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Heyhey, it’s a big day today; Moving Day!!
We have three couples, our best friends from NL, helping us out…it’s great to share this special moment with them!
Everyone got up bright and early and the work is divided; the men do the heavy lifting and move everything to the new place, the woman pack the last things and clean.
3.5h left until we have to hand in the keys of the ‘old’ house…tick, tock… 😉

Time’s ticking, and we’re counting hours instead of days now (14:50h to go 😉 )…the floor is almost done (an hour of work left), which means that the house is (kind of ) ready for the move! We picked up the dishwasher and oven/cooking plate today, the freezer/fridge will be delivered tomorrow so the kitchen is A-ok.

We just had the last dinner, the last night and the last wake up call…soon to be followed by the first dinner, evening and night in the new house! 😉

D-Day is coming close, and the work far from done…the work on the floor is progressing, but not finished today as I hoped. Oh well, change of plans and we’ll continue tomorrow. Robbert arrives tonight so an extra pair of hands tomorrow will (have to) get the work done!

Quite a lot happening in life these days; working on new beginnings, going through a lot of changes, challenges everywhere…not always easy, but at least energy in motion!

My first blog-post from the new house! Yes, indeed…ladies and gentlemen, we are connected!!  I love it when a plan comes together… 😉

It seems that the more we do in the house, the more work comes our way…we have ourself to blame since we took down a wall today! 😉 Quite some work, but it should make life easier tomorrow when we’re putting the floor together AND it gives us a lot more space in the kitchen/dining room!

Everything is fully prepared for tomorrow; the floor is clean and all required items are there, hehe, we’re ready to set a record time for the 65 m^2, EASY! 😉

The hard work is followed by a cold beer, some time in the sauna and relaxing afterwards! 😉

The real work started today: getting out the old laminate floor was relatively easy, the surprise of the day was the SECOND old laminate floor underneath!! Aaahhhh! 😉

We managed and after that we took down the indoor brick wall (which was protecting the wooden wall underneath against the heat coming of the fireplace). Since the fireplace will go somewhere else, the bricks could go off…and that meant brick by brick (aahhh!); taking that wall down was HARD work!!

In the mean time, back ‘home’, almost everything was packed by the girls, we divided the work and we’re right on schedule!

I have to say, everything is actually going quite according to plan, everything except for the cleaning of the new house…this is quite a big thing in Norway, especially when I compare it to NL where the first thing one does when entering a new house is: cleaning! Well, in Norway the seller should make sure that the house is SO clean that the buyer should not have to clean it anymore…as you can guess, the cleaning was hardly done, and the broker seems to try to play tricks on us, F#CKFACE! The last word has definitely not been said about this…

Sunday turned out to be garden furniture day; we found a trendy set consisting of a big couch with lounge parts, soft pillows and a glass table…I’d say, let the sun shine!! Especially now that we also own an original Weber BBQ (the One Touch Gold, as burning charcoal still gives the best bbq experience if you ask me! 😉 ).

Marko and Muriel came over with their kids and are camping in their caravan on our parking lot! 😉

They’re gonna help us with the packing, cleaning and laying the new floor, which we’re gonna start with tomorrow morning, wish us luck!

Amber Deckers: “Never regret something that once made you smile.”

Quite an intense day today; bought a floor, a dishwasher, oven and cooking plate AND found a store with some fabulous furniture…that’s for coming week though.

It’s our last evening together in this  house; from tomorrow we have guests coming over from NL to help us with the packing, cleaning and the new floor…Moving Day is coming closer and closer…

I had my last day at work today, am taking off for 1.5 week (I wonder why? 😉 )…it was the last time I drove from work to the soon to be called ex-home, wow!

Still 8 days to go before the big move, and just to get used to it, we moved the first boxes tonight. 😉

And also we managed to get the kitchen equipment sorted out…gonna order tomorrow/the weekend!

A cryptic subject for a practical thing;

Moving Day is coming close, we’re currently at ‘MovingDay-9days’, the countdown has started! We’ll be moving out on Friday July 31, interestingly enough I moved into this house exactly two years ago, on July 31 2007!

There’s still shitloads to do, but the stress-level is pretty ok; I accepted that the coming two weeks will be chaotic (what’s new? 😉 ). Most important at the moment is to get all kitchen equipment, which means that we’re gonna burn some money baby, yeah! 😉

Back in The Netherlands, at the airport waiting for my flight home…a good time to recap Pohoda 2009.
The roadtrip started on Thursday and went pretty smooth, hardly any traffic-jams although the roadwork in Germany caused us to loose some time. We left early in the morning since this years festival started already on Thursday night with a great show of Basement Jaxx, followed by some magnificent concerts on Friday (The Airborne Toxic Event, Razorlight, The Ting Tings, Pendulum and the dutch live sensation Kraak & Smaak!). The weather was excellent and the atmosphere relaxed and terrific as usual, I love this festival!
We knew that there were some thunderstorms predicted for Saturday afternoon, which would spoil a bit of the fun, but remembering The Prodigy performance at Pohoda some years ago, when the tropical thunderstorm became a magical part of the show, we didn’t think things would be that bad. When the clouds came in we were considering to go to the big dance tent to shelter, but considering the long night ahead we decided to relax a bit and wait for the storm to pass in our own tent. It actually became a small ‘tent party’ with some of our Slovak neighbors, we had a lot of fun…and yes, vodka and some funky wigs helped! 😉
The real cold shower came after storm past, when someone told us that the big dance tent collapsed, killing a 29 year old guy and hospitalizing over 40 people!! (at first I was told the victim was a 15y old boy, later a 25y guy, but various websites report now it was a 29y old guy)

We walked over what used to be a place of fun, excitement and good times and turned into a small warzone…words cannot describe what we saw, check out the Youtube movies below, it was AWEFUL!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12flkhtXoWs

Obviously the festival was cancelled and 35,000 people were told to leave right away (mission impossible btw.; cars were queing up and people had to wait 4-6 hours to get of the terrain!). Back in Bratislava we went out to grab some beers, but the Pohoda feeling was long gone.

People were putting candles on the big square in Bratislava the next day, needless to say that the forces of nature caused this festival to end in a terrible way…

Howard Thurman: “Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive… then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

If you read my Tweets from last night (twitter.com/raymondpoort) or followed the international news, you’ve seen that the (13th!) Pohoda festival ended in a way that should not be. A 25 year old boy died and more than 40 others were hospitalized after the biggest dancetent with around a thousand dancing people, collapsed in the storm…aweful and a national disaster. Logically the festival was cancelled right away, the terrain looked like a warzone, and everyone was forced to leave (causing traffic to be jammed for hours!). What a difference with some years ago, when an even bigger thunderstorm created a bonus lightshow for The Prodigy, making it a magical performance, one of the best I’ve ever seen…It seems to me that there was something wrong with the tent construction; the wind was strong, but not THAT strong, our tent was standing at the very front and catching all the wind first, it didn’t seem lethally strong.
What a way to end our festival highlight of the year…it’s unsure if there will be a next Pohoda, hopefully there will be, so everyone is able to get the good vibes back.

It’s the typical Pohoda wake up tradition; sweating in a hot tent when you first open your eyes, yuk! 😉 but as soon as you get out of the tent life’s good again and the party continues where it ended last night! There is one major difference this afternoon; clouds came in and there are thunderstorms nearby…we’ll not let our pohoda-mood be affected though; it’s still gonna be a great evening!

The first Pohoda-day is sunny without wind which means it’s friggin’ HOT!! Then again, I should not complain, there are thunderstorms predicted for tomorrow which is a lot worse.
Pohoda means ‘relaxed’, and that’s just what it is…this festival makes me HAPPY! 😉

4:40am…yeah it’s about time to leave (aahhhh! 😉 )!

Keep an eye on the Twitter box on the right-hand side for short updates of our roadtrip to the Pohoda festival!

I’ll be gone for only five days (that is *including* the weekend) and still it felt as if I would be gone for *weeks* when I left the office today…so many last minute things that came up, unbelievable!

The summer months are typically times when the ones left behind in the office are covering for the ones enjoying and relaxing on a sunny beach. And that means that a lot of running around trying to get everything covered…well, I think I did so now it’s time to go zzzzz, the alarm clock will wake me up in less than 6 hours tomorrow morning, it’s Pohoda time at last!!

‘On this day’ in 2007 I wrote about the a clip from Adam Curry‘s Daily Source Code #632 (will it ever come back?). The piece was related to Fear Industrial Complex and smoothly moving it into the the blue pill, red pill discussion (which was THE question in the show those days)…the interesting stuff and good to read back!!

I found the blogpost back via the ‘On this day…’-widget on the right, it’s becoming a better and better feature the longer this blog runs!