my heart is simply bursting with holiday spirit.

i am a maker of good decisions. professionally. [not really.] i have decided this because, this morning i exercised my ability to make good decisions so effectively that it just might have saved my life! or at least my extremities.
i woke up this morning, and it was not one of those "good morning sunshine, the earth says hello!" mornings. it was more of a "why am i even alive." morning. but anyway, i got outta bed and had to decide what to wear. usually, i just wear a pair of pants and a sweater, cos that's warm enough sometimes. but today, for some reason of divine enlightment in my subconscious, i thought to myself, "NOPE. today, i think i am going to wear a pair of leggings, pants, sweatpants, a long sleeve sweater, a zip-up hoodie, my german army jacket, a scarf, a hat, unox glovemittens, and my earmuffs." and my coat, of course.
i don't know what possessed me to wear approximately 5 more layers than i usually do, but it was a shining moment in my life. once i got to school, around second period, it started to snow. not like "teehee little fairy sprinkles in the skyyy~ @w@", more like "ow that snowflake just pegged me in the eye wtf".
they were giant mutant snowflakes, out for blood. and i biked home in them, with about half an eyeball of visibility, because my hair and the snowflakes combined in front of my face to form a frozen pink shield.
BUT THE THING IS, except for my face, i was completely toasty warm. do you know why? yes. because i have no shame, and proudly walk around looking like an assbutt in my bazillion puffy layers and earmuffs. i'm like an onion, each layer more socially unacceptable than the last.
laugh all you want, my fellow classmates. your shiny italy sportscoat isn't going to deter the hypothermia like my sweatpants and panda earmuffs.

i mean i really hope it's warm enough, for your sake.

besides the fact that i have to actually be outside with the snow, the snow itself is really pretty. it's getting me quite in the holiday spirit. i got home today and looked up the christmas song on youtube and totally got my jam on.
which reminds me, okay. every day i spend learning more about sinterklaas, the more utterly baffling the holiday becomes. at first it was just like "oh so it's like santa but not santa." but it is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING THAN THAT.
so we do presents, but we have to wrap them up in a "suprise" for the other person. like hiding them, or putting them in a paper mache model kayak, for example. this is something that i do not even begin to "snap" but i'm gonna try my hardest. other people sometimes do poems too, to give to the person with their gift. but i'm pretty sure that is beyond my skill in every sense.
also, sinterklaas himself is just a neverending fountain of WHAT. he rides around on a stoomboot with his black slave-elves, and he comes from spain but he's actually turkish, and he leaves presents in your shoes. [as i have come to understand]. thats like 1000 times more creative than a guy from the north pole with flying reindeer. good job, holland!

oh, the merriment.

at the afs party on sunday [at which i won a christmas tree and dutch porcelain ornament from blokker :D] we were just sitting around, chillin, completely unawares, when we all hear accordian. i was mildly intrigued, since y'know. accordian is not something that enters your daily life very often.
and then, into the livingroom danced 4 zwart piet and sinterklaas, fully costumed and singing spiritedly. forcefully spreading their holiday cheer and merriment to several confused exchange students drinking tea. it. was. amazing. everyone else was just kinda like whaaaaat, but for me, this was an experience i could not handle. i proceeded to go into a state of utter, nonfunctioning glee. i'm *fairly* sure i grabbed my knees and rolled into a little ball on the floor, smiling like a giant doof.

an emotion best conveyed by spongebob.

 to be fair, WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF SINGING SLAVE-ELVES STORMED YOUR HOUSE? because i feel like i had pretty much the right response.
anyway, that was probably the most surreal experience of my life thus-far. which says a lot, because i am here and every day is a surreal experience.
beyond that amazing experience, this weekend i also went to enschede with alex n eline to go to atak, which was awesome C: and briefly visited nijverdal. which was terrifying. only because the best way to describe nijverdal is "post-apocalyptic work camp". jacque and i had to stop there on our way to raalte because the other half of the traintracks in nijverdal have been demolished, and the main station is heavily under construction. there's just one track leading out towards hengelo. we then had to take a bus past what i'm pretty sure is an abandoned lace factory, and several gratuitously sized gun statues, to reach our destination. which was a sparse dirt-pile filled semi-wasteland. we had to walk through a tunnel made with a gigantic metal pipe through a dirt pile to get to the single set of traintracks where our train was. our final view of nijverdal was a huge, solitary factory building with two large red twisting pipes [basically water slides] attatched to the side. nijverdal made me feel like fallout 3, or a creepy future dystopia full of shelled remnants of yesteryear.

some inspiring google image results for nijverdal.

the death tunnel.

i'm sure it's a lovely place in the actual town, probably

no, really.

alright, i'm gonna go learn some sinterklaas songs now. care to join me?


of course you do, that wasn't even a question.



and, all of our favorite,



bye!

what do i do now? [a post *mostly* dedicated to blondies, but i guess some other stuff too]

hi everyone :) its a particularly lazy saturday afternoon, so i figured i'd busy myself with a blog entry! this post is really, really long. and probably doesnt make sense, because i have a sugar related headache the size of alaska and my fingers are shaking a little bit.
the last 2 or 3 weeks have been quite interesting. mostly average, but a few things have happened, and its been busy enough to get me out of a near comatose state of normality.

after the success of the chocolate cake i baked for jelle's birthday, i somehow became under the impression that i can bake things. like successfully. with my head full of dreams, i set out to work.
i felt kinda bad about purchasing 5 cups of walnuts for thanksgiving which i, post-thanksgiving, still had no intention of eating. so for the last week i've been baking walnut desserts pretty much nonstop. first i used half of them in meringue cookies, because i was like CRAP HOW DO I MAKE SOMETHING DELICIOUS WITH PRETTY MUCH NOTHING EXCEPT WALNUTS? [and eggwhites, and copious amounts of sugar.]
and walnut meringues drifted down from the heavens~ according to my parents, they were good :)
now, i must admit, i am one of those bakers who's baked goods always look sort of questionable. i wish i could bake things that were beautiful, but i'm pretty much just capable of sticking heart shaped sprinkles on top of my lopsided cakes and hoping for the best.
the next thing i baked is a good example of that. i had planned to bake some blondies for the sinterklaas thing afs is having this weekend. i *happened* to have some walnuts on hand, so i figured i'd throw 'em in and everything would be peachy.
blondies are delicious. they are gooey cookie-brownie hybrids, and they are probably one of the worst things you can put in your mouth. besides say, pure lard coated in sugar. paula deen would be proud. anyway.
i didnt have the proper sized pan handy, and i didnt feel like making conversions [I DONT BAKE BY THE RULES I FOLLOW MY HEART] so i just kinda winged it. i stuck them babies in the oven for the reccomended half an hour and didn't look back. i even checked them with a toothpick out of habbit, which came out coated in sugary-chocolate-ness. i did not care. the top was hard, and thats what mattered to me. who complains about blondies being too gooey in the middle anyway? certainly not i.
i decided that if they didn't cut into squares, i wouldnt bring them to the AFS thing because they simply were no beautiful enough. after letting them cool for like an hour, i cut them into... bars? slices? vaguely outlined 12ths of the pan? yeah. they didnt come out so much as "bars", but as "blobs of sugary, nut-y, chocolate-y deliciousness with some crust i guess" WHICH IS TOTALLY FINE WITH ME. i am now in a jittery, slightly crazed euphoria.
so, if you ever need a recipe that even if you fuck it up, it is still guaranteed to be pretty stellar, bake blondies.
okay, done blabbing about my love for baking.
so, the weather is getting colder. not like "ohh it's a little bit nippy noodles out thurr better wear a scarf" cold, like "FUCKING SNOT ICICLES IN MY FACEEE ohgod the tears are freezing in my eyeballs" cold.
like, i'm *fairly* certain an accident related to my fingers being too numb to use my bike breaks is imminant. like, sometimes i consider hybernation as a viable life option.
apparently this type of weather effects nobody but me, because while i'm biking to school in 3 layers of everything, a scarf, gloves, a hat, and earmuffs, there's chav-y guys cruisin' by next to me in naught but a shiny sports jacket. anyway,
cold weather, besides meaning being afraid to go outside, also means it's stamppot season C:
stamppot is a dutch dish that consists of potatoes and a bunch of other stuff mashed into a mash-y mush of stuff. some people love it, some people think it's nasty.

dutch cooking, like my baking, is not known for it's beauty and refinement.

i think it kinda just tastes like potatoes haha. i'm not really sure how someone could hate it, actually. it's pretty difficult to hate, its like hating bread or something.
but i guess we'll be eating a lot of it, since i purchased 3 packages of unox sausage yesterday. to give you an idea of what unox sausage is like, it come's in an sealed package and does not need to be refrigerated. which jacque and i decided is creepy. but, it came with free neon orange glovemittens and i needed them! actually, its really more like i bought a pair of 9 euro mittens that came with 3 free packages of sausage. which i'm okay with.

something everyone should have in their wardrobe.

also, i finally got around to changing my schedule at school! i dropped geography, because i explained to them that it was completely useless, which they accepted. and i switched into an easier math class. also, i got an extra period of CKV because i work ridiculously slowly in that class, because i have to spend extra time translating ridiculous, uncommon words in the questions into english. :D

this picture does nothing to help uitleg the opdracht.

 nevertheless, i think my dutch is actually improving. like, i have conversations with people now c: and even if 90% of my replies are "ja," or "echt?" or "klopt", i still deserve an a for effort.

anyway, today i'm just dicking around drinking tea until like 5, and then i'm taking the train to enschede to spend the night with alex n eline c: we're gonna watch movies and then go out dancing or something. :D
and i'm planning to dump my pan of blondies on them, since i dont want to leave them in the house where i could potentially eat all of them. evil, i know.

aaand my birthday's comin' up. yup. got 2 packages in the mail today c: but im gonna wait till the 5th to open them. joepieee~

hurr durr durr a lot of other stuff happened recently too, but i kinda don't have enough brain power left right now to explain it in a way that isn't stream of consciousness. which, to you, would probably sound like "ashammalammarabbaropparoopadoopaaaa"
and nobody wants that.

finally, have i mentioned to you that this is the nicest thing i own? because it is.

bye!

today has been a sorely trying day.

a sorely trying daywith an exceedingly happy ending. this is a pretty complain-y post, not gonna lie. sometimes i am a bratty shit, this is one of those times. sorry :<

this morning started off rough. i did not want to get out of bed, at all. as i was groggily eating my breakfast and checking my email, i found i'd gotten some hatemail. so that was a good start to the day. essentially, what i wanted to do was sit on the couch and filterfeed until it was a socially acceptable hour to go back to sleep again.
today i had 5 hours of school. usually, at least one of my classes falls out. pretty much every day, actually. wednesday, for example, 4 of my classes fell out. FOUR OF THEM. THAT IS 2/3. i was at school for two hours and then i got to go home and drink tea all day.
but today, i actually had things to do. i had a hair appointment for 4 o'clock, and i also had to bake. i thought, "oh! if one of my classes falls out, i can leave early, bake, and then go to my hair appt while i wait for it to cool." FLAWLESS PLAN!
except, obviously, today, none of my classes fell out. i sat through every stagnant hour. also, my last period economy class let out whenever you finished the homework. which i dont do, which means i actually *could* have left an hour earlier. D: urr.
so i got out of school and biked sadly to my hair appointment. which was okay, i guess. i got to drink 2 cups of tea and read magazines. but she cut my bangs all funny, because she parted my hair in the middle. even though i came in with it parted to the side. i am confused by her logic and apparent lack of knowledge on how to cut bangs and have them not look like straw, but i'll deal with it.
after that, i stopped by the post office to pick up a package from my parents c: i biked it home, but didnt have time to open it just yet. because i had to get baking.
baking is serious business. you have to pay attention. you have to pay attention and not reach into the pre-heated oven to take out one of the oven racks with only one oven mit on. especially when you are baking something for which time-is-of-the-essence and running over to your laptop to look up "how to treat a mild burn" is not exactly convinient.
besides that, it wasn't too traumatic an experience, and it went pretty stellar.
also, i have learned that mixing batter, trying to work the insta-coffee machine, and nursing a burn simultaniously is a rather difficult task. its like a game show where you have to do a bunch of stuff at once, except the grand prize is a panic attack and a brain aneurism. :D
anyway, with baked good safely in oven, i decided to sit on the couch and wallow in my own pity for a while. but oh! i had forgotten my package.
i slowly tore open the cardboard box, and what i saw filled my soul with utter, sweet steamy melty applepie a-la-mode and glitter pony rainbow lasers of glee.
on top of the box sat a 20 pack of celestial seasonings apple cinnamon teabags.

under that was 4 boxes of pumpkin pie poptarts.

yet under that was an issue of nylon, an issue of psychology today, and the latest urban outfitters catalogue, on which my mother had sharpied in commentary.
my shitty bangs? FORGOTTON, IN A HAZE OF HOT LIQUID APPLEPIE.
my possibly 1st degree throbbing blisterburn? NNNNNNG PUMPKIN PIE TOASTER PASTRY NOTHING ELSE MATTERS
my steaming pile of internet hatred? CROCHET HOTPANTS I CAN'T EVEN.
erm, excuse me.
needless to say, without my package i would probably be having an emotional breakdown right now. possibly in the middle of the kitchen floor, covered in batter, sobbing and cradling my lightly singed claw-hand. who can say.
now, for a product review:
pumpkin pie pop-tarts.
take into account, that i have 1/3 of an actual pumpkin pie sitting in my crisper. so these were only a meer knock-off. they were totally delicious, all toasted n everything, but they did not fill the void in my heart where pumpkin pie goes. they were warm, pumpkin pie is cold. they were also rather cinnamon-y. with 200 calories per pop-tart, you would be better off eating an actual piece of pumpkin pie.
that said, if you don't have an actual pumpkin pie awkwardly stashed in the fridge like i do, these make a pretty rockin' substitute. they are probably the best flavor of pop-tart. they are better than cinnamon and brown sugar. I KNOW, INCONCEIVABLE.
so yeah, thought i'd mentally drool a little bit about my day. i have more to talk about, but this post is about my package. C: ur hur.

oh sweet jesus, die antwoord and their stupid weirness is being weird all over my tv. this is seriously the stuff that nightmares are composed of.

anyway, this weekend was real good c: euhmm im kinda really tired though so im not going to say words about it right now.

i only have school until 11.45 every day this week C: and i got my gogol bordello tickets C: and thanksgiving is on saturday, for us C:

xx

just so you understand

this

is my life.

this

 is also my life.

and now this, thanks to nick,

also my life!

anyway. this week has been pleasurable. tuesday nijmegen met jelle, which was fun c: en i finally worked up the courage to wear my SICK DOUBLEBUNS to school. and people liked them C:
and uhh i actually finished my CKV homework after being 3 weeks behind.
yesterday a jazz concert at metropool, which was really actually very fun. i dont really have time to talk right now, im going to enschede to ice skate for the first time in aaaages, and then wencke is taking me to the party of one of her friends C: and then tomorrow i'm doing the art photoshoot for a girl in my chorus!
also, i joined this other alternative social networking site for dutch people, and ive been trying to speak a bit of dutch to them XD its going well. joepie.
so, uh, today you don't get any snark because my life is a pit of rainbows and fairy sneezes. but i'm sure something will go horridly wrong soon and you will get to hear alllll about it. promise :D