Pfff, just when I thought I had the worst behind I get a inner ear infection. Life’s little bonuses I guess. It causes me right ear to be completely shut and it’s buzzing like crazy now. Add to that the slight balance problems I seem to have now from time to time and you can imagine how very happy I am with this ‘bonus’ in life.

Well looks like the worse was yet to come. Doctor says it's Bronchitis and gave me a prescription so now I have some fancy colored pills and some coughing syrup to make my throat feel a bit better. Every minute and a half I’m coughing my self inside out, or at least that’s what it feels like, and when I have one of those attacks my chest hurts from all the coughing. Doc says that’s just because of the coughing itself, nothing serious to worry about.

No don't worry, I'm not that sick. But my dad has chickens and we had to put them inside today because of government regulations. Unfortunately for me though I’m still feeling terrible I had no choice but to go out and try and catch them to put them inside. Had I not been this sick it might even have been a funny adventure but now I just want to get to bed and stay there until it all goes away. Mission accomplished though, so we can all sleep better now.

Man, I feel terrible. I went home from work a bit earlier than usual yesterday and hoped to sleep it all away but today isn't much better. Feels like I'm getting the flu again, hope it passes soon.

This last Sunday was a long and pretty exhausting day, but I've enjoyed it very much. It all started when my alarm clock went crazy at half past six in the morning and woke me up. Now since I had set it at that time the night before this was nothing to worry about and it's only function is to wake me up so it was presumably only giving that single goal it's very best at that moment. Later on I realized that this was even earlier than usually I get up during the rest of the week so ... It was kind of odd, let's just leave it at that for now. The main reason why I was up that early was a promise I made to my dad to drive him and Margot to the airport that morning and we had agreed that I would be at their door somewhere around eight. Since, when driving normal, it's a three quarters of an hour trip and I didn't want to be late of course. When I got there we packed all their stuff into the IFO (which can be surprisingly roomy when needed ;-) and got on our way to Amsterdam. Since your truly was the designated driver we got there in no time (no, haven't lost that touch yet ;-), with literally a couple of hours to spare. After the checking in we sat down for a huge cup of coffee which basically was my breakfast for the day. Boy I needed both the coffee and the sitting badly. With my back not being the strongest I get major troubles when I'm just standing on my feet, while walking and sitting gives me no problems at all. So I was glad I could sit down for a minute. Then I whished them a good flight and went on my way for the drive home. When I got to the IFO I thought it would be nice to pay my sister, Stevie and little Eva a visit since that had been some time ago already and they were kind of on route home. My sister must have had that same thought because she said that she'd asked my voicemail box just about the same thing. Great minds think alike is what they say, but any more alike and it gets a little scary ;-) So about an our later I was there, just in time for lunch. Eva was already set in her chair for lunch and started smiling at me when I came in. Simply wonderful. That small gesture alone makes you forget everything and let's you enjoy the moment. After lunch we played around a bit with the little girl and watched her have fun with the blocks and her personal basket. She's so careful with grabbing anything and putting it into that basket and out of it again, it's sweet to look at. Then in the afternoon we watched another good race of the A1 Grand Prix series. 'Our' Dutch team unfortunately got driven off the road in a non-gentlemen's racer fashion but managed to keep the damage small and still finish the race. He was running second when that happened so pretty bad timing to get a little nudge to the wrong side. In the end I wasn't home that late so I could get a bit of my sleep back from the morning. However a returning problem of the past couple of weeks is that I tend to sleep really bad some nights. I just lay awake for hours on end, or wake up way too early, that sort of stuff. My back is acting up again a bit and I think that this sleeping problems have something to do with that. We'll see where this goes, but I hope it's not going to last that long as I'm feeling more and more busted. But, those small details aside, I had a great day and it was really nice to be with the family in Wageningen again.

Today was exam day for me. The exam I needed to pass for was ITIL which basically is a guideline on how to setup and maintain a healthy IT organization within the bigger companies. While working at Philips makes it a lot easier to 'see' some of the components of a organization it still is quite dry matter to learn. The exam itself was a piece of cake. We had sixty minutes for it but a couple of us needed only about half an hour to finish the test and pass it. You could call this a warm up exam, because it's number one in a series of exams that I agreed to take for my current function as a local supporter and the next ones are not going to be this easy. But the motivation bar is filled up completely again now so I'm quite positive about the next exam which is Microsoft's 070-270 and due a week after next Friday, on the seventeenth.

Forget what I said about snooker the last time, as (luckily) I've found out that it can still be great fun. I shouldn't worry too much about these things anyway as I knew that already. Whenever I feel down about snooker again I just need to ask myself one question: why do something for over ten years when it's no fun ... Hmm? Take last night for example. Jaap unfortunately was unable to make it to the game in time so Bas and I asked the visiting team if they would mind us two playing all nine frames. Just for the record they are allowed to disagree and write down the three frames Jaap should have played in their favor. But they are a quite cheery bunch (those teams still exist :-) and didn't mind at all. They came for the fun in the first place and the points second were their own words ... So Bas and I each took a table and wrapped up the frames one by one. Apart from my first frame, which I kind of messed up a bit, I soon got a nice rhythm going and won the rest of my five frames, putting four points on the board for our Foul and a Miss team. Bas later said he had been playing good solid snooker from ball one and won all of his four frames quite easily, making the score eight to one in the end. Needless to say these kind of evenings help a lot in liking the game (again), so many thanks to the other team for this royal gesture :-) I owe you guys one, I just hope you don't remember that when we come to your court ... :-D