Snowscenes, blogbug and other bugs and a Flashmob, not necessarily in that order...

Apparently the blogbug bit me and I'm infected again as I'm back already. This time to share with you something special that's currently going on in Groningen. The nearest city to the little village where we live. That something special is called 'Serious Request'. I haven't translated it into English, it really is called that. Serious Request is a project by Dutch radio station 3FM to collect as much money as possible for projects of the Red Cross. The radio station builds a square house, almost entirely made of glass, in which three DJs live for six days without anything to eat (apart from very healthy, but not always very tasty, fruit/vegetable drinks). Six years ago, the first house was located in Utrecht and since then the house has visited different cities in the Netherlands. This year.....drumrole......they are in Groningen! The DJs take shifts to play music 24 hrs a day. And if you want them to play the song of your choice, you have to donate some money. You can also donate by sending text messages that will be shown in the TV-broadcast of this radio show. You can of course also donate without asking for the song of your choice. Also lots of famous Dutch people visit the house, some even stay the night, and they give live concerts and donate stuff to be auctioned off. Our royal family have donated a day to be spend with them. Unfortunately you will not be spending it with them at their palace, but doing voluntary work that the Royals do for a day each year to bring volunteers and the good work they do to the attention of the rest of the country. So...you'll be donating money to do work, our Princess Royal said it herself: 'it is a bit stupid in fact', but still... I'm guessing it will bring a lot of money to the good cause. I will not be bidding by the way. Just so you know. As I mentioned, this radio show is also broadcasted on TV, every day for 24 hrs a day. Surprisingly it's great to watch. Real feel good TV. Crowds of people standing outside the House, in the snow, to donate money and to enjoy the atmosphere. Yesterday evening suddenly a flashmob (a group of people who seem to come out of nowhere and do the same thing at the same time - if you didn't know that) did a dance on 'Just say yes' by Snow Patrol and almost brought the DJs to tears. Very impressive for the relatively small town Groningen is. Or if you want to see it from the viewpoint of the square (the Grote Markt) itself, watch this one. If you have the time and the patience, watch it till they disappear into the crowd again. I'm proud of Groningen! This year all the money is going to 'Stop Malaria'. A great cause. And as my late brother suffered from malaria, he spent a lot of time in Africa, it is a cause near to my heart. Also I promised you some photos of the Winter Wonderland we are currently living in. Beginning with another one of the ice skating women (I have so many more, I'll have to do another post about that event).

Luctor et emergo

Not that I've been 'luctoring' too much, but I feel like I'm emerging from non-blogworld into blogworld yet again.

Update on the Lyme situation: there is no Lyme situation anymore. Hip hip...

Update on Willem's braces-situation: he is now bracesless, hehe. Again a hip hip hurray (hooray?) feels appropriate. His jaw has healed pretty good. The two teeth are sticking out just a tiny little bit, but as the vet said: "he doesn't have to win the Miss World competition". True! Not even the Mister World, which would be anatomically more correct, although he misses some vital parts for true Misterhood.

Sorry that I've been away for a couple of weeks again, but it is a serious case of time flying. Don't you feel that the days go by far too fast? I do. There are not enough hours in a day, not enough days in a week, etc. So blogging hasn't been at the top of my to-do list.

The photography course has finished. Due to the Lyme I've missed lots of lessons, but I do feel that I almost understand how my camera works now. Have to practice a lot to fully get to grips with all possible settings. So...this afternoon there were speed skating competitions, a marathon for women and one for men, in a neighbouring village and I took my camera.

As you can see, the Netherlands are covered in snow. We haven't had this much snow since 1979 I believe. We feel that we are living IN a Christmas card. I'll be posting some more photos some day soon.

The dogs and even the horses enjoy playing in the snow. Not so sure about the cats, but even they go outside a lot so they probably like it too. As do we.

In case I don't have time to post again this week:

wishing you all a very merry Christmas and a truly wonderful and happy New Year!

Be good!

Breaking news, the full story

Breaking news, the full story with more details than anyone could ever wish for: One of these past weeks, on Monday morning, our usual vet, the one who lives in quite a nice place (understatement!) which I'm almost convinced partly belongs to us since we are the ones who payed for at least half of it, was here to give our horses their yearly shots. We discussed the great feeding system we had taken into use about three weeks earlier and that is especially designed for horses; in each stable a box hangs on the wall. In that box you drop a bale of compressed dehydrated grass, put a metal grate on top of the grass to prevent the horses from gobbling it up all in one go and the proverbial Bob is your uncle. The horses can 'graze' from the box when they are in their stable, you only have to fill the boxes once every two days and they don't get bored because they have something to do. So...great system. We thought so and our vet did too. 'Great system', he said. And I agreed. Well... Thát was Monday morning. Monday evening Willem (one of the horses, if you did not know that already and if it doesn't become clear if you read on) got his upper jaw stuck in the metal grate (hów exactly, nobody knows) and in trying to free himself he broke it. Not the grate sadly. No, he broke his jaw. I know! Shocking. Three of his upper teeth pointed in a totally different direction than the rest of his teeth. And just next to those three teeth he had a nasty crack in his jaw. Poor horse. It was an ugly sight. So we called our usual vet, who couldn't come because he was operating on another poor animal. We decided to sponsor our backup vet, who specializes in horses anyway and we called him. He came, gave Willem some strong painkillers and decided he could operate on him on our premises the next day. That meant that we didn't have to take Willem 'on tour', which was quite a relief. We don't own a horse trailer, we have enough friends we can borrow one from if needed and we didn't have to arrange 'animal-sitters' for the rest of the Brinkbeest-crew. We called our usual vet again, who is one of those friends with a horse-trailer, and who had kept his mobile phone on to hear from us how Willem was doing and if we needed the trailer, to tell him the plan and that we didn't need the trailer. 'Great plan', he said. Again I agreed. Tuesday afternoon horse vet came, drugged Willem into a standing anaesthetic, hubs (who had cancelled all his appointments) rested Willem's head on his shoulder (which is now very bruised and painfull) and vet drilled and scraped and did something ingenious with metal wire and now Willem has a brace. For the coming four weeks Metalmouth will be his nickname. He could feature in a James Bond movie as a Russian villan. Fortunately he can eat (we have removed the boxes, informed the manufacturer who were as shocked as we were and who were generous enough to take the boxes back with a full refund and who wanted to know how Willem managed to break his jaw in order to prevent it from happening to other horses, and are back to feeding the grass many times a day in big flexible plastic buckets. We don't feed hay because we found it very difficult to get a consistent good quality supply.). 'Call me next week', vet said, 'I'll have to tighten the wire then.'

Willem's brace is hidden under the grass. We need a big toothbrush ;-) The rest of that week we had a lot of visitors who came to see how the poor patient was doing (and to see how I was doing too, since they were here anyway.) On Saturday one of those visitors told us that horse vet had had a heart attack on Wednesday. What? He had heard that from people who had heard it from other people who in their turn had heard it from other people, so by that time you never know what is true anymore. But still, we were shocked. We like horse vet. If he had been an arrogant bastard we couldn't care less if he was in good health or not of course (sorry, just a bad joke, only slightly true) but horse vet is a really nice guy. So now we were worried about horse vet too. The next Monday our farrier came to do the hoofs of our horses. Our horses don't have horseshoes, but still they need a pedicure every 8 weeks or so and our very cool and calm, plane flying farrier, Johan, does that. Not that he arrives in a plane, he flies them in his spare time. Oh, and Evie behaved very well. Since she was about a week old, she is now seven months, we have lifted her legs, tapped on her hoofs and cleaned them, all to make her a well-behaved horse. This was the third time she had her hoofs done by Johan. The first time he only lifted her legs so she got used to him handling her and she tried to jump over us. The second time she sat down on her big butt, so I was a little worried what she had planned for this time, but she made us proud and behaved very ladylike. Lifted her legs without any protest (which in human terms isn't very ladylike at all actually) and I asked Johan if he had heard anything about horse vet and told him what the story was. 'I've seen him last Friday', he said. 'Ah, but was he standing up or lying down?', I asked, because perhaps Johan had visited him in hospital? 'He was working', Johan said. 'He looked okay to me'. Wednesday hubs called horse vet to make the appointment for tightening Willems brace. Horse vet arrived late that afternoon, it was already getting dark, which is significant to the story if you read on, and we asked how he was doing, because we had heard something about him having a heart attack. He laughed: "well it's almost true. My left arm was a bit painful and I went to the doctor. Next thing I knew I was lying in intensive care with all sorts of monitors attached to me. They virtually held me hostage. But my heart is fine. High bloodpressure, that's all. Very inconvenient. Had to cancel lots of appointments."

Something tells me he isn't a typical man-flu sufferer.

Well, horse vet gave Willem another 'standing' anaesthetic and tightened his brace. "Looking good", he said, checking Willem's jaw. "Another four weeks and everything will be okay again. See you then! Got to go, still got a couple of visits to do tonight." And off he went. At least... that was his plan. You see, we have a double garden gate. A right part and a left part. It is painted black. It was a very windy night. One part of the gate had been blown in the wrong direction. So it wasn't opened into our garden, which is the right way, but into the path that leads up to our garden. And it can only open so far that way round. Which isn't far enough to let a car through. But it was dark, the gate is black and difficult to see in the dark, the vet was in a hurry, and when he backed out through the gates he heard a screeching sound. So he drove forward a bit, heard nothing, tried to back out again, heard the sound again, went forward again... And then I turned up. The rear bumper of his car got caught on the gate. Both bumper and gate lost the battle, which left the bumper only partly attached to the car and the gate only attached to it's post by the bottom hinge. I had noticed a week earlier that the front bumper of his car was stuck to said car with the help of lots of duct tape. 'I hope you didn't get that repaired yet, because you have knocked the rear bumper off your car too now', I laughed, a bit worried how his bloodpressure and heart would react to the bad news. Poor vet. 'Oh your gate, your gate! I'm so sorry!' 'Don't worry about the gate', I said. 'I feel sorry for your poor car.' Anyway, I opened the gate the right way round and he backed up to visit the rest of his patients that night. 'See you in about four weeks!', he said. The next day Willem found a little branch to chew on and part of it got stuck in his braces. By the time I got there to remove the branch from it's tangled web, he had fidgeted with it so much that half of his braces had come loose. So... I called horse vet again. 'I'll come around today', he said. And that afternoon he arrived, rear bumper in place again. 'It just needed a good kick.'

'Or were you out of duct tape?' He sedated Willem, thinking he could easily repair the damage, but then discovered that it would be better to just remove the old braces and fit him new ones. So Willem was brought into another standing anaesthetic and the operation 'new braces' began. This time I had the difficult task to keep Willem's head up, because hubs was back to work again. A very heavy head, but if left hanging, his nose almost touches the ground which makes it very difficult to fit braces as you can imagine, so I switched it from shoulder to shoulder and about half way through the operation I felt very faint and had to sit down. After a couple of minutes I felt much better and was up to the task again. But I had horse vet very worried for just a moment, hehe. This time horse vet left the premises without any further damage. And then, a couple of days later, a weathergod broke wind and a tree just snapped and fell from the neighbour's garden into ours, júst missing our stables.

Perhaps I shóuld change my headertext.