Well, that previous post was sort of left hanging in mid-air, eh? That'll teach me to try and pretend I can write trip reports...

The rest of that trip was short but very good. Highly concentrated, and with a finish at the end of Saturday, so we had the whole of Sunday to recover. The trip to the old favorite restaurant was a bit of a disappointment, because the owner was now the former owner, who had retired (happily, to his adopted homeland) and sold on to a group who were willing enough, but changing stuff around with not always good results. Ah well, how does that phrase go? "Sic transit gloria mundi," or something like that?

These next days are waiting and focussing on the new semester, perhaps even more so than for my exam grades - I'm reconciled with the notion that I will have Not Passed, and mostly trying to re-connect with my reasons for starting this study in the first place. With some small success. I am, however, a little anxious about the amount of work I know from experience is coming my way these next couple of months. Even if I know I'm going to fail, it's hard not to be hurt on some level by that, and hard not to get wrapped up with engaging in super-human efforts to try, ever so hard, to succeed. But that's not how my brain seems to work: this is the year, as Mr Sweetie's put it to me, that I'm planting the tree. And we all know that a freshly transplanted tree just Is Not Going To Bear fruit. I'll just be as open as I can to my materials, so that next year, next year I can harvest some of the good of this year's effort.

At the end of my post on butterfly moments, tandw pointed out here that, actually, my meeting with Our Mutual Mary was more than 30 years ago. Uhm. Okay. (Drat, I flubbed the arithmetic. Mostly out of haste.) I don't actually feel that old, doing that, dear tandw, but you know what did make me feel as if I'd been born before the current age? The Antiques Roadshow featuring a photocopying machine. At least, that's what the continuity announcer promised: alas, I wasn't able to stick around and see if that was precisely true, but still... *shudder*. (What else made me feel old actually happened about 3 years ago - I was reading a weblog by a male-professor teaching a womens' studies class, I think that was the topic anyway, and... he'd been shocked by the lack of knowledge among his female students about their own bodies. When he named examples, I was shocked, too - this was stuff I'd learned around my 16th birthday, and not a lot of it was from independent reading, either. Shocked, feeling old, and not just a little frightened.)

And, Mr the-magician, okay, okay, I'll try and stop feeling so guilty about having only stopped at two .mp3 players, okay? *wink*

The chats, old friend rdkeir, were entirely my pleasure. Glad to hear you're recovering! (I have this image, after "deep-tissue accupuncture" of something like a process of out-gassing via the bores of those little needles.... you don't have to duck away, as I'm still laughing at it.)

And, carly_sullivan, I'm so sorry I missed your comment to me about the wonderful visual properties of dropping blue chamomile into a carrier oil. :) I have a resolution to make a photo of just that thing sometime, just so we can enjoy that shot together on the internet. (I'd discovered somewhat recently the buttons I need to push on the digital camera to get it to take super-duper close-ups.)

So, the week in review...

• Did a bit of a good-deed, although perhaps P. from aikido doesn't regard it that way - he'd asked me if he could discuss investments, as part of a course he's taking (working on a license to be able to sell them, insurances, and related stuff; it's the uncertainty of the times, calling to him to expand his skill-set). Well, would it be okay to discuss them with Mr Sweetie? Oh, sure, said I. I didn't share that I expected the evening to be pretty entertaining: Mr Sweetie has done a fine job of educating himself, after his doctorate in economics, and he's met P before - they like one another, and I figured Mr Sweetie would set about entertaining himself with the notion that P had anything to tell him.
  
  P arrived with his tutor, a thin and somewhat overly-observant fellow named AJ. But, since this chat was P's show, AJ left P flounder until he'd ask for help. Which was as it should be. P learned what he needed to, although we haven't yet had a chance to chat since then - P's come down with a flu! (On a related matter, the flu-season has apparently been really going here - I'm feeling grateful for my flu shot, and for Mr Sweetie having also gone through the trouble of getting his.)
• The kids of A and J, they are so grown! We'd stayed at their family home near The Hague, but I was awake before anyone, so was sitting in the livingroom when two school-kids wandered in, quite self-possessed and ready to show off everything in reach. It was with an effort I managed to get the girl JJ to refrain from playing her party piece on the piano - it wasn't even 7:30 at that moment, and although I have no children, I have enough vivid memories of having awakened my own parents that I figured it a kindness. I got to make it up to JJ later - a wooden soprano recorder was found from somewhere, and H played a very little on it, before letting me have a go... yeah, so I was showing off, too. It rubs off on you, yeah? Anyway, soon after, JJ was playing her party-piece, a repetitive little run of "tonic-dominant-tonic" in the key of C, and, hey, what better thing to improvise on, if one is rusty from lack of practice, eh? Mr Sweetie was placed where he could see little JJ's face, and he said that her face just beamed when she realized that I was playing a melody to match her piano work.
• Part of our trip also included a short visit with a friend in Dordrecht, and then a concert in Rosendaal. I liked Ialma although I didn't think their concert was... oh, well, let's just say I've done standing ovations for better. However, they were pleasant enough to hear live - they do need to take a page from the book of Urban Trad, who don't let the energy of individual numbers fade before picking back up to play the next one. That was probably my biggest complaint, and might have had much to do with the fact that this was the last of a tour series - they must have been very tired.
• But the star of this evening had been the Chinese restaurant De Postkoets - at which we each had a duck dish, and mine was The Best: pieces of mandarin peel gave the dish a zesty edge that just hit the spot.
• I visited with M and F, in part to get back our housekey (M looked after our kitties, yay!), part to give a small gift acquired in The Hague, and partly to be company while F is still housebound, and M doing her best to look after him, despite the heavy weather. I'm much steadier on my feet than M is, anyway, so it was even enjoyable to sit in a warm bus and look at the snowy scenery on the way to their house. Luckily, the local snow hadn't been that bad, so by the time I was returning home, the busses were running more or less dependably again.

And now, I've regained some of my study momentum - not nearly enough, but it's the warm-up for next week. Goodness, so that's how the Japanese conjugate a verb in the negative volitional form, whodathunk?