Phew, much happened since last update. First up: a big congratulations to Jeroen, Tijntje, Maartje, Arnout & Aukje and Yohan on respectively birthday, graduation, birthday, wedding and PhD defense. The wedding was lovely, and the ensuing party was very nice. It had been quite a while since I had seen most guests (some never, but I mean the guests I know). Almost didn’t recognise Arnout’s parents – but it had been 10 years, and they also didn’t recognise me :)
One last thing about the discussions I had at the wedding: Suzanne: I’m not sure how you remember it, but to me the whole thing between you, Karin and me always ended in a tie :) So let’s keep the memory like that ;-)
(and have a nice wedding yourself!)
So, that was a short look back, but kind of in reverse… so a bit longer, and in a better order:
I travelled back by train from Lux on Wednesday the 25th, and had a nice pause in Maastricht to meet Jennifer and cook for her once. She has some nice housemates, we enjoyed a nice dinner (dessert: strawberry, freshly stirred cream and ice) and then it was onwards again for me. (Could say a lot about how nice the evening was, but I won’t :P)
Thursday, after meeting Sjouke at CWI, me, Ania and Marek had a very nice dinner and afterwards Marek and me got our asses hand-fed to us in a game of Carcasonne. Friday was the big day of the wedding, so I dressed up nicely, went for a swim and half a day of work, and then onwards to the officialities. Gotta say one thing about Nout: he is, inevitably, Nout. :) Wisecracking during his own ceremony :) :) Aukje looked lovely, and somehow I couldn’t notice the nerves on Arnout — though I am sure he had plenty of them. Well, he deals with nerves by making jokes, and in that regard… he was definitely nervous ;-)
As said, met a lot of people I hadn’t spoken in quite a while at the party, so there was some nice catching up. (To give you an idea of how long it had been in some cases: people coming up to me and noticing I have lost a lot of weight). Saturday Marek, Ania and me teamed up for lunch, serious shopping and a game of squash — really cool, I should play more often. Marek hadn’t played before, but he quickly started returning the ball. Ania, of course, had played before, but it had been quite a while… so at first I had the upper hand. And, of course, then she realised how to improve her stance… second time that week I got hand-fed my own ass ;-)
The rest of the weekend consisted of pizza, Heroes & Naruto (with Steven); Boboti & catching up with my brother, and shopping on Sunday in the sun. Ran into Ania during shopping, and we shopped together a bit. We were just dropping of the shopping, when the doorbell to OUR place (the unofficial name of the house where Ania, Petr and Amandine live) rang. Turned out to be Yohan’s parents, so with Yohan not being there yet, I got to practice my French a bit. 20 minutes later, Yohan came in with a whole bunch of French friends and family, and I got to practice my French even more :) Luckily Baptiste has been helping me out a lot with French.
Well, skipping the defense, that sort of concludes it (skipping over SAFE-NL too). À la prochaine!
Now gaming: not gamed since last update