Year of the tiger-lilly

What a wonderful week it has been so far! I feel like sharing, so here’s a Dear Diary to keep you up to date with all things random — that’s if you don’t follow my twitter.

My (future) sister-in-law turned 32 Monday and as a suprise we drove an hour to her place and spent the evening with her, her partner and their moms. I had a drink or two and ( I never have to be the bob and noshed on some snacks and talked house. Speaking of which we saw our second house today… I must say that though I tried to contain my excitement about the one we saw yesterday — afterall it was our first house viewing — the house we saw today really made me appreciate house nr. 1

House nr. 1: It’s in a small religious village right next to a church (Sunday’s rest? Not for us). It takes about an half an hour — by bike and then a bus ride — to get to town. Those are the down sides. The upside is that the owner has been renovating the house and it looks like you can move right on in. It has a wonderful bathroom and lots of storage space. There’s a harbor nearby (a little boat in the future?) I’ve been actually dreaming away about how it would be to live there.

House nr. 2: Is cheaper than house nr. 1 and has a whole lot more room. Those are the upsides. The down sides are: the previous owners were smokers, there’s a lot of remodeling work necessary. The neighbors are… well… they’ve got kids and the parents are screamers. You’re surrounded by houses all over; you’ve got no view. We both pretty much knew it was a no-go from the moment we stood at the front door.

We will keep looking of course, but we both already feel like House nr. 1 is our house.

Random:

• Today I did nr. 2 at work for the first time ever! I hate, hate using public toilets, so this was really an emergency.
• BF expressed his interest in cooking… B-Day gift idea?
• Hammy is still alive — I need to contact the Pet Shop for the Critter Trail Revolution

I don’t know if any of you have followed the Creationist vs Evolutionists debate out on YouTube, but if there’s one person who I’m rooting for it’s Thunderf00t. He and several other advocates of science have been battling PCS (Poster-boy for Creationist Stupidity a.k.a. VenomfangX) and other supporters of Creationism/ Intelligent Design making comprehensible and factual videos exposing the fallacies and illogical statements put forward by the religious on YouTube.

Do I portend to know whether or not there is a god? No, however, I do not deign to profess I know ‘The Truth’ without any evidence to corroborate my claims and/or ignoring all evidence to the contrary. A fine example of this is the debate between Thunderf00t and Ray Comfort (a.k.a. The Banana Man):

• R.C.:  ”So, what was in the beginning?” 
• T:  “This what we would call in scientific terms an unknown.”
• R.C.:  “You don’t know?
• T:  “It’s unknown. I mean… there are things that we know and things that we don’t know.”
• R.C.:  “Well, I’m going to stop you there, because I know what was in the beginning. You don’t know, I know what was in the beginning. In the beginning god created the heavens and the Earth.

… Really Ray Comfort? Watch all 9 videos of the discussion here.

Just because I know you (Elocutio) love it:

PS. New espisode: Mr. Deity and the Baptist out now!

So, I wanted to go to Zumba today. I actually did the sensible thing and took my bike. I actually biked it in 20 min. Feeling slightly out of breath, but not quite knocking on death’s door, I got to the door only to find it locked.

Apparently the class was cancelled. No phone call, no e-mail, no text message? How could he end it this way?

Anyway, that’s not the point though. The point is I managed to bike to Zumba and back within 30 min and I got home not gasping for air, not needing the kiss of life, not aching all over. I’m not sure if my story so far has conveyed this, but my condition is/was very poor. However, after 7 weeks of Zumba it’s actually possible that my condition is improving. Yay! I actually weighed myself 2 weeks back and I weight about 2 lbs/ 1k lighter than what I started with. I was was so disheartened, I was hoping to see dramatic improvement in my weight. BF told me that I might be losing fat and gaining muscle. I didn’t want to believe him back then, but after tonight… I don’t know, I might be on track after all

So, I applied for distance learning.  I got my books out of storage, I even made a cute little plan on how I’m going to chop up the subjects into little manageable blocks. So, why the hell am I not able to turn on the laptop — which was specially bought to facilitate the learning process– and just do the damn thing?

I always manage to distract myself by looking for a house on Funda, playing Pets and Mafia Wars on Tagged or going on YouTube. I really do want to do this, but after work I’m absolutely not in the mood to put in the hour or two a day it takes to complete this study. I’m going to try bringing my laptop to work and studying there, but I’m not sure that even with the wrath of Gandalf the Grey hanging over my head I would actually do homework. College graduates make it seem so easy… the basterds*.

*Yes, that was intentional

Questioning whether or not there is a god and the purpose of our existence doesn’t always have to be doom and gloom. Check out this hilarious Web series: Mr. Deity

I told myself I wouldn’t expand the hamster cage until we moved, but I can dream can’t I? I currently have a Critter Trail Two:

Critter Trail has many other hamster cages I can use to expand. I’m thinking of starting with the Outlook, because it has more room to add toys in:

Then I’ll get rid of the wheel in the Critter Trail Two and add the Revolution:

There are many more cages, but I don’t know how I’d incorporate them into each other. Then again, I’ve only thought about how I’d expand the hamster cage  for the past 2 hours. Before we move to a new apartment (1,2) I’ll have weeks and weeks to think about whether I should and how I could add the others:

I love spam. I slice it, fry it up and put it in a sandwich… hmmm. I also love to dice it up and mix it with some pasta — yummy. However, there’s one kind of spam I hate: self-promotion spam. If you must advertise on my weblog at least have something to say about my post. It’s just common courtesy…

I’m going to do something about this tomorrow, so spammers be warned: you may have reign of my blog till the morrow, but soon your tyranny will end.

Real post coming soon…

So, it’s time to revisit the topic of “cheating”. I started off by asking my readers what they consider cheating aside from the usual kissing/heavy petting/intercourse –got no response, but that’s beside the point. I’ll give you my answer on matter.

Let me start off by saying I’ve never actually physically done anything that could constitute cheating. But, I do play the game… everyone does (=gross false generalisation).

So, let’s bring up The Game chart:

• Not play the game at all = stay home, never look a man in the eyes and cover you body from head to toe when/if you leave the house
• Play innings 1-3 = Any non-verbal behavior programmed to let another person know you like them: smiling, mirroring, eye-contact, hair flipping/twirling
• Play innings 4-6 = Any conscious behavior: light (unnecessary) touching, purposefully looking that person up, flirtatious jokes, winking
• Play innings 7-9 = Any behaviour that constitutes courting: prolonged touching, chatting/ calling, rendezvous outside of usual contact, dancing

I’ll admit that I sometimes consciously flirt with others, though I must add that that’s not the norm. I would say the norm is innings 1-3; tops. There’s this guy at work that I’m pretty sure likes me. I flirt with him a lot. I laugh extra hard at his jokes, I touch his arm, I make sure I look him in the eye and smile for no particular reason. Why? Because, I can. It makes me feel better about myself when he does the same thing right back at me. I chalk it up to innocent fun and games, because he knows I have a boyfriend. I’ll rate it 6th inning flirting. I don’t go beyond that.

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We went to the First Time Buyer Info Evening at Hypodomus. It was an awakening. It seemed like the financial advisor and the realtor were playing good cop/ bad cop with us. The FA said that based on BF’s salary alone we wouldn’t really be able to get anything affordable at all. I asked — just to be sure he wasn’t being gloomy– and FA confidently said: “No, really. You can’t get anything nice with your salary.” It almost seemed like he felt he wasted his precious time and carefully crafted pitch on a couple of poor one-income/ low profit buyers. The realtor on the other hand told us we could move into our dream home within the hour, so to speak. According to her we could shave off 10k off the asking price and still be able to afford a house in our budget. Like BF told me once we got home: “We gotta be careful with these realtors, they’re crafty people.” He’s right, the truth for us lies somewhere in between. We’re not going to get the dream home in the city we live in, but we might be able to get something decent in a town 5 miles outside the city. So, yeah. I’ve learned that we’re probably going to buy a house. When? I don’t know.

We might move to a bigger apartment and rent in the mean time and buy before the year ends. I’ll keep you guys posted