February 20, 2012
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Amsterdam, Netherlands
Admittedly this is not a very exciting picture. It’s of some incense, burning and smoking away in its wooden container. But if you thought that this week is going to be just a boring old week, just as this picture is boring, then you’d be very wrong! Originally I had planned that only today would be a work day, but after a quick glance at my work load I decided it would be best to go into the office tomorrow morning and on Friday morning as well.
And the other days? Well, tomorrow afternoon I will fly to Barcelona with my sister Joyce and my nephew (and her son) Beau and we’ll stay there for two days, returning in the early evening of Thursday. The next day I will be back at the airport, again in the afternoon, for a weekend trip to Glasgow, only to come back to Amsterdam on Monday – one week from now. You can hardly call that a regular week, and of course it’s a week I’ve been looking forward to tremendously.
In the meantime things with the house seem to be going faster and faster as well. My upstairs neighbour has sent an email to the seller of our apartments, demanding immediate payment of the expenses we’ve had so far. It gave me quite a bit to think about today, especially because only last week did we reject a proposal of the seller to settle the dispute. I have no idea where this is going, but to be honest, I am not too optimistic about any of the options. In the evening I thought about what to do quite a lot, and I also wrote an email to the Chinese couple on the ground floor explaining to them (in English) what all has been going on. One decision that I had to make, and very very reluctantly it must be said, was to ask my employer if I can start working full time again from 1 March onwards. After fifteen years of having worked part time, that will be a particularly cruel blow to my way of life – or at least that’s how I feel about it now (of course I know that the majority of people work full time, but hey, I’m not the majority of people.) But that is for next week to worry about. That will be after thousands of miles of travel.
