Winter sun

since yesterday we finally have a few days off! we drove from groningen to amsterdam with 2 weeks worth of laundry.... ugh (only in amsterdam we have a washing machine)..... as i refuse to use a dryer, i managed only 1 load yesterday evening, as this morning we left again! first to tims grandmother, who turned 99 today!! after that, we drove on to a fancy hotel in the netherlands (we got some discount), we had a walk this afternoon, and then i took the above picture. the sun was shining like crazy!!!  the hotel has quite a nice gym and a pool, so... we used both and then had a nice dinner in a restaurant..... and now its time for the leftover homebaked brownies..... hmmmm.....

tomorrow we both took off from work. jippiejee!

Last post!

last post of 2014!!! this year went by fast, and i didnt post much, nor took a lot of pictures....  several big things happened, though.... the first half of 2014 i was still out of work and i sort of had given up on ever finding a job. when other people started to come up with "alternatives" of all sorts to my joblessness, however nice it was, i felt it truly was hopeless.... while tim was working long days, i just went to the gym, looked and applied for jobs, went to the supermarket, baked bread. days did go by fast, and at some point going to the supermarket became an event all by itself. end of february i applied for a job, right on the deadline (i think there was one hour left). i felt i had all the skills they asked for, but couldnt quite get what kind of work it would be. they actually had another position too, slightly different; but for that one i even had less of a clue what the work would be about. having applied for one, i forgot about the other and eventually missed the closing date on that one. months i heard nothing..... and guess what?! i was invited for an interview, did NOT get the job (became second), but was invited for the one i didnt apply for. and thats the position i now got!! i think its the best possible match, it turns out it has all the elements i was looking for (science, learning (LOTS of) new things, social relevance). but.... around the same time tim got a new position on the other side of the country. so.. when i finally returned to working life, we also had to adjust to living apart. thats not as easy as it seemed, but i am so very happy to be working again (and feel so bad for the numerous people i know that still have not found a job).

other than that, tim got his PhD this year and i could finally expand my shoe and clothes collection... something i could not allow myself while out of work... :)

so... thats about it. the year started bad for me, but really ended great, and i am looking forward to go back to the office again next week, even though my little working-from-home-while-on-the-other-side-of-the-country-with-tim was very pleasant too. it felt like a mini-holiday, work included (sure, i didnt work VERY hard).

enjoy new years eve! and who knows, maybe next year i will post more! maybe not... ! :)

Purple ride

soooo... today its purple, which is still my favorite color! this is in the car museum in the hague, where we went the day before tims birthday. i actually wanted to go shopping that day, and that was also the plan when we left the house, but instead we went to the museum and it really took forever to get out of it again. they have nearly 250 cars!!! and even without reading all the descriptions and not staring at each one intently, it took ages to get through the museum. and yes, at some point i was a bit bored! there were just so many, many.... cars..... the highlight for me was the purple car above. its in the central hall, so i had seen it upon entering the museum already..... it was custom made in new jersey in 2008, and the back has room for a harley davidson motor (as you can see here).

the museum was about to close, but there was still time to do some lunging in front of the purple car.... :) afterwards, there was just a tiny bit of time left for shopping...... ah well, it was for tims birthday after all....

Merry christmas!!

and again its been well over a month since i last posted! in the mean time i have been doing lunges (i am still not good at them, but the instructor in the gym said i just need to continue practising), AND i have been to geneva for work (i was in the united nations building for work, whoohooo!), and tim had his birthday, and what-not....

and then we were in some shop and tried these christmas-glasses...

here in the netherlands we have 2 christmas-days. but tim is working today.... buuh. and tomorrow as well. we left amsterdam sunday evening and drove to groningen, and he has been working in the hospital the 3 days before christmas and i have been working from home (well, his home). with crappy internet, so that was a bit frustrating. but still, i am lucky to have a job where it is OK to work from home, and where its possible to work from home :) and had i been taken those days off, it would have been OK too... but well, i thought. tim is working, so i will work as well...

anyways, i hope you had a great christmas!

Bed cover

in the fanciest store in amsterdam (i would compare it to bergdorf goodman, i guess), we saw this bed cover. i got tim to pose, and took several pictures, but my camera is getting a bit old, and the one pic where he is really aligned with his new body is missing... (sometimes it wont actually store the pictures anymore. on top of that i lost the lens cover 2 weekens ago. buuh. still need to do something about that). i was really tempted to buy it. were it not for him.... then at least for myself!! but that was before i saw the price.... :)
ah, and imagine the excitement kids will have! im sure i would.... maybe not as a ballet dancer... but i think the cover next to it was a super hero or so.... ;)

Rembrandt lunging!!

rembrandt does lunges!! did you know? the painter? yes! i didnt know either, until we had a proper look at this statue you can see above. a lunge? no, not lunch. tim is trying to do a lunge too, but as you can see, its totally wrong, while rembrandt's lunge is perfect.

never heard of a lunge? i dont know when i heard of them first (probably when i saw bojos do them in the gym, heavy weights in hand)... i do very well remember when i did one for the first time. it was not too long ago, and i didnt have to do one, but many of them, while holding a barbell on my shoulders. ehm yes, i was following a "body pump" class. result? i could barely walk down the stairs for days afterwards. ugh.... now i try to do them every now and then, and although wikipedia says that "the lunge is a basic movement that is fairly simple to do for beginner athletes", i dont think its really that easy.... (or perhaps im just not an athlete...). here you can watch a video as to how to do a proper lunge. but you can also just look at rembrandt above, whahahaha.

this is along the river amstel. we biked there on saturday, as it was another great after-summer-day. no jackets needed! behind rembrandt you see a "molen", which was built in 1636. lunging rembrandt was placed next to in 1969, 300 years after he died. many of rembrandt's drawings were made along this stretch of river. i just wonder whether he was always lunging when he painted. then he must have had some powerful leg and butt-muscles! ;)

While waiting

yesyes. defending your PhD in the Netherlands is a very serious business. you need to dress up, and everything goes according a strict protocol. the candidate and his/her 2 paranymphs have to be present well in advance. so there is time to get the "protocol" explained, and even practice a little (where to stand, when to sit, where to bow to the committee). of course, we were even earlier than "well in advance". but that was fine. did i mention already the weather has been great this september?! while august was awful, september feels like summer. as a result, we were overheated when arriving at the place where it would all happen; its not easy walking around in fancy clothes i can tell you....

we had to wait in the above room, so i had some time to take pictures. i guess you are supposed to work up your nerves in this room, but this was a better way to spend our time.... no? :)

University wedding

so. not yesterday, but the day before already tim defended his PhD thesis. that took 45 minutes, as tradition dictates. when the 45 minutes were over, the lady with the black hat came into the room, hit her stick onto the ground to indicate the defense was done. then all the professors (you cannot see them, they are in front of tim here, sitting behind the red tables) went into some room to decide whether tim should get his PhD. after a short while they came back, and yes, he got it! in the photo above (taken by my sister, the official tim-phd-defense-photographer), tim just got his diploma, its in the red thingie he is holding in his hands. right now he is listening to the "laudatio" given by his PhD advisor. 2 "paranimfen" are sitting behind tim (one of them being me, perhaps you can figure out which one! ;) ). paranymphs are similar to best men/bridesmaids in weddings... as in fact you marry the university (really!! i always said so, and now i read wikipedia says the same, so it must be true!). nowadays, the role of the paranymph is purely ceremonial, but in the old days they could also help answering questions during the defense. in fact, we all 3 worked in the same lab (yes, i worked a bit with tim, and yes, even one chapter in his thesis is actually "my" paper!). soo.... during the defense i actually felt like answering as well... just when they asked about "my" chapter... of course i could not have done it better than tim did... :)

it was a very nice day and evening. but exhausting!!

Big day...

this is tims thesis! its about the work he did in boston. after a successfull defense, he will finally be a PhD. just like me, so then we are even again.... :P ah no, he is also an MD, and i am not and never will be one.... 

but anyways. so he did publish a paper recently that was also picked up by news sites all over the world. perhaps you saw it? here is a link to the BBC news, and it was also on the dutch news site nu.nl (here), or a more serious link, here. it was really interesting to see how news sites were just copying the story from other sites, changing it bits by bits (not always correct), at some point tims name got lost too, and in some articles they even prominently name the photographer that was hired to take some pictures..... (the above picture was taken by tim himself, btw). there are also interviews, with the second author and the boss (ah, and i already forgot again, with tim as well!!), here and here.

so, this famous person is getting his PhD tomorrow!!

now, if you are around the netherlands, or utrecht, more specifially, you can witness this defense, as it is a public happening. just be at "het academiegebouw" at the domplein in utrecht tomorrow, september 9, at half past 2 (well, then it starts, so i would be there 5-10 minutes in advance...). its fun to witness a dutch PhD defense if you have never seen one.... (here you can see where the defense will take place).
edit; here is the official announcement. and here (unfortunately there is no full access) is the original researchpaper i refer to above... im just as bad as those news sites... :)

Far away...

this was in scotland too. i was faster taking pictures and got back in the car again (on the wrong side!!! hahahaha).

since monday, tim lives in groningen, a 2 hour drive from amsterdam. he started a new job as a doctor in the hospital in groningen (the biggest hospital of the netherlands). so, over the past weeks we furnished a place there. mostly with stuff we found in secondhand shops (often its so much nicer than ikea, and much much cheaper!), combined with some stuff that didnt fit in the apartment in amsterdam, and even quite some stuff we found on the streets in our neighborhood (every wednesday night you can put out "the big trash". quite often people put some really nice stuff out that they dont want anymore. more often than not, it doesnt stay on the street very long.... as we grab it, or more often, because others do so. there are even people driving around on wednesday evening, just to pick up anything that might be usuable...). anyways, i think the place is really nice now....

and me? im still in amsterdam.... in the weekends tim either should come back here, or i go there (its really far!! it feels like a foreign country almost! i know i know, for americans this distance is nothing, but for dutch you need to cross half the country!). not the ideal situation, and unlike anything we planned, but well.... sometimes you cannot choose.....

Self portrait

in case you forgot how we look after my long absence... here a recent self portrait. just last week we went away for a few days to scotland. we flew on wednesday evening, arrived in edinburgh, started thursday in the gym of the hotel (if you had asked me to do such a thing 5 years ago, i would have laughed very hard), then the mcdonalds for breakfast (i never had breakfast in mc donalds and it was the first thing we encountered while we were very hungry), and the off to the scottish highlands in a rental car! quite the experience to drive on the other (the wrong!!) side of the road! im glad i didnt have to drive, not sure i would have taken all the turns the right way.....

but it was beautiful!! absolutely amazing. so much green.... and we were lucky, as nearly all days were extremely sunny and even hot! (only one day of quite a lot of rain). we more or less randomly drove around scotland and on sunday evening we arrived in edinburgh again. monday we finally saw that city and while it was bright and sunny there, the netherlands had terrible rain. streets and houses got flooded and our plane was delayed.... luckily our house was still dry.

good to see some of you found me already again! we are about to leave for the weekend and are staying in a place without internet.... but monday i certainly will be back! (perhaps sooner, lets see)

Real patriots!

today the weather was not too bad, finally! quite sunny and even warm enough to sit on the balcony in the early evening. the above picture however was taken on queens day (oh no, i mean kings day). its one of the few days dutch people wear orange. as i wrote before, orange is the national color since its the color of the dutch royal family (they are named "van oranje", meaning "from orange"). the other days you might people see wearing orange is when the dutch soccer team is playing in the world cup, and i guess thats about it. orange is not worn in everyday life. so in general, people do not possess orange clothing, aside from the one orange jersey you wear that one time a year. it really is considered weird to wear orange, and you wont see much (any?) orange clothing in the shops.

i never even wore orange on queens day, but that changed after 3 years in boston. there we dressed up in the american colors on the 4th of july to feel like real americans. so... it was just natural to finally do as almost all the other dutch do. it also helped that i bought a beautiful silk orange dress in boston, just a few weeks before we left (it was crazy cheap in a shop for vintage clothing. i still miss the cheap american shopping, and hardly shop nowadays.) when else to wear it but on kings day?!

Ladies only

the first stop on the german highway (when we went for a little getaway last month) had 2 parking spots that were for women only (it says "women's parking place. please keep these 2 spots free"). tim didnt read and put the car right in the second one... and had to repark because i said so.... here he tried to pose as a lady with my shades on. but well....

wikipedia tells me its a typical german thing (although in the netherlands they have them too; but i never saw them). its so that women who are alone have the best lit places and dont have to walk too far at night when its scary out. many parking garages have some right near the exit, or placed such that they are in sight of the security guys....

here in the netherlands we get more and more parking spots that are only for electrical cars (they are charging points at the same time). in our street 2 spots have been sacrificed for that. it made parking even harder for those non-electrical drivers. but i must say, they are often used.

Self portrait

we saw a huge shiny american type of car with shiny mirrors that were just asking for a self portrait. again an early summer kind of day!

Perfect weather!!

it seems almost impossible to believe, but today the weather was even better than yesterday. and today i had signed up for an official run!! 7.5 kms. i was a bit nervous... since a while, me and tim do runs of 10 kms every now and then, but then its not official. since it was international womens day yesterday, this run was only for women. that was only a tiny bit comforting. and it meant twice as many cute outfits i had to compete with. nononono! it was a running competition, not an outfit one..... ;) 

above you see me in blue (but with purple running shoes; they are the best!!) and my friend in orange. i finished under 50 minutes (as you can see here), and i was happy with that. many were much faster than me, but i already ran faster than i normally do.... and while tim came home this morning after his 2nd of 3 night shifts, he went with us, and followed us by bike along the course. several times during our run he would bike past us, and then i would suddenly see him leaning against his bike, taking pictures. after which he would jump on his bike again... so if not for the race, i had to keep running for those pictures!! (how romantic is all that!! no?) afterwards, seeing those pictures, made me think of this, or this.... i most certainly need to practice a bit more.....

after that, tim really really had to sleep and i just enjoyed the sun on the balcony..... :)

Self portrait

we were away for a night! we explored the netherlands a bit again (and attended a PhD defence). we went to the far north part of the country; groningen. last time we went there by train, now we went by car. both is nice, but by car is defenitely more convenient and you can easily make many detours. unfortunately, when getting back today we got stuck in the evening traffic into amsterdam. beeeeehhh. 

we stayed in a nice and quiet hotel with a swimming pool, so we went for a little swim last night as well as this morning. breakfast would have been more expensive than the cost for the night. we had some special offer and stayed for only 25 euros; breakfast would have been 32 for the 2 of us. but guess what?! most supermarkets serve relatively good coffee for free, so all we had to do was buy their croissants; bringing the total cost of our breakfast to around 3 euros; we went all out and bought some fancy orange-mango juice as well.... hmmmmmm (thats how cheapos do it!)

yesterday it was really sunny, but today was grey and gloomy. and chilly! we went for quite a walk and i was glad to have something on my head...

more pictures of what we saw in the coming days!

Self portrait

nooo, this is not in the netherlands, this is yosemite, where we were back in march!! but we didnt take any self portraits recently. or many other photos, for that matter... it was so pretty there, and we had so little time. just one afternoon. we did one hike, and didnt know exactly how long it would be. with all the warnings for bears and whatnot, that was a little scary to me... and it was indeed getting dark when we finally got back to the car (i already saw ourselves stranded somewhere high up, with a bear taking our last food. hmm, actually we didnt bring much. yes, we were really not that well prepared). 

lif here in amsterdam is quite different! :) no bears for sure..... but the weather at the moment is really good. jipppiiieeee!!

Ceiling cleaning

even though the weather was amazing again today, we spent nearly the entire day cleaning and painting again. here you see part of the ceiling... my goodness, all the walls and especially the ceiling were rather black. bleeeeehhh. at first we werent sure about cleaning the entire ceiling as its quite a lot of work and in an uncomfortable position, but while painting the walls nicely white the ceiling looked of course more and more black. and so tim (pfew... i couldnt have done it), cleaned the entire ceiling! look what a difference!! (and what an awful ceiling anyways. yuck, who has such a ceiling... ?  :D ).

as in many old houses in amsterdam, there is no central heating here. the living room is heated by a gas heater. i guess coming winter we have to choose whether we want to be warm or clean the ceiling again.... ;)

all the walls in the living room are now done. the floor however is a terrible mess..... since tim did the ceiling, i probably should do the floor.....

Weird sign!!

in the us i was always looking for weird signs, and i found plenty. so i was glad to see that weird signs are also present in amsterdam. this is next to the terrace of some hotel in amsterdam, and the sign says "vetafzuig", which literally means "liposuction". eeehhh?! tim tried it by lying on top of the wall, but nothing happened..... too bad! (perhaps you need the key to that box in the wall..?)

yesterday we went to ikea as i needed a new mattrass. so sad, since i had just trashed our perfectly fine mattresses in boston... :((( we needed some small stuff too, so we ended up going twice, by subway, to ikea (no more huge car). it took more or less the entire day and gave us quite the workout (and public transport is so expensive... buuuh, that certainly didnt change in my absence).

i tried to bake my first bread, but the yeast i had was different and the bread didnt rise.... but well... lets see... :)

Self portrait

a self portrait in worcester this sunday, after we had put the truck in storage. this is in front of the train station. it was really pretty and so huge! the hall inside was pretty too, and very empty. the entire place was airconditioned and quite cold (especially when compared to the outside temperatures), must cost a lot of money to keep it that cool.

i had brought my balloon, which was the only way we could capture the entire station from where we were standing... ;) i just came to realize that balloons are a nice, cheap alternative to flowers; a bit too late as in 3 weeks i can buy cheap flowers again in the netherlands! probably i am a weirdo, but the past weeks i had 2 inflatable pink heart balloons in the living room, and now i have this silver one... so pretty! for sale at the dollar store..... im probably the only adult buying them to decorate my living room....