The end of rationing!

Ah December... a time of staying warm indoors and playing your own home-made games. In our case it was a version of "post-it-note-what-am-I". Where we had to guess what object in the room we were. It included fantastic questions such as:

• Can you turn me on and off?
• Do I have wheels?
• Am I valuable?
  
• Does Renee want to get rid of me?

I guess you had to be there to really enjoy it.


Speaking of enjoyment, December also included KABOOKI. This year Martijn and I wanted to go out and have brunch somewhere. In true Kabooki style, we started out optimistic (see foto above with smiles) but were never happy with the options and quickly became unoptimistic. Cafes were either closed, didnt do brunch, had really bad christmas music or were way too expensive. We spent at least an hour just walking around from one place to another. In the end we had to settle for a place that had eggs on the menu.... and it was quite a disapointment really.

Speaking of disapointment.... my knitting project. I'd been working irregularly on it for the past 2years (mostly just the past month) and I finally finished it. I was so excited to put it one once it was done.... and it was such a let down. Both Elisabeth and I tried it on and yep.... I think this one is designated " give away" material. If anyone is interested in having this warm sleeve-wrap, let me know.

Speaking of warm clothing, December was also the time for the 15m fun run in Nijmegen. Like last year it was cold despite all my layers of clothing. This year I took Tim-Tams and a thermos of vanilla coffee to keep myself warm on the inside (thanks to a parcel from my mum).


On the note of parcels... Christmas! This year Santa freaked out our housemates by including token gifts for them under the tree (obviously he didnt want our housemates to get jealous of all our gifts under the tree!... Here they dont really get into presents at Christmas). Thanks to everyone who thought of me/us and sent cards, gifts and emails. The theme of the gifts this year appears to be "warm and indoors" - books, knitting projects (check out the great book on tea cosies), socks, hankies and puzzles! I love being entertained.


My sister probably thought her giant Australia puzzle would keep us going for at least a few weeks. Im sorry to say that we got so into it that it was almost done in a few hours!

Other December news
No income November spilled over into December just as we knew it would. However, it is over! Martijn got his first pay just before Christmas. We celebrated by going to a cheap pizza restaurant (where we had a discount voucher), saying goodbye to orangejuice rationing and paying all our debts! Imagine if we had 2 incomes... maybe we could go to a restaurant where we didnt have a discount voucher.

My visa news..... the immigration people have decided not to follow through with their promise of a decision on the 10th of December. Instead, they have changed it to the 10th of February. Why I do not know.

And we pretty much avoided the Dutch 5th of December Christmas.

Next month (January 2009) I am hoping to:

• get a visa
• be paid
  

I dont think I am asking much.