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As I wrote yesterday, the week started as any other; with work…a shitload of it actually as I had to complete my travel expense reports (hehe, I kinda need some cash for the new interior 😉 ). It took a lot longer than I was hoping for, so I came home late. Oof, it’s past 11pm, I have to start packing, am flying early tomorrow morning…

The coming week will start as any other (with work 😉 ), but there’re two main differences:

I can think about the new house and its interior (less than three weeks before moving day, when most should be finished!), AND I’ll be partying at the Pohoda festival from Thursday till Monday! This festival has been THE road-trip destination for Robbert and I since 2005, so this year will be the 5th year we’ll be partying there, yay!

Basement Jaxx, Patti Smith, Pendulum, Travis, Klaxon, Lamb, ‘Kraak & Smaak’ from NL and Norwegians ‘Hurra Torpedo’ are just some of the bands performing…combined with (normally) perfect weather, cheap beers, great people and pumping beats at the dance stages; it’s the highlight of the year!

We had the first guests in our new house today! No surprise, the guests were my mother, grandmother and two aunts! 😉

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Originally uploaded by raymondpoort

I don’t think my grandmother will visit us again, she’s always welcome, but *is* 89 already, so I’m extremely happy that she had the opportunity to see the house now (even though we’ve not moved in, so it’s still far from ‘our’ house…). We celebrated with champagne, since we never get enough of that! 😉

Liz Friedman: “If you really want to do something, you do it. You don’t save it for a sound bite.”

Today has been a very special day; next to getting the keys of the house, it was also the day that my grandmother with her three daughters (my mother and my two aunts) came here to visit us. She is 89 year ‘old’ and has never flown before, besides that she has never been on vacation with her three daughters alone.

The trip has been planned for months, we came up with the idea at my sisters Birthday in January, and I must say; it really feels SPECIAL to have them here! Grandma really liked the flight (haha, she didn’t want to get off the plane after the landing…who would have thought! 😉 ).

It’ll be a weekend to remember!!

We got the keys to OUR house today!! Unbelievable that it’s been only 10 days ago that we decided to go for this house and can call it ours now, wow…!!

The past weeks have been quite intense, and despite the busy weeks coming up, it’s all good…a true fairytale house next to the forest! (pictures)

Good! Part two of three is done; we signed the mortgage papers today, everything went fine (no surprise, banks still want to make money 😉 ). The bank will transfer the money overnight, so part three can be completed tomorrow: getting the keys of the house!!

Realizing that we soon own a piece of Norway and will make it OUR place feels really good. It’s amazing when I think back; it has been less than two years since the move to Norway, just to try it for a while…everything becomes more permanent now, great!

Speechless…it took me some hours after the Michael Jackson Memorial before I could write about it and I am still speechless. Yes, it was a media event and yes, most was rehearsed upfront, planned and directed, and still…I have been watching with tears in my eyes. The energy coming from the speeches and performances of Mariah Carey, Stevie Wonder, Brooke Shields, Jermain Jackson and many more was amazing and touching.

I guess that as me, many got a slightly better idea of what MJ has meant for the world (in some speeches, ‘the world as seen from America’). Al Sharpton said to Michael’s children: ‘There was nothing strange about your daddy…it was strange what your daddy had to deal with!’.

Today was a day to stand still and pay tribute to the King of Pop (today often referred to as the ‘Greatest Entertainer of All Time’)…there are a zillion websites doing so, including live-blogs from the ceremony today.

The best tribute I have seen so far is the Eternal Moonwalk…superb! (I’ve seen close to 8km already!)

Micheal Jackson – Gone to Soon…he sings what everyone thinks:

Today two years ago I couldn’t hold off any longer and decided to go with the then next big thing on the web: Twitter.

Nowadays this microblogging service can be considered mainstream, looking at celeb-twitter’ers like Ashton Kutcher, CNN using Tweets for near-live local news gathering and the recents events around Iran.

I am close to 1100 updates, so roughly 1.5 tweet a day…not a real addict (some are way over 10000 updates!), but it still plays a part in my daily life. 😉

After we verbally informed our bank last week that they are the proud owner of a new house ;), it’s time this week week to formalize everything. First of all we’ll be signing the contract early tomorrow morning, to be followed later this week by a visit to the bank to sign the mortgage papers, brrr.

Hopefully we’ll be able to get the keys of the house as early as coming Thursday (!), worst case it’ll be July 27, hehe still ‘well’ in time before Moving Day at July 31, uuhhh!

With Moving Day less than 4 weeks away the cumbersome process of packing has begun.

It’s amazing to see how much stuff one can pile up in just a few years. There’s unfortunately (or fortunately?) not too much time to go through every little memory that I find, still it’s a time I value; living past moments of now all over again.

At the same time boxes filled with those moments pile up. 😉

Cecil B. DeMille: “Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.”

I just noticed that I put up a Marilyn Manson quote on the blog two years ago.

The ‘personification of my dark side’ and my favorite musician performed at the Quart festival in Norway yesterday. I planned to see him at first, but as I expected to have some busy days this period and also didn’t want to take two days off to get to Kristiansand, made me decide otherwise…so no MM for me, unfortunately. It all was for the best though; I couldn’t have made all the arrangements around the house if I would have gone; yeah, everything happens for a reason! 😉

The beauty of the iPhone is that besides the looks and nice hardware, it is mostly the software that makes things sweet…and software, as we all know, is pretty flexible.

One of the big improvements in the latest iPhone OS 3.0 is that it adds MMS capabilities, but…this option was NOT enabled for the first generation iPhone (no idea why actually), and happens to be the one *I* own…damn!

Anyway, here is where the flexible software part kicks in!

There are bright minds with programming skills in this world and one of them created a hack to enable MMS also for the iPhone 2G! You need to have a ‘jailbroken’ version of the iPhone, which allows you to install custom software next to Apple’s AppStore software, and the process of enabling MMS is really as simple as can be!

Check the iClarified site for a detailed decription and let the MMS’s roll in! 😉