300th post

Also, just because I love pretty numbers and pretty facts, this is the 300th post on this blog! The amount of posts has been steadily declining over the years, with 105 posts in my first year (2012, a third of the total) to an absolute low of 21 posts last year, but including this post I am already up to 24 for this year! Let's see if I can pour out 300 more posts in another six years time!
And to make the numbers even prettier; in page views I am around 29,585, so in just a little while the 300th blogpost will get the 30,000th view!

Echoes from a blogging past

So I was just uploading a whole bunch of my old stories (and by old I mean really really old, like stuff I wrote in Windows 95 when I was about 12) to Google Drive, because I want to be sure they will still be somewhere, even when my laptop and external hard disk both die in a fire, and then I was thinking about all the other things I've written long ago, and that made me think of my old blog. At which point I realised, that I didn't even know the exact URL anymore. Which is kinda horrible, for something that I wrote stuff on from 2005 to 2011. Luckily, when you google my full name, it´s the seventh or eighth hit, so Google came in handy there too. If I were still writing my old blog, I´d now be going on about the fact that the verb ´to google´ is written with a lowercase letter, whereas the company name is still with a capital letter, but that´s neither here nor there.

So I spent some time reading through some of the old posts (the newer-old ones, aka the most recent ones), and myyy, I had a lot of opinions. I mean, I have a lot of opinions on this blog, but they are mostly about books or films or stuff that only affects me personally. But while I was still a student of English, I had some very strong opinions about teachers, the content of courses, the running of the whole thing, the university, the educational budget, and what not. This may not come as a surprise, since I actually was vice-president of the programme committee, but still. Case in point is the letter that I sent in to (and was printed in) a newspaper about a community college in the Netherlands that had to withdraw a lot of diplomas because their courses and examination weren't up to scratch. I put the letter on my blog, and it generated a lot of comment (also on Facebook), including a contribution from one of the high-ranking people in the college who accused me of 'listening only to the media'. I never okayed that one to go online, because I felt it was kind awkward, but it does show how opinionated I was. While at that time, I probably thought I was being very mellow and polite and grown-up. Which is also what I'm thinking about the stuff that I write now, so in five year's time I'll have another cringe moment as I read back the stuff I write now.

Some other interesting stuff, the tags I used are mostly similar to the ones here; creative, cats, literature, postcrossing, random, rant (mostly about my housemates), writings (schrijfsels, in Dutch, I love that word), study, language, garden, home, free time, work. Guess I haven't changed that much.
But the really ironic one was part of this post from 2011, in which I outline our my sort-of new year's resolutions. The list is as follows (translation below):

- Fons en ik vinden een leuk huisje met meer ruimte en minder irritante buren
- Ik haal mijn BA Engels en begin aan mijn MA Engels
- Fons haalt zijn MSc en vindt een leuke baan
- Ik schrijf daadwerkelijk iets waarvan ik vind dat anderen het ook mogen lezen
- We vervolgen onze reis in wat ambitieuzer en creatiever koken
- We hebben meer tijd voor gezelligheid en een sociaal leven en minder gestress en drukte

- Fons and I find a nice little home with more space and less annoying neighbours
- I will get my BA English and start my MA English
- Fons will get his MSc and find a nice job
- I actually write something that I think others may also read
- We continue our journey into cooking more ambitiously and creatively
- We have more time for a nice social life and less stress and hectics (some words are just untranslatable)

Soooo. How many of those do we recognise for this year? I'd say at least 4. Although we do live in a lot bigger house, we still have annoying neighbours, and are looking for a new place to live. I still haven't written something that I think other people should read (doesn't mean I don't let anybody read my stuff, but it's still reluctantly). We're now using the HelloFresh food box to cook more adventurously, but it's not really what we'd like, because (point 4) we're still too busy to make the proper time for a social life and cooking and all those other things we want to do. So apart from both graduating and finding jobs, things actually haven't changed that much.

One thing I do miss; while I wrote my old blog, I was still learning loads of new stuff every day, and I wrote about that a lot. It may be the hereditary teacher hiding somewhere deep inside me, but when I found out about some new cool literary or other thing, I immediately felt the need to share it with the whole world. Also, a looot of poetry. I never knew I read and commented on that much poetry. Also, lots of links to other people's blogs and stories, when I still had the time to read those. I miss that. I will try to do more of that here.

So, after all that meta-talk, you must be pretty curious about the blog itself. Small catch: it's in Dutch. Surprisingly good Dutch, if I may say so myself; reading things back I never expected to actually write well in my mother language (no idea why, incidentally), but some of the posts are actually quite good. Yes, I'm as surprised as you are.
Because reading the blog isn't of any interest to those who can't read Dutch, I'll switch languages now, and I'll see the rest of you in another post.

Dusss, de link. Bij deze: sherco.livejournal.com. Mocht je weinig tijd hebben, maar wel iets vermakelijks willen lezen, dan misschien iets lichts als 'Waar ken je die man toch van...?' een fijne frustratie-post als 'Een frisse start', of het diep-ironische 'Carriere maken', waarin ik me druk maak over allerhande studiegenoten die ineens carriere willen maken, terwijl ik zelf uiteindelijk al een fancy baan had voordat ik uberhaupt afgestudeerd was. Of al die andere leuke mijlpalen in mijn leven, zoals toen ik Darwin en Vrutsel uit het asiel haalde (Vrutsel ligt op m'n schoot te spinnen), of toen ik besloot om te stoppen met biologie en het roer om te gooien, en alles helemaal anders werd. Misschien vooral leuk en nostalgisch voor mezelf en zij die erbij waren, maar ik wil het jullie natuurlijk niet onthouden. Ik ben echt oud geworden, ik word er nostalgisch van...

12345 pageviews

Would you believe I managed to log in to Blogger at exactly the right moment?

Wednesday 29th of April, 11:30.

Seems like the right time for the shortes blogpost so far. Yay, thanks for reading to you all!

Blogging time-out

So it's been a very hectic couple of weeks here, with lots of not-so-regular stuff happening, from celebrating my 29th birthday to swimming with dolphins, and in the less positive scale of things the death of my grandmother and a major train disruption that left me stranded at 11 at night. All things I would normally dedicate a blog post to, but as it has been a bit of a weird time, this hasn't really happened. Apart from blogging, I've been missing out on some of my other hobbies (Postcrossing, piano) too, so it's not that I don't want to write, it's a time-thing.
Rather than fixing this in the near future, I will be hopping on a plane to Australia to spend 4 weeks 'down under', so don't expect a quick revival. I will of course put a report of my travels here, but this may take a while. Unless I find a proper wifi spot and decide to write something while there, which would be the ultimate comeback from my time-out. But barring that highly improbable situation, I will be back in December!

10,000 pageviews (and counting!)

When I posted my Literary Splendour post, the page view count was at 9,990. When I looked this morning, it was at 10,030! A blogging milestone!
Youtube or Facebook probably get about 10,000 page views a second, so it's nothing big in Internet terms, but it feels like a (unconscious, to be honest) personal goal has been reached.
To give you some interesting details: most views are from the Netherlands, but there are quite a lot from the US and the UK, and lots of single views from countries around the world. Most traffic comes in via google (google.co.uk, google.co.nz and google.ie being the highest contributors, funnily enough), but some comes in via Postcrossing and some people have taken the trouble to memorise the URL and type that in directly.
The most popular post by far is still Painting with clingfilm, to which I've never actually given a follow-up post because I haven't actually been painting with clingfilm for about two years.
So there we are. 10,032 page views and counting. Onwards and upwards to the next 10,000.

Not dead!

So every blogger has to do one of the obligatory "I'm not dead, just really busy!" posts, and this is my first one here, so that's pretty good considering I've been going at this for 1.5 years. Even though I haven't posted anything for the last 2.5 month (seriously, didn't realise it was that long!), there are still quite a lot of viewers, mostly Postcrossing-directed. Don't be afraid, I will post more in the (near) future!
But for the last couple of months I was just too busy with work (36 hours a week, plus 8 for the editing work I'm still doing), and then we went on holiday to France. Which I will probably write some stuff about sometime, but not now, otherwise this wouldn't be a not-dead post anymore.
So keep tuned.

Life, and things

I've read quite some blogs over the past few years, and every once in a while there's a looooong pause followed by a "Not dead!" kind of post, in which the author exuces him/herself for the long silence and vents on all the things they have been doing in the meantime, and tells the reader that everything will be better from now on. This is exactly that kind of post, except that I can't tell you that everything will be better, because I'm expecting everything to get even worse for a couple of weeks.
So what have I been doing? In short: working. That's right, I've got my first fully grown-up job as a project manager for several science school books. It's 3 days a week, which means I'm expected to sit in an office 3 days a week (or attend meetings elsewhere). In practice, it's 7 days a week, since I've got people emailing me about important things almost every day (sad fact: the first thing I log into when I start my computer is my work email, not my private email). This week was my first week, and as all first weeks go it was pretty confusing and energy-consuming, but at least I now have a basic idea of what I am expected to do, how I am expected to do it, and who I am working with. Sadly, the person whose work I'm taking over has not been able to come in due to a back problem, so I've been trying to figure these things out mostly on my own. But now I know, so that's good.
In other news, on Wednesday evening I sent out my dissertation yet again, hopefully it's now good enough to go to the second reader, which means it is nearing completion.
On the house front, things are moving slowly but steadily to the desired end. We (that is to say: mostly my parents and boyfriend's father, as 'we' have been busy working) have painted and drilled and hammered and sanded (sooooo much sanding) until the top floor is entirely done, and most of the first floor (that's second floor to Americans) too. On Monday the carpet guys will come to install (is this the right word?) the carpet, so then these floors will be reeeeaaally almost done. Most of the hallway downstairs is also done, plus half of the living room walls, and with the carpet in there we still hope to move the last weekend of February (or the first week of March). This weekend we will clean the whole thing, as it is veeery dusty (did I mention the sanding?), so that the carpet can go in nice and clean.
And once it's in there we can start packing things and moving things, as the place we live now is steadily filling up with piles and piles of books and other stuff which does not fit into the closets anymore.
Oh yeah, did I mention the two classes and short internship I'm taking this semester start next week? Lots of reading to do!

Anyway, I think that pretty much sums it up. Lots to do, all fun things, all things that make me happy, but also all things that leave me very little time for other stuff, let alone for thinking about other stuff. So it might be quiet for a while longer here, until we settle into the new home and my dissertation is finally approved. Then hopefully, we will have some more breathing space!

Lay-out stuff revisited

Okay, okay, so it took a little bit longer than I had hoped (given that my first post was on the 31st of May...), but my new lay-out is finally here! Again, background picture is one I took myself, only yesterday, and I realise it is out of focus, but let's call it artistic licence. I may change the purple in the links, because it's hard to find a colour that works in contrast wit all the backgrounds, but we'll see. I think this one will stay for a while though!

Lay-out stuff

I will be playing around with the lay-out a bit today, because I'm not 100% happy with it and I want to see if I can get something better out of it. I will be doing this while I'm also working an essay, so it may change several times with long pauses in between. Creativity doesn't come all at once, you know!

Spring cleaning

As you've probably noticed, I've changed the lay-out of the blog. It's springtime, which means bright colours, green grass, and crawly bugs. As with the black-and-white winter version, the background is a picture I've taken myself. I've also changed the template around, and I hope this will improve the readability of the sidebars.
Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

First time's the charm

Right-o, the first post. Always annoying to get things underway.
Anyway, here I will (hopefully) be writing some more than on my previous blog (or journal, as I prefer to call it) which has not been updated since July 2011. I am planning to post some stuff about my creative works, my writings, Postcrossings, culinary stuff, travels, and some random thoughts when they occur. Post may be in Dutch or English, as suits the occasion.
I may import my older blog posts at some point, but I also may not.
I'd love to get some comments, if only to know that people are reading my stuff, but that probably also depends on how much I will actually write!