Vitamin C

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I like eating my daily dose of vitamin C. I trust in the positive health effects even though I have absolutely no proof that the vitamin is actually a benefit to my health. Still, my mind clearly tells me that taking vitamins is a good thing, and it makes me happy.

In Spain it is very hard to get vitamin C pills that you can take without first diluting them in water. I want something that will dilute in my stomach, because it is much easier. In holland this used to be my normal routine. Take a pill with some liquid, and done. One day, one pill, healthy me. It cannot be more simple.

In Spain the routine would be: Get a glass of water. Get a vitamin C pill. Put the pill in the water, and stir. Keep stirring, because in cold water it does not dilute very well. Keep stirring. The vitamin pill is now like a small pile of dust on the bottom of the glass. Either keep stirring, or drink it all and hope that you get all the vitamins from the bottom. Add more water to the glass to get everything. Stir again, and try again. You don’t want more water, but you force yourself to drink it to avoid throwing away the vitamins. The same thing happens! Give up, put the glass with the traces of vitamin still on the bottom and on the sides of the glass in the dishwasher. A terribly frustating way to start the day healthy.

Luckily I go to Holland every now and then, and now I found a great solution. At the kruidvat they sell huge pots with 500(!) vitamin C pills. Each pill has one gram of vitamin C, which is more than enough for me.

One week challenge: Thursday

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This is a post for my one week challenge.

[07:00] Again the same ritual. Wake up, kids, car, work.

[08:15] Punch in

[16:15] Punch out. Head home.

[17:00] AliExpress packages have arrived. One package with nine lotus seeds which I will plant in the aquarium with the shrimp. Two of the nine seeds I put in water directly, to see if they sprout. The rest of the seeds I will probably give away. The other package contained a new tribal bracelet for me.

[17:30] Alan his second English class! His first class at his new higher level. It went ok. I went on a short run, 5km.

[18:30] End of class so we head back home together. On the way back we passed by the hairsalon and we made an appointment with our hairdresser, Jeremy. Next week on Friday our hair will be cut. Alex, Alan and me. I am thinking about cutting my hair radically short, just like my father Kees used to have (not like he has it now, because that would leave me with almost no hair).

[19:30] Alex English (online).

[20:30] Alex’s class finished. The kids head over to grandma’s house (next door) for their dinner. In the meanwhile I will prepare their milk. After eating they will brush their teeth, put on their pyjama’s, and head to bed.

[22:30] Shower, some exercise, and to bed

One week challenge: Wednesday

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This is a post for my one week challenge.

[07:00] The same ritual. Wake up, kids, car, work.

[08:20] Punch in

[16:20] Punch out. Head home.

[16:25] Pass by the local supermarket.

[17:30] Tennis! The kids have their weekly tennis lesson. On hour, close to our home. During their class I go and have a short run in a park nearby. I forgot to bring cash. The tennis club only accepts cash for paying for the classes. I did not expect that to still be possible, but I suspect they have their reasons.

[19:30] Cook some food! The first two days of this week I had the pig from tgtg for lunch. Today I had leftover pasta from last weekend, but now there is nothing left, so I will make my more or less standard food. Rice with turkey and some vegetables. The rice is steamed to perfection in the Thermomix. First some water, the basket with the rice and some salt and oil, and on top some frozen beans. 19.30 minute, 110 degrees, and that’s it. The rice will be steamed and be just about ready. Some hard bits, but heating it up in the microwave i the next couple of days should make it perfectly eatable. The turkey I will bake with some onion, paprika, garlic and then add a can of Tikka Masala. Divide everything over a couple of tuppers and I have my lunch for the next couple of days.

[20:xx] After weighing myself I learned that I lost another half kilo! I now weigh 75.3 kilos, so I’m heading in the right direction. The biggest advantage I have is that we have no more beer, cheese and nuts at our home. I simply stopped buying them. Now, when I arrive home and feel a bit hungry there is no more option to get some cheese or some nuts, so I will eat a banana or an apple. If I’m thirsty I just get a small bottle of water. I think this helps a lot.

[21:30] The kids are already asleep. I showered and did almost half an hour of exercise.

[22:30] Cool down, relaxing a bit and sleep. Good night!

FrameMaker

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FrameMaker 5.5!I used to be a FrameMaker expert. My first job after finishing university was all about FrameMaker. I learned a lot in that job and even trained other people to use FrameMaker. Sadly it was only for a short while, a couple of years later my career grew in a different direction. Still, I am still reminded of my FrameMaker time whenever I have to make a document that’s bigger than one single page. FrameMaker used styles, page templates, and frames through which the text flowed. It worked! It simply worked, and it always worked, flawlessly. Even with huge documents of 1000 pages or more the software just worked, without any problems.

FrameMaker was bought by Adobe and at the moment that was no problem, in fact, people hoped for an impuls where FrameMaker could be much bigger as part of the adobe suite. The impulse never happened and the product development was moved to India. Suddenly it became a product for which you needed a subscription. Pay each year. A terrible progression, but for me it was not an interesting tool anyway. For a couple of documents I could never justify a price-tag of around 400 EURs (not sure about the price though). Now with the subscription approach I cannot even find the price, so that does not bode well.

I was working on a new book project, and once again I ran into the usual problems. Word just does not work. OpenOffice and LibreOffice don’t work. Working online with google Docs is even worse. They all work, but just not good enough. Maybe I am spoiled, but I want to see what is going on. See picture anchors, see the frames where the text will flow. I want to know which styles are available. I want to tweak the master pages. Maybe it is possible, but to achieve these simple things you need to figure out almost the core of each program, and it never works intuitively. In the end small tweaks costs lots of time, and big tweaks… better forget those.

There is still hope for me! I found a new tool, which makes me think about the old FrameMaker. Affinity Publisher which only costs around 50 euros! A bargain it if really works. I will give it a try.

One week challenge – Tuesday

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This is a post for my one week challenge.

[07:00] Again the same ritual. Wake up, kids, car, work. This is exactly the same as yesterday, except for an additional stop at the hospital where I drop off Ana for her work. Yesterday there was no need, because the day before yesterday she has a 24hour shift, so she was already there.

[08:20] Punch in

[12:50] My daily cappuccino was a bit of a disappointment. I suspect that someone before me tried to use a recyclable capsule. These are capsules that you fill up yourself with coffee, and afterwards you clean it and you can use it again. Much better for the environment, but at the same time much worse for the machine (and much worse for the next person, in this case me). The ‘dolce gusto’ injects the water into the capsule with quite a bit of pressure, and the recyclable capsule could not handle this pressure and this resulted in the entire machine covered in old coffee grounds. My cappuccino was likewise covered with a bit of these coffee grounds. Well, at least we had a good laugh and my coffee was only visually affected. It still tasted pretty good as usual.

[16:20] Punch out, head home.

[17:30] Alan has his very first English class! (Just like Alex at Tiny Tots)

[18:30] Alan finishes his first class, and he left the class pretty happy. During the class I went running. We head back home. I take a shower and wash all the running sweat off me.

[19:30] Alex Engels (at Tiny tots)

[20:30] Alex finishes his class. Head home. I did not run again, but instead I went for a walk.

[20:50] Home again. Ana informed about Alan at his English class (Ana indicated in a subtle manner that Alan has lots of contact/experience with different languages. He understands Dutch, and speaks it a little bit. He understands English, because everything he watches on TV/YouTube is in English, so we expect Alan to dominate his English class without even breaking a sweat), and the was pomptly promoted to a higher level! After only one class. Very good! Kids eat, pyjama’s, brush teeth, bathroom, review homework, another mini massage for Alan, and to sleep.

[22:15] Take a shower. Update this blog. A little exercise, read a bit of reddit, give my trail installation of publisher a test, and to sleep.

One week challenge – Monday

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This is a post for my one week challenge.

[07:00] The weeks starts as usual with my alarm early in the morning. I get up, get dressed, brush my teeth, and start preparing. Milk for the kids. Milk for Ana and a small drinkable yogurt for me with a hefty dose of vitamin C and a multi vitamin. Then I prepare the school uniforms. Wake up the kids, dress Alan. Feed the gamba’s. Raise the curtains and make the beds.

[07:45] Daily comute. It takes me about half an hour to get from home to work. Light traffic normally, except when there is some kind of accident, then there are no alternative roads, and my small commute can take a very long time.

[08:15] I park the car and walk to the office, I punch in and get ready for my first coffee. The office is a big open area with about 80 or 90 people working. I currently work on maintaining/improving an API used by a mobile app.

[12:15] At the office our entire department eats their lunch. I have rice, with coliflour and pieces of fried pig, left over from last week. After lunch I get a nice capuccino.

[16:15] I punch out and head on home. I might be just in time to pick up the kids from our front door and drop them off at their music school for their piano/keyboard classes.

[16:xx] After/during music I go to do some required shopping at a nearby supermarket. Every week we need milk for the kids, and various other stuff. I will also get my turkey which I usually eat during my lunch together with rice and some vegetables. With the shopping done I load everything in the car and head home.

[17:30] Music classes are finished for this week. Ana will take the kids home.

[18:30] Everybody is home again. The kids are going next door to eat their dinner with grandma. In the meanwhile we orden the house. I clean a few mirrors, the roomba, we was a set of clothes. I used an old tshirt to clean the floor and I collected a lot of dust. Much more than usual. I figured maybe the roomba needed cleaning, and I was right. It was filled to the brim with dust. The roomba is programmed to clean every workday (when we at all working) but it was so full of dust that I suspect it was unable to clean anything. After emptying and cleaning the roomba it should be good for at least a week.

[18:xx] Alex was doing his homework, and he noticed movement outside his window. One of his plants was covered in caterpillers. We removed all the caterpillers except the fattest one, so there will be enough food for the one to grow into a pretty monarch butterfly.

[20:00] Around eight I make the milk for the kids.

[21:10] Kids are asleep. The clothes are outside, they will dry during the night. Alan is sleeping after a little massage. Normally I read three jip and jannekes, but today he preferred a mini-massage. Alex read a chapter in his book and went to sleep as well.

[22:00] Shower. In bed. I will do a little of exercise, to hopefully reduce a bit of the size of my belly. Read a bit of reddit, and sleep. Tomorrow another day.

One week challenge

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You might have noticed that the usage of this blog has gone up a bit. After years of having little time and frankly little interest in blogging my interest has once again increased, and I feel like I have things to share. I like sharing my opinion about all kinds of things, but I also wanted to try something new.

I will be doing the one week challenge. Now-a-days lots of things are framed like a challenge, and why not. I made a challenge myself and that is that I challenge myself to write daily for one week on this blog. Even if there is nothing to say, or it is a boring day.

I will start on Monday (tomorrow), so the challenge will run from Monday, October 3rd till Sunday, October 9th. I will tell you what I do each day, and I will add a daily picture.

Tides

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Tides!High or low tide? I really don’t have a clue, and because it changes every couple of hours, and is influenced by the moon and even the sun (I think) it is very difficult for lots of people to know if it is low or high tide. Luckily there is an app for that. It has the fitting name ‘Tides‘ and it will show the current water level as well as the past and future levels. Great information to review before heading to the beach.

The app itself costs around two euros. Actually, the app is free, but removing the advertisements costs the mentioned two euros. This is one of the few app’s where I did not even think about it. Two euros for such a good and useful app is a bargain.

With low tide the kids directly know the drill. We will head to ‘la Laja’ and search/explore the tide pools. If it is high tide there are more options. The woods, a park or hiking a track.

Too good to go

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Too good to go!Too good to throw out. Toogoodtogo is an app that makes an effort to reduce waste. When a product is still pretty good a company can decide to toss it in the trash, or sell it with a big discount (or give it away, but that sometimes conflicts with the business interests). I installed the app and we have tried it twice!

Chinese foodFirst experience (4.99)
There were some left-overs available at a local Chinese restaurant. This felt like quite a risk, because what are you going to get? The left-overs from the buffet? Still we took a gamble, and what we got was unexpected. Four containers with freshly made Chinese food. Nothing to good to go, just normal Chinese food, with the only exception that we could not chose the menu. What we got was pretty good. White rice, rice with chicken, noodles with chicken and croquet’s. All very tasty, but not something that was at risk of being thrown away.

Meat!Second experience (3.99)
The second time we rescued a package from the trash from a big supermarket. This time we got lots of meat. Bacon, bacon pieces, sausages, yogurt (8x), and three apples. All the meat was from a pig. The best-before dates were all on the current date. Not bad, the products all looked pretty good, and we received a big amount of food. I spend the evening frying the meat and even though I would normally avoid pig-meat out of personal preference it looks like the next couple of days I’ll be having pig for lunch.

Conclusion
It is really a gamble. You don’t know what you will get, and you don’t know what state it will be in. I don’t think we will use this app a lot more. The food you get is cheap, and it can be a lot of food, but it is still a gamble. It is unusual to get something you really need. In our case it is much easier to simply pay a little more and get exactly what we want/need. As a game/gamble/surprise it might be fun to get something with friends.

For the company it is an easy way to achieve something. In the case of the Chines restaurant I think they used as a new way to advertise. A random menu for a low price, to maybe get some new customers. In this case I think there is a high probability I would try this Chinese place again, just to see what I will get next time. In case of the supermarkt the app clearly achieved its goal. Avoid throwing away food that was perfectly fine.

Companies that can really benefit from this app are companies that deal with perishable foods. Fruit, vegetables, bread, meat, fish, etc. These shops can avoid throwing away things and get some new potential customers at the same time. For the customer there is the potential for cheap food, but with a risk in not knowing what you are going to get.