Sorry for the peace and quiet on my blog the past couple of days. As most of you know I spent the past two weeks in the Netherlands, celebrating my birthday with family, but also making some must needed trips to hospital, dentist and optician. Anywho, I arrived back in London two days ago, and am slowly getting back into the daily rhythm of work.

The main change for me is I’ve got to switch to hard contact lenses (I’ve been using soft contact lenses for 10 years now) and it’s proving quite a challenge. Remember my blog post during Christmas where I went to the optician and found out my eyes had declined even more, and that I had to go to the hospital first before I could get any new lenses? Well, I went to the hospital, they checked my eyes and everything is fine. My eyes have declined quite a bit, but that happens more often and they can’t see anything weird going on.

So I went back to the optician where they had a new lens specialist who measured my eyes again. She explained to me that my astigmatism is now so high that soft lenses might not work properly anymore. Astigmatism is caused by the curvature of your eye; the higher the astigmatism the more irregular your eye. When the astigmatism becomes to high, what can happen with soft lenses is that when they dry out or when you blink, the lenses warp and the wearer can’t focus properly. Hard lenses don’t warp, so they don’t have that problem.

I’ve gotten test sets for both soft lenses and hard lenses, and I already notice the difference. I just can’t see properly through the soft ones anymore, while with the hard ones everything is so much sharper and precise. But my eyes need time to adapt to them; each time I put them in my eyes tear up terribly and there’s nothing I can do about that. It takes about 2-4 weeks to fully adapt your eyes, and I’m now on day 7. All I can do is keep wearing them and hoping my eyes adjust to them as quick as possible.

I’ve always wanted to switch to hard lenses, but was always too busy, and didn’t want to spend time getting used to them. Now I have no choice in the matter and I’ve got to make time to adapt my eyes to them. It’s annoying and time consuming, but in the end I know it will turn out better. The great thing about hard lenses is that they last way longer than soft ones (like at least 2 years) and they only cost €230 (in comparison to 4 times €160 in 2 years). So fingers crossed that my eyes will adapt quickly.

Today it’s my birthday! And the past week leading up to today has just been fantastic. For almost the entire week, I’ve been in such a good mood. Things have just been going so well and half the time I’ve had this silly grin just plastered to my face.

It started last Tuesday with a great turnout to the first Movie Geeks of London. I am so glad that event went well, and that people were just excited for it as I was. It’s always tricky launching a new event, so I’m happy it seems to be an event that actually fills a gap in the event space. I’m definitely going to do another one next month (end of March-ish?), so if you missed the previous one, keep an eye out on my Twitter for any announcements. Then I celebrated my birthday last Saturday with friends, feasting on pizzas, donuts, cookies and cocktails. I might have overdone it a bit (my stomach still hasn’t settled down), but it was awesome to spend that day with friends.

One thing that totally contributed to my good mood was the fantastic presents I got this year. First off, from my parents, brother and sister:

A PlayStation 3! Squeeeee! I kind of knew that I’d get that this year, but I thought later in the Netherlands while I was there. Instead my mum conspired together with Cristiano so that I unwrapped it on Saturday morning. Plus it came with 2 controllers, loading dock and 3 games:

I’ve already started Darksiders and Soul Soul Calibur IV and I’m loving both of them so far. I haven’t started Uncharted 2 yet, mainly because I haven’t had the time yet, but also cause I’m not sure whether or not I should play the first one first. Besides those 3 games though what really has me psyched:

It’s not been released yet, but I’ll be getting the Collectors edition of FFXIII on 9th of March. That includes the game, plus soundtrack cd, a special hardback book featuring artwork and designs, 3 artprints of the Eidolons, and a decal of l’Cie brand. Awesome!

From Cristiano I got my very own iPod Touch:

I’ve been wanting one for ages! Then I got some great gifts from friends:

I loved The Prestige (both the movie and the book), but I hadn’t taken the time to check out any of Priest’s other stuff. Priest seems to be brilliant though at building weird intricate stories which I adore.

Regular readers will know how addicted I am to Lush! I got a bunch of lovely Lush stuff, including the tasty Sweet Lips in the picture above. It’s one of Lush’s new products and is so far the best lip scrub I’ve found (mainly because you can lick your lips clean and just eat the sugar once you’re done).

Besides these presents, I got some yummy chocolates, Body Shop giftbag, book vouchers and a chocolate recipe book. My friends are awesome…

To top it off, I’ve gotten screening tickets to Kick-Ass tonight! I’ve been wanting to watch this movie for ages and being able to see it a full month before it actually comes out? Sweet. I won’t be able to write about it though (there’s an embargo until sometime March), but you might guess my mood from my tweets later tonight.

Sorry, it’s been a bit quiet here the last few days. I’ve been enjoying the Christmas/New Year aftermath and trying to catch up with some reading while at my parents (the more books I finished while there, the less I had to bring back with me to London). Anyway, yesterday we got back to London, and while it was great to visit family again and spend Christmas there, I am kind of glad to be back home.

It wasn’t all fun and games this trip though. Somehow every Christmas (at least for the past 5 Christmases) I manage to discover “something” that makes me have to do to doctor/dentist/etc. 5 Christmases ago I sprained my ankle really bad, 3 Christmases ago was the saga of my wisdom tooth surgery (if you weren’t around then yet, here’s the complete story). This year: it’s my eyes. Last time I went to Holland I got my eyes checked for the first time in 4 years. Of course, there was quite a jump and my eyes had each declined about -.50 (instead of -3.50 and -4.25, they were now -4.00 and -4.50). It didn’t feel right though and I went back 3 times to try different strengths out. In the end, I knew it wasn’t completely right, but didn’t have time to try out more and ended up with a set that was sufficient, but still not right.

So this time I got my eyes tested again. The verdict was my eyes had declined another -0.50 (now -5.00 and -5.50) and the optician felt uncomfortable with providing me new contact lenses until I’ve gotten it checked out by an eye doctor at the hospital, because it’s jumped twice in one year. Grrr. What I think happened is that it gradually got worse over the past 4 years and that last time they just didn’t check it properly.

I had an appointment on Monday with the GP about my eyes (not sure how it is here in UK, but in the Netherlands you always have to go through your GP to arrange anything at the hospital) and as I expected it was 3 minute meeting with the doctor going “nope, I can’t do anything, I’ve faxed your details to the hospital”. Now I have to wait until the hospital has time for me, so I’m guessing I’ll have to book a trip around February/March again. I know it’s better to have them checked just to make sure there isn’t anything wrong, but it feels like I’m wasting time.

Next to that my Dutch sim card died. Okay, not a problem, I thought, just go to the KPN store and ask for a replacement. Went to the KPN store and was told it wasn’t possible, because I’ve got a prepaid card. What I had to do was buy a new sim card, call customer services to get my old number transferred. Now normally I wouldn’t even have bothered with transferring my number, I would have bought a new sim card with a new number and live with that. But my bank account is linked to the old number and I didn’t want to go through the hassle (and the time) to get that transferred. I thought transferring the number would be easier.

Wrong. I ended up buying a new sim card a couple of days later at another store where the guy said the same thing. Buy a new sim card here and then call customer services to get the number transferred. So bought the new sim card and once home I called customer services. Call number 1: the girl told me they didn’t do that over the phone, but that it was on the website. Okay, easy I thought. I checked the website, couldn’t find the option. Call number 2: no, no, we’re not able to transfer numbers for prepaid cards, maybe if you call the department of “Nummerbehoud” (number retention?) on Monday they can help.

So on Monday I called, and unlike all the previous people I talked to this one actually knew what she was talking about. What I should have done and what all the other people should have told me was to order a new prepaid sim card on the KPN website checking the box “transfer this number”. There was no way whatsover to transfer the old number to the new sim card I got.

What did I do? I ended up keeping the new number (which is also way easier to remember than the old one) and transferring my bank account details. The stupid thing is I’m mainly annoyed with the amount of time I wasted, because the four people I talked to first each didn’t know what I should have done.

Sorry for the rant, readers. I know it’s the second one in two weeks, but I’m now back in London and hopefully I’ll get my regular postings back on track.

Just a quick post to let everyone know we finally managed to arrive in the Netherlands yesterday night. Our plane was 2 hours delayed! Not as disastrous as it could have been, but still very annoying.

We were at Gatwick airport pretty early, having had no problems with bus or train, and went through check-in and security much quicker than I expected (15 minutes while last time at Stansted it took us 1.5 hours). So we had about 2 hours to spare until our flight. No problem, I had my laptop, book and ipod with me, plus shopping around the tax-free shops is also always fun.

The most irritating thing was the lack of updates. Now this isn’t as a severe situation as the whole Eurostar saga of last week, but some short quick updates to the passengers could have helped a lot. What happened was that the info boards initially showed that the ‘Gate opens at 16:25′ (this for a flight leaving at 17:05) and we would see to which gate we’d had to go. 16:25 came and went and still no change. A couple minutes later it changed to ‘Please wait’, nothing else just ‘Please wait’. 16:40, 16:50, 17:00 and still no word. Finally around that time it changed to ‘Gate opens at 17:40′. No other information, just that our Gate would open then. Eventually it only actually opened at 18:00, and we rushed to the gate, only to stand in line for even more minutes until the dispatcher showed up.

I think it was somewhere after 19:00 that we finally took flight, two hours after we were supposed to go. The thing is: in the plane we were told that the reason the plane was late, was that it got held up in the snow in Manchester. They knew pretty early on that there was at least an hour delay. If we were told that we had an hours delay around the time we were looking at the boards, we could have gone on shopping around and not being in constant ’stand-by’ mode, peeking every few seconds at the board to see if there was any change.

Anyway, we arrived at Schiphol airport around 22:00 local time. I’m at least glad we managed to get here! Bring on the Christmas!

This is not the type of post you’re used to seeing from me here, but I’ve got to moan and rant a bit, just to calm down a bit more. Almost every single time I have a major trip, I become a bunch of nerves. It hits me each time again even though half the time it’s a trip I’ve done before without any trouble. In part, I guess it’s because a lot of it depends on factors I can’t control: the weather, buses riding on time (or even showing up in the first place), trains being delayed.

A part of me can’t help but wonder if it’s the geek in me that makes this all the more difficult. I have to think everything through, think of each possible outcome, no matter how bad, and make backup plans accordingly. Yeah, overloading myself with everything that *could* go wrong isn’t exactly the smartest thing to do, especially when I know how stressed out and nervous I can get.

This time around I’ve gotten more and more nervous since the snow of last week. Flights being cancelled, the Eurostar is completely messed up, it seems an impossible task to get out of the UK. The stupid thing is that our initial plans were to leave on the 18th, but we decided to postpone it (mind you, we booked 2 months ago). Still not exactly sure why we decided to go later; up until last Thursday I’ve been moaning about how we should have booked a longer trip and should have left earlier… like around the 18th. Looking back, I’m so so glad we didn’t do it, but even now traveling out of the UK is riddled with problems. Yesterday Gatwick was closed, because of the snow, and tons of flights were cancelled and delayed. It’s open now again, and I’m hoping hoping hoping that everything goes okay.

Another thing that gets me always worried too though, is packing. Do I have everything with me? Am I forgetting anything important? Passport? Check. Keys to get back into the flat when we’re back? Check. Reservation number? Check. And yet I almost always manage to forget something. Often it’s something small, but it annoys the hell out of me that a simple object was able to elude my mind and not make it into the suitcase.

An added nuisance this time around is that we’re flying out, and are restricted to 40 kilos of luggage. That’s an awful lot, I first thought, we shouldn’t have any problem. Ehm… think again. Christmas presents alone were 20 kilos, filling practically one suitcase. Argh! I’ve had to ditch an extra pair of shoes, some clothes (which admittedly I don’t really need) and extra goodies for my parents (like Australian BBQ sauce). I *think* we’re just under the 40 kilos now, and I’m holding my breath that the airport scales say the same.

Okay, rant over. Thanks for listening, dear readers. Hopefully, you’ll hear from me tonight that we’ve safely arrived with no problems. Fingers crossed!

After a “holiday” of 10 days in the Netherlands, I’m back in London and ready to get back to my blogging. I haven’t written anything for over a week, just taking a nice time out while I was away. I managed to get everything done what I wanted to do in NL, including a brand new haircut. It’s shorter than anything I’ve done in the past 8 years, and every time I look in the mirror I’m still completely startled by it. It will take some getting used to.

I don’t have a photo yet (I only got my hair done the last day I was there), but to make up for that here’s a photo of my cat:

Isn’t  she cute? (and yes, that’s my bag. You can always tell I’ve been in the Netherlands, cause all my stuff will be covered with cat hair)

Sorry for the quietness around here. Last Saturday, after waiting for a long 5 days of a reference check that in the end wasn’t even completely used, we got to move to our new apartment. Yay!

This new place is much larger than our previous flat. We’ve got our own kitchen and bathroom, and a nice big sitting room with two long leather couches. Finally no more annoying housemates and ugly furniture; we can do anything what we want with this place. For the past three days we’ve been cleaning, organizing and re-arranging everything here. It’s almost done, it still needs a couple of finishing touches, like bookshelves (very important!) and a new mattress for the bed (the one that came with the house is horrible).

The thing though we’re missing the most? Internet.

It’s going to take at least two weeks until we got a proper connection, and I was dreading those upcoming two weeks. Yesterday though we got a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband USB stick from 3, and it’s working great. It was about £97 for a “free” stick plus 12GB data allowance (which has to be used within a year). Once you’ve finished the 12GB, you get the normal pay-as-you-go tariffs: £10 for 1GB, £15 for 3GB and £25 for 7GB (which then has to be used within a month). Pretty good deal, right?

Yesterday the stick was working terribly; almost no speed and a very flaky line. I almost was considering bringing it back to the store and demanding my money back. Today it’s been working great though, so I’m guessing the snow must have interfered a lot with it yesterday. Even if we hadn’t moved house I would have been tempted to get this. Now I can get some work done from a cafe or when I’m on the road.

Anyhow, I’m going to try and blog some more the next couple of days, but I’m not sure how much I’ll be online even with this broadband stick. I haven’t tried uploading any photos so far, so I’ll have to see how it all goes.

So how about a house warming party in two weeks time?

I haven’t been posting here much lately, but that’s mainly because I’ve been trying to find a new flat. We’ve been fed up with this place for some time now; annoying house mates, not enough space, while there most probably is something way better out there. So for the past week (actually longer than that already) I’ve been phoning estate agents, scouting out new areas and seeing available flats. It’s all time-consuming, energy-draining and stress-invoking, but I know in the end it will be worth it. 

Lately we’ve been looking around Canada Water. It’s a quiet, almost suburban area, but the transport links are great for us (from there we’d be quicker in Central London, then from where we’re living now) and there’s a big shopping (plus cinema) right next to the tube station. And as a bonus it’s near the water. So we’ve been trying to find something around there.

And last Monday we found something. A spacious yet cheap 1 bedroom flat, only 5 minutes walk from the tube. We straight away made an offer on it, and were already celebrating that evening that we found something great. Only to find out the next morning that the landlady decided to take it off the market. Grumble, grumble, don’t put it on the market then in the first place!

Anyhoo, for the past week all the viewings and appointments all went without any problems. Until yesterday. Yesterday I had 3 viewings and I ended up seeing none of the places. Now I’m not one to rant. I don’t get angry that often, barely never in fact. Something really has to go wrong for me to get angry. But yesterday? Yesterday was one of those days where you end up dealing with the mess of incompetent people and not achieving anything at all.

I had appointments that day with three different agencies. The first one was at 11.00 with Oliver Jaques and I had arranged to meet the agent at the property. Because of problems with the tube I was running a couple of minutes late, but with a lot of running and hurrying I managed to be there on time. And no one was there. It took me a while to figure out what the telephone number was, but once I phoned the agency I was told that “He had tried phoning me half an hour earlier to confirm our appointment, and when I didn’t pick up they assumed I wouldn’t be there and cancelled our appointment”. Ehm, I was in the tube? And I wasn’t told the day before (I had only made the appointment less than 24 hours ago) that they would call to confirm it. What kind of idiocy is this that they just don’t show up? 

Now this same agent was supposed to phone me back later that day to reschedule the viewing to later that afternoon. He never did. I phoned again and was told he’d phone back in half an hour. He never did. So now I still haven’t seen that property, but by now I’m not even sure I want to. This isn’t the way to deal with clients!

Next up was my second appointment. This wasn’t too bad, and not even the fault of the agency, but I still couldn’t see this property either. Apparently the locks of the communal entrance were replaced earlier that week and the agency hadn’t received the new keys for it yet. So there I was standing in front of the building with the agent and we couldn’t get in. What ticked me off though? The person on the 1st floor who was home (we saw him behind the curtain) and refused to open the downstairs door for us. Refused to even listen to what we had to say. Hopefully we’re going to see that property tomorrow, even though the agent still doesn’t have the keys…

Finally we had the third property. This agent was taking over from some other agent who I had phoned the day earlier; the tenant and the property was usually dealt with by this other agent. We arrived at the property, only to hear someone in the shower. After a while, we found out the tenant was still home, angry as hell that for the third time the agency hadn’t cleared it with him when they’d bring viewers by. And he refused to let us in. I completely understand his point of view, I wouldn’t have done it either. But that meant 3 appointments for me all resulting in nil, nada, nothing.

Fingers crossed that tomorrow all goes fine, cause yesterday felt a complete waste of time.

After reviewing last year’s resolutions, I’ve (just like Cristiano) decided to skip the more “usual suspects” of resolutions. Of course, I have to sport more, eat healthier, be more organized, etcetera, but those aren’t the most interesting resolutions I can make. So here are my 2009 resolutions:

1. Finish my degree and get a job

This should be my number 1 priority this year; I’ve been taking way too long in finishing my degree and it’s about time I complete this. While I might be a bit demanding, I want to find a job that I love doing, day in, day out. I don’t want to settle with something that will pay the bills, I want to find a job I am actually passionate about.

2. Get a new apartment

I’ve had it with my housemates and I really want to move some time this year (the sooner, the better). I’d like to get a place on our own, so no sharing anymore, but with the prices here in London I’m not so sure if that would be possible yet.

3. Try out and create more recipes

The past year I’ve been slowly learning how to cook from scratch, not using any sauce bags etc. Instead I’m trying out recipes and learning how to use the different ingredients together. I’ve created a couple of dishes I’m already proud of, but I haven’t even scratches the surface yet here. Main Goal: making a perfect Risotto Milanese with Ossobucco.

4. Start my own startup

This might be aiming a bit too high, but I do want to get my idea of a startup going. I at least want to think it out a bit more better, and figure out if it’s possible or not.

Besides these four resolutions, I’ve also got a couple blog related ones:

1. 52 Movies

Cristiano and I discovered we’ve only watched a measly 25% of the Top 250 IMDB Movies, missing a lot of great movies (confession: I still haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption). So we’ll be watching one movie from that list a week, and I want to write a blog post ever single time. We’re already not having such a good start though; tonight is the last day of the first week, so we have to watch a movie tonight (and I have to blog about it tonight).

2. 52 Themes

Similar to the 52 Movies, I will take 52 photos, every week with a different theme (according to an already predetermined list of themes). I was interested in a Project 365 (taking a photo every single day), but I’m not that much of a photo addict yet to do that. What I do want to make sure of though is that I take every one of these photos with that theme in mind; I don’t want to make “random” photos and then look back thinking “oh, I could use that for the theme this week”. 

3. What I Wore

I’ve been inspired by blogs like Karla’s Closet, the What I Wore tumblr, and Sunny-Side Uptown, who post photos of some of the outfits they wear. While it won’t be every day (I don’t have enough different clothes and I don’t go outside every single day, for that), I want to start doing something similar to that. It will have to wait though until I figure out what the best way to take those type of photos is. I don’t have enough space here in my room, and I don’t trust London enough to leave my DSLR outside on the street alone (even if it’s just for a few seconds).

4. Write more reviews

I’m already writing reviews for movies and books, but not as much as I’d like. I want to try to actually write reviews for every single book I read and every movie I see this year (although repeats on TV won’t count).

What do you think of my resolutions? Anything I’m forgetting?

Before I do my New Year’s resolutions post, I thought I’d take a moment to step back and take a look at how I did with my resolutions from last year. 

1. Work out more, be healthier.

Kind of “check”? I did start running this year, but I can’t really say I kept to a weekly schedule. Food wise though, I do feel as if I started eating better. Let’s put it this way: I worked out more and was healthier in 2008 than I was in 2007. Overall, I still think I could improve a whole lot, but it’s a nice little start.

2. Work more organized and more regularly.

Again kind of “check”. I am much more organized than last year, but there is still room for major improvements on the “more regularly” part.

3. Stress less.

Check! If there’s is one thing I’ve improved in this year, is the amount of stressing I do. I used to get really worked up about all kinds of things, stressing out about stuff in my life that wasn’t going completely to plan (the plan in my neurotic-slightly-overachiever mind that wants to do everything perfect). This year I realized and accepted not everything goes the way you want it to, so there’s no reason to stress out about those things. 

4. Start organizing events.

Check! Since February I’ve been involved with organizing the London Geek Dinners and have created some spin-offs like the London Geek Meet and the London Girl Geek Coffees. I still don’t put as much time into each of those events as I wish I could (haven’t organized a Girl Geek Coffee since June), but I hope I can do more of these events next year.

5. Finish my degree and get a job.

Ehm. Pretty much “Fail”? I’ve made some progress with my research thesis this year, but I still haven’t finished it yet. There have been some serious issues which caused the delay (like my wisdom tooth removal), but it’s no excuse: my main priority of 2009 should be finally getting my degree.

6. Get a “real” camera and learn more about photography.

Check! Since Cristiano got a second DSLR, I’ve been playing more and more with his old one (although I like the lens on the new camera too). One of my resolutions of this year though is to actually process the photos I take and not keep them lying around untouched for ages.

I’ll be writing about this year’s resolutions some time later this week. So how did you guys fair with your resolutions from last year?