Hoe je blij moet worden, of zo

Een paar uur geleden las ik een blog van iemand die een leuk artikel had gezien over wat je niet moet doen als je blij door het leven wilt gaan. Dan is het natuurlijk interessant om te kijken wat ik dan beter zou kunnen doen. Eerder dan nu kwam ik er niet aan toe (druk met de was ophangen, en de afwas, en een beetje aanrommelen op feesboek en linkedin en zo en je bent al snel uren verder), maar daar gaan we.

Chronic complaining

Daar is mijn ex goed in. Altijd was er wel wat mis, of niet goed, en hij was zo zielug! Het nare is, dat als je daar veel in zit, het besmettelijk is. Ik was ontzettend ongelukkig in die tijd, en voor een groot deel lag dat aan hoe mijn leven met die persoon was. Achteraf zie ik al die dingen die wel leuk waren; stukken fietsen, gave kringloopwinkels ontdekken, zijn geweldige dochter mogen leren kennen … Zelfs de voedselbank waar hij heen moest had positieve kanten; ik leerde dingen bij elkaar gooien op de gok en zo iets lekkers koken. Dat werd dan weer teniet gedaan door zijn gemopper dat ik geen vier stukken vlees en gebakken aardappeltjes tegelijk onder controle kon houden. Tja.

Ook nu is het zo af en toe best wat gepuzzel met geld, maar het lukt allemaal, en er is ontzettend veel wat we wel kunnen. Ik merk dat daar naar kijken en zien wat er wél kan en waar we geluk mee hebben zorgt dat ik heel gelukkig door het leven ga.

Worrying about the future

Dat is er eentje die ik soms nog wat moet leren. Ik kan me nogal zorgen gaan maken soms. Wat als ik geen werk meer vind? (Nja dan vind ik geen werk meer, en creëer ik mijn eigen manieren om mezelf te ontwikkelen) Wat als … Nou ja, er zijn zoveel watalsen dat als ik zou willen, ik altijd door zou kunnen watalsen volgens mij. Heeft geen zin dus.

Eating poorly 

Ik geef het toe, we eten niet altijd even gezond. Dat valt nog best wel heel erg mee trouwens, maar zo af en toe verschijnt er toch wat makkelijks op tafel, of is die chocola wel heel erg verleidelijk. Als we vet gegeten hebben merk ik het meteen aan hoe hard mijn darmen moeten werken, en van eten uit pakjes krijg ik simpelweg gigantische buikpijn. Dat laatste doen we dus al niet meer aan, want voor mij is het verschil tussen pakjes en zelf maken qua goed voelen wel heel goed merkbaar. Maar goed, die chocola he …

Not following through 

Oke, ik weet dat ik wel degelijk de juiste keuze maakte toen ik stopte met de leraaropleiding Engels. Aan de andere kant gaf het me ook een enorm gevoel van gefaald hebben. Ik moet er niet aan denken om dat gevoel teveel te hebben, dus dat ik andere dingen wel af kan maken is voor mij belangrijk. Trouwens, dingen in huis hebben die nog niet af zijn is ook niet handig. Ik kan niet goed tegen teveel half gelezen boeken, en hoewel ik verschillende brei- haak- en overige knutselprojecten op kan starten, vind ik het vaak wel heel fijn om iets ook af te krijgen.

En dan voor mij de belangrijkste:

Stop Learning 

Ik zou er echt minder gelukkig van worden als ik niet meer zou kunnen leren, en vooral mensen om me heen zou hebben waar ik niet van kan leren. Hoewel ehm … minder slimme mensen geweldig kunnen zijn als persoon, ben ik heel blij dat ik met mijn man gesprekken kan voeren, kan sparren over dingen. Dat er iemand dicht bij mij staat die mijn liefde voor boeken, lezen en ontdekken begrijpt. Ik merk dat ik zelfs als ik voor mijn Etsy-winkeltje zit te breien, ik liefst mentaal ook bezig blijf door een serie of goede film te kijken, of te lezen. Dat laatste gaat dan weer handiger als ik het op de computer of ipad doe trouwens, vandaar dat ik zelf zoveel blogs volg en het liefst blogs van meer dan 300 woorden open. Dat scheelt een hoop scrollen en dus breinaalden wegleggen 😉

Goodmorning!

I am surrounded by fog today, literally. It does feel a little strange, while I am so used to being able to watch for many miles out of my living room window, while now I can hardly see the rooftops on the other side of the street.

Today I will go to the Ikea with my mom and brothers. Since we do not have a car anymore we hardly come there, so I have quite a shopping-list of stuff we want and (sometimes) need.

We need some diswashing-brushes, and those fit into my waterbottle, which I sometimes use for lemonade too. So I will get a load of these. (Funny, I learned a couple of years ago that brushes like these are a typically Dutch thing.)

Those clothespins are quite strong compared to those we found at other shops, so we really want some more for when we dry our laundry outside.

We already have four of those in green – we had six and both dropped one – and some more would be nice sometimes. The green ones are sold in sets of six bowls, six big plates and six small plates, and we do not need that much – these are sold in smaller amounts, and I think they will look cool with the green ones.

Then we also want two wooden herb-racks that I can paint blue myself, and some cider from the foodstore. I guess I will scare my mom in how full her car will be when we go home 😉

Finding the energy to…

I have set quite some goals since a couple of weeks. While it works most of the time, which is awesome, sometimes I wonder how I thought to find the energy to…

• plan a wedding (a week and a half!)
• read quite a lot (75 books in a year, what was I thinking of???)
• write regularly on four different blogs (and when possible without repeating myself)
• run my webshop (omg what if it starts to sell? Where do I find the time to keep it up already?????)
• work a little (about 8-9 hours a week is not that much, is it?)
• try to find another job that pays a little more.

Although I seriously wonder if the last dot is a good idea at all. At the moment I love being able to write, and to work on my webshop. Since last year there seems to be something amiss with my energy levels, and as long as we do not need the money of a bigger job, it might be wiser not to hurdle myself into something permanent. On the other hand, the job vacancy I wrote to this morning, the one with a 40-hour workweek, did look pretty cool. Well, I will first see what the outcome is of that one.

Another outlet of my coffee-addiction

I managed to do it again today – drinking nothing but coffee, I mean. On the other hand, the coffee I made is almost gone, and after that I think I will step over to tea or water. I just must admit that I still love coffee a lot.

Today I did not only drink the normal Americano with milk though. Today I had a kind of creative try-it-out mood. One of the reasons is, that last Saturday I bought quite a stash of aniseed-cubes.

Source: http://aliceverheij.files.wordpress.com

I bought a stash, because the machine with which they make these cubes was an old one, from 1938 to be precise, and maintenance was not possible anymore. So they went on making sachets of aniseed-powder to put in our warm milk, which is way more expensive… so when I found out a place that still sold the old cubes, I wanted some. Not that I drink warm aniseed-milk a lot, but sometimes it can be quite nice.

Anyway, now I have this pile of cubes, and at once I thought: hey, it is sweet, would it be nice in my cup of coffee? Right now I am drinking my aniseed-coffee-milk brew, and yes, it tastes good!

Thrifting my Stuff

Fiancé and I went to the thrift shop, mainly for an old, shabby book, so that I could start some garlands for the wedding, and to bring two things that lay arond here for too much time. The shabby book is here (and as a book not picture-worthy, otherwise fiancé would not have let me cut it up), and off course we came home with more stuff than we planned.

One of those things is an addition to our Colonists of Catan card-deck, for €0,25, which still sits in fiancé’s backpack, so I could not make a picture out of that either. The rest of it is:

This grey bag, in which I can put the post-bindy-thingies that formerly lay all around the living room. Not really, but they were too many and too present. Not anymore.

A couple of nice books, and another pair of thin knitting needles. Thrift shops still are the only shops where I can find those, ‘new’ shops do not sell them this thin.

A set of a Sims 2 game and some additions. Now I can go and kill off sims, just like Alice!

New Cake for the Weekend

No pictures today, Jos took the camera with him to the bachelor party of his friend. Perhaps I can make one tomorrow =)

Anyway, I made another cake, with self-raising flour this time, and a little more mix. It became beautiful if I may say so myself – much higher than the one of last week. I baked this one for a picknick we will have tomorrow, yayyyy!

Important Things to Do

Today I hardly had any time for my webshop, or creativity-related things. Somehow I had more important things to do – I know, it is horrible, but there it is.

It started with our bed linen that had to be washed very badly. I will not tell you how filthy we are, but it was needed 😉 Extra difficulty is the weather. I really do not like airdrying all bedlinen indoors, at once, certainly not if I can help it. So I put them all on the lines at the front. There started to come quite some big, scary clouds, and it was rather windy, but I hoped that the wind would dry everything sooner – before the rain would pour down. It did, but I had to go and fetch my clothes pegs from downstairs a couple of times.

Then there was boyfriend, who got his car broken down near the highway, poor him. Well, that was more work for him than for me, but anyway. And I decided that I really want a job, NOW! so I started to look for job vacancies, and applied for jobs for a couple of hours. Then my father called that he will pick up my boyfriend from his work (dad, you’re the best!) and I had to make sure that I at least had done the dishes today 😉 otherwise they’ll think I really am filthy. Ehm… whoops

So here I am, with hardly anything done. Kind of.

Weather-effects

I just saw that it has been almost a week since I wrote. This past week it has been very, very warm around here, too warm to have the laptop on long enough to write a blog post. I do have the ipad, but since it does not type that nice – usually I type blind, which I cannot do on that thing – I could not really blog.

Weather has a huge effect on me anyway. Usually I love cold. When I do not have to get out, I love rain as well. Sun does make me feel somewhat happier, but I am one of those persons who not particularly thrives on warm and sunny weather. In an ideal world, I would snuggle on my couch with a knitting project, a book or a good movie all the time. On the other hand, when it gets too warm, I can hardly do anything anyway. I did finish some armwarmers somehow, but please do not ask me how I did that. All I could hope to do is find the coolest spot I can find, sit still and drink enough not to dry out. As an example: last Monday we were with the cub scouts at their summer camp, I drank about 4 liters worth in total, and I had to go to the bathroom as much as five times. I go to the bathroom that much when I drink about 1,5 litres worth, so the rest of what I drank just… vanished somehow. Well, I admit I know where it went – into my clothes.

I guess it does not surprise you: I really, really do not like hot weather, and I do like the cold and rainy days. Although I do make the best of it off course.

And it was dry before we got in again…

The weather is really warm and sunny – not for the first time this year, although one would believe that when listening to the remarks of many fellow Dutchmen. Somehow every time it gets warm and sunny, ‘It gets summer, at last! We did not have some decent days this year!’ Oh yes we did, only you forgot during the days it was not as hot as it is now. 😉 The weather here is quite changable, and somehow every year we have sunny terms and rainy terms within one week. And every year people seem to be surprised we do not have one whole summer of sun… but anyway, it is warm and sunny now, and we enjoy that.

Yesterday I decided to wash the towels, and later the clothes, so that they could dry outside. Everything smells better when dried outside, and we have these wonderful clothesline over the arcade. Yes, the side behind our front door, so mosty I put something in between, and make sure to have the keys. Because the wind was not that hard yesterday, and my SO was inside, I slackened. He came out to help, and usually has some keys in his trouser-pockets. Not this time, and the door closed behind us. You saw that coming, did you not?

Lucky us, I once gave a spare key to my parents, and the neighbours below let us call them and wait at their place with a nice cup of coffee. Perhaps we should give them a spare key too, just in case. 😉 Oh, and the title? That was about the towels we hanged out. They were dry before we could come into our house again.

Cereals with chocolate, yuk!

I am not good at eating breakfast, so mostly I take care to have enough fruit – I used to eat sugared cereals, but after reading a lot of blogs about sugar and additions and so forth, I did not really want to eat those anymore, so I am not used to them anymore. Perhaps that is why my taste has changed.

This week the fruit at our local supermarket was crap again – usually my boyfriend buys fruit from a farmer who sells fruit at his work, but he could not find the cash, so he could not get fruit there either. So we decided to bring home one small box of cereals with chocolate, because I am rather a chocolate freak, and it would be fun to try.

Lucky for me the local supermarket near my parents does sell good fruit, since now I could throw the cereals away and eat a banana instead. Oh boy, was that muesli… blegh, it was uneatable! Like I was eating bogeys with chips of chocolate. I am not sure if it is for the couple of mouthfuls I did eat, but not long afterwards I had to run for the toilet too… like my body did not want anything more than to get rid of the nasty stuff. It is very clear to me now though: I do not buy these cereals anymore.