The week in review

Saturday (March 11th) – Mini me had a sleepover with friends and Junior asked us to vacate the house so he could have a group of 6 friends come over to go out on the town with and then have them stay the night. Mr E and I packed ourselves off to Utrecht, which really was a delight. I’ve been sick again and was just recovering and Mr E had been busy, so we didn’t make any huge plans. Just walked around for bit, had a very nice Greek dinner, walked around some more and ended up in a lovely arthouse filmtheater bar. No movies, just a few drinks and then back to the hotel.

Sunday (March 12th) – Slept in at the hotel, then checked out, went for a lovely lunch, walked around town some more and hit a large bookstore. We don’t have them that large in the town I live in, so much choice! Bought two easy reading books and a book on the history of libraries. Then home again late in the afternoon. Hats off to Junior, the house was looking good, like no one had been around and partied/slept there. Sunday evening my friend came around to stay up with me and watch the Oscars.

Monday (March 13th)– Watched the Oscars which started an hour earlier (so 1 am and not 2 am) than we had anticipated due to daylight savings having just happened in California. It was a bit boring (didn’t think Jimmy Kimmel did so great), but I was stoked for the Everything, Everywhere All At Once wins, i.e. Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis! Would have loved to see Angela Bassett win but I was also very pleased for Jamie. The Brendan Fraser win was also well-deserved. Got to bed at around 5 am and slept. I slept a lot, actually, also after my friend left again, as I was still recovering from being sick.

Tuesday (March 14h)– Back to work again and although I am better, I am definitely not ALL better. Had two new student-assistants that started working at the library last week and needed to first join the one and explain all sorts of things to her and then in the afternoon did the same with the other who was at another location. I was exhausted when I got home and went to bed early, to read and sleep.

Wednesday (March 15th) – Another busy day. I had two very long appointments with two refugees at my refugee council volunteer work. Hoped to be done early but didn’t leave till 3 pm. Was already pooped but needed to go by my mom’s as promised so drove on, helped her with some stuff, chatted and then back home again. That evening, I actually finished a book again for the first time in ages, one of the books I had bought on Sunday. It was an easy romantic book read called Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood about two NASA scientists falling in love and it was fun.

Thursday (March 16th) – Really, really busy day at work with lots of meetings and then at the end of the day even a presentation to give. It was all good, but yeah, pooped again! Spent the evening mindlessly scrolling though social media and catching up on some YouTubers I occasionally follow. Came across this, which I loved and as a cat owner feels so relatable!

What would you say to YOUR cat? pic.twitter.com/EaEdmir4r4

— The Dodo (@dodo) March 16, 2023

Friday (today) – Had the chance to work from home today which is lovely for a change and now that work is done I am typing this. Mr E has traveled to Bruges in Belgium today by train and bus for a Heraldry day there tomorrow and will meet up with people from his “nerd club” as mini me calls them (a Dutch heraldry society that he is a board member of). He’ll be coming home again on Sunday. I need to go get groceries for dinner now.

Tomorrow (Saturday) – we celebrate my younger sister’s 50th birthday. Man, seeing her turn 50 makes me feel even older. It emphasizes how long ago these were taken…

Let the weekend begin!

Congrats, Richard!

He has hinted at it but now it’s apparently almost done: Richard Armitage has written a book!

So. Here we go ⁦@audibleuk⁩ asked me to write something. It’s taken a year and a half. I’m on the finishing touches and heading to🇨🇭in July because, you know how I feel about details. Geneva Audiobook | Richard Armitage | https://t.co/RbJisGiW7e https://t.co/WYHxCkD2eN

— Richard Armitage (@RCArmitage) June 28, 2022

He’ll be going to Switzerland in July, to Geneva I presume, to finish it – I wonder when and for how long? Should he happen to be in Lausanne at the beginning of August, I’ll be there for a day and will be happy to meet him… 😉

Anyway, the Audible page that Richard refers to in his tweet gives a little synopsis of the story…

“Nobel prize winning scientist Sarah Collier heads to an important conference in Geneva with her husband Daniel. But while there being lobbied by corporations for their support she begins to experience confusing contradictions and lapses of memory…
A dark psychological thriller for fans of Before I Go to Sleep and The Woman in the Window, written and performed by Richard Armitage.
©2022 Richard Armitage (P)2022 Audible, Ltd

I am still not one for audiobooks, so I really hope this will appear in print as well. I hope this new Daniel will fare better than the last Daniel Richard was involved with…

The sentence “she begins to experience confusing contradictions and lapses of memory…” makes me think of gaslighting, just as Charles Boyer did with Ingrid Bergman in the 1944 movie Gaslight.

Will this Daniel be the baddie? Or will he be Sarah’s rock? Although I’m not really one for reading psychological thrillers I am curious about this one, due to the sole fact that Richard has written it. For him I will brave this genre. Congratulations Richard on writing and publishing a book!

A quieter Christmas

Christmas this year was quite lovely albeit a little more low key than usual due to Covid 19 restrictions. Thankfully everyone I know is in good health, so we actually could still have a nice Christmas and see a few people.

This year we didn’t get to go to a Christmas market in Germany with two good friends of ours from college, like we do every year. At the Christmas markets we sometimes keep the commemorative mug from the Glühwein (mulled wine) that we usually drink then. This year there would be no Glühwein in mugs at markets like we’d been having for more than 20 years. So, I had our own commemorative mugs made with selfies from Christmas markets past, for Mr Esther, myself and for our two friends.

_{The text translates to “Due to Covid 19, a mug instead of a Christmas market. Merry Christmas 2020!”}

We were going to try a socially distanced get together instead of a market at one of our friends’ houses about a week before Christmas but then the other friend canceled because she had some cold symptoms. Good thing she did too as she tested positive for Covid 19 a day later! She and her husband both had it, although luckily only mildly. I still wanted to get my mugs to our friends, so last Monday mini me and I drove to the healthy friend, handed her her mug and spent half an hour drinking tea with her at a distance. On Christmas Eve Mr Esther, mini me and I drove over an hour north and dropped off the other mug. We set it down infront of our other friend’s door and then, keeping a good distance outside despite her not having any symptoms anymore, we chatted across her front garden with her for about 15 minutes. It was good to bring a little Christmas cheer that way.

We had a nice drive back home coming through some typical Dutch landscapes and the picturesque town of Volendam, which was quite deserted due to the lockdown we’re now having…

Back at home again, we had a quiet Christmas Eve dinner with Junior’s girlfriend also present and we unwrapped a few small gifts with her as he wouldn’t be seeing her for the rest of Christmas. Afterwards I dedicated myself to finally reading the rest of my Michelle Obama “Becoming” book that I had bought second hand a while back and had started reading the first 3 or 4 chapters of but still needed to finish. The cats seized that opportunity to lie on and next to me.

One of my favourite things that day was my brother sending us a video of my mother reading the Christmas story from our old family bible. On Second Christmas Day (or Boxing Day, December 26th) we usually have a big family get together where she does that but, as the whole family get together wasn’t happening this year, I loved that my brother (who’s temporarily living with her) made that little video and sent it out. It’s one to cherish for the ages.

On Christmas morning, Mr Esther made us a nice brunch, we then unwrapped our gifts. I got lovely cat socks that I adore and chocolates from mini me, Junior got me Barack Obama’s “Promised Land” that I had wanted and Mr Esther got me a Audrey Hepburn calendar and a portable record player, so that I could play my old Bowie records. My fave thing that I got for Mr Esther was a “Blessed are the cheesemakers” t-shirt (a line from the brilliant Monty Python’s The Life of Brian). As Mr Esther is a cheese nerd, it felt like a very fitting gift for him.

Mr Esther has no siblings so we could adhere the ‘no more than 3 guests’ rule easily by inviting our in laws (whom we hadn’t seen in months) over for dinner. We table grilled. On Second Christmas Day in the afternoon we went to my mother and my brother and had a low key delicious turkey buffet dinner at her house.

In between these social activities we played a game or two and I read and read and read, really enjoying the Michelle Obama book. Today is a lazing around day, I finished the book a few hours ago but, even though I love the Obamas (even made a video once as they left office in January 2017), I need a little Obama break before I start Barack’s book.

Anyway, I hope all of you who celebrate in one way or another had a nice Christmas too. Now it’s back to the real world again, I guess. For me that means that from tomorrow I should become productive again (we have some storage clearing out to do). For now I’m loving the down time, though, so we’ll see if that happens.

Sunday

After going through depressing news and some Twitter this morning, and enjoying Linnet’s little song lyrics adaptation…

Imagine there's no Donald
It's easy if you try
No Jared or Ivanka
No more daily LIE.
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the Senate will be won.
😍🌈🌈🍾🍾

— Linnet Moss (@linnetmoss) November 22, 2020

… I decided that today was needed to lift some spirits. Going out for a walk is always good as a mood lifter except that today I really didn’t feel like it and let Mr Esther go off alone on the long walk he had planned. I decided on a lazy Sunday at home instead.

I leafed through some more Letters From Hollywood, a lovely book that I had bought a few weeks ago while browsing through a book store.

There was also Sunday cuddling and playing on the couch with my black cat (I love those tiny vampire teeth) which was fun…

Folding laundry became a bit of a challenge when my ginger cat decided that lying in the middle of the bed, which also doubles as my folded laundry sorting station, was a good way of keeping me company…

And I also had some time for my latest Lucas Bryant fix, he had a new Hallmark movie out called The Angel Tree.

It was of course pretty standard Hallmark Christmas fare but really not too bad, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It’s been kinda quiet on the Lucas Bryant front. He did a Chrismas movie last year called Time For You To Come Home for Christmas which was alright but missed some spark for me (more due to the story than the leads). This fall he had another Hallmark movie called Country at Heart which was alright as well, but he wasn’t the lead guy, so that was a pity. This recent Hallmark movie he did that I saw today I liked best, so I took this screenshot for my screensaver (I love those flecks of grey in his beard)…

It’s dark now, Mr Esther’s cooking dinner and I’m looking forward to a nice glass of red wine to round off this lounging-around-the-house Sunday. Hope you are all having a good one as well.

Feierabend

The German word above, literally meaning “celebration evening”, is a good word. It’s what you call the end of the working day in Germany. Busy work week again for me and especially today was filled with lots of video meetings. Those really do get quite exhausting. Mr Esther must be even more exhausted, because he’s been at it with the video chats even longer than I have today and is now (at 6.45 pm as I type this) still working.

I worked some on my day off yesterday as well, so I stopped an hour early today, did the weekend grocery shop (supermarket gets much quieter here at the end of the afternoon) and now finally my Feierabend has come. I’m ready for the weekend…

… but, unlike Mr Esther, I still have work to do tomorrow. Maybe wait with the wine until Feierabend tomorrow?

Decided to enjoy my cats outside for a few moments (OK, picture of my black cat was taken yesterday but it sure is a really pretty picture of her!)…

… and I’m gearing up for a new book on my e-reader…

I’d gotten pretty worked up about that Audrey Hepburn book I read recently and I get very upset by the news (even though I’m not looking at social media so very much nowadays) and work is busy, so I want and need something calming now. My e-reader houses a whole collection of Georgette Heyer books that I’ve never read, to be accessed on just such an occasion when I need something light. I’ve only ever read one or two Heyers, I think now might be a good time to try a third.

Of course, just as Feierabend hits and I finally sit in our garden, the first drops of rain are starting to fall. Well, time for getting dinner ready anyway. Looks like my e-book needs to wait until this evening…