The Dutch Files

Now that the year is drawing to a close, I always have the habit of thinking back. I don’t think back very often, but this just seems like the time of year my mind has a “mind of its own” and makes me think back…

I will be spending NYE at a girlfriends place. I’ve been at parties where I was the only single there, a few times. Being the only single there is a tad awkward at midnight when everyone is slobbering eachothers faces and you are there, with your glass of champagne in your hand, waiting for the first couple to be finished. Come to think of it, that’s usually the couple that is no longer a couple the next year… they don’t do the long slobbering kissing… They’ve come down to the peck on the cheek kinda NY kiss…

It made me think of the last NYE I spent with The Ex. Which was December 31, 2001. We split up 4 months later. At the time the relationship was already near cumbustion to say the least and the NYE party we attended… well… it was… ehm… kinda special to say the least… It was a fancy dress party and well, I don’t let anyone tell me thát twice, so I looked all pink… As the regulars over here might have noticed I am not at all the pink kinda gal, but I figured “if you gotta dress up you gotta dress up and go all out”… Right?

So I was dressed up in pink spandex pants (and trust me, I did NOT have the body for pink spandex pants at the time), a tight pink blouse (OK so the top buttons couldn’t have been closed even if I had wanted to, fuck that!), I think there was a purple bra under there, a pink tiny handbag, a pink cowboyhat, a pink feather boa, pink sunglasses, fake eyelashes, pink make-up and to top it off the highest fucking stiletto slingbacks the world has e-v-e-r seen!!!

Do you have the picture? Oh, I was about 45 pounds heavier than I am now, and I was a blond, a short haired blond… Got the full picture now? OK, for those of you without any fantasizing capabilities, here it is…

The party was at the home of one of our best friends, at the time. They were swingers and some of their friends were as well. We weren’t, and the party certainly wasn’t a swingers party, but you can imagine the stories slinging back and forth at the party. This group of swingers was very open about their “hobby” and we had a blast listening to their adventures. There was champagne, music, champagne, dancing, champagne, oliebollen, champagne, appelflappen, more music and dancing, oh and did I mention champagne? Yeah, that too.

Needless to say that it was a relief from our relationship shit that had been going on for the past year. We knew we were in a bad spot, but we had taken The Kid to my sister’s place for NYE and decided that whatever happened, we would have a great NYE. If we would go out, we’d go out with a bang.

We did… Well, I did, to be more precise…

We were staying the night and had been given a room at the top floor of their house. I was experiencing some shortness of breath due to some people smoking a lot and so shortly after midnight I went up upstairs to get some medication from my overnight bag. The Ex came after me to see how I was doing, we talked a bit (ok we had a snog), and then we decided to go downstairs again.

There I was, at the top of the stairs, ready to step down the stairs and… my stiletto heel got stuck in the seam of my blow-your-brains-out-pink spandex pants… I tripped… and I bolted down the stairs… I remember thinking “Oh!! My!!! Fucking!!! God!!!” and probably also “AAaAaaaaaaahhhhh!!!“. And at some point seeing some of my life flash by… I am not sure how many summer saults I did on the way down but I estimate it was 2 to 3, maybe 3.5… And then in the curve of the stairs I slammed my head into the wall, rolled to the end of the stairs and came to a halt…

I remember lying downstairs, totally conscious, thinking “OMFG… I survived!…. I think” and then everyone coming rushing from everywhere in the house because of the loud bang they heard… OK, so there were loud bangs going on outside, but this one was coming from inside… One of our friends is a medical doctor, in the medical center I work at in fact, and he had just arrived at the party. He walked in, just when I was getting myself up, surrounded by utterly shocked group of friends. I sat my big fat pink ass on the bottom step of the stairs and looked at everyone and said: “No worries, I am ok, I think“… He checked me over and decided that I had been one fucking lucky pink bitch… The fact that I had had some champagne had probably rolled me down the stairs pretty “relaxed” due to which I hadn’t broken a thing…

Then I looked at the wall next to the stairs and saw a GAPING hole the size of my head in there…

Still, the night was young and as I felt pretty much ok, I partied on for a few more hours. The next morning when I woke up… OOOOOOHHH MYYYYY GOOOOODDD!!! All my muscles had spasmed up and it turned out that I hád bitten my tongue on the way down… It took about 2 weeks for all the hematomas and shit to disappear and for me to be able to walk normally again… And due to the swollen tongue I talked like a drunken bum for 2 days.

I guess it was a sign… that I had gone into 2002 with a big bang… It turned out to be one of the worst years of my life… Still, I have good memories of that NYE. And I did look pretty in pink, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

All of you have a great NYE! Have fun and I’ll see you on the other side! I might wear slightly less high stilettos tonight… 2008 should be a helluvah great year! I just know it! No pair of stiletto heels is going to fuck up my entrance into 2008…

OK you guys… I’m exhausted… I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night…

STFU! No! Not for a reason remotely like that… God! I wish!

Then again, I don’t have any usable condoms in the house anyway… so, maybe just as well…

I am feeling funny… Like I usually do when the year is drawing to a close…

The past year kind of withers thru my mind…

And this big huge enormous daunting new year is staring at me from the other side…

Just a few days away…

I know, I know… A new year with all brandnew opportunities and shit…

You don’t have to tell me that…

I KNOW!

But it doesn’t feel like that right now, for no particular reason…

I am not scared of it or whatever… It just feels daunting to me for some reason…

And the fact that the phonecalls from The Kid haven’t ceased (one/day) isn’t helping much…

I had a problem getting to sleep last night…

I never ever have a problem getting to sleep… EVER…

I saw the clock turn 01.00 a.m. and 02.00 a.m. and then…

It continued until 6.30 a.m. I think… then I fell asleep for about an hour or so…

I will be fine, don’t worry about me, puh-lease…

Tomorrow I will be busy baking mini-sateh’s and appelflappen…

And then I’ll drive over to my friend’s place to spend NYE…

I will be meeting nice people there and we’ll have a Sjoel competition…

We’ll eat oliebollen and appelflappen and have champagne…

I’ll be staying the night and be back home January 1…And The Kid will be back on January 2…

And today I will snuggle up on the couch and try to catch up on some sleep…

Latah!

I tweak templates for blogging friends at times. I love doing that shit. It’s something I like to do when I am bored.

Make no mistake: I have NO clue on actually designing templates from scratch… I have no clue about setting up CSS or HTML coding from nuttin’ to a fully operational template.

I just take an existing template, preferably one with some basic design and tweak them into something fitting for my friend’s blogs. I have some understanding of HTML coding on fonts, size, colors, and I can design and put in banner pictures and sidebar stuff.

So I take a basic template design and tweak it into something I think will fit their blog and their writing. Nothing fancy, just some tweaking and changing here and there. I sometimes do so just for the fun of it, without asking people first… I just think of something that would fit their blog, work on it and then email it to show it to them and if they want they can use it, and if not, that’s fine too. The tweaking takes away boredom at times and improves my coding understanding up to a point, so it’s good anyway… Yeah, I’m a template stalking bitch like that.

I did it first for Blogarita, who I can happily say, though she has taken a break from blogging for a while, has started blogging again recently. I tweaked a template for her without her even asking me to do it and just emailed it to her to show her what I had been doing while I was bored and she wanted to use it. She still is to this day.

I also did so for Froggy once. He closed that particular blog and is using a new template of his own right now. But on his last blog I offered him a banner picture with a frog and he used it for a while.

Catalin, from Flying Into Cold Deep Waters, I did 2 templates for. He was commenting on my blog for a while and contemplating starting blogging and I offered to help him set up if he ever decide to go ahead with the blogging. He did and so I did. One for his “old” blog on Blogger and recently he switched to Wordpress and I tweaked a template on there for him. I am so glad it convinced him to start blogging.

Then my Brazilian friend and colleague Carolina decided to start a blog as well, which is called “La Bra-Dutch“. I tweaked her template from the Minima template, like I did for Blogarita, from Blogger. I didn’t do too much tweaking there other than design her banner picture and set up the account for her. I like the way her banner turned out. I just need to tweak my Brazilian a bit to keep up with her blog…

Recently I did, again from the Minima template, the banner picture and color tweaking for Severity’s Realm. I love how simple it is and how it still is hot and getting the message across…

And then a few weeks ago Marty, from The Life of Marty, told me that he felt forced to delete his blog. I immediately offered him, if he would ever start again, that I could tweak a new template for him. He started again yesterday, with The Life of Marty - Take Two, and I tweaked a nice and simple template for him. I am so glad he’s back, please go over and see him, especially if you still remember him from before.

I know. I am crazy. I am a template tweaking addict. STFU! Deal with it!

I am working on a new design for my own blog again. Fab has been the only one to have gotten a sneak preview yet. But then he’s the fiance and I need his approval, right? I just have to patiently wait for Lucy to get her pretty ass back from Vegas to download the basic template for me, as she is still graciously hosting my blog on her domain (PPH Luce!). It won’t be anything fancy, just a change, just a tweaked basic template like I did for the above and like I’ve always done for my own blog… I’ll let you know as soon as it’s there… Oh well, I guess you’ll see it once it done and on here…

I suck at the Mommy-At-A-Distance thing. Any divorced woman sharing custody or in a visitation arrangement with the father of her child(ren) knows what I mean, and many others can probably imagine what it’s like as well…

On Dec 26 I took The Kid over to his dad. Very reluctantly… The older he gets, the more reluctant he is about visiting his dad… And the harder it gets for me to actually stick to the arrangement and take him over… I feel I have to though, as I find it important that he keeps in touch with his father, and because -though he is reluctant to go- there isn’t anything really serious to prevent him from going like any abuse or anything… He just prefers not going and being “at home”. And even though I think he’s father could do with standing up for his son a bit more and putting him somewhat higher on his list of priorities, I still think it is mucho important that my son continues to see his dad. His dad is part of who he is and he should grow up being with him.

He sees his dad regularly: every Monday and every other weekend. He loves his dad to bits… He HATES his dad’s girlfriend, and as years go by more and more attention of his dad goes to his girlfriend and more and more his girlfriend starts meddling in The Kid’s business, he hates going over there more and more. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not a bad woman, and I do realize it is not easy coming into a relationship with a man with a child and the child being around some of the time. I know all that. But she is on my son’s case all the time. All.the.time. She corrects him about the way he speaks, the way he walks, the way he sits at dinner, the way he stands, the way whatever… WTF? I am totally fine with her correcting him on whatever when he’s in her house and when he’s being a pain in the ass or doing something he shouldn’t or whatever, but putting him down on the way he looks and speak and all that… WTF!?

Whenever The Kid comes over to his dad’s she makes him change clothes the minute I turned my back and walked out the door. Cuz what he is wearing is never good enough in her eyes. She also makes him change báck his clothes minutes before his dad takes him back to my place. Not every once in a while… but álways… It’s like she’s trying to mold him into her idea of the perfect child. Fuck Off! Mold your own children, stay the fuck away from mine. He’s fine the way he is!

I have already warned The Ex about this shit many times, and about the fact that he should ask her to step back a bit. Because as he gets older he will not take crap like that anymore. He turned 10 a few weeks ago and well, I can see he’s getting fed up with the shit.

She totally blew it for herself the other day when she told him off on playing his brandnew Nintendo DS he got for his birthday. Because I couldn’t afford one on my own, I decided to give him the present together with The Ex. So we did. He paid half, I paid half. At least that’s what I thought. Turns out: I paid half, he paid a quarter and The Girlfriend paid a quarter. And now she was telling my son that she felt she now had reason to tell him off “because she paid for the damned thing”…

H.e.l.l. N.o.!

The Kid was blowing steam out of his ears when The Ex took him home that night. It took me 1.5 hour to get it out of him what the hell had been going on. He told me. He also told me that he wanted to call me and his father forbid him to call me “because calling my mobile is too expensive”. Fucker!

So on Dec 26 I took him over to The Ex. Just short of kicking and screaming… He hugged me to death just before I left… I told The Ex that The Kid can always call me and that if his non-child support paying ass he considers that too expensive, he can just leave a voicemail and I will call back. At my expense.

I suck at this. I spend the day on the couch doing nothing, just feeling bad and guilty… Being without The Kid for a week, that just sucks. I woke up at night with my jaw and my legs all cramped up. That’s how I work thru stress apparently. I try to keep busy, so I went to the hairdresser yesterday and then went shopping with one of my best friends.

And then, when I arrived at her place for coffee… there was a voicemail on my mobile… it was The Kid: “Mom, can you please call me because all kinds of stupid things have happened and I just want to talk to you“. I called him, I talked to him, he got it all out of his system, he said he wanted to go home, I convinced him that he should really stay because he loves his dad and otherwise he would never get to see him (though deep in my heart I just wanted to reach out and get him), I told him that he could call me anytime, and that on January 2 he would be home and we would do all kinds of fun stuff together that we have planned to do. Then I put down the phone and hardly slept a wink last night…

I could never have stayed with The Ex. Our marriage was só bad that I wasn’t doing The Kid any favours by staying. But this hurts my Mommy heart… I suck at this shit… and as one of my blogging buddies, who knows all too well how this stuff works, said the other day: “You would think it would get easier as years go by, but it doesn’t“…

I’m so sorry baby, I wish things were different, I am so sorry…