Journal of a Time Traveller

Our skiing holiday is almost over, tomorrow it’s time again to go home. We had lots of luck in the past week, the weather has been beautiful almost all days. Only Tuesday morning we had a bit of snow, and today it’s snowing big time! Until now there is already 30-40 cm of snow fallen, and according to the weather forecast it will be snowing until tomorrow afternoon 4 PM, so tomorrow morning will be the first time we will be driving with snow chains… Ah well, I managed to get up to the slippery mountain, so we’ll manage to get down again as well

Monday was my first day of skiing after 2 years, I made the stupid mistake to go down a red slope directly, and the first curve was already @$%! So with my heart in my throat and my courage nowhere in sight, I got down the piste in one hour… After swearing that I would never go down a mountain ever again, Hendrik got me to book an hour of private lessons for the same afternoon. I had an eldery woman, who got my confidence back a bit. After my lesson I went back up the piste again with my brother in law, and back down the same red piste as in the morning. I got down ok this time, just fell once face forward, after flying 3 m through the air, down in the snow.

Tuesday I had another two hours of private lessons, together with my father, this time we had an elderly man (66 y) who was teaching us. He was a really really good teacher, who managed to get my confidence back totally. The red slope was now not a problem any more in the mornings, in the afternoons the pistes were a bit to bumpy to my taste. Tuesday afternoon I did some more practising at the baby piste before our apartment.

Wednesday we went up to another part of the Zillertal Arena, where there were some beautiful broad blue pistes. Unfortunately it was very windy up there, so the lift which we needed to take back up to our side was closed. Instead we needed to go back with the bus.

Thursday was a beautiful sunny day where we made lots of kilometres over nicely prepared red and blue pistes. I got to practice the tricks ski teacher had taught us, so the skiing went easier and easier.

Friday we took a long route over 3 red pistes twice, I don’t think I have ever skied this long on one go before. After lunch we went to the other side of the mountain, where I managed to fall on an easy blue piste. I did hurt my shoulder a lot, so we decided to go home. But I had skied about 40 KM that day.

Today (Saturday) it is snowing too much to really go skiing, not that the sight is really bad, nor that the pistes are not prepared, but it is snowing so hard that there is already 10 cm on the piste again. We might go down the baby hill this afternoon, don’t know if it will be on skies or on the sled We already had a very nice walk in the snow to the supermarket this morning.

Health-wise things have been going uphill the past couple of months, I can slowly reduce the frequency of my injections, now at once every 2 weeks. And the nerve damage is also still improving, which is good. Rule of thumb is that everything which is not healed after two years will never heal, so I still have good hopes that most things will get back.

At the moment I also have the most wonderful physiotherapist, she seems to know exactly what to do, when and where. That together with my new pillow (a tempur pillow) makes that my pain levels have dropped big time. Half a year ago I was at a constant 7-8 (out of 10), and now I’m at a 3-4 (out of 10) I can now even sometimes sleep without painkillers

So I lied on twitter, update II will come tomorrow. We went to see a movie tonight, “Komt een vrouw bij de dokter” A movie about a man whose wife dies from breast cancer. I was a best selling book a couple of years ago, a book which also made me cry. The movie is really impressive, sometimes it was like sitting in a roller coaster of lights and sounds, at other times is was almost breakable. And it made me cry, just thinking back to some scenes bring the tears back in my eyes.
Most impressive moment: the little girl saying goodbye to her mum, “I don’t like it that you are dying.” That just totally broke my heart.

Wow, I haven’t been updating in ages. Which is usually caused because I have absolutely nothing to tell, I mean I don’t have this really exciting life or something. But now it was more because I’ve been insanely busy. A very quick overview of what I’ve done the past couple of months.

In August I had to juggle the balls of preparing for the acceptance tests of September and managing the department with half of the people on holiday. Luckily I had a couple of days of to go to the races in Dahelmer Binz in Germany, so I could relax a bit.
In September we had the acceptance tests of the new system, where a no-go no longer was an option. Luckily things even seemed to be working as planned, so we could actually say that we saw no show-stoppers for the go-live.
October was planned to be a rather quiet month, where I would be able to work in Deventer and train my guys in the new system. But instead it was a month where I had to go to Germany again 3 days a week and work some more on the new planning system. Which left me 2 days a week to train everyone, which of course led to mostly training on the job in November. The end of October was really stressful with getting all our migration files and master data right, but in the end we managed. A few days after the deadline, because one day I royally f***ed up a file, by saving the old data over the new. Oops… I bought the guy who had to solve the sh*t a six-pack of beer with chocolates to make up for it.
The first 2 days of November were nice and calm, the old system was already down, and the new one was still being set-up by the consultants. For 2 days I could even go home at 16.30.
But on Wednesday it started… At 6 AM the system was released for master data checks, which all needed to be checked and corrected that day, because on Thursday we had a final acceptance test. We’d quickly found out that about 90% of our material master data was f***ed up, because of a program which had run in an old version. So on Wednesday it was making lists of materials, checking and correcting them all day long, from 6AM till 9PM.
Thursday we started again at 6AM because we needed to test all backbone processes in one day. So another long working day. But in the end the overall vote was a GO. (not that there was another option, but that’s another story)
Friday was the first day “live” with the new system, luckily we had been prepared for a system failure, so the stock figures were high. That meant we could relax a bit and relatively slowly get used to the new work ways.
On Saturday we prepared the planning for the next two weeks, as there were still a lot of master data issues the automatic wasn’t to be trusted. An then on Monday, we really started to work with the system, which meant for me, long days of running around to everyone and noting down bugs, then putting those bugs in the ticket system so the consultants could work on it. And correcting the things I could correct myself. I’ve worked a grand total of 74.5 extra hours in November, so I already have 3 extra weeks of free time to spend in 2010
Now in December it’s starting to calm down, most urgent issues are solved, and for other things we have work-arounds. Of course there are still a lot of things to be done, but we don’t have to do the crazy hours any more.

So now I can actually get home, relax a bit on the couch before cooking dinner, and have an entire evening of doing nothing again. The first night that happened I was utterly confused what was happening. Of course that also means that I am now totally exhausted in the evenings and get to bed ridiculously early (10 PM on a Friday night) But that will get better soon

The dentist and I are no friends, never have been, and never will be. Not that I’ve had any traumatic experiences, but going to the teeth doctor always scares the hell out of me. So after I received the “you should come for your check-up” message in April 2008 I spent the next year an a half telling myself to make an appointment, but never actually pick up the phone and call… Always when someone told something about going to the dentist, I thought “I will make that appointment, but… not now. I will do so tomorrow…” My sister needed to go to the dentist last week,  and when she told me I jokingly asked her if she couldn’t get me an appointment, which she then did… For today… Oops that wasn’t quite what I had expected.

Anyways, I had an appointment at 11.40 this morning. At 11.15 I accidently looked at my watch and realised that I needed to hurry big time to get there on time. At exactly 11.40 I walked in to the waiting room. While I was biking over there my stomach was doing somersaults the entire way. Around 11.50 I walked over to the desk to check if the dentist assistent had already asked me in before I was there, but the denstist was just running late. At 12.00 when I was really starting to get nervous the assistent called me in. I could already sit in the chair and the dentist would be with me in a moment. By then every fiber in my body was just telling me to run away as far as I could. When the dentist came in, I was close to tears. Luckily my denstist is really sweet with stupidly afraid people like me. She is very calm and makes you relax. She explains everything she does which works for me.

Unfortunately I need to come back (twice) Once in two weeks to get my teeth cleaned (dental stone) and for an evaluation of the röntgen pics she made. Then they will tell me what needs to be done next. I have at least one small hole between two teeth, which needs to be filled. But I also have a couple of old fillings which she wants to check on the röntgen.

Blegh, I am already nervous. I HATE going to the dentist!!!!

Guess my therapist really hit the right (or wrong depending on who you look at it) spot last week. My shoulder and neck are still hurting. It’s not a cruciating pain, but enough to wake up from at night. Next to that I cannot sleep on my side due to my shoulder, so I sleep on my stomage in stead. This puts a strain on my lower back, which leads to waking up at night and a lot of tossing and turning.
Ah well, Monday I have another appointment, hopefully she can put everything back in it’s rightfull place.

But before that I have some other things to look forward to. Sunday my sis and I are going to the spa, we booked us a sauna day complete with lunch and a Shiatsu head massage. Really looking forward to it!
And tonight… I’m going to the Coldplay concert!!!! WOOT! It’s a strange feeling that the concert is tonight, I’ve been looking forward to it for so long.

Today was a day of housekeeping. I spent the better part of the afternoon and evening in the kitchen. But now I have the dinner for tomorrow (goulash) already almost ready, just need to cook the rice tomorrow and warm up the goulash. I have 12 mini quiches in the freezer for my bento lunches. I prepared my lunch for tomorrow, rice with French beans (left over from tonight’s dinner), chicken tandoori and a salad of paprika and celery, and I even made a bigger batch of that so I don’t need to cut it up tomorrow evening for Tuesdays lunch.
Perhaps I will make a picture tomorrow and post it.

*is proud of herself*

We also did some gardening, the grass needed to be mowed, and there is this flower bush which is too heavy and nearly lying on the ground which we bound up to the fence. That, together with throwing away old flowers and stuff, now makes our garden look all pretty again.

Of course (as in every weekend) we’ve done the laundry, don’t you just hate it when you have only two or three pieces of clothes in one colour… I have this 3/4 red pants which are new, so I don’t dare to put anything else in with it, except for this one red t-shirt. But putting the washer on for only 2 pieces of clothing… I’m probably too Dutch for that. So instead I will see which red clothes I have and wear them this week.

Tomorrow it’s back to work. My colleague is now in China, so I will have the office all to myself. Tuesday I have a couple of meetings, Wednesday and Thursday I will be in Germany, Thursday evening is the Coldplay concert (!!!) and Friday I will probably be exhausted. Ah well, work is a good place to rest, right…

Have you ever seen someone shoplift? And what would you do?

This afternoon when I went grocery shopping after work, there was this girl (in a wheelchair) behind me at the pay desk. After I paid and was busy putting my stuff in the small (free) plastic bags. While I was packing my stuff I noticed from the corner of my eye that the girl had just taken one of the big bags (where you need to pay 20 cts for) and was pushing it below her knee.
Somehow I was too surprised to say or do something, and I am still not 100% convinced that I saw it right. So I didn’t say anything and just biked home.

It’s a really weird feeling.

Somehow I have the feeling my presence here in Wesel isn’t appreciated. And the building/equipment wants me to go home.

- Tuesday morning it took about an hour for the computer to recognise my profile and get logged on.

- Yesterday the server had problems, so I couldn’t log on until 11-ish

- Today, while I was happily working on a huge excel-file my screen suddenly looked like it had been on some kind of halucigenic drug. I tried to solve the problem by taking the monitor cable out and put it back in again, but alas that didn’t help. And ofcourse, I hadn’t saved…
Luckily the computer has this really nice button, which shuts down the pc when you press it long enough. Only, when restarting the thing, it started to beep. And instead of a nice green light, the light turned red. Great, great, when working towards a deadline (the huge excel file needs to be done today)
I called the service desk here, and they came to check the error. The guy took my computer with me to see if he could solve it. Within half an hour he was back, with the message that the machine worked perfectly well down in his office. It seemed to be working at my desk as well, but the log on screen froze. And by the second time starting it started to beep again (5×5)
So back to the IT department the computer went. It was lunch time then, so I used the opportunity to get some lunch in the cantine (sausage with fries, so no dinner for me tonight, too many calories) After lunch the IT guy came back, with a new computer. Which sort of worked… It was terribly slow, and didn’t want to load all programs.
Another 30 minutes passed as they tried to get the spare machine to work. I passed the time by chatting about the annoyance called Vista and how that doesn’t allow me to change the IP address of my laptop at home. Suddenly the second IT guy saw the light, apparently my computer and monitor were on the same power cable (an Y-cable) And probably the computer didn’t get enough power. So new power cable, and now it works again like a charm.

Not really, I think it will keep me grounded more today, as the office floor is very very sticky.
Some how a can of Red Bull exploded in my handbag this morning, drenching everything in there in sticky smelly liquid. So now the contents of my bag are spread out through the office, or tossed in the garbage bin.
The bag itself is hanging to dry (after I cleaned it with lots of hot water of course) I just hope it will be dry before I leave at 14.45.

Also a tip for everyone using twitter, don’t put the phrase “wet and sticky” in any of your tweets. The amount of followers I got exploded within 5 minutes, so now my tweets are protected…