I am reminded that we have enough tortillas to get through the end of the month and then it is time for me to learn to make them. Unfortunately, last month I didn’t grab the tortillas for the dogs when I should have. I thought I would have plenty of time to do it over the next week. Turns out things didn’t really go that way.  As I counted the tortillas last night and realized that I couldn’t recharge my toothbrush since I had also lost all my US to EU power converters, I made a promise to myself to never again believe that there might be continuity in experiences. In other words, grab your tortillas (or other experience) while you can.

Lovely weather again. At this rate, I will be riding to work again soon. I am looking forward to that! At the office today and at least four people had birthdays which means there is cake everywhere. That’s the Dutch thing again, you bring pastries on your birthday. I am managing to avoid temptation.

I had my intake interview for my language course. Yesterday, I had to finish the pretest and it was heavily writing and I gave up. I turned it in and thought “to hell with it, they will obviously see how frustrated I am with my writing ability”. Well, it turns out that their system failed and threw out my test 😉 Of course, I ruined it for myself by saying I hadn’t finished it anyway. I got an extension so that helps.

It reminds me of a story that my mom used to tell. For the job in the department of the Dutch government that ended up being where she met my dad, she had to do a typing test. She was convinced she had failed it. However, it ended up never reaching the people that would have seen it and said “No” – it was lost along the way by the courier. She used to blame the wayward test for the reason that she met my father because she never would have had that job if they had seen her typing 🙂

Rocking out to “Rebel Heart” again. Well, rocking out is a relative term considering I am wearing earphones. It wouldn’t do for all the other grownups to hear my crazy musical taste.

One thing that came up today in the intake is that I have to stop reading books in English to take my written Dutch to another level. I really don’t want to do this since I love reading so much. And if I have to read in Dutch, I get frustrated. Per suggestion, I am going to start with a book that I already know in English. So it will be the first book in the Game of Thrones series. I could get it as an e-book from the library. Guess it is time to pull up my big girl pants and go through the painful humiliation of not being able to read at the speed and comprehension that I am used to. I am serious about learning to write properly in Dutch.

I also want to make the transition to dreaming in Dutch. The English speaking dreams I am having lately are not that conducive for a good night’s sleep so I would like to switch over to Dutch pronto. They say that once you are dreaming in a language, you have really made the transition to thinking and communicating in that language.