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!
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…
ck in The Netherlands, at the airport waiting for my flight home…a good time to recap Pohoda 2009.
The roadtrip on Thursday went pretty smooth, hardly any traffic-jams although the roadwork in Germany caused some time. We left early since the festival started already on Thursday night this year with a great show of Basement Jaxx, followed by some magnificent concerts on Friday (Pendulum, Razorlight 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 (vodka and some funky wigs made it standup comedy 😉 ).
The real cold shower came after storm past, twhen someone told us that the big dance tent collapsed, killing a 25 year old boy and hospitalizing over 40 people!! We walked over the terrain, which turned into a small warzone…words cannot describe, so check out the Youtube movie below, AWEFUL!
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! 😉
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!
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!
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! 😉
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! 😉 ).
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. 😉
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!
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