MissLeonie.com

I’ve been feeling uncreative and unchallenged for a while now. My job, as fun as it is, consists of number crunching only. Although it requires an analytical, problem-solving frame of mind, I’m using logic, not creativity, to think of solutions. I am challenged by time, not by problems.

However, I made the decision to go after an interesting yet doable job this summer. After three years of pushing myself at university, I wanted a summer job that wouldn’t put me to or rob me of sleep. The job I have fills that description perfectly.

I’ve decided that I need to stay active outside of work as well. With my family away on holiday, it is all too easy to spend night after night in front of the television, mindlessly taking in American detective shows. After shelving my books, lining them up like soldiers on a battlefield, I picked a little known Jane Austen to kickstart my creatively fruitful summer.

I bought this pocket version in a little white church just outside Harden in rural New South Wales. We were on our way back from a flight show weekend when we drove past it. Emma, who collects and sells second-hand books herself, and I, a well-documented bookaholic, just had to have look. It had been a very hot weekend, but inside the church the air was cool and booky. There were tall, dark bookcases with actual ladders. Getting up on those ladders to browse the rows and rows of novels made me feel like Disney’s Beauty. The boys were eager to get back on the road, but I couldn’t leave before buying some Bill Bryson and Jane Austen.

I paid $7 AU for Lady Susan/The Watsons/Sanditon by Jane Austen. As much as I love Jane Austen, I must admit that I’d never heard of these works of hers before, which in itself was a reason to grab the copy and keep it close as I was browsing the other shelves. I love that it’s a 1970s Penguin pocket that was originally sold for just $1.35 AU. It smells old and looks read, which is how I prefer my books. I’m loving it so far. And I had a good time knocking up the banner for today’s post too.

Isn’t it a pity that I will now have to channel all that creative energy into doing the dishes?

My parents and sister left to go on holiday this morning. I would have come along, but there are only so many days in a summer holiday, unfortunately. I’m starting to feel like a person again: I can eat (reasonably sized portions), I don’t sleep till all hours anymore and most importantly, my eyes have stopped producing snot.

I missed autumn in the Netherlands last year, because I was busy getting a non-tan in Australia. It’s my favourite time of year out here. I love the colours and the sound of the wind roaring around the house while I’m inside with a good book, a cup of tea and a fluffy blanket. I’m probably one of the few people who enjoy going for a walk in the middle of a storm.

Mother Nature decide that, while it is summer, she would gave me a taste of season I had missed. I’ve had the flu, it’s wet and grey outside. The only logical solutions are to make myself a nice cup of tea, find a good book and disappear into some other world for a few hours; or otherwise make it a lovely, lazy day inside. I believe I have some Gilmore girls DVDs lying around somewhere. It doesn’t really matter WHAT you do inside, as long as there is tea.

PS. Have a look at what the sky looked like last night. Full moon!

Of course, one other thing to do on a dreary day off is to dig around the attic. Before I went to Australia, I moved out of my university dorm room. When I returned and moved back into a slightly larger appartment near uni, I didn’t want to move all my things there. It would only spend four months there before I’d move back again. It just wasn’t worth it.

But in the attic are all these boxes. And some of these boxes, they have books in them. I’ve been wanting to open everything up to see what I could put back into my room. I’ve been back here a few months now, and I just haven’t got around to turning my room into my room again. Until this afternoon.

I’m very proud of my bookshelves. They’re bursting with old coursebooks and novels that I wouldn’t mind reading again. I now know that I picked the right courses for me, even though I’ve often second-guessed myself. Three years after I started uni as a curious 17-year-old, I’m still want to dive into the all the information that is on that shelf. Of course, I sold all the books I had no interest in even during the course as soon as that very same course finished.

When my sister and I were little, we had a big, faux-leather travelling bag filled to the brim and beyond with costumes. There were old dresses that belonged to my mum, hats from my grandmother, uniforms from my dad… Out of the three wearable dresses, I always had a favourite. It was a black spaghetti-strap cocktail dress that I have been dying to wear someplace that wasn’t imaginary since I was six. The second-best option was a polkadot dress. With polkadots EVERYWHERE at the moment, I jokingly said to my mum that now that I’ve got breasts and all, I should try those dresses on again.

A good idea in itself, of course, because these were really nice dresses. The downside was that mum tidied up the attic not too long ago, and the bag full of clothes was - that’s right, behind the eight boxes of stuff I’d moved back here with. After the whole book-adventure, though, I could just reach. I had to shove aside two cases with horse brushes and a pair of horse riding boots (isn’t it fantastic how attics are always a guided tour through your own history?), but now I have two beautiful cocktail dresses airing out upstairs. We didn’t tear them up too badly as kids, so perhaps you’ll see me wearing vintage polkadot soon. Provided I get the granny smell out first. Bleurgh.

When I got home from work on Monday, I was so tired I went to sleep straight after dinner. On Tuesday, I lied down on the lounge after dinner to snooze a bit. When I tried to get back up, I had to sit back down straightaway. It felt like all my blood swarmed to the back of my head and there simply wasn’t enough room. I don’t think I’d ever had such a painful headache before. My eyes were very sensitive to light too.

I decided not to go to work on Wednesday. I felt very guilty about it, because we have a big project due before the 31st of July, but I simply couldn’t. I got up for work and everything, but when I ate my breakfast, it felt like another spoonful would make it come right back out. Going to work would be a bad idea.

I went back to bed and woke up again at about 11:30. My parents had bought a load of pebbles for the little path around the house. Babysit Kid’s Mum was helping them distribute it and I felt bad that they had to do all the work, so I pitched in a little. Truth is, when I got up after that extra sleep, I felt fine.

Babysit Kid and two more kids from my street started helping out. They climbed up on the trailer and started scooping pebbles into the buckets and the wheelbarrow. The smallest of the three couldn’t really get up on the trailer. Lost for a job, he started picking up pebbles one by one, and throwing them into our buckets with a look of great satisfaction on his face. It was incredibly cute.

I went to work on Thursday. I was a bit slower than normal, but numbed by painkillers I made my way through the day alright. In fact, it was quite possibly the busiest day at work so far, and I spent a lot of time doing crisis management. My boss sent me home at about 4pm. She told me to take it easy and see how I felt the next day. We have this massive switch job ahead of us and I’d really have to be on top of my game to pull it off. She said that I shouldn’t feel guilty about staying home if I didn’t feel my best. “If you’re ill, you’re ill,” she said, echoing my mother that morning.

And… I wasn’t my best at all on Friday. After I got home on Thursday, I got more and more nauseous. I didn’t eat, I couldn’t drink. And I threw up. More than once, even. I don’t remember ever feeling so very sick. I lied in bed most of the night, trying not to move. It would come in waves: I’d feel increasingly sick until finally, I just wanted to get it over with and throw up. After that, I’d feel OK for about half an hour, until the whole cycle started again.

I’m starting to feel a little better. I still have belly cramps, but the headache is a lot less immobilising. And although I can’t taste anything yet, I can eat small portions of food again. I’m going to take it easy this weekend, so I’m good to go on Monday.

It’s a good day for roos. Not only has the Qantas kangaroo survived a redesign of the Qantas logo, I got the most fantastic kangaroo-themed key ring in the world ever. Babysit Kid and his mum bought it for me on a shopping trip in Amsterdam. They are obviously also fantastic.

There is more than meets the eye on this one. Not only is it shaped like a kangaroo, not only is the hollow centre the shape of Australia… it can open a beer bottle with its paws. If that isn’t Aussie, then I don’t know what is.

As the company who manufactured this piece of genius says, “Australians wouldn’t open a bottle with anything else.” Have a look at the od-ities website - they have heaps more cool stuff. I just wish they hadn’t indulged in the string of smileys for a mouse pointer.

PS. Finished Harry Potter. More when I’m not so tired I went to sleep after dinner and was in a coma until 8:30 pm.

Last Friday, my job agency had some sort of a party on. I wasn’t planning to go, but my sister had been and they gave you a fluffy beach towel as a present. I’m cheap, so I thought, why not drop in and get a towel too. I had to ask a few things anyway, because something went wrong with my first week’s pay and it hasn’t quite been cleared up yet. It was a good enough excuse.

Of course, I was offered a cocktail as soon as I stepped inside, so it was quite fun after all. I didn’t want to stick around too long because my dad was waiting in the car outside, so I had to get rid of it quite soon. I figured it would be rude not to drink it.

Since then, I’ve lazed around a bit. I’m starting to look for little Dutch souvenirs to bring to Australia with me. I have a visa (an ETA, which is pretty much the same thing), and the tickets should be arriving in a few weeks time. I’m really looking forward to it. I think I’ll need this happy goal to give me a purpose this upcoming week: work is going to be a madhouse. I have a giant project due the 31st and no idea how I’m going to manage it all.

In other news, I’ve also bought the new Harry Potter book. I’m torn between wanting to finish it yesterday and never wanting to get to the last page. I’ve remained surprisingly spoiler-free so far. I really made an effort to make sure I could start the book without any expectations about where it would take me. I have my theories, of course, as does everyone else, but I don’t want to read anyone else’s opinions until I have finished the book and formed my own.

I was working in a bookshop when Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince came out. I wholly intended not to buy the English version, but to wait for the Dutch translation, since I owned all the previous books in Dutch. After a lame “joke” on a forum and random bits of information I couldn’t help but hear in the shop, I decided to buy and finish the book as soon as possible. I didn’t want to wait any longer and have all the magic disappear before I got to chapter three.

I’m not going to spoil it for anyone. I’ve read a little over two-thirds now. I might discuss the book at a later date, but I promise I will mark it [SPOILER] to ensure you can enjoy the book the same way I am.

Sometimes just looking out the window is enough to realise how small I am, and how small and inconsequential my worries are in the grand scheme of things. It would be blasphemous if a gorgeous sky like this didn’t fill me with happiness.

One of the boys in my street turned nine years old the other day. They rang a little ice cream van and everyone queued up. It was very cute.

Kids, adults, everyone wanted something from the multicoloured van. The two boys who ran it were very sweet to the birthday boy: they gave him free ice cream and he got to ring the bell. You should have seen the proud grin on his face.

“There’s a marble in the tree,” I said to mum as I pointed at the roof of leaves above us. We were sitting in the back garden, enjoying the first real summer day this month. “Look!”
I put my book down and stood up to grab it, slightly creeped out from the Life of Pi echoes I was getting. I grabbed the marble and tossed it up in the air, caught it, and bounced it on the floor.

It broke. It split open with egg white and yolk rolling out. Mum said it wasn’t in a next so it was lost to begin with. There’s a blackbirds’ nest in the two trees over the back terrace. The egg had been worked out by a cuckoo or its siblings or something, it was stuck between two branches. It was quite round too, not at all egg-like. There was no little bird inside, just egg bits, so I guess it was already beyond hope. July is a little late for little blackbird season.

I still felt so bad the second that egg hit the floor.

The picture of the frog is to show that I didn’t kill *everything* in the garden.

Friday the thirteenth is the object of many a folk tale recounting bad luck, but I’ve been on a roll since Friday. First off, I had a chat to my parents about wanting to visit Australia before starting uni in England in September. We talked until after midnight, so I consider this the kick off of an altogether great weekend so far. The thirteenth was work as usual. Fridays are always more fun than any other day of the week. The office is half-empty, for starters, and there’s a certain giddiness that spreads like a virus. Calling it a day at 3:45pm doesn’t hurt either.

I’d done some browsing after Thursday, and I found a few half decent flights online. There’s something about ordering a €1000+ plane ticket online that creeps me out, though, so I visited a travel agency in town today. The owner of the travel shop looked a few things up for me, but she seemed clumsy and uninterested. When I heard her colleague tell another costumer that “new rules state that no liquid of any kind is allowed in carry on luggage,” I knew I had to find a way to get out of the door as subtly yet quickly as possible. I’d like to have some confidence in the people I’m paying to transport me halfway across te world.

Mum remembered another travel agency in a closeby town where she’d been looking for flights last time I was arranging to go to Australia. We drove down and put money in the parking ticket machine for 35 minutes, thinking we’d refill it if need be. Mum ended up going back to put in double the initial money. Three euros for an hour and 45 minutes of parking!

I showed the travel agent, a lovely girl named Margot, about the Qantas flight I’d seen online. Turns it out that it was cheap because it was a collection of random bits and pieces in the right direction. Margot couldn’t book it as it was, so she phoned the main office to work things out. Just as we were about to close the deal, the middle stretch from London to Bangkok sold out. I just felt the money slipping through my fingers, and I cursed myself for not just ordering the flight online. The travel agent was wonderful though. She took out an option on the next best flight and said she’d keep checking for the initial Qantas one, as someone might only have taken an option on it. Just before we left, she wanted to take another look at the website I found the Qantas flight on, to see if it was still listed.

It wasn’t, but lo and behold, there was another version that turned out to be three euros cheaper too. That may not seem like a lot, but it’s a chicken curry filo to me. We hurried to make sure we wouldn’t lose this flight as well (Margot even ran back from the printer), and I am now booked to fly out on the 19th of August. I also posted all the university stuff on Friday, so now I haven’t a worry in the world. This weekend has been the very first where I’ve been able to just sit back and relax completely.

I got to celebrate at a lovely barbeque at the neighbours’ place too. They had invited us to come over to eat up the leftovers of the neighbourhood barbeque we organised a fortnight ago. The salads Babysit Kid’s mother made were amazing. I asked for the recipe and I can’t wait to make them myself sometime. My weekend has been a big non-physical Sunday morning I don’t have to get out of bed stretch. Finally.

I am totally going to Sydney. Whee.

PS. The photo of Babysit Kid is blurry because I was laughing too much.