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John F. Kennedy: “So, let us not be blind to our differences – but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.”

Woohoooo!!!!! I could write a thousand pages and would still not come even close to describe my first Northern Light experience last Friday February 7 on the Lofoten Islands!! Absolutely stunning, amazing, bizarre, emotional, incredible, wow-WoW-WOW, etc., etc., etc. Seeing is believing…when I close my eyes I am there again and I am totally hooked (I want moreMoreMORE!!)…for now I guess it is best to let the pictures do the talking…

Disclaimer; It was my first time with the camera (Canon D40, thx Sascha for borrowing, the iPhone would NEVER have been able to catch any of this!), my first time photographing the Northern Lights AND my first time seeing the Northern Lights for real (so my attention was obviously somewhere completely else than with taking pictures! 🙂 ). None of the photos have been edited or optimized (…yet :))

I added a professional picture at the very end, taken by a Lofoten local Northern Lights pro-photographer (Vidar Lysvold)…it came out pretty nice eh? 🙂

Rene Descartes: “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.”

After nearly 15 years I am cat-less (not a great feeling actually…). Kwibus and Pluis flew back to NL tonight so it is all and only me in the house now (though *with* Misha for the coming two weeks, yay! 🙂 ).

Kwibus has some medical challenges and well, since I am traveling every now and then (understatement), it really didn’t feel good to have the care for them ‘outsourced’ so often…since Kristel moved end of last year to a more spacious home in a much greener area, the time seemed right for them to go back to NL.

One cat though, Nikky, will always stay here with me. I buried him in the garden last summer so he is always close…and in my heart forever!

William Van Horne: “Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt.”

Maureen Dowd: “The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.”

Karen Hall and Jerry Stahl: “If you’re here for four more years or four more weeks, you’re here right now. I think when you’re somewhere, you ought to be there. It’s not about how long you stay in a place, it’s about what you do while you’re there, and when you go, is that place any better for your having been there?”

Lorraine Anderson: “Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.”

Lianne and I are going to the Lofoten group of islands tomorrow, and will be celebrating her Birthday in a magical place. This amazing place will become even more magical when the Northern Lights show up…predictions for Northern Lights to ‘be’ there are fantastic, it is just that the clouds might decide to not play along….cross fingers they will not!!!

Dr. Robert Schuller: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

Chuck Palahniuk: “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known.”

HI-LA-RI-OUS!!!! 🙂

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Don’t Argue With The Gay Flight Attendant:

My flight was being served by an obviously gay flight attendant, who seemed to put everyone in a good mood as he served us food and drinks.

As the plane prepared to descend, he came swishing down the aisle and told us “Captain Marvey has asked me to announce that he’ll be landing the big scary plane shortly, so lovely people, if you could just put your trays up, that would be super.”

On his trip back up the aisle, he noticed an extremely well-dressed and exotic young woman hadn’t moved a muscle. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me over those big brute engines but I asked you to raise your trazy-poo, so the main man can pitty-pat us on the ground.”

She calmly turned her head and said, “In my country, I am called a Princess and I take orders from no one.”

To which the flight attendant replied, without missing a beat, “Well, sweet-cheeks, in my country I’m called a Queen, so I outrank you. Tray up, Bitch.”

Ali Vincent: “In order to truly give to others, you have to give to yourself first.”

Wow, this is very inspirational; watch the video below (dutch spoken / english subs) and realise that the best kind of thinking is: Doing!

“At 5 years old, you are at the top of your creative ability and by the time you’re 8 your creativity is halved. At 44 you reach a state of ‘terminal seriousness’. Structure determines your life and reality can only follow. This video is a call to start ‘doing’!”

Louise Bogan: “I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!”

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider: “It’s just human. We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants and needs and desires, strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we’re all pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. it’s like a kind of poetry.”

Yihaaaa, the tickets for Lowlands 2014 are INNNN which means I am halfway there! (mentally not physically 🙂 )

Getting the tickets went much smoother today than the fight for tickets that became a tradition in the last years, not sure if the festival is loosing momentum or it is something else, but anyway, more than happy to have the tickets, the countdown started today (195 days to go)!!

As usual, hardly any bands have been announced, the biggest name so far is Queens of the Stone Age and well, that alone is a reason to go (since ‘fun with friends’ is always present! 🙂 ). The full name for the festival is ‘A Campflight to Lowlands Paradise‘…well, camping is what we’re gonna do, and it is up to us to turn it into paradise which we will!

I know where I will be between August 15-17, ready for my sixth Lowlands festival hell YEAHHH!!

Robert J. Sawyer: “You can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.”