It was a nice adventure. Fishing on the North sea was a fun experience. Sailing for a while, trying to catch something, sailing a little more. This is how it went a couple of times and during each of the stops our bucket stayed empty and clean… until father Kees caught the first fish. Quickly loads of fish followed until we had the bucked totally filled. The result was 29 mackerels.

The result:



The route:

Tough sailors who defy terrible weather and the hardships of the endless ocean. The fierce life of hardship and suffering. Risking your life in a storms and in the pouring rain just to catch a few measly fish. On a ship adrift on the wild ocean praying to the mighty god of the seas to be allowed to see your home again. Knowing your family is home, living in fear and anxiety.

Most likely the trip will not be so bad as the previous paragraph depicts, but you never know. With some family and friends we are going fishing on the North Sea. With shipping company Trip we’re leaving tomorrow early in the morning to spend the entire day fishing for Mackerel. The fish we catch we can take home, so we’ll be eating lots of fish.

We have a new car! We traded in our faithful Seat Ibiza and now we have a new nine year old red Focus.

Well, the car was as good as new when we bought it. After a few days of use we have notices that our parking place on -3 is giving us quite a few problems. The car already had some big dents and huge scratches on the left side, the right side and on the front bumper.

7 young rabbits are playing in our garden. The left their nest about a week ago. All seven are as black as the night, which is strange because their mother is red-brown. Clearly they are having a lot of fun in the garden.

Emotions are a very personal subject. Writing emotions down on a piece of paper is even more difficult. Still, it seems that it is possible to use mathematics to calculate the emotional values of written texts. In this context I was asked if would agree to allow two texts from my website to be used in an investigation.

The texts the researcher was interested in were the two texts read on our wedding. One text read by my brother Bert and one read by our friend Miguel. Ana and I were both very moved by the texts so clearly there is a good amount of emotion there. I am very curious as to the results but I will have to be patient because the results will probably take a few months.

At my parents place there are always a lot of animals walking around. Thanks to the rabbit the number of animals has just gone up a lot because the rabbit has a nest full of young ones.

Noordwijkerhout is a little town in the middle of the area where loads of flowers are grown. Normally it is a very quiet town and there is not a lot happening, but today there was something to be seen. The 66th annual Bulbflower Parade passes through town. A lot of cars all decorated with thousands and thousand of flowers.

It was very cold, but very nice to see.

I have been in Holland since April and it has been quite a busy time. I needed to arrange a lot of things and I quickly started my new job. My first impression of Holland was that is was very very cold. Somehow I did not remember the low temperatures.

I underestimated the effect the distance between myself and Alex and Ana would have. The first few days it was very hard to be so far away. Still, in the end we worked out some kind of rhythm were we speak and see each other every day. This way we both stay up to date regarding our lives. Luckily I also have my family and friends close.

Today we leave for Madrid. A nice few days of holidays with little Alex visiting the capital of Spain. We’ll be flying with Ryanair, so we’re in for some discomfort, but afterwards we’ll be ready to enjoy the three kings celebrations.