Month: February 2005

You know that you are getting older when you start getting overly irritated by the most trivial things in life, usually those minor issues over which you have little control.

There's nothing more fun than spending the day driving down to who knows where to inspect a large slab of stone.

This is necessary because it is a so-called 'natural' product, meaning that we the buyers are expected to check it out and verify that it looks alright to us.

Knowing that you will be spending tons of money on this seemingly not out of the ordinary piece of nature, scanning the surface for invisible inaccuracies of nature, you must do it anyway.

No weird swirls, patches and/or discolorations for us.

Within two months this wonderful flat piece of rock will be polished down and then transformed into our new kitchen counter.

According to the recent web statistics, the term 'anus' was the top search item in my blog last week, followed by the word 'drunk' and then 'f--k boy' believe it or not.

Is this indicative of the average visitor to my web log? I certainly hope not, but it could be true.

Just the other day our planet was engulfed in an unseen once in a lifetime explosion of stellar origin.

To think that we didn't even notice it because it was so far away, and yet it would have resulted in our complete extinction if it had occurred within 10 light-years of us.

Life is frail in more ways than one...

"The commotion was caused by a special variety of neutron star known as a magnetar. These fast-spinning, compact stellar corpses -- no larger than a big city -- create intense magnetic fields that trigger explosions."

Only the most sensitive scientific instruments could barely detect this monster of an explosion so very far away. Does it then really exist or is it merely a figment of the imagination, an iota in the minds of the so-called scientists?

Don't worry yet, there don't seem to be any magnetars close enough to us, at least none that we know about.

Be careful, just in case.

There's only one thing that I hate more than looking for new clothes. And that's looking for new furniture.

As long as I can just sit on it and feel fairly comfortable, that is good enough for me.

However, my wife is much more selective in her choice of the so-called 'perfect arrangement' so I have to be patient and nod my head up and down when it is required.

I am glad that that is all done and over with (I hope).

Rumbling along on my bicycle early in the morning in the pitch dark on my way to the train station it is so darn cold that I am amazed that the water has not frozen over.

I know this because the wind causes subtle ripples on the surface which reflect light dynamically with all kinds of motions which I know would not be possible if the surface was otherwise.

Just in case, I decided to tap myself on my left shoulder to see what would happen if perchance I had declined to do that in the first place.

Much to my surprise things occurred as expected, so I felt better about everything anyway.

Have a good day, I kept thinking to myself.

When he came home from school that day, he was surprised that his home just wasn't there any more. Sure he had heard the sirens in the distance and he was aware that the Germans were attacking the city of Rotterdam. However, he had never expected to come home and discover that he had nothing any more than the clothes he was wearing.

Maarten really wanted to go visit the Oorlogs Verzets Museum Rotterdam so I took him there this Sunday afternoon. He had been waiting all week long, and every evening when I brought him to bed he would tell me that there were only so many days before we would go.

Once we arrived there, we received our own personal tour from a guide who was a survivor of the awful bombardments during the outbreak of World War II. He was seventy-seven years old and had alot of personal details to share with us and it was heart-breaking to hear of all the atrocities during that period of history. He was Lennart's age when they deported him to Germany for forced labor.

With a scratchy voice and slightly trembling hands he relived the many experiences anew so that Maarten would learn and be aware and prevent this from ever happening again.

Maybe some day humanity will have learned its lesson, but until then we will all have to be patient and do our best to survive from day to day.

Certainly it felt like I was escaping from it all quite well, running at a high enough pace for thirty minutes without stopping.

Of course, the escape was purely a mental one as in reality I was just another fitness freak driving the cardio treadmill in an endless rumbling cycle.

A better way of looking at it would would be that yes in fact I was running 'towards' some fantastic finish, not running 'away' from some hidden danger or whatever.

The highlight was breaking my record by churning out a modest five point two kilometers.

(Either way you might look at it, maybe it was a combination of the two and I was stuck in the middle going in the right direction)

I know that the day will bring lots of good luck when from behind the shower door I can toss my toothbrush high into the air and it somersaults its way over a smooth trajectory landing perfectly in the plastic cup next to the mirror inbetween all the other toothbrushes.

"So that's where all those splatters on the mirror are coming from," my wife grumpily informs me.

That poor old guy was just sitting there motionless for the longest time waiting for a tram which never came.

His head hung low and his eyes were fixated on some spot on the ground between his two tattered sneakers.

At one point I was concerned that he may have passed away, but I did not dare get too close to him for fear of how he might suddenly wake up and angrily flail his arms at me.

When his thumbs twitched ever so slightly I was relieved. What moments in time had lead up over the years to result in the sad homeless person who sat before me?

When I was a boy still living at home, my father would often rant and rave about how stiff he was. He was focused on all those aches and pains and the general unfairness of life.

We would think, "C'mon, quit exaggerating!"

Of course, he was always complaining about one thing or another, but his many aches and pains were his favorite. Now many years later as I approach and then pass his very same age back then, I am beginning to understand this more, how and why it happened and all.

Now it is my turn (shame on me). Boy I can sure feel overly stiff as the day is only just beginning. Getting out of bed is for me a chore which is comparable to lifting and carrying a stiff board across the room. Usually, this stiffness remains for half an hour or so. Jeez, how's it possible to be so stiff? A hardened resin has gathered in the joints, some kind of unnatural glue, whatever. I understand better why my father was complaining back then.

This is something that runs in the family, and surely I have inherited an acute case of so-called early morning stiffness from my father.

While I prefer not to cuss and yell and wake up everyone in the mornings, though I confess many times to be on the very verge, this stiffness is aggravating and makes one grumpy in more ways than one.

Many people nowadays are uneasy when it comes to trusting the infinite possibilities of technology.

There is just no way to know for sure ahead of time whether or not things are going to turn out as you expected them to happen.

But does that really matter?

The truth of the matter is that there is a finely tuned mesh of reality which combines the strengths of technology with the way things are meant to be.

This means that the human emotions and spiritual awareness cannot be underestimated when searching for the ideal balance between solutions based purely on fact and those solutions built upon faith that things will turn out alright.

That is why it is not a good idea to ignore (almost) completely the limitations of technology for the sake of getting things done now or never.