Journal of a Time Traveller

It’s been over a week since my laptop suddenly died on me, and there is still this nice box standing in the hallway, waiting to be picked up…
I called the company we bought the laptops at in May 2008 on Monday, but they were rather uncustomer-friendly, by telling me that “No, there was nothing they could do, it was outside the warranty, and I had to find someone to fix it myself.” Ok… Never going to buy there again…
The guy I had on the phone from Dellw as very helpfull on the other hand. He agreed with me that my videocard should not die after only a year and a half. He checked if he could sent me a loose videocard, so I wouldn’t have to sent the entire laptop to the repair service, but it was an intergrated card on the motherboard (or something like that) so it had to physically go to the Dell repair shop. He organised that their special repair pick-up company would sent me a box to put my laptop in. That should arrive on Tuesday. When I got home on Tuesday, there was no box in sight. On Wednesday the box had arrived though. So on Thursday I called the pick up company and arranged for pick-up on Friday. The girl I had on the phone could not tell me a part of the day when the pick up would be, not could she organise that I would be called when the pick up was in the neighbourhood. So I had to stay at home all day, because they could come between 8.00 AM and 17.00 PM.

At 17.30 PM, the box was still standing in the hallway, silently waiting for his taxi driver. Who of course hadn’t shown…
I’m going to give them such a PO call tomorrow!! They better organise something quickly, because I won’t be staying at home for another full day!

This cold is starting to annoy me. Ever since we got home from our winter-sport holiday my nose has been clogged. I’m even starting to develop an addiction to nose spray, as it is the only way I can sleep at night without choking… So I bought me an herbal nose spray which you can use every day, as the medicinal nose spray will worsen the non-breathing in the end. Can it become spring already, please?

On a different note, I’ve won tickets for the final races of the ISU World Cup in Heerenveen next week Sunday!
Our new car will be coming next Friday.
And the motor racing season is about to start soon

Our current car needs a lot of things fixed to get it through the annual check-up in May, which will cost at least 2000E. Take that together with the fact that it’s a petrol car, and with ca 30.000 km a year it’s a lot cheaper to drive a diesel. We kinda concluded quickly we needed a new car. So for the past couple of months we have been slowly looking for a new one.

First of course the discussion what kind of car, all the cars Hendrik likes are a bit to big to my taste, and everything I like he thinks is to small. A car model we both like is the BMW 1 series, but that’s a bit out of the budget… Last week we found a pretty nice Peugeot 308 on the internet, so today we decided to get in our car and drive to Zutphen to check it out. Live the car looked just as nice, even nicer as on the screen. We took it for a drive, it drives like a dream, the only thing was that the parking sensors were f*cked up (it was beeping already a few meters before it should) But that was something they could easily fix.
After the drive we had decided to sleep over it, before we made our decision. But the guy wanted to sell the car really badly (perhaps he hadn’t made his target for the week…) so he was asking us why we couldn’t decide now. Which was the price of course… Then the negotiating began, in the end they could sell us the car just a bit above what I had in mind. So we signed the contract and bought us a car!!!

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…