Church, TV, Soccer
This morning after mass I had the talk with the man at the church, the assistant-priest I think he is. I was really really nervous about the talk, but it turned out not to be too special. Pretty early in the conversation he proposed that he would give me the texts of the Dutch version of the RCIA classes. It’s not really RCIA, it’s called an ‘Alpha-course’, it’s a general introduction into the church. Anyway, he’s going to give me the texts so that I can study them at home when I have time. And then once a month or every 2 months we get together and we discuss what I’ve read. I think this is a great idea, since I’ll never have time the next couple of years to follow a course like this in real time. I just don’t have a night off to do this, and these courses are usually on Tuesday or Thursday evening. He also said that I should take about 2 years for the process of joining the church and that was a bit longer than I had expected, but OK, I guess I can live with that. I also asked about that I live together with someone, unmarried, and that I take the birth-control pill. He said I shouldn’t worry about it too much. He says God loves me anyway and He wants me to grow slowly to Him. The priest also said that ultimately marriage is about two people making each other happy, and that living together like Martijn and I are doing now, is already a bit like that. At the end of the conversation, which lasted about 15 minutes, he blessed me. I really liked that, if I can say that of a blessing.
I was relieved when the conversation was over. He didn’t say anything really shocking. I’m a bit disappointed that he said that I should take about 2 years before joining the church, but I knew that was a possibility. What he said about me living together was what I had hoped to hear. I always thought that God wants me to be happy, and if that means living together with a boy, then he’ll accept that of me. Of course I want to get married, but I want to know for sure whom I’m going to marry and I want to know all the bad things about my future husband. And I also want to have some money to have some kind of a decent marriage.
The rest of the day I did really little. Martijn and I went to bed and watched two episodes of Charmed after we had eaten breakfast. Tonight I watched some more TV and I knotted two rosaries. One of these days I’m going to colour a new batch of them with KoolAid.
Oh, and our national soccer team lost tonight of Portugal with 0-1. I’m not too sorry about it. It means we can finally get back to our daily lives and we can get rid of all the stupid orange decorations. I do think a lot of people are disappointed over here though.
Nothing to tell, First Aid, Literature
I’m sorry I didn’t update in the last few days. I didn’t really live anything spectacular. I went to work, I went home, I played the Sims, I went to bed and I went back to work.
Today I could sleep in for an hour because I was allowed to come one hour late. That was really nice, because I was just calm and there was no hurry. It was a relaxed trip to work today.
At work, there was this girl who’s going to help us for a couple of days. She’s really nice, about 20 years old, and she’s going to study Psychology at the same university as where I studied Psychology. It does give us some topics to talk about. I’ll work with her most of tomorrow.
Tonight I continued playing the Sims. I have started this couple at the university and now they’re old and aged and I’m kind of waiting for them to die. It’s not nice of me to say that, but that would mean I finally finished one family. I usually leave them about half way through, because I’ve gotten bored with them.
Oh, I’m going to another Larp event in July, ‘Summoning’. I’ll be on the First-Aid team again, like in May with the ‘Moots I’. The best thing about it is that Martijn is coming with me. We both have arranged to have the days off work and I’m excited about what’s going to happen there. I hope it’s better now that Martijn will come with me.
I decided a couple of days ago that I wanted to start reading the books for Literature for the next semester, so I wrote an e-mail to the bookstore for some information. They told me that they don’t yet know which books are needed for the next semester and that they will have the books in 3/4 weeks. There go my weeks of reading in advance… I will pick up one book next Saturday which they did have already, ‘Sense and Sensibility’ by Jane Austen. So that’s what I’ll be reading the next few weeks.
Bad day at work
Wow, I really had to work hard today. That’s not supposed to happen on Monday. I hadn’t even had my cup of coffee and I was already forced to work real hard and to think. People know my brains don’t work until I’ve had a cup of coffee and I’ve checked my e-mail and the SQPN forum.
It was just a busy day with lots of work. We had to print lots of pictures, but we also needed to help customers with frames, albums, passport pictures etc. It was really awful when one of the first customers came into our shop, crying, because she wanted to have the pictures printed of her still-born son. The pictures were really hideous to see and I think I will remember them forever. The woman was 41 weeks pregnant when they told her they couldn’t find a heartbeat and the baby was born a week later, on 6-6-2006. The baby looked so terrible. Both me and my colleague got sick to our stomachs of these pictures.
Later that day we also got a picture we had to reprint and I had to do some retouching because this was the only good picture she had of her daughter and she was going to die soon of Cancer.
And then finally there was a picture I had retouched last week of two dogs, and the woman told me that the big dog had died, because he choked on a tennis ball. Just unbelievable.
In that sense, we didn’t have a really cheerful day. The turnover was pretty good. I hope things will be better tomorrow.
I did it!
Here's a really short update from work. I just received all my marks for the exams via e-mail. I passed them all! I am so happy, you just can't imagine. Some courses I passed barely with a 6 and a 6,5 (out of 10) but I have an 8 for Literature 2a! I'll never have to read Gulliver's Travels or Tom Jones again! And the best part is that I won't have to do any resits in August. This means I have vacation until September, at least from my studies! I am so glad and relieved.
12 of 12
Today was my 12 of 12. A picture says more than a 1000 words:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charda/sets/
Hot, Today, Yesterday, Rosaries, Dinner
I’m so incredibly hot. And that’s purely because of the high temperatures over here. The temperature reached 30 degrees Celsius here in the Netherlands this afternoon. I can’t even move or I’ll sweat. The only thing I did yesterday was buying groceries. For the rest I just read, played the Sims, and I watched TV. My friend also called and we talked for a couple of hours. I was really glad to talk to her again, since we hadn’t spoken each other for a long time.
This morning I went to church. There weren’t too many people there. I was still a bit tired, so I had some difficulty listening to the homily and really understanding what it was about.
When I came home I played some more Sims and I got my Sims to graduate from University. Then Martijn had woken up by that time, so I had to stop playing and prepare breakfast (like I’m some kind of woman who does that all the time :-p). The rest of the afternoon I just read in my Virginia Andrews book, I made another rosary and I dyed my rosaries with the Kool-Aid dye I received yesterday by mail. It was fun to do that, though it was a bit warm to nuke something in the microwave and then play with it. I was really surprised how well they turned out. I dyed them with the Black Cherry flavour and they’re a really nice colour of red now. I wasn’t sure the twine was 100 % nylon, because it didn’t say any ingredients on the website. I also didn’t know what the colour was going to look like. I was afraid it would turn light-pink or something, but this colour is really cool. I only need to get my knots closer together and then they’re ready to be shipped off. I’m not sure what I’ll do with these rosaries.
Tonight my boyfriend and I had dinner in a Chinese restaurant. It’s a really cool place where you choose your own ingredients, you put them on a plate, and then the cooks stir-fry them with the sauce of your own choice. It’s a good way for Martijn and me to both be able to eat something we like. Because of the high temperature I wasn’t too hungry, but I had a really nice time and it was good to be alone with Martijn.
Tomorrow is 12 of 12 day, so I’ll bring my camera to work and I’ll try to make some picture. I hope my colleague likes her gift.
No more exams, Shopping, SHP
Wow, finally, all my exams are over. I’m just so happy and relieved it’s all over. I have no idea how I have done and whether I have passed them or not, but right now there’s nothing I can do about it. The results will be sent to us on the 22nd of June, so I guess I’ll receive them a day after that. I’m really curious to see what I’ve done, because most of the exams didn’t go too well and I hope I did them well enough to have passed them.
Today I enjoyed my first no-study day and I went shopping. I had to buy a present for my colleague who turns 17 next Monday. I usually don’t buy gifts for her, but I know it’s her birthday and we work together, so I decided to be nice. I also bought a new Bible for myself. I bought the newest translation of the Dutch Bible before we moved to this house, so I have no idea where it is. I only have another Dutch translation, but it’s 50 years old (the translation, not the Bible) so that doesn’t read too easily. Now I bought an English Bible, a New International Version. It’s a really cool edition, because it has a pink cover. I also bought some other second-hand books. One of them is concerning Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary. I saw the book and I remembered that my teacher had recommended this book if we ever saw it for sale somewhere. So I decided to be a good student and buy the book. Then I bought some cheap clothes, both for Martijn and myself. I went by the hardware store to buy some more twine (100 metres) and then I was pretty much fed up with shopping and I went home. The temperature is really high here at the moment. I was so tired tonight, that I have slept for two hours. That felt pretty nice.
What you see on the picture is my new Bible and one of the rosaries I have knotted myself.
I also sent out a mail to the scriptwriter’s team of the Secrets of Harry Potter podcast. There hasn’t been a new podcast in a long time and I was wondering if people were still interested in working on it. As it turns out, they were still interested. Since I have the next couple of weeks off, I hope to have some time to spend on scriptwriting. I really hope we can get this podcast back on the Internet.
That was about all I did today. Tomorrow morning I have Pilates, for once on a Saturday, and I don’t really have plans for the rest of the day. I only have to buy groceries, together with Martijn, but that’s it.
ANTM, Literature Exam
Yesterday I didn’t do too much, nothing really spectacular. I only discovered that last night America’s Next Top Model is back on TV! I was really happy. Now I watch Britain’s Next Top Model on Saturday and America’s Next Top Model on Monday and in the autumn we will have Holland’s Next Top Model. I just love these shows and I’m so happy that I’m able to watch them.
Tonight I had my Literature exam. I was really anxious that it would be very hard and that I would do it really badly, but it didn’t go that bad. I knew most of the answers and I wrote down an answer at every question. I think I answered about half of the questions correctly and I hope I will still gain some points for the rest of the questions. With some luck I hope to have passed this exam. When I was finished, after two hours of straight writing, I talked to my classmates, but they all thought it had been extremely difficult. I don’t know why they thought that, because I wasn’t surprised at the questions. They were pretty much how I expected them to be, I was only surprised that I knew how to answer them. But I’m really glad this exam is over and I’ll see what the mark turns out to be in about 10 days. Only one more the day after tomorrow.
Whitsunday
Today was Whitsunday. I went to church this morning. It was pretty cool, because the mass was in Dutch, Spanish and English. The people of the Spanish parish, who have their mass after our Dutch mass usually on Sunday, were all at the mass tomorrow. It turned out that the priest, an old Dutch man (that’s what he looks like anyway), speaks Spanish fluently. I was really surprised when I heard that, because I could tell that he wasn’t just reading out loud some texts.
Yesterday evening I got a telephone call. It was already 10 pm, on Saturday evening, so I thought it would be a prank call or someone dialled a wrong number. But the call was meant for me. It was the man from the other church I went to before, the man who lent me the book. I has sent him an e-mail about a month ago that I would like to have a talk with him. He never responded, so I didn’t even think about that mail anymore. But now he called and we scheduled a meeting on the 25th of June. The only problem is that I now go to the church really close to my house and not to his church anymore. But I was really glad that he invited me to meet him, so I’ll just go and meet him and I guess then I’ll tell him that I’m going to another church by now. Or I’ll just attend his church. I don’t really know what I’m gonna do yet.
This afternoon I should have studied for my exams, but I didn’t. Well, I read some pages, but I didn’t even do half of what I should’ve done. Today I decided that they should abandon exams. I’ll attend all the classes, I’ll do the homework, I’ll write some essays, but please, don’t make me do those horrible exams!
Tonight Martijn and I went to an Omnimax Theatre, the Omniversum, right here in The Hague. It was really a lot of fun. We saw two movies actually, since the second movie was half the price. We saw the movie ‘The mystery of the Nile’ and after that the movie ‘Greece’.
www.omniversum.nl I preferred the latter movie, because it was calm and peaceful with lots of nice photography and information. It didn’t make me nauseous like the first one. Martijn preferred the first one.
We found out some pretty cool stuff in Guild Wars. I finally got some new skills by completing some quests. I’m really happy about that, because I hadn’t had any new skills for quite some time. I need to figure out what they do exactly, but they look good.
So tomorrow is another day off. I can sleep in, since there’s no mass tomorrow. I’ll study a bit, play GW, and perhaps watch some DVDs. I bought the first season of Charmed and I also bought the Xmen 2 movie. After I’ve seen that movie I can go watch episode 3 in the cinema. That’s one of the ‘after-the-exams’ plans. I can’t wait till it’s Thursday and it’s all over.
100th post, Exam, Rosaries, Work
Today is my 100th post. That’s quite something for me, a lot of posts since November last year. Yeah, I’m a bit proud of myself.
Last Monday I had my exam of Language Acquisition. It was a multiple choice exam about vocabulary and grammar. I really have no idea how I did. The grammar questions weren’t that bad, but I don’t know if I answered them correctly.
I was supposed to study for my next exams yesterday, but then I thought of making my own rosaries and I found that more interesting. So I travelled throughout the city yesterday to find some nylon twine of the right thickness. That was pretty hard to find. I finally found it and then went back home to try and make a rosary. I downloaded the video and the pdf file and I actually did it. I’m not too good at making things with my hands, and knots aren’t my speciality, but I managed pretty OK. Today I made another one and that one is even nicer. It’s hard to get the knots at an even interval. The reason why I am doing this is to send them to the US, to the Rosary Army. I’ve been listening to their podcast for quite some time now. Their apostolate is to make rosaries and have other people make these rosaries for them, and they will send them away for free to anyone who requests one. I’m now going to try and help them by also making rosaries. And since the only twine available in the Netherlands is white, I have been looking around for ways to dye it. There is this fabric dye, but the description looked a bit tough and I didn’t want to try that. The alternative method is to dye the nylon with ‘Kool Aid’. That’s a kind of lemonade powder, when you add water to it you’ll have lemonade. Apparently there’s so much colour-stuff in there (and it’s an acid) that you can use it to dye nylon and wool with. So I just ordered 10 flavours at a website in the UK and I’m going to dye my own nylon. I’m really curious what that’s going to look like (and taste like) and whether it will work out all right.
Today was really busy at work and I still have lots of pictures to print for tomorrow. I hope I will finish everything in time and that tonight I’ll sleep enough.
