Categories
in the netherlands

random paperwork

* today i got to work under a snowstorm that lasted for 15 minutes. snow in april? yes, i wouldnt believe it as well but it was true. i hadn’t put my rain trousers on, so i got all soaked. at least i brought capuccino and brazilian music today.
if i can’t have the trousers dry, at least the heart is warm ( of course now there’s hardly a cloud on the sky. )

* in the office, there’s a map on the wall that i’m facing, when i’m at my computer. it shows the netherland’s national and regional gas grid, with its pipeling accross the country, transfer stations and other bits and bytes. it also shows what is called the Groningen gas veld – the biggest gas field in the netherlands- which, you might have guessed, is sitting somewhere under my butt, miles deep down in the ground. scary? well, no. by a lucky quirk of fate, this natural underground storage has enough gas in it to keep the netherlands working (and i mean factories, homes and exports) for at least another 20 years – and that’s a lot, specially if you think it has been being explored since the 70’s.

* i secretely hope they’ll take me to the control room, deep underground, one of these days. or (even more daring) to one of their drilling platforms in the northern sea. that ought to be fun (though not very likely).
meanwhile, i was invited to the company’s birthday party, more than 2 months away. (the dutch plan with their lunch with months of advance. everything must work perfectly)
no one knows where it will be, or what will be done. a well kept secret, with the promise of dinner and party afterwards. looking forward, though slightly scared.

* i read somewhere on the wikipedia quotes that “dutch is not a language, it’s a throat disease”.
i apologise to my dutch friends, but i couldn’t agree more. it hurts to speak (amazing, i can actually say a couple of things by now!) and to hear. making out a few words per phrase is a hard exercise of concentration. today they put a poster on the wall by the koffieautomat, something about a workshop by the ict department. due to the high concentration of technical words (which for me are much easier that the others), i could actually make out what it was about. another victory against the forces of evil!

* it’s been a month i’m working here now. yay to me. i survived the indifference, the unberable language wall, the age gap. i also survived the amount of new information and methods, vb code produced by a non-programmer and windows.
you gotta have a sense of humour, i’ve learned, and you definitely have to have the nerve to make a lot of questions and fuel as many conversations as you can. it doesn’t matter that everybody speaks english – most of the time it’s just too troublesome for them to bother. i can tell they have never been in my shoes.

* last sunday there was an openday in the company, and we were encouraged to bring friends and family to see a photoexhibition they have on the ground floor. it was rather nice. first of all, because i got to show part of my workplace (and i’ve always liked to peek at people’s work place) to my friends, and they got an oportunity to enter the building without having to show their id or other burocracy.
and then, by the exhibition itself. it’s about “golden oldies”, and the beauty in the 3rd age. a lot of wrinkled closeups and old madonna’s statues mixed with funny one person sequences (from waking up to ready-to-go). some rather unexpected works involving not-so-dressed grannies. :| that must have been fun to shoot.

Categories
in the netherlands just life

do estado deste quarto (e deste blog)

tenho o quarto em escombros. de tecido, de meias pelo chão. de restos de música, recibos de visitas curtas, carimbos, flores a murchar, postais, café, linhas de esquemas e colunas de valores bem alinhados, livros, pacotes de sumo lavados (para um armário de pequenas portas), a revista da cidade, as canetas preferidas da stabilo, a caixa das aspirinas das dores de cabeça contínuas e desgastantes dos últimos dias. a música espanhola animada que passa pelas paredes do quarto vizinho, ou as discussões apaixonadas, do outro lado, que às vezes se sentam no meu colo, em soluços, e me lembram que ainda tenho muito para aprender.
algumas visitas marcadas, as reuniões em letras grandes, para não me esquecer mesmo, as calças da chuva a secar.

mas tenho tido ideias. escrevinho, desenho, desarrumo um pouco mais. todos os dias me vêm aos olhos pedaços de projectos, de coisas que quero misturar e que acabam misturadas em cima da minha minuscula mesa, pelo “sofá” improvisado. em cima e por baixo de outras coisas, esquecidas, re-descobertas.
sempre para dar a alguém, sempre com gente em mente.
imponho a mim mesma deadlines, mas não era preciso: quando se abre a portinha das coisas que gosto, elas acabam depressa demais.

andamos assim.

Categories
in the netherlands

i’m working on it.

goed goed goed.
this blog has been suffering from severe lack of inspiration. i have a few things i want to blog about, but when the end of the day comes, i can’t seem to find my way in my own keyboard (the one at work has a dutch layout, and i have to use the windows shortcuts all day)… so i either sleep, fix bugs on webpages or recover a bit of my social life.

when the weekend comes, it all changes. i miss my “publico and a café” ritual a lot, but i found an equally thrilling replacement for it: the saturday market, in vismarkt. the purple bright aubergines, the goat cheese with herbs and garlic, the kipananas schnitzel, the freshly baked bread, the “twee kilo banaan!” shouted across the street… everytime i find something new and i stuff it in my bike’s basket (by the way, i finally fixed the brakes this week!).
and on my way home i stop for some tulips or daffodils…

so now the fridge is full of healthy colorful things and my batteries and patience are recharged.
i’m working on new stuff and on new posts to schedule throughout the week.

(the photo is from g., which is now working in a’dam. he has a new camera and likes to bring it around to groningen on weekends. it’s pretty neat and he’s a cool photographer, so don’t forget to check the rest of his flickr gallery.)

Categories
just life photography

the ode to dad.

(i saw rita made a post about her dad, and i suddenly felt like doing something similar here too. thanks for the idea :) )

my family was always a different one.
mom worked a lot. more than 30 hours in a row, at least twice a week (and amazingly, she still does). when she was home, we weren’t allowed to make any noise – a rule which later was responsible for us listening to music much lower than most people, i think.

so, anyway, how did me and my brother end up normal healthy kids?
yes, you might have guessed it, the trick was my dad. he woke up early, fed, washed, drove us to school, went to the teachers meetings, took us to the hairdresser and the dentist, invented new foods (pasta with sausages was his and our favourite!) etc etc etc.
on top of it all, he still had a semi-normal job with some degree of liberty and he helped my mom with the housework. wait, i know what you are thinking – “helped with the housework” is an ironic expression that is often a sinonym of joyfully washing the dishes once a week.
well, that wasn’t the case at all. the proof is i’ve never seen my mom ironing any single piece of clothing or vaccum cleaning.
that’s just the way it is.

dad.

< we've had our ups and downs, but some people are special, i guess. my most treasured memories are from a period in which my mom was finishing some sort of degree or post-graduation and she had to study a lot. my dad would take us two to porto on the train with a kilo of rice and we'd spend the afternoon there, feeding the pidgeons. on the picture you can see him and nani, my little cousin – who we took there a few years ago, just for the fun of doing it once again. we still love it. and i love you dad. :) ps – paizito. já sei que não percebes o que eu escrevi ali em cima, mas não tem mal. já te disse tudo quando te liguei hoje. resumindo, gosto muito de ti. continua a fazer massa com salsichas e tudo, que a gente adora. beijocas.

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geek

on for another year.

we are back. me and meiadeleite.
a one-day payment delay because of a forgotten email account were enough to scare me (and the occasional reader, i’ve heard – thanks for the concerns. it still amazes me that some people actually read this :P)

i’m a disaster at remebering dates and birthdays. even my own site’s. i guess this means it’s the 2nd year of me blogging in meiadeleite.com (a little more if we count the old nofundodasescadas). go me! :)