New home

We finally made it...

In the past couple of months we've managed to buy a house, move into it and -- most importantly -- get rid of the landlords whom we rented the old apartment from. And the things I could tell about the landlords are unbelievable, but I will just summarize it into this: they are a bunch of selfish, snotty, manipulating, money-grubbing, antisocial gangsters and I'm EXTREMELY relieved that they're now out of our lives. I think that says enough.

As for the house, it comes of course with all the responsibilities and tasks that a house brings with it, but it's really remarkable how I've managed to get rid of loads of stress, regardless of the leaking kitchen roof, the moist outer wall, the cellar staircase that practically falls apart, and the monthly down payments eating through our budget. Having a house of our own (and getting out of that evil infested apartment) has turned my life completely around -- for the best. We still have lots of boxes to unpack, two weeks of laundry to catch up with, and two extra cats to take care of, but I sleep a lot better than before and I can now find the peace and time to practice my hobbies again. I actually signed up for a drawing course!

For the first time in four years, I feel like I'm getting on top of my life again. And it was about time too.

Election Duties

Like many other of my fellow countrymen and -women I voted for a new Belgian senate and chamber of representatives today. But unlike the most of them, I was also an election judge (called "bijzitter" in Dutch).

Being such is cause for grieve for many but I never understood why. Okay, you have to spend a day away from home, but other than that what's the big deal?

Today I've been proven right. My first ever duty of judge was definitely a day to remember: fine company, fun conversations, meeting and greeting neighbors and acquaintances, ... And the work was nicely relaxed and certainly without any strain.

Add to that the free breakfast and lunch, and an extra compensation and I'm not complaining.

Or maybe we were just extremely lucky with our chairwoman?

Gourmet Weekend

For my 30th anniversary, my wife treated me to a gourmet weekend in Burg-Reuland, a small community in the province of Liège, Belgium. As a special bonus, she also invited our close relatives (brothers and sisters, parents, and children) to join us. My father-in-law had some prior engagements, so he couldn't join us. We also decided it would be best for our son to relax in a familiar environment with not too many people (what with all the hospital-adventures he's been through in the last few months), so my mother-in-law volunteered to stay home with him (for which we were, of course, immensely grateful!)

We arrived at the hotel on Friday afternoon, and stayed until Sunday afternoon. All meals were included and most were four courses, except for the meal on Saturday evening, which was a six-course dinner. Other than eating, we relaxed on the terrace overlooking the fishpond, went for a stroll through the village and surrounding country, or played boardgames. We all had a terrific weekend, despite one of the playing cards from my Shadows over Camelot boardgame getting caught in the wind and sinking in the fishpond. Which reminds me, I still have to order a new one.

Now, this wouldn't have been a blogpost, if I didn't have any musings on the topic. In fact, I have two.

First of all, it occurred to me how much happier our daughter was, with her brother not around. Not that she doesn't like him, though - she always enjoys watching her brother play and they both get along very well - but he always takes the center of attention, leaving her to mostly entertain herself. This time, though, she got passed from one person to the other, was fed bottles by nearly everyone present, was constantly played with, talked to, and cuddled. I've never seen her smile so much. She's an amazingly sweet girl, and I don't even enjoy half of it, so I've decided to pay her a lot more attention and spend a lot more time with her from now on.

Secondly - and this one wasn't a musing as much as it was a hammer on the head - I've come to realize, since I live in Dendermonde with my wife and children, how much I miss my parents, brother, and sister. The little time we spent together this last weekend reminded me so hard of our childhoods, the fun my brother, my sister, and I had together, and the conversations we held with our parents at the table, that our parting and saying goodbyes hit me like a train; I've been overly emotional ever since we got back, and I admit to breaking up in tears on more than one occasion by now. Much of it might be because of the exhaustion of the past half year, but some of it roots in these family ties for certain. So, I would also like to spend more time with them.

This might turn out to be a problem, though. I also decided to spend more time with our son, because he needs the care and attention now more than ever; I need more time for myself to blow some steam every now and then; and I don't want to spend any less time with my wife, because she deserves a lot of love and attention too (because if it weren't for her...)

I think it's about high time for some changes.

Power-party

Last week was a scary week at our apartment. On monday, our electricity started to show peaks in voltage, which caused our lights to occasionally flash brighter and dimmer. As we advanced further into the week, it became intenser and even caused some household appliances to shortcut.

Thursday evening, Christmas day, was the culmination of the whole fiasco, when suddenly the lights in our living room went down. Then we heard something click in the kitchen, at which point I tried to turn on the lights there. They immediately went down too. Suddenly I smelled a distinct burning coming from the living room. We got out the flash lights and saw smoke coming out of our printer.

I immediately shut down the main circuit and called the technical services of our electricity provider, and they sent someone by to come measure the voltages. I also called our landlord to let them know about the problem. They promised to drop by as well -- on Christmas day none the less!

The guy from Electrabel, our power supplier, measured no abnormalities in the power coming into the building, so from their part it was all okay. However, at our apartment, he measured 400 volts on the sockets (where it should be no more than 220V). Since there was nothing he could do, he left and we waited for our landlord to arrive.

At around 22h, the landlord, his wife, their daughter and son-in-law arrived at the scene, and immediately set to work, trying to figure out the problem. At 23h30, they found and fixed the problem: an old powerline (I believe they called it 'line zero') had burned and caused a shortcut.

The resulting damage beyond repair includes:

• 3 cable modem adapters destroyed
  
• 1 cable modem destroyed
  
• 5 lightbulbs destroyed
• 1 halogen lamp destroyed
• 1 printer destroyed
• 1 computer screen destroyed
• 1 computer 6.1 surround speaker set destroyed
• 1 radio alarm clock destroyed

All this happened with two kids in bed, in pitch black darkness, while we had planned to leave on holiday for a week the next day. We are very grateful, though, that our landlord was kind enough to leave their home on Christmas day, to come and repair it as soon as possible. That way, we were still able to sleep a little and be gone in the morning.

Right now, we're still on our holiday, so I hope everything will still be okay when we get back home in a couple of days...

Week of Bad Luck

I think I just had my unluckiest week of the year.

• On monday, while driving from work to the train station, I got hit by a car. Well, perhaps 'tagged' is a better word; while driving along a bicycle path (with right of way), a car from a crossing street didn't see me and tried to advance slowly onto the intersection, when his bumper hit my left shin. I lost about a square centimeter of skin.
• On tuesday morning, after a night of severe freezing, I slid with my bike on the road and hit the ground. I still feel my ribs and hip when put force on that muscle.
• That evening, when returning from work, I noticed that one of my brand new bicycle lamps didn't work anymore. Apparently, I managed to leave it burning inside my pocket for an entire day, effectively draining the batteries in one go.
• While trying to remove that same bicycle lamp from my bike when I arrived at the train station, it was stuck in its placeholder. While trying to force it out, it suddenly sprang out, making two small cuts on the inside of my wrist from scraping it across the sharp borders of that light holder.
• On wednesday, I learned that our daughter was allergic to milk. It's the reason why she's been crying of belly-pains all the time. My wife had to stop the breastfeeding, and we had to buy special milk powder for our baby girl.
• On thursday, our son had a really bad day, throwing his books and toys towards his sister whenever she ate. He ended up 5 times in his box that day, as punishment.
• On friday, the monitor of our computer broke down.

In hindsight, none of these incidents actually got me down, though. I took them all with a good laugh, except of course the allergies of my daughter.

There were some good moments too, by the way. The new milk for our daughter has its effect; she has no more pains, is gaining in weight, and seems a lot happier now. We've also bought a new, 20-inch flatscreen for the computer yesterday, and on wednesday, we finally restarted our D&D campaign at work, after almost three months of downtime. So it wasn't all that bad.

A new life

Yesterday around noon-ish, our daughter Cato was born. She's a healthy daughter, weighing in at 3.730 kg, and measuring 52 cm.

We have a blog going at http://cato-vanherle.blogspot.com. I apologize to all non-Dutch speakers: it's in Dutch. If you would like to know what's going on, drop me a line (either here or on Cato's blog) and I'll give a quick English transcript.

Return of the old me

The last two years have not been kind to my resistance against stress and pressure and my ability to see things in perspective. Not coincidentally, a lot of (albeit good) things happened to me these years: I moved to a new city, got a new job in the video games industry, raised a son, got married, and now we're expecting a second child.

Suffice to say that the extra responsibilities I gained for other people (of which I used to have almost none in the past) piled up a little too high for me. I was trying too hard to be the best husband, father, friend, employee, ... possible. I was losing sleep and spare time pretty fast, and I started taking things way too serious.

And then, about a week ago, I realized how far I've strayed from the path of inner peace. I need to get a grip on myself again, so now I'm trying to live by a few simple rules:

• Accept what happens, and don't try to change it. You will only realize that you can't change all that much, which will only annoy and aggravate you. Don't fight the stream, let yourself get carried by it and enjoy the ride.
• Forgive peoples' mistakes and admit your own.
• Try to look at things in perspective. If something bad happens, try to see it in the big picture and realize that it's never as bad as you first think it was.
• Don't let yourself get riled up by other people in traffic. Let speeders pass, take your time, hang back if necessary, and when some driver thinks he owns the road, just shake your head and forget about it.
• Don't always play music, even if it should relax you; try to listen to and enjoy the silence every now and then.
• Don't forget to breathe.
• Look up at the sky more.

The baby is getting ready

Last night we got to drive to the hospital again. This time, though, as opposed to the previous trip, it was a lot more relaxed.

My wife started to have minor contractions around noon, which would slightly intensify towards the evening. By the time I got home from work, they would come in 5 minute intervals, which is a sure sign to get ready to leave for the hospital.

When we were there, she was attached to the monitor to quantify the contractions. The nurses told us they weren't strong enough, though (in their words: it needed to hurt more), so they were considered Braxton Hicks contractions (aka 'false labor' or 'practice contractions'). We were allowed to go home again.

It does mean we won't have to wait much longer for the actual birth.

Oh, and the nurses reassured me about not making it to the hospital in time: if my wife is about to deliver while we're still on our way, all I need to do is pull over, call an ambulance, and just 'catch the baby'. Very comforting...

Bonded

So, the wedding was last saturday, and I have to say it was everything it should have been. Except for the weather, maybe (there was no sun, but that didn't bother us in the least), the entire day was as perfect as it could be. Everything appeared to be meticulously planned and executed, even though we just let ourselves go with the flow and just had a great time.

The civil wedding in the morning was quite okay. It took half an hour for the official to say his thing, have us sign the papers, and congratulate us.

During noon, we went to my wife's parents' house to relax and have lunch. It was really comfortable and enjoyable, having everyone close to us be there.

The service in the church was good (no hassle with rings not wanting to slide over fingers, or witnesses not showing up, or anything). Our son stole the show, though, running around and playing in front of the altar and doing his cute little dance whenever the fanfare played their music. I think the people attending the service payed more attention to him than to what the priest was saying.

Then we went on to the reception, the evening dinner and the dance party, all at the same place. The food was excellent, the staff was courteous, fast, friendly, and clean, the place was very cozy, and the DJ did his job very well (at any time during the dancing party, there were more people on the dance floor than sitting at their tables, which you don't see all that often at weddings).

What I liked most was seeing everyone at the evening feast honestly enjoying themselves. That really gave me a kick.

Too bad you can have this day only once in your life (at least, that's the point).

Back to square 1

Well, the week off has come to an end. It was a fun and relaxing week, with a couple of trips (Brugge, Gent, and Leuven), and some time spent at home drawing, playing boardgames, and watching Twin Peaks.

Our good intentions to sleep out didn't really succeed, though. Most of the time we stayed up later than we normally do (too much fun), and we got up at almost the same time as always (routine). So I don't feel of having caught up on sleep very much.

Holiday

It's the first time in his life that our son will stay with his grandparents for an entire week. It's also the first time in 16 months that we can take a breather from all the nursing and cleaning.

On the one hand, I'm glad to be able to do whatever I want for a change, without constantly having to interrupt because of nap-time, diaper-changes, bottle-feeding, and reading books; but on the other hand, I sometimes wonder if it was such a good idea to send him away for the week, both for him (he was a little sick) and for his grandparents (they loved to take care of him, but I don't think they realize anymore how much work it is to take care of a toddler).

At the moment, I feel good, relaxed, and free. So perhaps it was a good idea after all.

Household challenges

Until recently I figured that when two people have been together for over 4 years, have been friends for over 8 years, and have successfully (i.e. without any fights or much doubt) lived through the first year of raising a child, any challenge would be easy to overcome.

Apparently, I was not entirely correct. It's very important to think of your wife and kids first, and to talk things out at the earliest opportunity, but lately I have come to the realisation that it's equally important to not stop thinking about yourself.

The trick in keeping a happy family is finding the balance between providing for your loved ones and keeping yourself happy and healthy. But that can be hard sometimes when exhaustion finally catches up with you.

I, for one, am EXTREMELY lucky to have a wife (well, actually a fiancee) who thinks on the same level, whom I can discuss these issues with, and who actually helps me better myself and at the same time allows me to help her better herself.

I'm also EXTREMELY lucky to have a very healthy, very kind, very calm, and very intelligent son, who makes it all worth the trouble.

Hello World, part two

Just in case someone does happen upon this blog, and decides to waste some time, I would like to introduce myself a bit.

I'm a 28-year-old guy, born in Belgium. I've lived here my entire life, in a worry-free and well-supported environment.

I've studied mathematics and science in high school, and went on to computer science in college.

Currently, I work as a game software developer at Larian Studios, where I plan to stay as long as possible.

I have a wonderful girlfriend, with whom I am to marry in a couple of months, and we already have a 15-months-old son.

My hobbies include computers, tabletop roleplaying, go, drawing (only since recently), and listening to music.

So, as you can see, there's absolutely nothing special, unique, or shocking about me. This will be a mediocre blog from an average person.