Recently in Life Category

Should I summon my dream lover with yarrow under my pillow? Nine flowers or nine blades of grass?

I packed up all my unread books today. I don't need to buy a new book until 2010. Curiously, I got two copies of my bookclub book, The Book Thief,  from Amazon. My first thought was 'fuck, did I click 2x on that!?' then I saw it was an error and thought 'wow, I'm lucky.'

Midsummer's luck, maybe?

Never in my life had I considered tracking my period, until this year in March when I got kind of interested in knowing when it was going to happen next and whereabouts in my pms cycle I was. I have a calendar in my diary, provided kindly by Opzij magazine, (a feminist magazine here in Holland) which allows you to track and predict your menses based on when the last one started.

It gets better than that (and there is a reason I'm telling you this). Today I found, via browsing, a website called Mon.thly.info which sends you an email telling you when you'll be getting your period based on the dates you've entered in previously. I was able to enter five months of data and now the calendar will give me interesting details like which day and phase of my cycle I'm in, like this.

Today apparently I am on day 16, having ovulated on Wednesday and my cycle averages 28.2 days. If I'd wanted to make babies yesterday was do-it-day.

Imagine how useful this will be for planning when to get pregnant, for when you hit the menopause? Or when not to book your holidays? And aren't people just so clever sometimes?

Now someone needs to make a PMS calendar based on the same information except instead of your own email you enter in your boyfriend/boss/co-worker's emails and they get an email that week saying 'Beware of the bitch!'

'I've looked for love in stranger places.' - Melee, Built to Last

The distance from Amsterdam Schiphol to Harare Kutsaga is approximately 5109 miles or 8222 kilometers. Flying time is approximately 17 hours including stopovers, either in Nairobi or Johannesburg or both.

The approximate number of days since I last saw my parents is 2008.  There were approx. 2191 days between that visit and the one before.

London - Harare cheapest fare is around 627 euros.

There are 120 days until my dad turns 70. So I'll be up 63 days if I can get back in time...

• I bought an epilator. It's a nice thing, once you get over the fact that instead of the 5 minutes in the shower doing your legs that it used to take you, it now takes half an hour to achieve the same result. And you end up with this ghastly uber-prickle situation whenever you get goosebumps. Nasty!
  
  
• I just paid my daycare bills all the way back to October. They hadn't billed me yet so I got a bill for 2600 euros in one go. Ouch. More shocking than the epilator.
  
  
• I had my hair cut short at my local hairdresser. This is the kind of hairdresser where you can't make an appointment but you have to wait in the queue. It cost 22 euros versus 60 at the middle-aged-lady hairdresser I went to before who cut my hair all wrong. The fancy-pants hairdresser I went to in Amsterdam was 150 euros and this haircut is better than any I had from either. I had to wait 2 hours for a place but still - score!
  
  
• When I was in the hairdressers one of the daycare workers came in. This is someone I've known for almost 6 years, since Seb started at pre-school here. She'd been fine all along until about a year and a half ago when I noticed that she was behaving oddly. Subsequently she started working at the daycare that the kids are at now and a few weeks ago I noticed that she was drunk when I picked up the kids. I reported it to the owner, and she was placed on office duty, away from the kids, and was supposedly getting some help. On Saturday when I saw her she was absolutely shit-faced.
  
  So, what to do now? Tell the owner of the daycare? Keep quiet? This is a difficult situation for me because part of me is sorry for her and part of me is still the little girl that had to deal with alcohol issues growing up.
  
  
• On Thursday I went to see Martha Wainwright in concert at Paradiso. It was good, but I was tired and she sort of went on and on a bit in some of the songs.
  
  Con: the going on and on.
  Pro: she looks like she's having a kicker orgasm during some of the songs. Go Martha.
  
  
• The next concert I have tickets for is Radiohead on 1 July. I'm considering Alanis on 13 June, but listening to some of the new songs I'm not so sure... some of them sound a bit nasty? Moratorium is ok. Here's a preview clip for the whole album. The thing about Alanis is that she makes me wonder if I'll ever grow up? I mean, it doesn't look like she has.
  
  
• It's almost the end of another school year. The kids finish school on the 27th June and then go into daycare for the summer. I'll be working mornings only while I recover from my neck injury, but they'll still be at daycare the majority of the time to allow me to rest. After the summer Joe goes to Group 3 and Seb to Group 6.
  
  They don't know about the divorce yet. They'll be going to a workshop in the summer where they'll be with other kids in the same situation and be encouraged to work through their feelings. I hope when we tell them that they'll be able to adjust quickly to their new situation and understand that they actually have more time with each of their parents, separately.
  
  
• Watched Atonement this weekend. Sad, but James McAvoy is a joy to behold. He was a joy in Shameless too. Chloe thinks so too.
  
  
• My new car is a Hyundai Getz 2005 model. It looks like this one. Same colour, just with a sunroof too. Nice huh? I'll try not to crash this one!
  
  
• Comments are still broken. They were never really intuitive with this version of Movable Type and now they're absolutely broken. Sorry! One day maybe I'll get around to fixing them. I've tried re-enabling comments but nothing works. Until then, you can mail me. Link in the sidebar.

'Somedays aren't yours at all,
They come and go
As if they're someone else's days' - Regina Spektor, Somedays

Today was the last day of the Avondvierdaagse (four day walk with the kids, written about previously here and here).

I didn't walk this time because of the injury from my car accident, but I served coffee and drinks on the first day and I took pictures today.

Taking pictures is weird sometimes. I read a story once about photographs, or perhaps it was an excerpt from a book. The woman who wrote it had a miserable childhood but if you looked at the photos it seemed perfect.  'Picture perfect' is a wonderful expression, isn't it?

I hope mine don't just have a picture perfect life but a life that's just good, in pictures and out.

Here are my babies being picture perfect. I hope they remember days like these.

I've been reading The History of Love and there are some sentences in that book that really just get me. Absolutely get me, like hands around the heart and squeezing hard get me. Most of the book has to do with death in one form or another. Losing people, losing things, losing life.

Here is a quote:

'Three years later, I lost Mameh. The last time I saw her she was wearing a yellow apron. She was stuffing things in a suitcase, the house was a wreck. She told me to go out into the woods. She'd packed me food, and told me to wear my coat, even though it was July. 'Go,' she said. I was too old to listen, but like a child I listened. She told me that she'd follow the next day. We chose a spot we both knew in the woods. The giant walnut tree you used to like, Tateh, because you said it had human qualities. I didn't bother to say goodbye. I chose to believe what was easier. I waited. But. She never came. Since then I've lived with the guilt of understanding too late that she thought she would have been a burden to me. I lost Fritzy. He was studying in Vilna, Tateh - someone who knew someone told me he'd last been seen on a train. I lost Sari and Hanna to the dogs. I lost Herschel to the rain. I lost Josef to a crack in time. I lost the sound of laughter. I lost a pair of shoes, I'd taken them off to sleep, the shoes Herschel gave me, and when I woke they were gone, I walked barefoot for days and then I broke down and stole someone else's. I lost the only woman I ever wanted to love. I lost years. I lost books. I lost the house where I was born. And I lost Isaac. So who is to say that somewhere along the way, without my knowing it, I didn't also lose my mind.'

I'm not sure of the moment exactly during the last three weeks that I became quite so preoccupied with death. I remember thinking during the accident that I might be killing my companion. Filled me with absolute horror, and I was too busy being horrified to consider the possibility of my own death. I seem to have been considering it ever since.

It's a strange thing isn't it? You want to be the one who goes so you are not the one who is left. Being left behind is much worse than just being oblivious (I believe there is no afterlife), but perhaps wanting to be the one who goes first is the ultimate form of running away?

When I was little I lived with my paternal grandmother in the week and my mom and dad on the weekends. I would have to say my bedtime prayers every night (on my knees if you please) and mine would be a mantra of 'Dear God, please don't let Gran die' over and over under my breath until I could get off my knees and get into bed. The gods must have listened because Gran lived into her 90s.

Eventually, when she died, I was distanced enough not to be really affected. She'd had Alzheimer's so she wasn't really herself anymore anyway. I often wonder though how that feeling of extreme attachment ebbs to a point where you feel vague discontent at the idea of someone's death, but not the gnashing misery that you felt in your gut when you considered it before. How easily things slip away.

My maternal grandmother's death affected me much more badly. She was younger. I was closer to her and I was too preoccupied with my life at the time to visit her much when she was in hospital. I didn't understand that she was dying because no-one told me, so when she did go, and I was told on a sunny day that she had died I was aghast.

My grandfather died some time later and even though I loved him, my Oupa, I didn't really feel a huge pull of anything when he died. I had visited him a lot after Ouma died and I think he was just really relieved to go. I barely remember either funeral, although I must have been there. Instead, I have vivid memories of my Great Uncle Vic's funeral, but that's a story for another day.

Yesterday at the divorce mediator's office we were asked if we had any funeral insurance and when we answered 'no', the mediator said 'wow, living dangerously, aren't you?'

Living dangerously by not having funeral insurance? Doesn't that seem a little ironic?

What do you think? Do you have any funeral insurance? Do you think you need any? What's your approach to the adventure of dying?

I'm watching The Holiday on DVD right now as I write this. I've just had a holiday too, a mommy-holiday.

My boys came back today from three weeks away in the US. It's been pretty odd actually. I missed them, but at the same time I kind of slipped back into the role of being a single person and it was nice! No chores, no running to and fro, only myself to take care of. I love my kids, but it was incredibly liberating to just be me for a few weeks, and not be someone's mom. From today I'm two little people's mommy again and I'm just as happy to be back in my mommy role. It's a role I've held for a really long time. Soon I'll have been a mom for longer in my life than I've not been a mom, how weird is that?

So they're bigger (in three weeks!) and browner and they talk with American accents. They also forgot how to ask to leave the table, seem to have lost their volume control mechanics, and are so full of E numbers they glow in the dark, but they're home and they're my babies and I love them so much.

Otherwise, how do I feel?  I feel a bit like I'm in the cinema. I've watched the trailer for the film I'm about to watch and now I'm in the interlude waiting for it to start. I'm not sure of the genre of the movie but I'm hoping it's an epic love story. A Merchant-Ivory production with a happy ending. I'm as curious as you are to see how it all unfolds.
 

'You could say this was an independent lovesong, it's nothing like to us what love meant to them' - Scarlet, Independent Love Song

What do you write when you have nothing to say? Usually very talkative, I've found myself saying less and less recently. I'm dumbstruck. Maybe it has to do with the amount of things I need to do, that I wake up and my head spins with the sheer amount of stuff that's in there. My friend suggested I keep a notebook next to the bed and write down everything I think about so I can empty it all out. Thing is, I'd be writing all night and filling it with things like 'change hairdresser appointment' or 'buy new washing powder'.

Conversely, I feel I can't write anything else. No fiction, no made-up stories, no real life stories. I've had so much I could have written about. Countless opportunities to describe my life, the day to day stuff that people, accidental (disaster) tourists like you, like to read. Everything that could be interesting seems to be blanketed in the mundane. Who wants to read about the mundane?

Today's list of the mundane, sprinkled here and there with the truly wonderful.

1. Results of car accident = whiplash. 6 - 8 weeks recovery time. Ouch.
   
   
2. A new bicycle and a new linen shirt. Bought a new bike for where I stay in Utrecht part of the week. Sadly dissuaded from the hot pink version and conformed with uniform black. But hey, the brakes and the light work.
   
   My new linen shirt is gunmetal grey, neither black nor hot pink. Gunmetal is my new favourite colour, but it doesn't look as good on me as it does on my favourite blonde.
   
   
3. Sunshine. Lying in the park reading the papers and falling asleep on the grass. I took my jeans off from under my dress and lay with my legs bare against the grass and remembered what it was like to be a little girl. My friend, Belinda, and I used to take turns to tickle each other with blades of grass while we sat on the school field at break times. I would close my eyes and she would tickle up my inner arm with a blade of grass and I'd have to say when she reached my elbow. Then we'd swap. Do kids still do these thing?
   
   
4. World Press Photo exhibition.  I wandered through all the photos mostly untouched. How many photos of Iraqis and Afghans and women under the Taliban and starving children have we all seen?
   
   My heart is stone.
   
   So I walked and looked and then I came to a photo taken by a Zimbabwean photographer named Bold Hungwe. It depicts a scene with a shoe flung skywards as a man runs from watercannons and teargas. I stood in front of a landscape I knew, with people I might have known, and ice ran up my spine.
   
   Maybe we only truly become better people when we can look at another human being's suffering and not need a contextual association? Perhaps we only reach the pinnacle of humanity, the best we can be, when we are touched by events which have no personal connotations for us, no identifying with the deceased or the tormented?  I don't know, but I'm not there. I still need a context. Maybe it's just self-defence.
   
   The photos were excellent but the images of misery and the futile nature of life left us curiously depressed and needing a drink and a lie-down. The exhibition is running at the Oudekerk in Amsterdam until 22 June. After that it might be coming to somewhere near you.
   
   
5. Scrabulous. I'm playing Scrabble on facebook with a friend who likes to play like me! No two letter bullshit words. Real words like obviate (except I couldn't make that one because I had an H instead of a T) and triple word scores and messages to say 'I got you!' Lovely.
   
   Scrabble is surely all about being the cleverer one. The one who can think up long and complicated words and then preen when the right letters come up? Speaking two languages diminishes the first language though. I have much fewer words than I had before I spoke fluent Dutch. Nice excuse, isn't it?
   
   
6. Letting go. I deleted all my inactive phone numbers. I cleaned up my facebook. I threw away all the bags of clothes in the basement. I am starting with paper next. Do I really need that receipt dated 2 June 1997 for some computer hardware that is now defunct? Will I feel all free when it's all done?
   
   
7. Books. I'm reading Nicole Krauss' History of Love right now. I just finished reading David Baddiel's Whatever Love Means. In between I read 'I Feel Bad about my Neck' by Nora Ephron.
   
   Whatever Love Means was astonishingly good. I started off thinking it was some boy-lit kind of thing. You know, bloke screws around, finds girl who changes his opinions, blah blah blah, but it's not.
   
   It's based around the death of Princess Diana and the affair that Vic, the protagonist starts with his best friend's wife, Emma. There's a curious twist at the end when you really do ask yourself what love really means and the question seems to stay with you.
   
   When I was at the GP's office after the accident and he found some neurological problems in my left hand, left field of vision and my hearing in my left ear, I suddenly thought about what love really meant. Would love mean walking away if I had some horrible neurological damage?
   
   I suppose that intrinsically, because I've been brought up with a very stiff upper lip, love for me means not burdening anyone else with my problems or expecting anyone else to solve them, so in a sense I would walk away. The more I care, the less I ask of a person. Conversely, love for me means embracing, not just accepting, the other person's problems or ill-health or stress at work or simple ill-tempered bloody-mindedness. So I want to embrace someone else's differences and spare them mine? And they say it's a sign of intelligence to be able to hold two opposing views simultaneously?
   
   
8. Charlotte's Guide to Bores. Fantastic. I think she needs to publish some flash cards for hauling out of your pockets when each specific kind of bore is standing in front of you. I've been stuck with the Enthusiast more times than I can tell. The last notable time was at a party where I got stuck talking to a bloke about taps. Yes, faucets. Those things from which water spews forth. And spew he did, lengthily. Even my attempts to move the conversation onto something more dirty than water, (he was a man after all), were swiftly turned back to the intricacies of importing German taps into Holland.
   
   So, if you're an Enthusiast and you've been talking to someone for two hours and they say suddenly, 'I'm sorry, I can't take it anymore' and get up and leave, it's really time to start reading your audience a bit better.
   
   I have simple advice for how not to be boring - make other people talk about themselves. They'll remember you as scintillating witty and charming. You, however, might end up listening to someone talk about taps all night. It's a risk you have to be willing to take.
   
   
9. Merging. Traffic, life, work. If I had to categorise the style in which I navigate my life it'd be that of a highway driver. Once I'm in my lane I'm happy as Larry, but when I need to take an exit my palms sweat, my blood pressure rises, my hazard lights come on. Unexpected diversions or difficult choices and my equilibrium disappears. I thought I'd gotten better at making choices but presented with a list of them this week following
   my accident I fear I'm no better than I used to be.
   
   
10. Barbecues. Mmmm, it's barbecue time again. Here's my favourite marinade recipe:
    
    Nigella's Salt and Pepper Marinade
    
    2 tablespoons Maldon salt
    4 cloves garlic
    2 tablespoons pink or white peppercorns. I use that mixed peppercorn stuff that has some pimento or something in it. It's the sadist in me.
    60 ml olive oil
    2 tablespoons lemon juice
    
    Crush the salt and peeled garlic cloves in a pestle and mortar until it goes all thick and gooey. Add the peppercorns and crush some more, then add the lemon juice and oil. Pour into a freezer bag and then add about a kilo of chicken wings. I usually don't measure carefully and I just throw stuff in. A bit of chilli sauce is also really good added to this.
    

Now I'm taking my headache back to bed.

'These foolish things remind me of you.' - Bryan Ferry, These Foolish Things

Writer's block so here's a list of random bullshit:

1. I'm 5 ft 11. In England I felt like a giant. Now that I live in Holland I know that the English are just short.:)
2. I have naturally curly hair that goes very straight if the weather is wrong (it doesn't matter what kind of wrong, just wrong!)
3. I got my driver's licence when I was 32. I just had my first car accident.
   
4. I believe in second chances.
5. And true love.
6. I never thought I would. How things change.
   
7. Apparently I talk posh and plummy and sound like I should be sipping G&Ts on the verandah.
8. It must be true because my drink of choice is gin & tonic. Or if I'm not drinking, just plain tonic. All that quinine from my childhood must have made an impression.
9. I've had bilharzia but never malaria. (See, quinine works).
   
10. I loooooove to dance.
11. I think that airports hold the emotions of everyone who ever passed through them.
12. I work in an airport. Go figure.
13. My mom used to recite this rhymne to me when I was little: 'There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very very good, but when she was bad she was horrid'.
    
14. I don't like team sports much. I'm better pitched against my own best time.
    
15. I find it hard to say no to anything so I'm overcommitted and invariably disappoint people.
16. My favourite country out of those I've visited so far is Mozambique.
17. I'd love to visit Zanzibar. About ten years ago I watched a travel documentary about a cycle tour (like this one or this one) around the island and it's stuck with me.
    
18. I grew up in a landlocked country.
    
19. Subsequently, I love the sea. Islands especially. Landlocked sounds so final. Like a country in prison.
    
20. I'm turning 35 in January 2009. I wonder if I will feel different with only 15 years left to 50.
    
21. I'm a work in progress. I lost about a million kilos between 2005 and 2008. I'd like to lose 10 more.
    
22. I don't have a favourite movie, or a favourite song. I have a life soundtrack.
    
23. Childbirth was incredibly difficult but not nearly as difficult as being a good mother.
24. I grew up with a maid.
    
25. Ergo, I like ridiculous things like having my sheets ironed.
    
26. I like eating in bed. I also like carpet picnics on rainy days.
    
27. I leave my clothes in heaps on the floor. Despite this, I think I'm tidy.
    
28. I know lots of useless stuff, like the Latin names for plants, how to make obscure things like sausages, how to fold a fitted sheet.
29. I'd have liked a really big family.
30. I wonder all the time whether I'll have enough time to do everything I want to do.

I'm sorry - comments are disabled.

'The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity' - Bob Dylan, Things have Changed.

Today I could write about a million different things.

I could write about Paris in the springtime, Sacre Coeur in the sunshine, walking, walking, walking, eating, drinking, loving the warmth on my skin. I could tell about the finest meal I've ever eaten or about sitting on a park bench at Pont Neuf or walking along the Seine. I could tell you how far away it feels from where I grew up and how I'd look at my mom's cosmetics and see London-Paris-New York on the labels and wonder if I'd ever go to any of them? I've crossed off two. Next stop, New York?

I could write about Queen's Day in Utrecht - my first and it was fun!

I could write about the car accident I had on Tuesday evening and the details of what happened, but I'm not into disaster-tourism (well, just a little maybe). Your past doesn't flash before your eyes, your future does. You think you'll think about everything you might have lost, but what you really think about is everything everyone else might lose. How quickly things can change.

I could tell you that one of my best girlfriends is expecting her third baby and I'll be living in the same building as her, three doors down, when the new baby comes. Simultaneously overjoyed and terrified . New babies are so very very small.

I could tell you I haven't written anything in a lifetime, but you know that. So what I will tell you is that the sun is out, life is short, it's time to have fun.

Anything could happen ...