Little progress

After one month of "special back" weight lifting, today I finally got to lift more.
7.5kg instead of the usual 5kg.
I'm happy there is some progress, although at this pace it will take me 3000 years to lift 100kg.

Who would have said that one day I'll have 4 medals for sports

Sport has never been my cup of tea when I was a kid. I recall my parents enrolling me to every sport they could think of hoping I would maybe show some talent. That never happened.
While most kids were improving their grades thanks to sports, I was losing points and hated it.

Yesterday night I put my 20K medal in the drawer with the others, and I realized. The otherS, yes plural. In the past year I walked 4 different races and received a medal for it. True anyone who participated and finished the race got a medal. True I didn't finish in the top 10 (or 100, or even 1000).
BUT for the first time in my life I feel proud about my performance in a sport. And that's very unusual, yet satisfying.

Over the past couple of years I've finally found two sports I like doing: walking and swimming.
Swimming is probably linked to the fact it helps my back and keeps me in shape. Most likely as well because I've always preferred sea over mountain.
Walking is different. Walking requires training, effort and a lot more motivation. 4 times, we've set an objective and we've achieved it.

Dear Alice, thanks for being crazy enough to enroll yourself with me last year for our first race and even more for doing it again, and again, and again.
Yes we suffer, yes we bitch about it and ask ourselves why are we doing this, but once we're done, it feels good, so good we already start thinking about the next one.  

2:45:51

The weather was great.

The company was fantastic.

Motivation was sky high.

And voila!

20 km in 2 hours 45 minutes 51 seconds - our best ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And what's even better, I'm not exhausted as I was last year or even in Paris. Seems all the training is finally paying off. I feel like I had a good work out but not like I nearly died.

Makes me wonder: could I walk a marathon?

They are back

Mosquitoes!
The warm weather brought non only sun but also mosquitoes. As you know I'm like sugar to them and they already started to get their fair share of my skin.
It's official, summer is upon us.

How hard can it be to find a church for our wedding?

Apparently harder than I thought.
Because:
- one should get married in his/her parish or the one where he/she lived. Tough life if you live in a Flemish parish and none of you are Flemish.
- some churches don't even bother answering an email or phone call.
- some churches are too far off the main roads.
- once you believe you have one, the priest tells you he's leaving Belgium and going back to his country.

Now I understand why services like "rent a priest" exist.

A long weekend just for me

Wolfram is flying to the US this morning. This means I have 3 full days ahead just for me.
That's good because I have a few things I need to do:
- search and luckily find my shoes for the wedding
- wash the winter blanket which we hopefully won't need anymore this season, which requires a gigantic washing machine i.e. I can't do it home
- walk 20K on Sunday
- put a few things on eBay
- find some examples of flower wedding decoration to prepare the meeting with the florist
- finish the book I started 2 months ago
- dream of a foot massage after the 20K

And once all of this is done... maybe I'll get to the one thing I need the most: rest :)

Everybody, have a great weekend!

5 days to go

until the 20K of Brussels. We are for sure more ready than last year at the same time... but that's easy.

7 months to go

7 months to go until the wedding.
Clock is ticking harder and harder.

Wedding To do list

Today, pushed by my dear sister, I started working on the list of things that need to happen before the wedding in December.
The same way as if it would have been any project I manage at work, I started with an action list, guided by examples found on the Internet. I've put owner and timing against each of them and realized something.
The list is long.
The list is very long.
The list is extremely long.
I'm not panicking because I believe that after organizing events for my company with 500+ people, our wedding is manageable, especially as I don't have to align 20 people on each decision.
I'm also not panicking because in theory no invention is needed but still....
... I sense I need to be a bit more disciplined in tracking the actions and bring in a few trusted people to help.

PS: today was the first fitting of my dress and it looked great already, even in plain cotton fabric. Next fitting end of June with the jacket. Can't wait!

Flowers

Mokka and I both like flowers... but for different reasons.

One of us likes to look at them.
One of us likes to eat them.

I let you guess who likes what.

Where is Spring?

It's now mid May.
It's cold.
It's rainy (at best cloudy when we are lucky).

It's just not right not to have a bit of sun and warmer temperature.
Consequence, I'm getting a sore throat and feel like eating soup. That's more winter if you ask me.

Tonight we start a 4-day weekend and if I'm lucky it will rain only two days out of four. It's depressing.

Edit Friday: My sore throat got worse and I had to switch the heating back on as temperature dropped in the house. Where is the sun????

Searching for the church

While we have found the place for the wedding reception, dinner and party, for some time already and are  already discussing details, we are still missing one tiny important detail: the church.

The challenging elements are the following:

-          We are looking for a church in the area of the castle i.e. not where we live and some priests are not so keen on marrying people not attending their church

-          We are looking for a priest ok to have a marriage between a catholic and a protestant, which on top of paperwork requires a priest with an open mind

-          All the protestant churches in Belgium look like an office building or a house.

Today we took the car and drove the area around the castle to have a look at the churches around.

We’ve discarded the churches that were too big, too modern, under work, with graffiti’s… and ended up with three options: Bornival, Arquennes and Familleureux.

This week we’ll contact the priests and find out whether they would be willing to marry us.

Keep your fingers crossed.

The Avengers

Another movie I could have skipped but it was Wolfram's birthday night so I patiently watched it for 2 hours and 23 minutes.
Despite a crash course on Marvel super heroes just before the movie so I could understand better the tensions between them, I'm pretty sure I fell asleep during the first half. Yes these are different heroes, with different sets of super powers and different stories BUT how come a movie about them can be so boring. That's probably the biggest mystery.
Second half was a bit better, i.e. once they decided to overcome their differences and fight as a team.
The thing is that the story was predictable and there were too many references to other movies (like Stargate, Transformers, Superman, etc.), and apart from a few jokes here and there, it was VERY long.
I guess that's what they called "marriage"... you don't always get to pick the movie :)

What I like about getting married

Since we got married almost one month ago we keep receiving cards and flowers. I simply love this!
It makes me so happy to get a card from family or friends.
Look what just arrived from Wolfram's department!

Please let me put more weight

This week I started the practical part of the Ecole du Dos. The whole idea is to get us back in shape by strengthening all the muscles in our bodies. If my legs and arms muscles are strong, they carry the effort and not my back. Very simple logic.
Of course I was late at the first session. There are new road works on the ring until end of June and it's basically causing traffic jams. 16km in 1h10... no comment.
Of course I didn't have the cardio watch I'm supposed to bring to monitor my heart rate when I exercise. This was mentioned during the last session which I missed. Despite I asked three time whether I needed anything for the practical sessions, nobody thought about telling me I need to buy one of those.
Of course I was very frustrated after wasting so much time in the traffic and all I wanted was to work the frustration out.
Unfortunately for me, the spirit is not "push your limits" or "no pain, no gain" BUT "take it slowly, one step at a time, do not force yourself".
As much as I understand that for people who haven't done any exercise in one year, they should start slow, but this is not my case.
The sessions start with 30min biking for cardio training. The first session they put the resistance to the minimum with small effort periods one setting higher (again... take it easy). My heart beat moved from 106 at rest to 118 during exercise. In other words, I didn't feel like I was exercising at all. So the second class... I cheated. I increased the resistance of the bike to at least sweat a bit. Even then my heart bit stayed pretty low (120-122). I guess all the walking and swimming helped.
Second part is weight lifting. All these years I've seen those machines in the gym but never touched them. Now it's about to change. Again,one should not overdo it, so they made me start with 5kg lifting for the arms, 15kg for the legs. I managed to increase the arms to 10kg arguing that if I can carry a pack of coke, I should be able to lift 10kg. Luckily I can increase the weight from one session to the other. Who knows, one day I might be able to lift my own weight :)
Third part is "gym douce", a combination of stretching and abs. That's the part I prefer, especially the stretching.
While I'm a bit annoyed by the "slow" approach, I have to say I feel very well taken care of. A physiotherapist will check on me every 5min (seriously). They want to make sure that I am not in pain at any time because that's not the purpose. From one session to the other they check whether I had more back pain or sore muscles to adjust the program. After two sessions I have to say my body is ready for a bigger challenge.
With another 29 sessions coming up, I should have a brand new body by August.

Traffic overdose

Today could be renamed as my traffic day.
We hit traffic going to work despite it was earlier than usual.
I wasted a whole hour to get to the hospital for the physiotherapy.
I got stuck going back to Alice's place to take care of the cats.
I really thought I would never cross that bridge on my way back.
Net almost 3 hours in the car today to cover 50km or so.
Maybe next time I walk, it might be faster in the end.

Stroke by lightning

A bit before landing in Amsterdam, there was a bang and a flash of light. This got everybody quiet, even more when we were told that it was lightning. Apparently we should not worry as lightning cannot damage the aircraft.

Really?

We landed a bit later but couldn’t disembark because there were still risk for lightning strikes and people were not allowed on the ground. Net we waited for 15min.

The lightning strike may not have damaged the aircraft from Singapore but seriously disturbed the traffic in both Schipol and Zaventem airports. Once we arrived at the gate for boarding, we were told the aircraft was still in Brussels, i.e. 1h20 delay.

Around 11am we were told the flight was simply cancelled. Now what?

While KLM service has always been good to me so far, today I was disappointed by how they managed this flight cancelation. We were told to pick up our luggage and go to the train station to take a train to Brussels. 

There was one woman only to handle the whole crowd of obviously unhappy people. It would have been much more efficient if they had issued all the vouchers in one go, taken all of us to the luggage belt and then to the station. Instead, individually we all went to the counter, asked for our vouchers and what to do. Of course many people complained and this poor woman had to deal with this even though she cannot be blamed for the weather.

Once we got our vouchers, we rushed to get the luggage and to the station. While I was queuing at the counter, Wolfram had already figured out the train schedule. The trip takes 2h40min (!!!!) and if we were lucky we could get the noon train.

At the station, we had to queue at the train ticket counters as we couldn’t use our boarding pass with the automatic machine. The line was huge. Again, it would have been smarter to have KLM deal with the train and issue a train ticket for everyone altogether.

While standing in this very slow line for international travel, I noticed that the counters for the Netherlands also handled Belgium and Luxembourg. We divided ourselves in two lines and luckily things worked out well. We got tickets (2^nd class despite us flying business… KLM could have thought of that), we grabbed a sandwich and rushed to the platform. The scary part is when the lady at the counter wanted to keep our boarding passes. She needed them for the exchange; we needed them for claiming our miles voucher not to say our expense report. Now how do we manage that dilemma? She made copies for us.

3 minutes before the train was due, an announcement mentioned it would arrive on platform 5 or 6. So precise…

Train left the station for what felt the slowest train drive ever. We stopped in many cities of the Netherlands before the border: namely Den Haag, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Roosendaal, then in Belgium: Antwerp, Mechelen and finally Brussels. It felt more like a local train than an international connection. The best part was when we had to wait for the “train conductor” in Antwerp. Apparently he was delayed on his way to us.

Eventually, we reached Brussels, got the car and drove back home, some 3.5hrs later than planned.  The good thing about this very long trip back home is that it kept us awake for most of the day. Seems, there is indeed something positive in everything.

It’s good to be home… finally.