Yesterday I took another day off to go with Anna to her scheduled pregnancy examination. It’s really nice to hear its heart (correction: HIS heart.. we have evidence) beating and see him move around. As the doctor says all is good.
Anna is feeling well, too, apart from some deficiencies in short-term-memory ;) She has begun writing post-it notes to herself, just like in “Memento“. :D
We have dubbed this symptom “pregnancy dementia” with a wink but the doctor confirmed this and also scared Anna by telling her that many women report that they never got as “sharp” again in their jobs after the pregnancy… there goes my dream of Anna managing the family and me staying in the background.. ;)

UPDATE:
In American books they call this issue “the pregnant brain” ;)

I just stood in front of a nintendo Wii in a toy store in Amsterdam and asked the guy in the store if I could also play with it, having heard about the new controller that they invented…
You basically swing your controller around when you want to perform actions in the game like strike with a sword or swing a tennis racket. Sounds cool enough to me :-)
BUT…
Some american lawyers have done their homework and Nintendo now has to clarify who is responsible if you injure someone or destroy something while playing.
So there won’t be any playable demo-Wiis in Amsterdam. Unbelievable.

Either this is some amazing marketing gag or else some lawyers in the states just have waaay too much time ;-)

UPDATE:
Ohwell: Looks like they are right: See Wiidamage and wii have a problem ;)
It’s not the lawyers, humans are just stupid by default.

Kruidnoten are a terrible dutch invention.. they are mean!!!
and someone had the terrible idea of wrapping them in chocolate.. the bastard wants me to get fat! ;)

Always remember:
Ubuntu NFS shares cannot be mounted on Mac OS X without the parameters -o and -P

And don’t eat too many kruidnoten ;)

Thanks to:
http://anotherubuntublog.wordpress.com/2006/09/14/sharing-folders-between-systems-with-nfs/
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=30250

Not only I go to fitness now twice a week, also “Baby Rüdel” (the city of Amsterdam called it like that in a recent letter, so we call it like that for now) is exercising a lot.
It kicks Anna whenever she stops moving.. as if to encourage her to continue to move :)
Thursday will be an extensive echo examination and we will know the sex of it. And hopefully see that everything is okay with it.

I am having some trouble writing at the moment, realizing that too many things are connected to this.. the fact that I have to respect Anna’s desire for privacy, the fact that even my potential employers have been reading my blog before some of my job interviews in August, and so on.. now that I think of it, maybe I should have done all this anonymously. But would that have changed anything?

I should go to bed.. mind is going in circles ;)

today, representatives of the EU the USA, Japan, China, Russia, India and South-Korea signed a multi-billion-euro contract to build ITER, the long discussed and anticipated prototype of a fusion-reactor.

ITER, that will be built in Cadarache in southern France, will (hopefully) start a new era of energy production, allowing us to tap a virtually unlimited source of energy for the world. Without radiation, long-term nuclear waste or environmental dangers. It’s clean and free, uses hydrogen and produces helium. Just like its big brother, the sun.

I have been looking forward to this since I know what nuclear fusion (see Tokamak reactors) is. For some 10 years now I heard them talk about and followed the development of ITER. I’m so excited. :)

I just woke up on Sunday morning with pain in my back… unpleasant. It’s time we get rid of that mattress and get a decent bed, I say. We already went and had a look how much we have to invest into a new sleeping device and it seems that IKEA (as usual) has the best offers on latex-mattresses around.
One day our complete house will be furnished by IKEA.. waitaminute.. it already is :P

anyway. This night I dreamt a _lot_ , I mean, it was so much that I woke up from it.
First one was crazy, it featured me in the USA. Very strange. Some Hotel/Motel with a gas-station and a SUV were involved, completely not my style :) Somehow we always circulated around the lobby of that hotel, where scenes like in a soap-opera were coming and going and cheesy dialogues were taking place, then the same happened at the gas station, where the story went on.. I was in a suit. Driving one of these _huge_ SUVs and doing smalltalk with the other participants. Just the thought makes me smile. :)

If I think about it, it must be related to what I thought about last night.. a very old dream of mine, going around the globe once, clockwise. It started with a globe that I had in my room when I was young.
The trip will (I hope that much) take place in 5~10 years and go for 3-6 months, I’ll have to make a kind of a sabbatical from it, I think. Wanna join? Drop me a line and I sign you up :)

It should go somehow like that:
Berlin > St. Petersburg > Moscow (All with railway)
Moscow > Novosibirsk > Vladivostok (with the trans-siberian railway)
(Alternatively there is also the “Silk-Road” via Kazachstan to Beijing – but that’s plan B)
As we arrive at the Pacific, we have to decide, either on the ship immediately, crossing the pacific, towards California (with a small stop in Hawaii) before we reach San Francisco,
or we do the longer version, taking another train to the south, reaching Asia/China, passing Shanghai, HongKong, then towards the USA.
Both will miss Nepal/Tibet somehow but that will be another adventure. On the way is Japan, by the way, easily reachable by boat both from Beijing and Vladivostok.
Then, of course, the big tour-de-USA will start, ending in New York. From there, we can actually take an aircraft, taking us to Paris, where the trip will end.

I wonder how much we have to save for such a trip.. I mean, that’s some miles..
Use Google Earth or something similar to plot this route once, it’s exciting, if you ask me.
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I never really sent someone away rudely but this time I was just annoyed..
at 2100 in the evening someone rings at my door and asks me if I have an insurance for my funeral..

Damn, he was actually lucky I didn’t hurt him somehow. :P

but hey, it’s weekend and I enjoy life :) Just had a coffee and croissants and hopefully the stress of the week will be away soon. (still lots of things to learn at work.. which make working less relaxing as it could be if I didn’t have to ask questions all the time..)

today I work late shift.. but I can’t sleep long anyway.
Good opportunity to make some sandwiches for Anna and then get a coffee and do all the nice little time-wasting things that I like to do but hardly find the time for. Like blogging, chatting, hugging the cat (which always tries to get on the keyboard for whatever reason…) ;)

Looking out of the window I get the typical dutch grey mish-mash that I am now more or less used to but additionally to it I see a monster traffic jam growing. The public transport will go on strike 9 a.m. today.
Kinda strange to go on strike from 9 o’clock on but I guess they have their reasons. I will go with my bike and laugh at all the cars with only one person in them that will be clogged on the roads.
Still a mystery why the Dutch seem to be unable to share a ride.. in the campaign for the elections one party even promises two-store highways and extra lanes to get rid of the morning jams.. kinda ridiculous.
I guess it’s the way the dutch go after the Americans (or the Americans, who are just like the dutch.. but that’s history. It’s called New York and not New Amsterdam).

Another thing I noticed is the fact that Firefox 2.0 is out since 24 October and I just noticed it today (to my shame, through an advertisement banner on a torrent website…because AdBlockPlus wasn’t updated… bad, bad, bad…)
I guess I’m getting old. ;)

we just had a long weekend together (both took the friday free to do a medical examination of Anna and the baby and then went to visit some potential daycares) and did nothing but relax.. it’s incredible how long this weekend felt. :)

On sunday then, we went to the sauna to get rid of all the other problems, that still managed to interfere with our relaxing programme. (Main sewage pipe got stuck friday evening (as usual) and our landlord doesn’t think this is an urgent case…)
We had to use buckets to wash dishes and after a good shower the bathtub was nicely full.. but the toilet still worked (thanks god!)

Apart from that I feel just great, life begins to get a little coordinated, I am having a steady income now, by next year I expect to have paid all..err most of my debts ;) and when the baby is there, I want to get us a small car.. just because it looks silly if I mount a MaxiCosi on the motorcycle :P

today we visited two daycare centers close to our home.. becoming a family soon requires such stuff, I guess :)
It was a lot of fun and we had lots of nice moments there, but what really made me memorize this day is the effect that being there had on me.
I mean, I don’t really remember a lot of things from my childhood till 6 years or so.. just some fragments and images.
Now, being in this place, seeing children, 1-4 years old, playing with each other, laughing, crying..
seeing small rubber boots size.. what do I know, 20 cm long maximum, seeing wardrobe / hangers for coats that reach just up to to your knees.. each of them labeled with some animal sticker and a name..
This triggered some very colourful, really emotional reactions in my brain.
I was amazed how much detail all of a sudden came back to me. Images and situations from my pre-school times.

It’s 1:30 in the morning now and I am still excited… oh my :)