Present Perfect

Yesterday was spent doing a company event (climbing trees in ‘el bosc vertical’) - I had to rub my eyes when I got on the bus to see the bus close to full, some 45 people leaving from the World Trade Center. We’ve come a long way.

I had a flight booked on Saturday morning leaving at 8:00 AM in a vain attempt to get to Christophe’s wedding on time. I wasn’t able to arrange for transportation getting off the plane (Kristien ‘working’ at the radio and other friends not going to the service) so I took the early flight for no good reason at all in the end.

There was also a birthday party last night, with food starting at 22:00 and, in Spanish tradition, with 30+ people attending, at least an hour between the ‘last coffee’ and ’standing outside’ moment - which was at 1.30

Does one cut his losses at 1.30 AM for a 6:40 AM wake up or just keep going ? I went with the latter and joined the group in going out, which, in Spanish tradition, involved people proposing various places, going to a few, and settling on something that actually has room in the area of some place we actually wanted to go but didn’t have room. We shook the booty until 4:45 AM - I wanted to give myself at least one full sleep cycle.

Woke up into a coma, dragged myself out of the house, kept myself awake with loud music in the taxi and in the waiting area, and continuously dozed off and woke up again when my head fell on the plane.

With the plane arriving 20 minutes early, I was able to get on the regional bus - without having to wait for it, and leaving just as I had gotten on - that leaves just outside the airport, takes 55 minutes to go to my house where it has a stop exactly in front of it. A rare trip where all elements align to make it a swift one, even if the conditions were less than ideal.

So, today’s best moment ? Figuring out for a second if there’s any way I can prolong my comatose state and attempt at dozing, setting my alarm to 40 minutes into the future, and then sprawling myself across the backseat, with The National on headphones, dozing off with the rumble of the engines, sunkissed by an October morning sun filtered into warming specks by the dirt on a window that went unwashed for a month.

Comfortably numb.

Dell has started shipping pre-bundled Ubuntu with our Fluendo codecs.

Julien showed me this image on the site:

Whee!

This weekend we were invited to one of Kristien’s friends’ birthday party. It was dress-up, and the goal was to dress like people who don’t have any money and are invited to a formal dance.

This was a perfect match for my cross-dress-shoe habit, so I wanted to go one step further. I ended up getting two really cheap blazers in a recycling store (one red, one blue), and cut a diagonal through their backs, and sewed them back together:

It came out rather nicely for a quick sewing job, I’m considering taking the other two halves and actually spending some time finishing it well for a trip to New York.

Was forced to pick up a new skill today - driving through pouring rain with non-functional wipers. I had to drive for 2 hours like that. I got out of the car all cross-eyed and with a hint of headache.

The trick is to focus on the tail lights of other cars and the white lines, and keep your distance. And, possibly counterintuitively, driving faster or getting take over by big trucks splashing water all around actually helps in this situation.

Faithful readers already know I am not the biggest fan of dentists. Last year in August I had an urgent problem, and my regular Spanish dental office apparently was closed all of August, without any information on what to do if I had an urgent problem, not on their voice mail and not on their website (which by the way was so broken that it scaled the flash animation to 10% of the page width, but I digress).

I ended up in the emergency dental office on Passeig de Gracia, and there I was helped very well by a very good young doctor. I felt I finally found the perfect dentist.

That is, up to the point where I got an infection on one of my teeth, and she told me it would cost anywhere between 2000 and 4000 euro to get the tooth pulled and a bridge or an implant made, and that it wasn’t covered by my health care.

I guess that’s when I decided to be stupid and try and get it fixed in Belgium. And for that I needed to make sure my health insurance was still ok in Belgium, and for that I needed some E-three-digit form that I still don’t have my hands on after 9 months.

When last month the left part of my body started feeling strange I thought it was time to just go find a dentist and get it fixed, coverage or no.

My wishes for a dentist are pretty simple. It has to be a woman (from my experience I find they are usually more emphatical), I prefer them relatively young (I have this vague hope that they are more likely to be up-to-date with the latest technology) and it helps if they speak my language. Now that I live here in Brussels though, of course most dentists are French. And probably not that easy to get to.

So in the end I found Comments (5)