At last! We have a few dry and sunny days, so I'm going to paint my patio this week. The walls are were white, but the previous owner used paint unsuitable for exteriors, so it's slowly turning in to white powder and being flushed down by rain:
Planned fot today: remove excess old paint and apply special coating for powdering latex layers to make sure the new paint will stick to the wall.
The weather has been so awful this month, it's causing a winter depression over here. It's August for heaven's sake! Of course there is another factor at play here: I didn’t manage to graduate this month. It means I’ll have to pay tuition fee to graduate next academic year... hence my new job and hence my grumpiness.
I’ll try to post here more often again… I promise! After next Tuesday my life will be more or less back to normal; no more graduating friends (...), birthday parties, theater festivals and overdue papers, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
For now, here are two pictures of the beautiful carousel at the Noorderzon Festival I wrote about before (here). I do love my new camera phone. :)
There's such a lovely and very obvious sexual tension in the new Gsus Original Denim ads that are hanging all around town in Groningen. Suddenly seeing two men with their pants down when driving through the city is not an everyday sight:
This Gsus Drop-your-pants campaign could last for a long time if I were to decide. :)
The annual Noorderzon Theater & Crossover Festival will start on Thursday in the park very close to my home here in Groningen. They're busy building all the tents, pavilions and bars at the moment. I'm really looking forward to this every year. Ten days of music, theater, modern dance, lots of booze and great times with good friends... all set in a park that looks like an enchanted fairytale forest due to the beautiful illumination, strange pavillions and many art objects. Just look at the beautiful Merry-Go-Round in the second picture... a lizard, an old blind mole, a flying horse, an ostrich... And best of all: it's just a two minute walk from home. (Click pictures to enlarge.)
As promised, two photo's I took of my friend Froukje for her website I'm working on (a link will follow when it's finished). Both pictures are taken in Amsterdam.
Good news (for me): I've got a new phone! Today I got my 4th (Sony) Ericsson phone in a row: T66, T610, K700i and now a K750i.
And since my new K750i has a pretty good 2 megapixel autofocus camera built in, I can post lots of decent pics on my blog from now on! So it's good news for you too!! I got my new phone because I changed from my previous crappy operator (T-Mobile) to a decent one (KPN Mobile). My old phone (the K700i) was still good enough, but I got the chance to get a new one for free, so...
I've thought about the comparable but even newer (and more expensive) SonyEricsson W800 Walkman phone (attractive due to an extra 512 Mb Memory Stick) but I've decided it's too ugly and far too tacky orange/white to consider:
and to finish things off... here's the first picture by my new phone. I took it at the exit of my nearby supermarket today.
I’ve recovered; and it was a great weekend. (And the weather wasn't as bad as I expected!)
I had a lot of fun; I had dinner (Ostrich Steak) at the Getto with some friends on Friday from 8:00 PM until 11:30 PM, after which we celebrated the start of our Gay Pride weekend at the nearby street party in the Warmoesstraat. We had a lot of fun judging outfits of men entering The Eagle.
On Saturday I went to work with the friend I was staying with. And I shouldn’t have done that. She works in the 'P.C. Hooftstraat', the most expensive and excusive shopping street in the country. It was sale and most shops offered a 70% discount on their spring/summer collection... I couldn't resist to pull out my creditcard at the Armani, Boss and Ralph Lauren stores. The result:
All together it has cost me less than one Ralph Lauren shirt at the regular price. I'm especially happy about my new belt (note: my belly is not as white as it looks in this picture):
After my financial irresponsibility I went to the annual Canal Parade, where I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in three years. The parade was a bit more tame compared to previous editions, but it was fun. Here's a link to a selection of pictures on my Flickr site to get an impression.
In the evening I went out for dinner and drinks with some friends; we danced at the streetparties in the Reguliersdwarsstraat and on the Amstel.
On Sunday I took a series of pictures of the friend I was staying with. She´s a poet and needed some publicity pictures for interviews and for the website I'm developing for her. I´ll post some of those pics tomorrow.
This blogger is leaving for Amsterdam right now to celebrate Amsterdam Pride. The weather will be really shitty all weekend (16ºC / 61ºF and rainy) but I won't let it spoil my fun.
I'll try to post an update during this weekend if I have time.
I just saw War of the Worlds. When we walked out of the cinema, all street lights in the entire city turned off. Everything was dark while cycling home, except for some shop windows and houses. Some sort of malfunction probably, but a very freaky coincidence after seeing War of the Worlds...
And talking about coincidence: Last Saturday I wanted to write a bad review about the movie Sugar on my blog. I did some "Googling" while writing and found out the leading actor (Andre Noble) had died at the age of 25... exactly one year earlier on July 30th, 2004. After I discovered this, I just couldn’t write a bad review anymore. I know, I’m weird, I just deleted the blog entry.
Although there will be no review, I still want to say: please give Brendan Fehr (the other lead-character) some media training... his interview on the DVD's extras section is sooo painfully awkward with him talking about homosexuality like that.
Except for running in the rain for 50 minutes, I hadn't done anything useful whatsoever until 3 PM on this terrible cold and rainy Sunday. I was bored and didn't feel like doing anything.
So I didn't. I've been watching tons of online cartoon episodes since 3 PM: Happy Tree Friends (so hilariously gruesome) and snappy Queer Duck. I hate rainy Sundays, but they can be great fun...
