matt and i are the owners of two chandeliers.  one is from ikea, that friends bought for us as a housewarming gift in maastricht.  it holds taper, or dinner, candles.  the other we bought two weekends ago while visiting the same friends (well some of them, anyway) in lyon.  it holds tealights.  we hung them a few days ago.  the taper one over the diningroom table, and the tealight one over the foot of the bed.

they rock.  i mean that literally, as in what a cradle does.  it’s a very constant reminder that we do not live on solid ground.  one forgets.  we get used to the motion, quite slight, of the boat.  but the chandeliers rock constantly, sometimes a lot.  🙂  i like it.

in other news, job prospects are opening up.  the film company that i interviewed at several months ago, and who recommended me to another film company last week, just sent me another email saying that they now have an unexpected opening.  fascinating.  anyway, i’m going in to chat with them on thursday morning.

and, further interesting news.  my brother is writing a book!  he sent me the outline, which at first glance (all i’ve so far had time to do), looks very very interesting.  i would read it.  🙂  and no doubt will.  eventually.  the book, that is.  obviously, i’ll read the outline. 

it’s raining, and i’m off to work soon.  last night i was so amazingly busy.  we ran entirely out of food.  by an hour before “kitchen closed.”  tonight i have to call a coworker to try to arrange some hour swapping. 

moving into july, the weather decided yesterday to be lovely.  after listening to my crazy austrian pothead boss rant and rave about coming ice ages and how there is no such thing anymore as summer, it was very nice to enjoy the first day of july by wandering around the outskirts of the city with matt and dick.

first stop was an organic/recycled crafts market in beatrix park, where we discovered that while living across the street from it, we never noticed a very nice restaurant.  maybe it was closed in the winter.  service was ridiculous, but the food was fresh and lovely.  at the craft fair, matt bought me a new purse made from used innertubes.  🙂  i like it.

then we wandered off in the direction of jane and jonathan’s place, closer to the vondelpark.  jane refused to leave the house, and i refused to go in, since it was so gorgeous out for the first time in 2 weeks.  jonathan joined us out at a nearby tapas restaurant.  after an hour and some, matt went home to nap.  a while later, jonathan went to drop off his library videos and go home.  dick and i walked through the vondelpark, then took a bus from leidseplein home.

at home, napping on the benches of the garden was a priority, until matt made delicious lunch, then dick went home to utrecht.

matt and i got ready to go out to living in oblivion, which was really fun.  we are starting to know more people, so talked to the ones we knew a bit, then i ended up talking to a very nice american living in london who had been (with friends) in the restaurant the night before.  they were all there, but i ended up chatting with her most of the evening.  really fun, too.  when they left, matt and i danced a bit, chatted a bit more with the couple of people we know, then went home.

it was a nice day, all in all.

today seems to be landlord day.  piet-with-haircut has been by several times already.  the doorbell keeps ringing.  🙂  piet-with-haircut is nearly unrecognizable from the guy we originally rented the boat from.  weird.  he says he gets one around summer solstice every year. 

what did i do saturday?  don’t remember.  no, really i do.  i had a nice relaxing day with matt, then went to work.  work was insane, and i didn’t get home until 1am.  ugh.  see, nothing much to report.

why is it that tourists never take the buses?  only the trams.  the trams are always crowded and unpleasant in the center, as a result, whereas the buses are so very relaxed.  lots of seats, and they’re usually padded.  yay.

hello.  well, here i am, still drinking coffee and sitting at the computer at 1:15 p.m. on a friday afternoon.  is it friday?  yes.  and i don’t work tonight.  yay! 

what’s been up? 

 maybe in this case, the cut-away wasn’t necessary.  it wasn’t very long.
fool that i am.

i just wanted to do it.
it’s raining, so my brilliant idea of taking the motorcycle to the cherry farms today and buying a large crate of cherries isn’t going to work very nicely.  oh well.  i guess i’ll finish some of the projects i’ve started this past month.  and not finished. 

tonight, matt and cheryl and i (and maybe bart? no idea) are either going to see a movie, or possibly to a reading of a biography about alice b. sheldon, aka james tiptree jr.

i’m voting for the reading, but cheryl has an appointment at the vet’s, and it may not work, timewise.

so here i am in a brief respite between travel and guests.  i was in paris last week visiting michi, came back, toured our friend michael and his visiting sisters around amsterdam saturday and sunday, and spent today cleaning the house (round 1) in preparation for matt’s mom and her girlfriend’s visit, starting next saturday.

did i mention i’m waitressing?  can’t remember.  anyway, i’ve got 5-10 minutes until i need to head out of here (the library) to go to work.  fortunately, it’s a rainy quiet day on the streets.  maybe it’ll be similarly quiet at work.  that’d be great.  i’m feeling exhausted and kind of crabby today.  got a lot done, though.

my stepdad, cey, is undergoing a SERIOUS back surgery tomorrow.  it sounds terrifying.  pre-op is today, so i sent off a big package of treats and suchlike for his recovery period, which will be 6-12 months.  if it goes well at all.  crossing fingers. 

i have defeated the goddamn aphids on all the rosebushes, with help from green soap and rain, but now the plum tree is beset with little black bugs.  nasty.

thank goodness wave gotik treffen in leipzig is coming up.  i can’t wait.  matt and i have finally paid for our tickets (we booked hotel months ago), and we plan to motorcycle there and back.  i am in desperate need of a road trip, especially since the rain made me choose the train over the bike to paris last week.  then of course paris was gorgeous and sunny the whole time.  damn it.  🙂

heading out now.  smooch!

how is it that i’ve never known that french keyboards are different?  i haven’t typed so slowly in YEARS!

i started working last week at a vegetarian restaurant on spuistraat, green planet. i’m waitressing. matt’s loving having me not around; who’d have guessed?  i work 3 nights a week. 

visiting with michi now in paris.  it’s great to be here. i’ve missed it.  we went to the supermarket and i drooled over the luscious foods!  i saw what i’m missing in the netherlands.  oh man!

well, it’s so annoying to type that i’ll stop now.

here i am at the library again with 3 minutes to go for time.  so i’m posting.  this morning i picked bob and ceese (matt’s dad and stepmom) up at schiphol.  they’re napping, so i decided to bicycle over to the library to do my taxes.  i successfully navigated the belastingdienst website, and declared my so far non-existent business to have not gotten any money so far, thus nothing to pay.  thank goodness for that, or i would have needed my dictionary.  i tried to phone in for help yesterday, but the man on the phone refused to speak slower or rephrase when i didn’t know a word.  he just repeated the word over and over.  i asked if maybe i could speak to someone else in english, and he said it was against policy.  argh.  but it’s done now.

oops.. out of time.  bye!

wow!  amazing!  we knew enough people in the area to have a successful party on saturday!  i was shocked.  actually, i’m feeling kind of guilty, because matt did all the inviting.  i didn’t bother inviting anyone, so that especially included people we know in maastricht.  i didn’t think about it.  anyway, we had tons of people.  2 from maastricht, several from rotterdam, a huge group of ikea people from delft, and a surprising number of people from amsterdam and surroundings.  yay!  we almost had more non-ikea than ikea people.  🙂 (that would be a rather wry grin… there were a shitload of ikea people…. we’ll have to meet more non-ikea people.)

anyway, i think it was a good start.  oops, and i see i’m less than 2 minutes away from being out of time.  damn.

hi there.  well, as i’m sure everyone knows, we moved into the houseboat almost a month ago.  amazing.  so we’re settling in and having a great time there.  i’m learning that waking up early is practically a given on a boat.  first, so much sun comes in the bedroom windows that it’d be hard to sleep in anyway, but also, the people who live and work on the water seem to start their noisy days earlier than other people.  ugh.  but other than getting ridiculously tired by around 11pm, i’m liking it just fine.

we still don’t have internet at home, so i’m at the library, using some of my free daily time.  i can’t wait to get our connection set up properly.  i hate having time limits to pay attention to, and i have a bunch of stuff i’d like to be looking into.  anyway, i just wanted to do a quick update.  that’s all for now.

i am having a crappy day.  woke up limping from having fallen on my bicycle last night (icy roads and i was actually trying to stop to help another guy who’d fallen), then bicycled in pain to see another apartment.  then called the doctor about other medical problems that keep popping up to make my life miserable, including a cold sore that has decided to encompass my entire mouth.  yay for those little cold sore patches that i bought a couple of weeks ago… but i’ve got them completely plastering my mouth now, and it hurts anyway. 

anyway, the receptionist asked me if i’d be able to come in between 11 and 12 today.  i said yes, then spent 2 hours waiting around until it was finally 10:45 and i could go over there.  got there, and she said, “well! i expected you a bit earlier,” in that finger-wagging tone of voice.  it turns out she’d MEANT to say, “before 11 to 12.” on the telephone, and had used the wrong preposition.  now, you ask, why wasn’t i speaking dutch during that telephone call, thus saving us the trouble? because i ran out of the right words to explain why i wanted to come in and so soon, and asked to switch to english.  but she was mad at me for the mistake, even if i wasn’t the one who said between instead of before, and spent 10 minutes haranguing me about it, until i told her to stop yelling at me and how could i get in to see a doctor today.  in the end, i waited an hour in the waiting room while the doctor had telephone appointments (although for the life of me i can NOT understand the purpose of telephone appointments, especially when i could hear through the door and she was only on  the phone about 5 minutes) then ended up being late to my appointment at the KvK (chamber of commerce) that i’ve been waiting for.  so they asked me to call tomorrow to work things out about that.

oh, and i still have to go back to the doctor tomorrow morning again.  but for now, i have a prescription for the cold sore. 

fucking doctors.  and fucking finger-wagging middle-aged dutch women.  what is it with the fucking finger-wagging thing, anyway?  it’s annoying as hell.

just got back from OCCII, which is quite near the place i was staying all last summer.  too bad i didn’t know it then.  anyway, we saw 3 bands, and i have much to say!  we left during the 3rd, not because we weren’t enjoying it, but because i didn’t give poor commuting matt time to nap before taking him out for yummy ethiopian food at addis ababa on overtoom and a concert.

so, while matt’s in the shower, i’ve stolen his computer for a quick recap.  well, i’ll try to be quick.

(excuses if i have the names of the bands wrong.  i have assumed the first was de bakfiets boys, etc. but i could be wrong.) the first band was de bakfiets boys.  very generic, but ok.  the second band, bratpack, was more fun.  i liked them a lot.  the third band, the holy mountain, were really hard and energetic.  i have never seen such a genuinely violent mosh pit.  seriously.  i’ve never seen chicken-fighting in a mosh pit.  chicken fighting.  mosh pit.  sound dangerous?  it was.  they’d get up there, try to punch somebody, then fall drunkenly off, narrowly missing being trampled.  i had a good view of all this because i was standing on one of the side benches so that i could better see everything.  some guy near me got accidentally bumped by another guy, thought the guy had done it deliberately, and had to be pulled away by his girlfriend.  the accidental bumper just looked confused, and his friend was trying to calmly persuade the fight-seeking guy to back off.  i saw the bump because i was watching the bumper, having determined he was possibly the queen bee of the hive mind that were the stripey-shirted people.  so i can verify that it was indeed accidental.  and not much of a bump, either.

in the last band, who rocked, the bassist reminded me of nathan (yep! you! if you’re reading this) at about mmmm i dunno, somewhere between 17 and 24.  i can’t remember when you cut your hair.  or when you looked like a logger.  but he had the long wavy huge amount of hair, general body and face shape, including the slouch.  i would guess he was in his early to mid 20’s, but not younger.  too much chest hair.  if he’d taken off one more article of clothing, i would have been able to see if he had awesome calves, but i doubt it.  🙂  you can keep your legendary claim to fame.  ha.

(i had another little segment here about a gea-lookalike also, but it just disappeared and won’t come back. i’m on matt’s computer because mine won’t let me post, and i’m having all kinds of weird experiences with it.  i just did a preview and the preview said that matt posted this.  but he didn’t.  and when i go to the top of this, i am definitely the logged in person.  so… i have no fucking idea.  and i’m going to take my shower now and give up.  enjoy this picture of my new toaster!)