Kiki did some fun projects for charity over the summer and fall and just before the year ended I donated my hair for a good cause. I am back in school full time since the fall, after a slow start in 2013. Joris is finding his way between the 2 teams he is working with, that took some character building from his part to balance that out. We had wedding and births and pregnancies all around us, and have made some amazing new friendships. Once again the garden was a joy to work in and DIY projects were finished. There were more and more days that the Happy moments were plentiful and prolonged. Writing this down, I am so counting my blessings! (another reason to blog more often!)

It'll grow back soon enough...

Movember on steroids

Produce from the garden

Good times in good company

DIY greenhouse

Cupcakes for charity

Workshop for charity

Good music

We had a good summer

Quality time

New family: Galchi!

New family: Finn!

New toys

Kiki Cupcake 1 year!

Charity cookies

Soespraisboxes galore!

Many happy hours in the kitchen

Long time dream: check!

We have now arrived at the point where we have the energy and resources to think and plan and do outside ourselves. So 2014 we are upping our game! We started with a new year cleanup, de-cluttering our tiny home and lives. Holding on to junk can really weigh you down. And how we accumulate stuff!

Our ultimate goal for being here is to prepare for our trip around the world, after me finishing up university, so this year we hope to find the opportunity to foray a bit into the preparations for that. So we hope to see most of our friends around the world this year and make some new ones along the way. We will celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary in September, incredible how fast that went.
This promises to be a fun year. I hope for all of us!