Lucky biscuit

In Liverpool we ate at a Chinese restaurant. After diner, we were fortunate enough to recieve some cookies with our tea. The cookies were wrapped in a nice, shiny red wrapper. When I finally managed to rip it open, I could break the cookie in two and fortell my future.

Small piece of Chinese wisdom in a cookie...

The message from the fortune cookie read:
Prosperity will come your way in September...

[ so I need to wait patiently for a couple of months... ]

Creative reflections

Someone stuck a sticker on the mirror in the mensroom:
"Without creation you have nothing".

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

Well, that might very well be true, but the same can be said for: without a mirror you have no reflection...

[ maybe I should print that on a sticker... ]

What's that flavour?

One of the best things of going abroad is that they have other stuff than you have at home. Another language, other public transport, other weather, other time zone and... other candy!



With the introduction of the UCD cookie jar it became sort of a habbit to bring along weird candy. That's why, when I entered a Liverpolean Marks & Spencer, I couldn't resist buying this bag of sweets...

Rhubarb and custard candy, who on earth came up with that?

[ the candy may sound exciting, the flavour was a bit tame... ]

Daylight savings: grrr

I really do not like daylight savings. Not only are you deprived of a whole hour worth of sleep, you're also brought of balance for at least a day or four. Every part of your body is telling you it's one hour earlier later than it really is.



The most obvious example of my daylight savings jetlag are my fixed 'going hungry' times. At precisely four five o'clock I was craving for my four o'clock breadroll...

Oh no, my exactly one hour overtime snack...

Joris, you were right about the fact that there really was a fierce wind blowing outside. And you couldn't manage to stay on your bicycle, was almost blown off your socks and you did crash your bike into mine. But as you can see at the above post, that was not important enough to blog about today...

[ mmm, I did mention it now, oh well... ]

Almost right

For work I had to was allowed to travel to Liverpool. The hotel and trip reis were booked for me by a collegue, but I fear she forgot to inform the hotel I was a boy...

Welcome text on the hotel television...

Farmer licorice

Our cookie jar was host to some licorice with a farm theme. There was candy shaped like horses, chickens, farmer and his wife. There was even a little tractor. Although I enjoyed eating the sweets, I really didn't like the scale of the different pieces of licorice. The horse looked more like a small pony, the chicken was as large as a young bull and the tractor, well, it was the size of a garden variaty lawn-mower...

Farmer and his tractor lawn mower...

I would like to see this type of candy conform to a more true to nature scale.

[ very small chicken licorice, huge tractor licorice..! ]

Nuon is cute

On monday I recieved a phone call from the Nuon (Gas and Electricity supplier). The mail problem was now solved, so they assured me.

[ by leaving a friendly message on my voicemail... ]

I couldn't be more suprised when I came home this evening and again found nine (!) letters from the Nuon. These letters were again addressed to the previous tenant...

The Nuon nine...

I rang the Nuon again and talked to a nice mister. If all goes well, the problem will really be solved this time. The previous tenant had some unpaid bills.

[ nine unpaid bills to be precise... ]

Four slices

Today I've done absolutely nothing. I made the discovery that bread could be quite fotogenetic, but that is all...

[ like I said: I have done nothing today... ]

Four slices of bread, one plate, one picture...

Is that really true?

When I was still a little boy, I wondered about a lot of stuf. Most of the time I would ask my mom or dad, but wasn't alway sure the answers I got were the correct ones. I got the feeling they didn't know the answer to most questions themselves. One of my most tantalizing questions was: "Does the light in the fridge really go off when the door is closed?"



Well, years later, armed with a camera, I finally put this question to the test. Flash off, self exposure on, camera in fridge, door closed and wait...

The inside of my fridge...

The results of the test were quite interesting. There were I expected to get a picture that was just 100% black, I was able to clearly identify a small jar of olives and a tub of butter.

Conclusion: the does light goes of, but it's not pitch black inside!

[ good news for all the vegetables that are affraid of the dark... ]

Not a black hole

Eventhough Jacco had clearly pointed out the danger to me, it nearly went wrong. In the floor underneath the table we were working on there was this big hole. It was created to allow for some cables to run through, but was also more than big enough for one of the legs of my chair...

[ and you're not very stable on a chair with only three legs... ]

Watch out: Chair leg swallowing hole...

Luckily the carpet around the hole was very bright and cheerful, making the hole less scary than it really was...

Coffee machine

Our office is home to one of those big coffee machines. If you know which button to press, you can get coffee, cappucino, chocolate milk, espresso, vienna melange, hot water or tea. Yesterday I discovered that there's a sticker on the side of the machine, which reads: Automatically delicious coffee.

[ In dutch: 'Automatisch lekkere koffie' ]

Some marketing person must have though he/she was really funny coming up with that slogan. Unfortunately it doesn't say that the machine automatically creates delicious tea as well...

It is fully automated, but not very nice...

Am I seeing things?

I know I run an imaginative life, but be honest: this bread rol looks a lot like a dolphin or at least a whale..?

Beached whle or 4 o'clock sandwich

Eventhough it looked like some marine animal, it did not stop me from eating it at 16:00...

Plato

Don't ask me how the conversation steered towards this subject, but all of a sudden a collegue confesed she owned a toy platypus.



Of course I didn't believe her (toy hippotamus, OK; but a toy platypus..?!), so she promised to bring it (Plato) to the office.

Plato: the complete domesticated toy platypus...

The brain of the platypus is very small, but nicely colored and labeled for easy reading...



[ I wonder if I should bring along my green and yellow dino..? ]

Fire

A company in the north of Amsterdam had caugth fire. The wonderful view we have from the office permitted us to clearly see how an enormous smoky cloud crept over the city centre of Amsterdam. I took a picture of the fire, which was good enough to illustrate the news on www.nu.nl...

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire...

Cold bread

Eventhough I found it a pitty it was not freezing anymore on thursday, this morning I couldn't wait for the frost to leave...

[ but this had nothing to do with the snow outside... ]

I was feeling hungry but only had bread in the freezer and in too much of a hurry to wait to let it de-freeze in a natural way. I even had no time for a stacked bread construction...

Thaw bread, thaw...

So I decided to stick my bread in the microwave. After a few seconds on full blast I had four beautiful steaming hot slices of bread.

[ added bonus: the kitchen smelled of freshly baked bread... ]

Green bag

George Baker made a song about it:

Lookin' back on the track for a little green bag,
Got to find just the kind or I'm losin' my mind

I myself have a green bag, but unfortunately I'm unable to call it small.

My big green bag

I was looking for a bag to carry my kendo equipment on my bicycle. Somehow they only make backpacks in the required dimensions in army green...

Snow white

It snowed yesterday evening. The tree in front of my house is now looking very clean and bright...

The white tree

[ a pitty that the thaw has set in already... ]

Not surpised

I actually kind of expected this wouldn't work, so I can't say I was surprised. But that didn't stop me from trying...

[ you can never be too sure... ]

Will it fitt..?

Conclusion: with a piece of key-shaped licorice (Dutch: dropsleutel) it's not possible to open any doors...