Martijn & Lissette's weblog
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Acquired: Monstertje (Gorki) & Blonde on Blonde (Bob Dylan) Sunday, 01 February 7:18 pm
I am a little jealous of my moveable type using friends. Pivot claims to be able to use categories, but it seems like I am going to have to put on my coding hat to make it possible. Don't feel like it.

So here is another one in the virtual category: acquired.
We paid a quick visit to Concerto today. Since I was still in that Gorki mood I was happy to find a copy of Monstertje. Priced at 11.95, charged at 7,99, I couldn't be happier with this hard to find item.

Since I am trying to rediscover music that I like that's not in my native tongue I also bought a bob dylan cd. I'm going to have to find my little corner in the world of folk music. With this cd: So far, so good. I'll be happy to take any suggestions.
Lissette bought the goldfrap (spelling?) cd wich is pretty nice as well.

The single of the poemas that lissette bought me a few days ago is no good. I am glad I didn't go see those guys play.
I still like the album though, mind you. Let's blame it on van dik hout and forget about it.

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Meneer Aart Monday, 02 February 11:22 am
Sometimes i feel like my life is nearly over. everybody must have noticed that time flies by faster the older you get,but I feel that having a steady job increases the speed by another few steps. maybe it just means that I don't have such a miserable life. That I enjoy my job and all that. I think I am turning into a houseman from the 50's. Soon I will be wearing suits on saturday.But where is the ambition, and, more importantly, the desire to live a more interesting life?
I do not seem to suffer from those emotions.As long as there is food on the table, and news at eight, things are good.


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sounds good, feels good, looks good too.... Wednesday, 04 February 5:01 pm
hello hello,
well i havent written anything in here in awhile and i think my lack of enthusiasm and or action may have offended martijn. sorry hunny.
i have just been a bore lately. i tried to paint the other day but it just ended up looking like mud. so i wrapped my painting in a plastic v&d bag and put it in the bin today. i did spend a nice afternoon with martijn in amsterdam this past sunday. we walked home which was great. it was dusk and windy but the wind kinda just carried us so we could enjoy ourselves.
ive been doing aerobics in my tiny house recently. my weight loss effort is going slowly but surely. im glad about that. i feel so guilty nowadays for even looking at the candybars at the checkout stand.
so i fill my days with shopping, wandering around amsterdam and hanging out in coffeeshops, house hold chores, the occasianal creative spurt, lots of music and bbc television (especially the cooking/ antique show variety) and very recently i started exercising oh and watching what i eat. i do start dutch classes next week. that should give me a bit of that structure i yearn for. and after danny's gone im gonna crack down on finding a job and house. that's for sure.
martijn got home unexpectedly early just now. nice.
today i got up and spent the morning with sam. it was a nice time, trying to keep permanent markers out of her reach and let her try on all the jewelery i own at once. she felt so pretty. we also watched finding nemo which sam brought us as a gift (this is not out on dvd here yet) right when i was about to make her fries for lunch she took a big dump and it made the whole house smell like crap for an hour or something. gross huh.
i also got my gravy train c.d. and gossip tshirt in the mail today. im anticipating driving martijn up the walls when he hears gravy train. talk about amateuristic synth pop screamy crap....i love it, he's gonna hate it. oh well, thats just how it goes.
sometimes it feels like we grew up on different continents....oh wait. we did. :)

danny will be here in a week exactly!!! horray.

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the sweet swans of nes... Wednesday, 04 February 5:27 pm
one of my favorite things about living here is the swans...


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discman, bankboekie, horloge, en hash Thursday, 05 February 11:22 am
als iemand een van de bovenstaande items ergens heeft gesignaleerd, melden graag. zij zijn respectievelijk enkele weken, dagen, dagen, en anderhalf jaar zoek.

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Remembering Fiep Westendorp Friday, 06 February 10:51 am

Fiep Westendorp died yesterday at the age of 87. She was a dutch childrens book illustrator. She was well know for her collaboration with prolific dutch childrens book author Annie M.G. Schmidt. She made drawings that children in holland have grown up with for generations and now that she's gone I'm sure that its really the end of an era for lots of people.

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Inburgering Monday, 09 February 11:46 am
I just dropped lissette of at her first inburgeringsclass. For all you non dutchies out there: inburgering is what we do to foreign people to make 'em behave and speak dutch just like any jan or margriet.
I think I've been more nervous about it then her, and I'm really wondering how she's doing right now (she's a good 3 hours into her lessons if all went well).
I had a good feeling about it after I dropped her of though. The people walking into the school looked pretty sane. I'll be meeting with her when she is done to see how it went...


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Ik ben Lissette. Hoe heet je? Monday, 09 February 6:11 pm
i have officially begun the mandatory intergration process into dutch culture. so far so good. today was an easy day in class. introductions, polite sayings,computer lessons. i sat between a lady who was a doctor from serbia and a girl who had never used a computer from marroco. it was a multi cultural class to say the least and both the girls i talked to were either there for either their boyfriend or husband. i saw two other girls walked up by their boyfriends one of them kissed hers in front of the whole class...i mean full on kissed him.
i didnt expect it at all but it was fun having martijn with me on the way to school this morning. i didnt realize how close it was to his job. it was really great to be able to talk to him face to face so soon after my class was over.

ive been so excited about danny visiting i dont think i had time to be nervous about my first day. martijn was definetly more nervous than i was. still, its nice to have it over with. after we spent his lunch break together and i was getting on the metro to go hang out in amsterdam martijn turned back and said to me..buy yourself something nice.
it made me smile for like five minutes. it was so cute how sincere he was about it.
i ended up buying myself a little incomplete tea set for 3 euros. its kitschy but way cool in my opinion. theres just something really sweet about it and i liked it so much i didnt mind that the tea pot was missing. i would post a picture of it but our camera is in for repairs right now.

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he's here!!!!!!! Thursday, 12 February 09:14 am
danny got here yesterday afternoon. its so amazing to see him in these surroundings, its like my worlds have collided. so far he's only seen the village and last night we went out to dinner in the next town over. But he was in a very good mood for someone that just took 3 flights. The airline lost one of danny's bags too. so were hoping that gets here before he goes to london.
today is gonna be a day of sightseeing in amsterdam. i cant wait. i hope it doesnt rain down too hard on us.


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Keep those hefeweizens coming please Sunday, 15 February 8:44 pm
Ah, Germany. The land where the eighties live on forever. I am here supporting an event for the well known suplier of imaging solutions that pays the bills for us. While the week, and especially the last two days leading up to this were probably the most stressfull in my working career, I feel pretty good now. I made the silly mistake of booking a morning flight while officially I do not have to get my hands dirty until tomorow. I figured I'd have the time to check my emails at the hotel. A funny story in itself. Hotels have those little boxes with high speed internet and modem connections. My modem connection was blocked out though, so I did it the cheaky way and just unpluged the phone and stuck the jack in my laptop. This act of civil disobediance was immidiatly answered by a hotelboy knocking on my door saying there was something wrong with my phone. I am not sure if he understood when I told him I hooked up my computer to the thing, but after 5 minutes of gesturing he apperantly left me alone.
Then it turned out that my companies email service was down. I remember hearing something about that. Of corse, if maintenance needs be done they'll do it on sunday.

Next challange: lunch. This hotel has 3 restaurants. I think you can have lunch in two of 'em. After I made sure there really was no Burger King in the vicinity I chose to go for the American Sports restaurant. I thought the cheesy concept might be amusing. It was exactly as you would expect. Lots of pictures of American Football players on the wall, a few tv's with sports on, and two or three framed shirts with autographs, one of die Mannschaft selber. I have yet to find a place in Europe that aims to go for the American diner feel withouth turning out to be a really hopeless and depressing place. At least they have a bottle of ketchup and mustard on the table, I thought. Lissette would like that. The one thing that made me feel like I really was in America was a desperate craving for mayonaise. I don't mind that other countries think it is gross to put mayonaise on fries but please, WHAT IS THE POINT OF SERVING FRIES WITH YOUR FOOD THEN ANYWAY! The fact that the ketchup coming out of the Heinz bottle was clearly not Heinz ketchup made this craving even worse. It wasn't even normal shitty ketchup, it was the worst I ever tasted. It had this side flavor that tasted like straw to me. I wonder what Heinz thinks about places that refill Heinz bottles with buckets of inferior stuff. I think they could actually make a good point about it in court.

Anyway, maybe it was the ketchup, but when I got back to my room I completely passed out. I slept for four hours having the weirdest dreams. Since my colleagues were probably going to have dinner at the congress hall, and I was still kinda woozy from my nap, I got myself some roomservice. There's something really depressing about hotels, and roomservice is the epithamy of that. You find yourself in a building where every room is identical, on the 35th of about 50 floors, looking out over the business center of an anonymous city, eating food at your little desk in your bedroom. The fact that the rooms here are quite small (I was a bit surprised to tell you the truth. I've had better) doesn't help either. Last year I spent ten days abroad and the hotel just starts to feel like a prison. You start to feel very anonymous yourself too, since your private life outside of work is spent being naught but a customer. And, lets face it, German tv is not known for it's quality. Currently there is a great Robbie Williams docu on MTV though. I like Robbie Williams, but even if you don't it should be a pretty nice 'I am a star and it sucks ass' rockumentary. I know it will probably be over in a few minutes though, and it drives me to despair a little bit. Why didn't I bring a book?
There's a normal and a mormon bible in my cabinet though, that should be some fun. There's also a book written by the dude who apperantly started this chain of hotels. Well, congratulations for finally being able to toot your own little horn mr (hotelchainname). Your literary work has served me well as a hiding place for my cash.


German word of the day: klingeltohn, as in 'Heinz, ruff mir sofort ann! Ich habe die neuste supertolle klingeltohn von Herbert Gronemeyer auf meine handy!'

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Getting the hands dirty Monday, 16 February 8:08 pm
Today was very nice. I arrived at the congres center a little after 7:30 in the morning. Was very impressed actually. Nice building, nice surroundings, nice weather. It looks like the stands here are shaping up nicely as well. It's the last day of set-up, and it feels like a swarming bee hive. It's fun, and not nearly as hectic as last years CeBIT. Another thing that pleased me is that this time, our office did not resemble a treehouse in a desert.
It wasn't a very hectic day either. Right now I'm just sitting in the office by myself making sure no one pisses on the tables while my colleagues make a final round to see if we can mean anything to anyone still. At CeBIT I would've died 3 deaths by now, but now I just long for the shower and a beer. Very bearable indeed.
Tomorow is suit day, first day the event is open to the invited guests. I look forward to it.
Then tomorow night I fly back to my hunny-bubbles. Right now I'm enjoying the sound of an orchestra tuning/rehearsing their bit for tomorow and the buzz of the stand builders at work. They'll be working till the break o' dawn.
For a guy who's not much more than an administrative assistant, I have a pretty cool job. It's just, I wish someday there would be some action outside of germany. Next few times that'll be the case actually. Hurrah!

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Biologie Friday, 27 February 8:17 pm


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my classmates Saturday, 28 February 10:53 am
this is noam from isreal, puja from india, xiumin from china, ghada and her daughter (ghada is from egypt) & sagit shes from isreal as well. puja, xiumin and i have been spending lots of time together recently and im glad to say we enjoy eachothers company alot.



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