Holy holy, I spent
over an hour answering all the wonderful comments on my paper art for the Reverse Bang! I am more than slightly overwhelmed by the response to that. The amount topped even the reaction to the clay Sam&Dean puppets! I had not expected that for my favorite pairing of JDM/JA, which is usually sadly underappreciated in this fandom. So this has been very validating. *grins*
I had meant to respond sooner, but I've had quite a busy week and I got very sick on top of that, boooh.
A day by dayOn Monday it was posting day of the artwork mentioned above.
Tuesday was a workday, not usually worth mentioning, but with all the forced time off I only had two workdays this week instead of the normal five, ahem.
I realized on Wednesday that my mom had infected me with her throat infection (after I had brought her a get well bouquet in the weekend, tsk) but that didn't stop us from traveling to the East together to visit the grandparents and to have dinner at Ikea \o/ (Swedish meatballs, bb!).
Thursday was another day at work, even though I was already too sick to deal, but whatever.
By Friday I had completely lost my voice due the full on head cold that had developed. I worried I wouldn't be able to enjoy the visit to the family in The Hague. But no way was I going to miss my nephew's first Sinterklaas experience. Of course he had already enjoyed the
family festivities last year, but this was going to be the first time he would see Sint arrive on the big steamboat. His mum Gayleen (my SIL;) had never seen that either and I absolutely wanted to share this huge Dutch event with the both of them on Saturday.
So I dressed up in the warmest clothes I had, brought loads of liquids and licorice and got on the train to the West on Friday afternoon for a sleep over (so I didn't have to get up freakishly early on Saturday;)
Gayleen and Ruben picked me up at the trainstation and we walked through The Hague for some windowshopping. I also made a couple of photos of the outdoors artwork.
( PHOTO'S! )We got on the tram at the underground stop at Grote Markt, which has such a marvelous design.
They saved all the ancient things they found during the excavations and put them on display IN THE FLOOR!! That floor itself is a wonderful design of three kinds of wood in the shape of the old houses that used to stand in this area. They put the finds in old fashioned wells, covered with thick glass plates, so you can walk right over history!
( MORE PHOTO'S! )I'll fast forward through our evening at their home, where I caught up with my brother Jaap and cuddled with Ruben. (No worries, his mom and dad were already infected with the germs of snot themselves, so I couldn't do more harm)
On Saturday the four of us traveled by tram towards the harbour; after we changed trams half way we discovered my other brother Hans in the same carriage! Together we walked the final bit to the already very crowded harbour of Scheveningen. What I love about Sinterklaas is that everybody has the same sweet anticipation; young and old, we're all there to enjoy the party, it's such a wonderful atmosphere. Before the steamboat arrived, Ruben already had his first encounter with a couple of Zwarte Pieten (black Petes) - initially he wasn't too sure about these painted and colourfully dressed creatures, but when they handed him some candy, he warmed up to them *grins*. He clearly loved the pepernoten (candysized ginger cookies).
I posted pictures of Ruben's adventures in my Dutch blog:
EVEN MORE PHOTO'S!
For those of you who are interested:
more on the history of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Pieten [Wikipedia]
Oh, this turned out long;) Will put my RB-art recommendations in a separate post!
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