Waffle

Allright, this post is the big announcement I've been promising to make since I came back from the US on Monday. It took a bit longer because I came home with a cold on top of my jetlag, AND I had to get straight back to work the next day. It's taken me this long to get on top of things.

I'll keep it brief: Aggie and I are getting married! I've been sitting on that announcement for a long time; I asked Aggie back in March. Back then, though, we didn't have a date set yet. We do now, so the big news is that Aggie and I are getting married in a historic location in middle Tennessee on May 29, 2010.

Back in March, just the act of asking her was a big phase shift in our relationship and my feelings about committing myself. Things just fell into place emotionally. But it didn't have any immediate practical influence. That's going to change, because the marriage means I'm going to move to the United States, and that's a pretty big, scary, complicated move to make.

But that's something to write about another day. Today, I'm just happy to let everyone know what's going on in our lives and that we're planning to be together for a long, long time.

I'm back in the Netherlands after 2 1/2 months in Tennessee. I've got some announcements to make and a backlog of other things I want to write about on the blog, but they'll have to wait as I'm exhausted, jetlagged and sick with a cold.

I did get a few things done since arriving here. I've renewed the domain registration for five years so I won't have to think about it again until 2014. And I've started recovering data from my Macbook, which broke down spectacularly while I was in Tennessee. Let's just say that I'm unimpressed with the hardware quality on Apple's newer laptops.

Adventurecon was fantastic and very productive. I'm still in the US with Aggie, working long-distance for my employer in the Netherlands as an experiment. Aggie got me hooked on True Blood; the rest of my spare time is spent working on comics and trying to prevent a puppy from chewing up its surgical bandages. Life is good.

Jim Macdonald at Making Light has a good clearing-house post of All You Need To Know Generally About Flu: what it does to the body and how to prepare.

The Scienceblog Effect Measure gives more detail about the public policy aspects and the swine flu outbreak's progress.

People in the Netherlands planning to travel to the United States in the next few weeks, such as yours truly, need to keep an eye on the Dutch foreign ministry's travel advisory (in Dutch), which still has no official word on the epidemic. While I'm at it, here's the the one for Mexico.

On a personal note, I REALLY hope that this isn't the Big One. I was kinda planning to get married next year and would like to be alive to experience that.

This week, I had a cold. I stayed in bed for two days and am beginning to think that when I got back to work on Thursday, it was really too early as I don't think I was mentally up to scratch. It's been my opinion for a long time that people who are sick with short-lived contagious illnesses that temporarily addle their brains should not try to be heroic, and I think I kinda broke that rule. Not that everyone else didn't already have stinking colds anyway.

This YouTube video (embedding has been disabled) shows Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan trying to be a hero while under the influence of a stinking cold, on live television and doing terrible damage to his reputation in the process. Don't be like him.

This YouTube vid, shot after a gig in São Paulo, explains why he carried on through over a week of looking, sounding and feeling like death warmed over:

I do admire the entire band's commitment to carrying on no matter what, and what could be more rock and roll than playing a whole gig bleeding from your crotch? But I don't think it worked out well this time.

1. Almost a quarter-century after its first release, I watch a video for the Deep Purple album track "Mean Streak" off the "Perfect Strangers" record. It is a fairly run-of-the-mill performance video set in an orange, red and yellow autumn forest, though the video quality is outstanding. One thing is slightly off though: former Gillan basssist John McCoy, looking the age he is today, is sitting in the front of the stage. When the guitar solo comes, we don't see Ritchie Blackmore playing it; instead, McCoy holds up an old transistor radio on which the solo is heard in a tinny, distorted sound quality. After that, the camera zooms out to reveal fewer and fewer musicians on stage. The song morphs into the album's power ballad "Wasted Sunsets".
Afterwards, I talk to singer Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover about the video. It is the present, but they both look like they did in 1984. I want to broach the subject of how John McCoy, with whom Gillan has not been on speaking terms since before the release of the album, ended up in the video (I guess there was no real reason to wonder why Blackmore wasn't in it; that was just Blackmore being Blackmore). Instead, I ask them about "Wasted Sunsets" saying it is a much underrated song. Gillan thanks me but Glover says nothing. Gillan mentions that they wanted to play it on a recent Deep Purple tour, but current guitarist Steve Morse couldn't get one of the licks right, so it ended up being played on the latest Gillan solo tour instead. The dream fizzles out.

2. I am in Trinidad & Tobago, having taken on my therapist's offer of a vacation in a place she regularly stays in, in exchange for a simple favour: I have to go to the beach and read stories from a storybook to a cat. Initially, I want to skimp on that duty, taking just the (gorgeous) illustrations collected in a separate volume with me and improvising stories for the cat should it arrive, but the person behind the assignment is adamant that I take the storybook, and read the stories from it. The person trusts that the cat will arrive and listen to the stories.
Trinidad & Tobago is dirty and impoverished. The water isn't drinkable and is poisoned with nitrogen. Swimming in it is also not encouraged, though some local children do. The sunshine is nice though, and walking down the slope from the house to the beach, and back, is decent exercise. In the house, I find some of the notes my therapist has taken about me, among the mess she has left in the bedroom - which I am quite sure is her mess and not mine. The dream fizzles out and I wake up.

Both dreams were very vivid and I can still remember them pretty well several hours later. The autumn forest in dream number one was beautiful - who said people only dream in black and white? I sure don't. In the second dream, I could feel the tension in my stomach muscles from walking down the slope, exactly the way it feels in the waking world.

Bonus dreams: I actually had two other dreams that I still remember in part last night. Both involve running. In one of them, I was planning a trip to a running competition in Zuidwolde at short notice and not getting the schedule together (the competition would have been today, Sunday December 14). In the other, I am on a hiking trail with Aggie and her kids. Aggie is energetic, bouncing along ahead of us and occasionally speeding up into a run (in the dream, she has an excellent running technique). I point this out to Squirrel, her oldest and he shrugs it off.

I've sent DFG one more page I drew over the weekend. So I kept my promise of cranking out one other page.

I didn't really enjoy it though. All weekend, I've been fighting back fatigue and so I wasn't focused on anything and got gradually more depressed. It didn't help that I didn't get any exercise all week - it's making me feel weak and sluggish. Also, I have hardly spoken to anyone who wasn't a co-worker all week, except Aggie who I talk to online all the time. I love Aggie... but it's not good for me to just talk to a person on the other end of a webcam.

So I'm back to square one in terms of how focusing on my projects is working out. I have to push myself to get out there and run, to keep seasonal depression at bay, and I have to push myself to socialize with people in my own area and in meat space. That will, however, leave me once again with proportionally less time to finish the work that I feel has been breathing down my neck for some time. I won't make any claim to being a great artist, but I do have an inner need to be working on my art or else I don't have a sense of purpose. So not having time for it because after my work day I have to perform social and physical maintenance on myself, even though I realise that I need that too, that I need to be out and about and meeting my friends, frustrates me.

I did no work on the other projects - I was going to read the script to Muscle again but I ran out of time. I overslept again on both Saturday and Sunday - it seems like I can't wake up in the morning anymore once the pressure of the working week is off me. Just doing that one not very complicated page was all I managed.

Well, that, and Christmas shopping, which is now halfway done. Only 5 hours of trudging through town and another 2 hours of looking online - so if I can spare another 7 hours next weekend, I should be golden.

When Aggie and I were at Nashville zoo back in May, she was disappointed that all she could see of the porcupines was their rear ends. Yesterday, I was in Emmen zoo as part of a company outing, and got to take a few shots with my cellphone camera. Most of them were no good, because the cellphone camera is too slow and doesn't have zoom... but this one turned out all right.

Small child looking at a porcupine raising its spines, shot in Emmen Zoo. Click to enlarge.

The porcupines were in a bad mood that day. This one had its spines raised because one keeper whom it disliked was in the area. Later on, I caught two porcupines fighting, again with spines raised. They attack by nipping at one another and pushing, and only use the spines for defense.

I use the cellphone camera as sort of a toy camera that will get me into the habit of photographing interesting things, before dropping money on a real camera. It's not great, but then you don't learn to play the violin on a Stradivarius either.

Some miscellaneous things:
First off: there will not be a new comic next week. My 37th birthday is tomorrow, and my present to myself is a day off the treadmill. No deadlines, no accomplishment targets. I may or may not do any work, but I'm releasing myself from all obligations for just one weekend in my life.

Driving class is going well, though it doesn't always feel like it. My instructor is sending me into more difficult areas to navigate and is finally letting me pay attention to traffic. As a result, it feels like I'm stagnating, because the more difficult things I'm doing don't go smoothly. I find some of it hair-raising, in fact and come home from the class all tired and sweaty. Give me a stretch of road I'm familiar with, though, and I do notice a difference.
I do now believe I should have done this much earlier. Not so much because learning ability declines with age (it does, but not by as much as people think; indeed, the biggest factor that causes adults to learn more slowly than young people is that adults typically aren't immersed in a learning environment), but because it's much more difficult for me to find the time and schedule the classes than it would have been 18 years ago. The cancellation rate on my classes is about 50%, because I can only make it outside ordinary work hours, and those hours happen to be difficult for my instructor to make.

Grocery expenses today: €21,10. Not bad, especially keeping in mind that I was able to buy for the pantry: various dried bean/lentil products will keep me fed for months, and I did the shopping while hungry (I had no breakfast foods in the house, which meant I had shop before breakfast) which is normally a big no-no. The general frugal advice is not to go grocery shopping while hungry. I overcame this problem by sticking to the periphery of the supermarket as advised by Michael Pollan and giving myself very little shopping time. Compared to the farmer's market, the selection of fresh produce was poor, but I got enough of what I needed for this week's meal plan (cauliflower korma, spaghetti bolognese and dal curry, each for multiple days) and probably will have to go back only once to buy odds and ends.

I got an € 609 tax refund, which is less than I expected. But I'll also be getting part of the nationalised part of my health insurance premiums back, which could well make up most of the total. If you actually look at your tax form, the actual income taxes in the Netherlands are pretty low in the lowest bracket or "box". Most of what you pay is for health insurance, which is a separate bill (and is topped up by a part that you pay to private insurers. Yep, it's a complex and expensive system, but as compromises between private and socialised medicine go, it could be worse). I'll be spending the refund on rebuilding my financial buffer, which has suffered a bit from my plane ticket and the cost of driving lessons. On the personal finance front, I'm also untangling the final issues with the rent of the studio, which I will be leaving on October 21. And I'm thinking of having another go at budgeting. I tried that in February, but I don't think I was ready for it at the time. Now, though, I've realised that my plans for the future will make it essential to save a lot more money than I do. Also, I have become aware of how much anxiety about money stresses me out. I have never had any significant debts, but I have no significant assets either, which means that it doesn't take much to cause my buffer to run out. Time for me to start dealing more intelligently with money.

I spent €60 at the market this afternoon, plus €17 at my local organic butcher's, and €6 at the market yesterday during my lunch break (when there were different stalls including an organic bread stall that I didn't discover until after I'd bought bread. I'd have spent much more if my lunch break had been longer) . It's safe to say that my food budget has exploded this week.

I'm not going through an itemized list this time, but I do want to mention that some of these expenses were one-offs. The biggest extra expense was tortilla chips plus four kinds of dip to go with them; the plan is for me to reverse-engineer and then improve on the dip I like the best (which is probably going to be the chilli), so that's €8-10 that I'll only spend once. I also bought enough cheese to last for three weeks, plus fresh cilantro, which I usually do without.
I've located milk! But I didn't buy any as it was €1.30 for half a liter. Locally produced and organic, so probably very good, but the price was one I'd expect in a cafetaria, not in retail. I can technically afford to pay € 2.60 a liter for milk, but only if I still save money overall, which I'm not doing.

Going back to the original purposes of the experiment, I ended up buying a lot of things that weren't whole food staples but prepared foods: melba toast, the dips, chocolate nuts, the tortilla chips which by Michael Pollan's definition are edible, foodlike substances. So the experiment's purpose was defeated entirely and I might as well get those things from the supermarket again. On the plus side, shopping at the market is a lot more fun - you're outdoors, there are bargains to be had and new products to try, and the smells from some of those stalls is just divine. Goat cheese in particular taunts and tempts me whenever I pass it, as do Moritz's olives, sun-dried tomatos and feta.

Experiment over! It would have been fun and interesting to do this for a couple of months; describing your shopping in great detail is the sort of thing that's dull if you do it once, but becomes more interesting if you keep it up until patterns become visible. But the pattern that's showing up already is that I spend more and don't stick to the experiment's purpose, so to protect my wallet, I'm cutting it off here. I'll be splitting my purchases between the outdoors market and the supermarket like a sane person.