The end.

Saturday, October 28th 2017.

Well, here I am editing my last blog post. It's been exactly 10 years since I started. The main reason being that I emigrated from Amsterdam (The Netherlands) to Adelaide (Australia) and I wanted to keep my family and friends up-to-date about how I was doing on the other side of the world.

Writing this post forces me to think of the past 10 years of my life and it's actually pretty confronting because so much happened; emigration, relationships, different employers, being depressed and in need of a shrink (twice), buying and selling my appartment, buying my Mustang and recently a garage.

When I started my blog I was 34 and weighed over 135 kilos. Now I'm 44 and I weigh almost 85 kilos.

Look at me then and now:

It's been 10 crazy years when I think about all the things that happened but also 10 I wouldn't want to have missed. All the new experiences I got, the people I met, the jobs I got and finding out that indeed, the grass is ALWAYS greener on the other side.

So why am I quitting? Quite simply, it's started to feel like an obligation. More and more I have the feeling I want to spent my time differently doing other things. Less digital and online. This feeling ain't new, it started a year ago already but I really wanted to get to 10 years.

So, since this is a photo-blog I won't write too much.

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who contributed to my blog in one way or another and also thanks to all the people who followed me for all or some of those 10 years.

I'll leave you with one more blog from today. As of tomorrow, if you wanna know what's going on with me, you'll simply have to call or text me and schedule a night out with me :-)

Byebye, thanks, auf wiedersehen, mazzel, au revoir and ciao!

With love,
Vincent.

It's garage-weekend again and I started with some painting. Now the lower back walls are done. It will be lighter there when the floor is in. I think I'll do the rest of the walls later.

I hung up the tool board in its definite spot. My future workbench will be in that corner under the stairs.

I also wanted to practice welding today but I didn't get around to it, that's for tomorrow, but there won't be anything about it on this blog because, the blog ends here :-)

The (complete) rainbowrain

Today is the last time I'll post blog-photos from my work as tomorrow, the last day of this blog is a Saturday. So you can enjoy this view one more time ;-)

To top it off there was an awesome rainbow today and after 10 years I have finally mastered the skill to make a panorama shot with my phone and I couldn't think of a better occasion :-)

By the way, this is how we see them from work quite often...

The new work computer

So yesterday at the restaurant they had these glasses on the tables. I liked them so much that I bought 2 of them. They'd make great whisky glasses I think, maybe I should try that tonight! ;-)

At my work I got a new computer. The small one is replacing the BIG one. Unreal! It's got 32GB of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage and a 3.7GHz i7 CPU. This thing is fast!

Unfortunately during the morning I had several weird crashes. Usually when a computer has random crashes it's got something to do with the RAM chips so after lunch I had them swapped out for new ones which solved all the problems. I'm looking forward to work with this little great machine :-)

On the side I'm also going to try and develop without a Delphi IDE. It's too old and not supported anymore and the whole world has moved on to Visual Studio and C#. I've been doing C# for many, many years now but a good chunk has always been Delphi development but that will come to an end soon, which is OK.

I was just as tired as Silver but I didn't have a nice basket to lie down in like he did...

He however, didn't have this lovely whisky from this wonderful new glass! HA!

He couldn't watch me drink my whisky ;-)

The musical trip

Silver was helping me clearing out the dishwasher this morning, he did very well ;-)

So today I was at work only for a few hours because in the afternoon the four of us went to Leiden to walk around (= shop) a bit and to have dinner in Noordwijkerhout and then visit a musical called "The soldier of Orange", made after the movie.

First things first: Leiden.

Above is a small display of the huge variety of "pepernoten" (google that if you want) a certain shop was offering. There were all kinds of flavours, some nice and some not so nice. My conclusion: a pepernoot should taste like a pepernoot and not like apple pie, orange, limoncello or whatever.

Still, pretty cool shop! :-)

I had to run into a toy shop where they only sold models. Model trains, model cars, model airplanes and model boats. Their stock of model trains was rather limited but I did run into some interesting model cars. These ones are for miniature racetracks and I was hoping they'd have a Mustang as well. I only found out online that they have 1, the 1970 model I believe... Very nicely done little cars though!

It was a bit chilly walking around but it was OK.

Milan and I went up the old fort. Nice views.

Then we drove to the little town of Noordwijkerhout. It only has about 10 shops so thankfully shopping didn't last too long there ;-)

We had a nice coffee outside in the sun.

Just after 5PM we walked up to the restaurant. My expectations were not too high but wow did they serve us some great food! We all had different stuff and everything looked and tasted awesome! I had guinea fowl which was terrific.

And therefore I'll link them: http://tomeat.nl/dinerkaart.html.

And then the main event of our little trip: The soldier of Orange - The musical. 3.5 hours seemed like only 1, that's how great it was. The seats were on a rotating platform so it spinned to different parts of  the stage which was all around us. They drove motorcycles on stage and even incorporated a bit of the airstrip outside into the play which was so cool! This is very recommendable!

We all had a great day out and got home after midnight. Nice!

The leftover cake

This morning I had my breakfast really early, just after 6AM because I had to drop Larissa off to do her driver's theory exam (which she passed!) at 6:45. I was at work a few minutes past 7AM and so I was hungry again around 9AM. Thankfully there was cake leftover from yesterday so I didn't die of hunger ;-)

More painting

Todays office-view in the morning.

In the evening I did some more painting. The weather was good so I could push the Mustang out and reach more wall.

The humidity

I went to my garage for a few hours. This was the humidity when I arrived.

And this was after the door had been open for an hour or so. Ventilation is key indeed!

I did a bit of painting again.

The IKEA visit

No better start of the day than a Silver photo! Wouldn't you agree? :-)

Simone and I went to IKEA.

I couldn't decide which photo of the carts I like better so here they are both.

They have these trolleys which I reckon could be very useful in my garage! They are very sturdy and not expensive.

And to end the day there's another Silver photo. He's still the best :-)

The R&D day 2017

Today the complete R&D department of my work got together for the annual R&D-day. There were talks, workshops, activities and.... BBQ!

The activities were all outside, so we spent 2 hours in the cold wind and rain. I took this photo during our first activity: building a catapult. The best thing was that our team won with the furthest shot :-)

All in all it was a fun day :-)

The announcement

Since there are no photos to show today I'll make use of this blog to announce its end.

Yes, next week Friday the 28th of October will mark the 10 year existence of this blog and it will also be the last day. I better not forget to take any photos that day ;-)

So please enjoy the last week of my blog.

The (not) diet update

I've quit my diet a few weeks ago and it's still holding very well! I'm aiming to stay between 85-86 kilos.

The roof vent / The red sun

I was at my garage around 6:15 this morning because I was having a roof vent installed. This will hopefully improve the humidity inside. The guy who was doing the work helped me push the Mustang outside and carry a few things out of the way, very kind of him. Then he drove in his lift and started.

This is the vent pipe that's gonna be installed.

It fits a 150-160mm pipe if I ever hook that up. First we'll see how it does without a fan.

While the guy was working on the roof I painted the inside of my my cupboard with anti-mold paint.

There's the hole that was cut from the inside. Next up was cutting from the outside and mounting the pipe.

By the time everything on the roof was done I had also finished painting. Looks nice. Let's hope the mold will stay away, too.

Back at work I learned about a natural phenomena that was happening outside. I thought it was cloudy but it was not, it was dusty! The tropical storm that hit Ireland brought along lots of red dust from Africa which was spread even across The Netherlands!

It coloured the sun a bit red which was something you don't see very often here!

The fire

Late afternoon there was a big fire close to my work for a short while.

It made a lot of smoke.

The little locomotive

I spotted this old locomotive 2 days ago. I've always wanted to create models of it semi-professionally and sell them but since they're not in use anymore they are hard to find to get measurements of. And of course I never had my own workspace to produce anything at all.

But I do have my own workspace now and maybe this is a sign that I should get started ;-)

And then I painted a bit more. Also I found more mold on certain pieces of wood / shelves. I'm so not pleased about the mold and I can't wait for my roof-vent to be installed...

In the afternoon Simone and I went looking at furniture. On the way back we passed my office.

When we got home, Silver was bossing or playin with some other cats. He was happy to come to me though and let me carry him home...

Checking out a hood

This morning I went to check out a standard Mustang hood that was for sale for 150 euros. I was hoping it would be good but unfortunately it was not :-(

Rust all around the edges where the inner and outer metal is welded together. I wouldn't know how to fix that...

And inside there was rust as well. No way you can spray stuff like rustoleum in every corner so it's really a lost cause, sadly...

So I went back to my garage without the hood but also not having spend money on something worthless.

I hung up my Guinness mirror.

I also replaced more molded shelves with new ones (that will probably also get moldy as long as the humidity doesn't go down...)

I started marking spots where the metal poles for my first floor have to be. At least that felt like progress...