Good news: Saan got everything she will need tomorrow (except for her cell phone and book and maybe a map) packed in her backpack. Including the (delicious) apple cake, her poi, the pink hair band for L., a shirt and two rather red caps. Her bike works, meaning Saan's dad sort of did everything, including figuring out how to get the dreaded dynamo working without using Saan's way (which basically consists of hitting the damn thing against the tyre). The bike is six years old and no one knew how to do it before.
More good news: After about...Four months and thirteen days of disappointment, a store in the Netherlands still has a copy of Saan's book. It's even been reserved and hopefully getting shipped to Breda as she types. Saan also sort of knows how to get where she should be (down the street, through the village center, follow the road to the Opel garage at the old ostrich farm, turn left into the tiny sideroad, straight on, over the railroad, straight on until there's a marker.)
Bad news: Saan will be running around like a reject from Snowwhite and the Seven Dwarfs, with a painful beard, at certain times tomorrow. Seeing she's taking her cell phone, it's possible there will be (low quality) pictures or perhaps even (lower quality, probably) movies. Providing it doesn't rain. Heigh-ho. It's also (not likely, but) possible her classmates will leave her to rot at the mill because she didn't feel like doubling her biking kilometres. If she doesn't see them by, say, nine o'clock, she'll just turn around, go to school and try to explain that one. Only downhill once you're in Langdorp center.
So fingers crossed and check back tomorrow for what probably will be a report of Saan's day.
It's eight o'clock and thanks to some bastardly Brits, late night work for Saan's mom and Ketnet, Saan's not yet finished with her homework. That, and Saan's exhausted. Allow her one day of a break.
Saan's a bit woozy after two bus rides that most people do in twenty minutes or under and the bus driver did in forty-five. Two-level buses without air conditioning suck. Having cleared that, Saan wants to tell you she had a great day at her science day (or at least, she had a great day until some total and utter *BLEEEEEEEEP!*rs sent her back her book from Ostend. Argh.) looking at... You know, cancer cells and test animals. The un-tumored nude rats were cute (But fifty euros is a bit rich for seventy grams of shaved household pest) and she got to bring home her own bit of gut cancer on a glass to shove under her brother's microscope! It's painted pink and glued safely between two panes of glass and everything! Oh, and she got to go to Imec and let DJ Kelvin (K, too, I think) teach her group, another group and her how to make songs from samples on Sony ACID. The first one was really fun to do, the second one the only boy in her trio made.
One of the fun bits about feeling woozy is that you don't believe it until it's gone. Allow me to elaborate. On the maaaaajor detour to Louvain, there was The Extreme American Bar. With the slogan 'Sex is Better than (something, possibly 'War')'. At twenty to nine in the morning, in a musty bus, no one believes that (or, at least, Saan hopes no one does).
So now Saan's scraping together NP for her Quest To Get As Many Affordable PetPets In Her Safety Deposit Box. Which doesn't mean she doesn't put all the stuff she gets for cheap/free in there, too. She's already got 1 codestone, 1 air faerie in a bottle, 1 negg and (she can't check until the Wheel of Monotony's stopped spinning) 9 or more petpets. Sadly enough, she's also plundered her (neopets) bank account to fufill that little petpet feat. So now she saves money during the weekend and makes money to spend on petpets during the week. Or that's the plan, anyway.
Two days will have random hours of class falling away, two other days will be replaced by alternate activities: team building and science day. Which means scrambling for where you left the letter with what you need and finding the right bag to pack it all in. Oh, and a bus ride. Monday is not a good day to start in the world's most uncomfortable vehincle after a low-fare company's aeroplane. Louvain traffic at half past three is almost a worse way to end it.
To make it even more fun, Saan's got an oral exam for French on Tuesday for which she only has the excercises, but not the text she has to say, and a test for Dutch which has two parts not filled in due to an irritated teacher. If Saan's honest, she doesn't blame the woman.
Then there's Wednesday, which starts with a refreshing two hours at the local gym and then has an entertaining Maths test. In the afternoon, she has an apple cake to bake, which is harder than chocolate because it has fruit in it and fruit tends to go down and thin the batter, making the cake at best fragile and at worst a soggy pile of crumbs with chunks of apple in it. Oh, and she's gotta go to a classmate for the costume she has to wear on Thursday.
On Thursday morning, she has to be in a place she roughly knows the location of at a quarter to eight. Problem is, she knows where it is, but not how to get there and she has to go on her bike. Saan's biking is about three miles slower than her walking. Better yet, the way to the starting point of the team building day is almost three miles less if Saan just goes to it from her home. And to top it all off, she has to leave her bike at the starting point and walk for the rest of the day anyway.
On Friday, last day of the schoolweek, there's Environment Activities. It's Environment Week, but apparently, two hours and a home-made team lunch are enough for that.
And Saan is still pissed that she had to return the book they sent because it wasn't the one she ordered.
It's eleven pm. Saan's just remembered she had to fill in her blog. The reason she didn't remember before is the skull-splitting headache she has at the moment. She's all alone because her parents and sister went out for a hike with the GAS-organisation today (they should be back whithin the hour) and her brother went out to get smashed. Elly's on a week of exchange program fun, Yif's probably asleep by now, Jay (who once more crawled out of bed early to talk to his transatlantic SoE buddy) had to get off of the pc. Leaving Saan with a headache, water tasting like activated carbon (filter in the jug needs changing), aspirin and seasons one and two of Lost on DVD. She did go out earlier for some döner kebap and to help her brother stuff mailboxes with flyers, but that wasn't much of an improvement. There's funner stuff to be done on a Saturday night, but Saan's feeling so bad that the only option seems to be to crawl under a blanket and pretend she didn't wake up this morning.
Today, in Belgium, anyway, it was the National Day of Scout Movement. Basically, bakers and youth centres gave out free breakfast to everyone who came in their scouting uniform. Most were covered in patches or names. Leaders' flutes were used during classes. People came late because they'd miscalculated their ability to break the world record of 'devouring a plate of scrambled eggs within the shortest period of time'.
Saan once (in a previous life, probably around when she was eight and sort of influencable) was member of the KSA. After getting homesick and sick of leader A picking on her, laughing at her and getting her lost till the middle of the night so no one in her group could get a proper dinner, and after literally scarring leader B for life (he started by scaring Saan and Ellen during midday room break, Saan retaliated by digging in her nails until she actually heard it was not leader A but leader B and that leader B screamed like a girl) and also after spraining her elbow and finger on cobblestones and having people go 'oh, that's nothing' until they decided to pull and push at it, after pretty much all that, Saan quit it. Her love for oversized tops makes that the T-shirt which was big on her at age eight is still big enough to be a nightie at age sixteen-and-half. Probably still has the orange scarf somewhere, too, in the general area of her wannabe bandanas.
Her cousin's planning on a trip to Rome someday. Saan has been volunteered to go as a guide. If Saan's going, the scarf's going, most probably with the T-shirt, like on most trips with ruins and overly high temperatures. Shirt's gonna be serving as night- and morningwear (who needs pajamas when you can just pull a jeans on and be presentable enough to go get breakfast?) the scarf's the last-minute-where-the-heck-are-my-Buffs rescue from a teddy bear print with the mission to cut off all blood flow to the head. It's that or look like all the other brown-haired, grey-eyed girls and get lost in a city you don't know. When traveling in group, you either stand out or stick together. Saan tends to... wander, or linger and lose sight of her uncle(s)/cousin(s)/aunt(s)/brother/sister/mother/father and/or grandfather. The Little-Red-Riding-Hood-Laudry-Day-Routine's worked so far, and you don't tinker with things that work.
Moral of the Story: 'Parents, listen to kids when they say they hate scout movements and buy a leash for your kid after you've lost them once to prevent them from looking like a wouldbe-archeologist'
This was Saan spewing her gall. Enjoy the last twenty minutes of your Friday.
Presenting... The Official Halloween Chibi Under Construction Sneak Preview!! Okay, so it's a tiny square, but it's original is pretty small also. Try guessing what it is.
Saan's book turned out to be a hardback instead of paperback and had to be sent back. Maybe she'll see her paperback copy someday. Her movie was sold out, so she didn't get to hang out with Yif. And now she's sulking behind her pc.
It's late, and Saan should be filling in this blog... But Jay, who's always on while she's asleep, apprently got up early and decided that some RPG'ing and talking to the weird Belgian chick was in order. So you get nothing and Saan gets a little bit of good in her bad day. Nyah.
Saan's day, apart from having forgotten to do a few things for class, having something she actually studied for being called off due to technical problems and her book not arriving (but then there's tomorrow!), sucked.
So, today, you'll have to get by with the high point of my brother's day, who studies electronics-ICT. Today, in Rubes' Thingamabob Saan Would Not Understand Even If He Explained It To Her class, the professor, like always, was tlking about bit. One bit, two bit, you know, the one or zero your pc uses to make this message legible. Now, Dutch has a diminutive suffix: '-je' or 'tje'. A bit's pretty small, so the prof tends to use the suffix a lot for this particular word. Often in plural, in which case it sounds particularly like: "And over there," *Points with his nifty laser pointer* "we have three bitches." And so on. For two hours straight. Another reason to believe that articulation is everything. Or that the accents in Antwerps are getting more amusing each day.
The sad part is that Rubes did not discover this until now, with a professor he also had last year, for the same subject.
The blog now has an Official Neopets Account. Honestly. Username's Irreality4Dummies. Objectives for the account: -To get a Pack Rat Avatar (1000 items in safety deposit box) -To have more money than Adam -To get as many avatars as possible -To have one or more honey potion(s) -To get a good set of battledome weapons
Saan didn't pick the pet's name; she adopted him from the pound.
Today, Saan, in a moment of temporary delusion, went to a karate lesson. Yes, come on, give a nice laugh behind that screen of yours. It was her first, and will most likely be her last. Her body is being very unhappy with her right now.
It started out okay. Saan, completely having forgotten that she was going to meet her friends for a tryout lesson for karate, had decided to sleep in sinfully late. At a quarter past ten, Yif got let in by Saan's little sister, who helped Yif get Saan to wake up and get dressed. Breakfast got skipped, the fact that Saan hadn't drunk anything forgotten, along with the little factoid that Saan probably wasn't in shape enough for an hour of warming up. Four oreos burn off awfully quick. During the stretching excercises--after letting Saan try to do a few push-ups (push with the arms, fall on the knees, skip the next push-up, try again), kicks (her calves are currently begging for her to just convince her mother to put on the second duvet, pull the flannel covers over it and forget she ever woke up today), punches (Her bi- and triceps have stayed nice and close to her body for the entire day. Movement is highly overrated) and listen to the kia's of the people who had something else than a white band keeping their gi's closed--Elly kindly requested Saan move to the side of the hall if she felt like fainting. Yif, being naturally more supportive and believing in Saan's abilities, just asked if Saan was feeling alright. Then the sensei picked some poor sod named Kevin (to who Saan offers her deepest apologies for being such a slow learner) to teach Saan, Yif, Elly and Sanne the basics. Saan, who was more concerned about the way her vision was swimming a bit, did not hear and was not able to reproduce the words meant for the stances. The basic stance was fun. Two fists, feet at shoulder width, arms bent at about ninety--no-a-bit-over-actually degrees. So it was not the 'one arm on your hip, the other dangling by your side, pelvis tilted a bit, roll your eyes and ask what the hell he was going on about' stance. Then came the problem of making a fist. Don't put your thumb on the inside of it. Don't let your nails show. Make sure your knuckled are on a nice and even line. Wrist, no matter what Kevin or the sensei asks in line with your bottom arm. Then came 'punching'. Arm, at the uttermost point of your punch, at slightly less than one hundred and eighty degrees, palm down. Reaction arm folded in line (with what wasn't said, which was probably the reason Saan did it wrong only eighty percent of the time) next to you, palm up. Free translation: 'Keep your reaction hand at the point where you can feel your knuckled against your chest, and the arm folded, but straight behind you', or thereabouts. Do not punch to the side. Do not push to Elly's side either. Push to the middle of your own symmetry axis. Different heights for the punches gave similar results, though not for Saan alone (the others screwed up a few times, too). Kicks were pretty much the same. Saan refrained from any power-shouts (though Elly didn't) because she was half-sure it'd come out like 'Pudding'. There's making a name for yourself, and then there's making a name for yourself.
A stance different from the basic (bend knee in front so you can't see your toes, other leg behind you, legs apart at shoulder width) gave the hilarious result that it had the option of a freaky little walk (first fault: Kevin: "Keep your feet to the floor, it'll keep you stable" thirtieth fault: also Kevin: "Every foot I hear stomping on this floor from now on will earn you all five push ups!") and a freakier turn (Kevin: "Right, right...Wrong, wrong."). And that shoulder width is pretty much impossible when your feet are nowhere near enough for your shoulders to set the width. Kevin pushed, Saan and friends faltered and nearly fell. Stability when you're trembling with hungry-hungry-hungry-vibes is something like a man to try and get an erection with only half a pint of blood in his system. After five push-ups, which were not caused by Saan for once, the lesson was over and the non-members could watch the sensei and his students bicker over storing the equipment. Apparently, when you're a member, it should be a "god-damned" honor to clean up cushions that were hit by about a million sweaty feet. When they got to the dressing rooms and Saan had her shoes back on, she stole Elly's (gallon of pure, fresh, tasy, nutricious, wet--)water and drank about a quarter of it. The next ninety minutes got wasted on calling home, eating pizza and having fun with friends. Saan's going to go sleep now. Saan's going to go sleep and never going to crawl back to the karate lesson. Best idea she's had all day.
Saan's having a bit of concentrational issues. Someone turned on the tv, so she's cathing random tidbits of it. Circus pigs get taken excellent care of, so they swear they will be enemies or Rome for the rest of their life and they love Maria! Maria! Maria! on the intro of Comedy Casino. So enjoy the webcomics on www.countyoursheep.com and http://www.countyoursheep.com/.
Saan is happy because: -Tomorrow it's Friday. Yay, Friday! -She received a mail of shipment after cancelling a book order on site a, who refused to send anything, and ordering it from site b. So, unless the mailman eats it, Saan will finally have the book she's been waiting....nearly a year and half for. Yay, book! -She's filling in her blog before the end of the evening news. -She does not have a boring historical novel for Dutch. Nope, she has a hisotrical whodunnit, located near her own home. -She didn't have any screamingly bad grades this week. So Saan's enjoying her happy moment. You should get off the pc and enjoy yours, too!
Saan's computer time got cut short when her pc got cleaned in and Saan was not allowed to go over the wet floor (her slippers have gone AWOL) and she still has some showering and schoolwork to do. So no post.
Music is the soul's way of talking, or so several people say.
If that's true, Saan's soul is one of the more pained ones out there. Or so you'd think when she finds her flute (every Tuesday afternoon, while cleaning up her room) and decides to try a song she hasn't heard in ages. Or tries to play her sister's piano. Her sister's better at the playing part of it. And the actual singing of it, too. The singing's been better since Eve was about... Say, three. Think Scala for toddlers and Scala for kids. Think grandmas who buy top ten records and three naughty little stars on Christmas Eve, and you have a pretty accurate idea about what you could hear squeaking in Saan's house up until a few years back.
Saan's better at listening to it. Preferably at the lower volume settings of her pc, MP3 player or cell phone. Her brother is going half-deaf and has to rattle the neighbourhood at X PM to enjoy some music, or let all passerbies (Trust me, that word doesn't get any better-looking) know which song he's listening to, even with in-ear headphones, which basically gives you five to six decibels more. The only time of year Saan allows for the volume to be turned way up is the annual trip to Germany, with the annual sing-along-cd. Schnappi, Céline Dion, the Pizza Hut, The Cranberries and Strawberry Shortcake echoing through the Eiffel. Saan's mom gets dumped with the youngest cousin and Saan's aunt in a different car to assure at least ninety minutes of sounds, with most songs replayed at least once. You have not been on a family trip after trying to dance the Macarena in a car that's overloaded even without the three loud kids in the back seat. Compiling that cd is about as far as Saan's musical talents go.
Her brother's very musical, if he can program the piece in his pc and let it be played by a bar code reading, lego-robot. Which he actually did once. Baby shampoo with milk can be musical. 34r, 933|<$ //0rLD//1D3. Saan's not the only one not quite right in her family.
Saan, contrary to popular belief, likes fruit (it's just the funny-smelling kinds she doesn't like). It's healthy. It's yummy. You can cover it in chocolate and kill the healthy part. And, seeing it's fruit season, Saan's typing all she knows on fruit. Prepare to be astounded.
The first thing they learn you in kindergarten is that fruit comes from plants. And not to eat the red berries on the bush, or wild chestnuts. Saan's never been a nutty kind of gal and the berries were less interesting than the ladybugs on the bush, so that never was a problem. Strangely enough, this lesson, about fruit, is repeated once more in seventh grade. Apparently, kids tend to forget and start thinking fruit's made in a factory, right along with milk, honey, meat and fish.
This astonishes Saan, but then again, not every kid has a grandfather who for the largest part of Saan's life has had fruit trees, a small plot of land with vegetables and strawberries, bees for honey, rabbits and chickens for eating and, at one point, a white cow. The animals have dwindled down to bees and the odd chicken. The last rabbit got murdered (well, removal of limbs until it bled to death, after it had somehow gotten its eyes pecked out by something, after being sick) by Saan's uncle's dog after it got identified as easy pickings. So Saan's always known how grapes can grow underneath a car port, how funny-growing apple trees make excellent climbing practice and how much yummier freshly picked cherries are from those in the store. Her dog-less uncle, who lives next to Saan's grandfather, has a set of plum-trees, cherry-trees and one apple tree.
Saan's neighbours (or their garden, anyway) has walnut trees and apple trees. These months, the people who rent their house are, as usual, bemoaning the fact that the apples are rotting away in the orchard. Saan, however, loves the fact that her mother is too polite to refuse ten kilos of apples that are mostly good for, well, cooking. Too floury for anything else. All they need is some puff-pastry (though usual pie-dough's much tastier, but puff pastry will do) some sugar and apples.
You preheat the oven (don't know at what temperature. You can always check the website on this one if you enter 'tarte tatin' at google) and take a pie mould. You grease that mould until it's, well, pale yellowish as far as the eye reaches. Then you spread a nice layer of sugar on that. Arrange a few circles of apple parts on that, cover in sugar to taste, put the dough over it and put in your oven until the apples are a golden brown and oozing with caramel. Or before the caramelisation process turns to the burnt stage; it tastes nasty. Get it out of the oven, turn the mould upside-down on a large plate, eat before it cools down. Microwaving it will get you murdered by a bunch of angry Frenchmen. In Saan's experience, it'll turn the apples back to the floury, unappetising, bland flavor, as will eating it cold, or using too much or the wrong kind of dough. Eat it while it's still hot, on a cold autumn night with a dvd spinning away in the player, not worrying about your homework, housework or job.
Or, if it's summer, there's always the trick with the frozen banana, guaranteed to keep kids busy for half an hour. For the dieting readers; with black chocolate, it's worth a point and half in Weight Watcher's Points. You take a banana, peel it, cut it in half, stick a popsicle stick (or spoon, saté-stick, ...) up the flat end and freeze it in for a few hours. When they come out of the freezer, have some hot chocolate sauce ready and cover them in it. For kids: make a large helping and put the bowl in the middle of the table for them to dip in. The world's biggest mess that way, but you won't hear them complaining about heat or being bored. An alternate, fruity breakfast can be small pieces of banana (and probably a few other kinds of fruit), chocolate sprinkles, sugar and yoghurt
Or, for the quick and easy: cut up some fruit and make a fruit salad. Add some yoghurt, sweetened, to taste. (put them in a Tupperware container and take them to work or school for lunch with a picnic spoon, the kind you can throw away; the same amound of dishwashing as a lunch box, healthy, probably a lot less work than dancing the hula to get to the chocolate spread on the top shelf) Strawberry, apple-orange, appel-pear-banana are Saan's personal favorites. The only easier thing is washing an apple and eating it whole.
Saan has recently learned not to put lemons or other acidic substances on aluminium foil, luckily not the hard way. Severals kinds of fruit (example: apple, plum) have HCN in their seeds, a kind of acid that smells nicely of almonds but is quite unhealthy to deadly for your average human being. Cherries can't dry out from lack of water, but burst when there's heavy rainfall due to the high amount of sugar they contain. The only way to dry them out is to put them in a substance with a higher sugar concentration. Leave them there too long and you'll get this murderously sweet, sticky kind of candy.
...a job, probably. Wasting weekends away behind the pc is rather unproductive, and jobs bring in money, with which one can do... fun stuff. Like buy things. Christmas and birthday gifts for friends. Books. Locker-candy. Useless things.
The problem with actually getting a job is: a) finding one: Saan's got the speed and willingness to move of your average garden snail. Something close to home. So far, there's a job at a butcher, but Saan's mom has some doubts concerning Saan and sharp objects at nine AM on a Sunday morning. b) the law: Saan knows vaguely that she can't work more than X days three thirds of the year and as much as she wants in period Y but can't make more than Z in euros, over the space of W months, weeks or one year. c) school: Saan has to have enough time left to do her schoolwork and study for her tests. d) sleep: the later Saan goes to bed, the worse her time asleep and general mood gets. So no night work on Fridays at the uncle's bakery. e) a place to put the money: Saan has no bank account from which she can withdraw money with a credit card. Few people pay out sixteen year olds in cash.
So, so far babysitting has been scratched off the list due to Saan's general impatience with kids, butcher's been vetoed and the bakery has, apart from being fifteen miles away and keeping her up from, say, eight to seven, the downside of being yelled at during that entire time. So she'll probably spend a few days trying to find some info on the subject.
Saan wanted to practice her alternate butterfly, because she had one part of the move down, and mess around a little with her poi in general, but it's been raining funnily all day. The kind of rain that doesn't bother you until you notice your jeans are soaked. So there's not much to do outside today, except go out with friends (There's always a movie... Chances of convincing her friends that the quarter past ten show is a good idea are tiny, though) or stay home and find ways to amuse yourself. Like filling out your blog, watching movies, bugging your family through msn, jigsaws, books, tv, doing very you-things... And sadly enough Saan just feels like going out and, if possible, spin something. Feeling a bit jittery. Wandering around town in the middle of the night sounds like fun, too. So, maybe, just maybe, she'll grab the phone and ask a few people if they feel jittery, too.
