Kyria's journal

With my husband! My mother in law generously dogsitted for us and we went to The Hague for an afternoon of shopping (new pants for both of us), catching a movie (The Hobbit) and dinner (Asian/French at Umami). It was heaven! Strange how fast life can change: since our dog is still not used to staying alone in her bench for a couple of hours (we received her after the socialisation phase had passed) we have been working on dog logisitics for months. It will only get worse with a kid, I imagine. We are very lucky with our dogsitting service, as we can drop her off around eight and pick her up at six thirty. The dog always comes back happy.

She has hit a puberty and is close to being in heat for the first time. Man, she's hard to handle right now! We are really putting our foot down and she won't win from us: sit means sit, even if it takes fifteen minutes for her to do it right. She is very defiant, trying to ignore us, or only doing half of what we ask of her like sitting down but in the wrong place, sitting down but not paying attention, etc.

All things will pass surely.

On Sunday we had our annual new years dinner at my dads house. It was fun and entertaining, his newish girlfriend is nices. Strange how my dad likes educated and strong women, despite discouraging his former wife and daughter from becoming one. He showed us various bits of videomaterial from the eighties and nineties, when we all were very young. He wants to buy a new computer or assemble one from old parts. I donated my old computer to him. I had to do a quick format yesterday night and double checked that I backed up all the data I wanted to keep. Found some video material that I was wondering about. I really need to organize my digital archive, as it is now roughly 250 GB. Video and high res images really add up.

I also managed to do a bit of organizing and throwing away during this weekend. I finally threw out my psycholgy study books. I graduated 10 years ago and have since rarely picked up the books, let alone read them. By now, many new discoveries have been made and I am better off reading the newer books in the library if I feel the need. It was an emotional thing to do, I spent five years of my life on that study but it is a part of my life that is over. I also went through my wardrobe and threw out items that I haven't worn in years, always hoping that I would one day reach for it. But I am a different size and a different shape, and even if I turned into the same size once more my taste has changed as well. Good riddance, I say! Once I cleaned up my practice room completely, I'll post a video.

The recent cleaning up stint is started by our plan to add dormers on our house this year. All the stuff in the attic will have to go somewhere else during the rebuilding. The less we have, the less stuff we have to move!

We picked up the moving van on saturday morning around 9.00 and the first thing that struck me was that it is HUGE. A small sized car could be stashed in the back.
Needless to say that I wasn't looking forward to drivign this thing into the city of Utrecht and Mr. R took the first drive. Ikaya came over to help, which was incredibly nice of her and made things go smoother. We took most of the boxes plus the biggest furniture items, the. Drove back to De Meern. We spent the rest of the afternoon by unpacking most of the boxes, getting the tv up on the tv cupboard from my house and switching the mattrass to mine. I ended the day being fairly optimistic about the whole process.

We relaxed during the evening, Mr.R had a dixieland performance that was fun to attend, but a little bit loud and a couple of hours too long to my taste. We hit the sheets at 02.30.

Waking up on Sunday morning was not very pleasant. We managed to crawl out of bed on time and I drove the van to Scheveningen. We ran into a couple of tight spots when I scraped the walkway with the aide of my tires, and when we had to drive through a couple of very narrow streets with lots of parked cars and bicycles. The closet with the big mirror doors was okay, a bit worn out but it'll nicely considering the price. The seller was nice, he helped us by taking the closet apart and helping us get everything into the van. Mr.R drove us to the house of a friend, where we bought a table and chairs for the garden, then back to De Meern.

By that time we were feeling the fatigue but Little Brother reinforced our team. The strong burly guys carried the heavy stuff upstairs and we went back to my house in Utrecht for the second round. See, second round is tricky because all the easy stuff was already packed up, leaving us with the harder items. We managed to even bring my regular bike back to De Meern. I ordered pizza to celebrate, making this weekend the official shoarma/chips/pizza weekend.

As expected, the house is a mess. Things will ease in in the next couple of weeks, with mutual effort and a lot of selling, decluttering and giving away of stuff. I am glad that this weekend is over.

You guessed it, our christmas was largely spent on painting doors and doorframes white. It was nice, on christmas eve we watched a couple of cheesy christmas movies sitting next to our very own christmas tree.

On the first day of christmas we were invited to dinner in a restaurant that looked all posh, but ended up being a bit blegh. We waited two hours before the first course came through and the food was okay but not that special. I chatted a bit with his brotherse and their wifes, and with his nephew who is a couple of years younger then me. He has a lovely girlfriend and they just bought a new house. I am so excited for them! I talked a bit with Erica, who is from costa rica and who is going there after christmas for six weeks so she could catch up with her close family. The three brothers were catching up on childhood stories at the end of the dinner which wad very fun. Stories about three rascals playing outdoors and such :-)

On the second day of christmas my mother cooked us a wonderful meal, and we spent the evening not discussing the absence of my Big Brother, except that we did because we couldn't help ourselves. And then the childhood stories from our childhood came out, something Mr.R. Was actively hoping for. Turns out that I was a bit of a tantrum thrower when I got angry and that Little Brother and I agree on many things regarding our youth. Like the way our mother told us to solve problems with talking, which doesn't go down well among kids. It was a great night and my mother gave us a wooden garden fence door for the garden that she had lying around the house. She also wants to give me her old bike which is awesome! It's 12 years old, still 20 years younger then my current bike.

On friday I went into town for a yoga class and found out that the bus that stops next to our house drives straight to the yoga school, which is next door to where I teach my belly dance classes. In short, excellent bus connection for the win! Afterwards I noodled a bit in my rented home. It is silly that it is starting to feel less like a home because we spent a week in the new house. We haven't actually moved stuff from my houseto the new house becaue we are still painting the doors and woodwork on the inside and because Mr.R has stuff to unpack too. Fitting both our stuff in the house will be interesting, to say the least. We went to the 'furniture boulevard' to look at curtains and carpet for the staircases. Looks like we agree: we both want red carpet and red curtains :-)

In short, I had a good time during christmas, despite doing a lot of not-so-christmassy things. To top it off, today is our one year anniversary and we had a lovely dinner yesterday to celebrate. I am happy with him, in an unexpected way. He makes me feel loved and respected in a thousand tiny ways that melts my heart and turns my into a glowing heap of sentiment.