Busy busy busy

Everything is going fast, it seems. Our wedding plans have just been announced, and already we have to take care of heaps of things, like I said in my previous post.

At work I am getting swamped bit by bit. Many things that have to happen at the same time, for various reasons. Because of the pressure I tend to lose focus, which causes all kinds of small delays. Since I work with my collegues in Minks all the time the language barrier is not very small as well. I have to translate our customers' and project managers' wishes to English, the Minsk team has to translate back to Russian.

I am thinking about taking a course in Russian, to cut back on the translation difficulties. Apart from that, Russian always sounds impressive and looks even cooler because of the Cyrillic characters used.

At home I have been working on my Whisky Cabinet. I blogged about it a while back, and since then not much has happened. I have sanded it, cut it into pieces so it would fit in our house. I already have reassembled it in our living room. Anneke and I have to start painting it now, at the first opportunity. We want to do it in the daytime, because we don't want artificial light to change the way the cupboard looks. Can't wait until it is finished!

I have surprised myself when I was working on the thing, because I really liked doing handywork like that. Never liked it very much before and always shied away from it.

I might even start working on something else after it... Probably not though, since I don't have much room and our entire living room looks like a pig's den because of the tools lying around, and all kinds of stuff that had to be moved to make some room.

But anyway, I am more relaxed than I have been in a long time. Anneke has finished school about 5 weeks ago, which has caused a lot of peace in the house. Not that we fought a lot, but it is much less stressed. We have a weekend of two days in which we can do what we want. We have a bit more cash coming in (two wages now!), we have less things that have to be done. We have more time to see our friends.

Lots of good stuff going on. Now let's hope for this to keep up and we finally might get somewhere... Still so much to do. The list of things to do I posted a couple of months ago has only grown I think.

O, and by the way. Coming Friday I am going to see a band called "God is an Astronaut". I really like them a lot. Looking forward to that too.

Marriage Preparation Kick Off

So, over enthousiastic as Anneke and I can be, we already started doing some preparations for our wedding in June. We have an option for the old City Hall in Zaandijk, which is where her family has gotten married for the last three generations. The rest is still in the "information gathering" phase.

I looked into car rental, but that is incredibly expensive, especially if you want to get a real American Muscle car (1965 Mustang, of course). Apart from that, I downloaded a wedding checklist.

That was a shocker. The list was about 5 pages long when I started looking at it. Luckily, it had all kinds of crappy things on the to-do list. "Informing your parents".. Duh..
Since we are not getting married in a church, we don't value churches that much, we could delete some lines on the list.

But still, it is quite an incredible lot of things to do before you can get married, apparently. The coming months will probably be quite busy in getting all kinds of stuff done.

We have both picked our "best (wo)men", we have chosen who our masters of ceremony will be, but that is about it, for now. The guest list will be a work in progress for a couple of weeks, everyday some people pop-up in our heads that should be on the guest list.
Guest lists are nasty business, anyway. You have to start selecting people for the entire day, for the party in the evening, and a reception for even other people. Quite hard to make those decisions. I usually like the "the more, the merrier" way of thinking, but that is just budgetary impossible. Never thought that things could get expensive like this, and we only have estimates.

Lucky for us, we have some friends who want to help out with all kinds of things. We have had an offer for a cool car to use, and a lot of experience in the family with these kinds of things...

Back to work...

Getting married!

This weekend turned out quite different than I expected.


After not going to Scotland, I had some cash to spare, and since we were in a Scotland and whisky mood, we, of course, went to the Whisky Koning. The three of us bought six nice bottles. Thomas bought two Blackadders: a 19 year old Bruichladdich raw cask, and a Laphroaig of undefined age, called Smoking Islay.

Floris aquired a new Springbank, the 1997 Vintage, and an Amrut, the Indian whisky.

I have a bottle of Bruichladdich XVII and The Macallan Elegancia, 12 years old.

We had lots of Scotch on Thursday night, after we went for a very good Steak in Eindhoven (Gauchos). Friday was a calm day, on which I finished Neverwinter Nights' expansion (the game I blogged about a little while back).

Saturday I went to the Whisky Koning again, with Floris and bought the last two bottles for my project: Scapa 14, and Bunnahabhain 12, both in the 1 litre edition. We, tasted the first 8 whiskies for my project on Saturday night in this order:

• Glen Grant 12
• Auchentoshan 10
• Battlehill (Miltonduff 7)
• Bunnahabhain 12
• Auld Edinburgh Islay (Bruichladdich 10)
• Smokehead (Ardbeg undefined age)
• Scapa 14
• Old Pulteny 10

We only tasted the first six properly, since that was the plan, to do 6. After that, we ended up in a mood for more, and took a couple more whiskies. The best of the evening was Smokehead, and then the Battlehill. Floris and I liked the Bunnahabhain too, but Thomas thought it disgusting.

Glen Grant was, without exception, the worst whisky of the evening.

Sunday was the day that we would have come back from Scotland, if the trip had started a bit different. But we made Sunday a very special day after all. I asked Anneke to marry me. I had been thinking about it for a while, and we have been together for four years and a bit now. I thought it time to take the next step.

Of course, we had to call a lot of relatives during the afternoon, and everybody was very enthousiastic. My sister and mother didn't see this one coming. Anneke's family had been expecting it for a little while (and wouldn't stop nagging about it).

Today is my last day off on the Scotland trip, so we have been doing all kinds of preparations and making some decisions for our pending marriage. The big day is going to be on June 10th 2008, since that is the day we met for the first time. We have decided on where we will get married officially, and where the pictures are going to be taken. We have also decided how we want to do our party, but not where. So, a lot has to be done, and 8 months seems a long time, but I think we will be married before we know it :-)

I am really happy about getting married!!! Can't wait...

... know that joke ?

Do you know that joke, of those three guys that went to Scotland? They didn't go!

Why, you might ask. Quite the strange story. Yesterday was the day that I was supposed to go to Scotland with Thomas and Floris, on our own and first whisky trip. We booked a flight, accomodation and had all the plans made up.

We had to be at the airport around 10 o'clock, preferably about 30 minutes earlier. The airport in Brussels. Brussels is about 90 minutes from here, but we left at 6.45 to beat traffic around Antwerp and Brussels. All went well until we drove into Belgium, where the weather gods had decided to cloud the entire country in heavy mists.
So, all in all, we had enough time to get to the airport, but not if the traffic jams were multiplied by 5. We kept pushing and trying our best to get there in time, and we did. We thought.

We had printed an itinerary from Google Maps, in which I entered our destination as "airport, brussels, belgium". Unfortunately, I think (can't be sure) that I forgot to enter the word Charleroi, which is another airport, near to the French border.

So all in all, Ryan Air does not fly from Brussels International, the airport that was our target was an hours drive further to the south, which we would never have made in time (we had about 10 minutes to get the car back from the parking, drive 50 miles, park the car, check in and get our asses on the plane. No flight for us.

We tried booking another flight, but those started at about 300 euros each, for a single ticket.

I still can't believe that an airport which is 50 miles from Brussels is still called Brussels, it would be the same as Amsterdam South airport, in Rotterdam. This is, of course, only partly to blame, and we might have informed ourselves better...

No Scotland whisky trip for us at this moment. We did do our own Scotland adventure at Floris's and Thomas's, with some very cool new bottles. After all, we had some money to spare now...

Almost going to Scotland

This Thursday is going to be the day! We are heading off to Scotland, only for a couple of days, but I am looking forward to it. I haven't been on a holiday for a long time, except Lowlands and to Barcelona in February.

We are flying to Prestwick, near Glasgow, and head of to Edinburgh straight after landing. We plan to stay there for 2 days, and have booked a hostel right on The Royal Mile, so there should be a couple of good Whisky bars there. It is, after all, the main purpose.

We haven't planned much to see there, but I hear there is a whisky museum around there somewhere, which is always fun.

After Edinburgh we will try to get up early and head back to Glasgow on Saturday morning, and will go to Glengoyne by bus and do a "Cask Tasting" tour or a regular tasting tour, the one which is the most promising.

Of course I plan to extend my collection by at least one bottle (of course, transport might be troublesome). I hope to be able to find an affordable but rare or special bottle that is not available here. That will be my quest for the coming weekend!

Can't wait! Three days and counting...

So much to do before leaving (like charching the battery of my camera, the phone battery, packing, laundry...)

More live music

Last Tuesday I went to see "Straf" in a pub in Den Bosch. It is a small local band that has yet to make a name for themselves. I saw them once before in December last year, when they opened for De Kift, another Dutch band.

They played at "De Rode Pimpernel" a pub with Guinness on tap, which tends to make me a satisfied customer. Floris and I went there, Anneke didn't come.

The music was very good and we had a lot of fun. The strange thing is that the pub decided that the band had played enough at about half past twelve, so the show came to a very sudden stop. That left a very strange impression of the Pimpernel, which makes me think again before going there another time.

Mask of the Betrayer

About a week ago I received an email from my local computer shop. They have specified newsletters for specific types of games and hardware that you are interested in, and by that letter they told me that Mask of the Betrayer was to be released.

Mask of the Betrayer is the (first) expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights 2, one of the best Role Playing Games that I can be remember. I pre ordered, as every self respecting rpg adept would, and on Saturday I picked up the game.

Then the shit hit the fan. I finished Neverwinter Nights 2 about 9 months ago, so it was not installed on my computer. I installed it, downloaded 200 megabytes of patches (no kidding)!!!

After patching and updating I installed the expansion. Which seemed to work fine, until I started the game. Everything new was installed without text. So the adventure was called "unnamed module", with a new base class "unnamed class". All dialogue boxes were empty too.

About 2 minutes of Googling later I found out that one of the patches I had just installed locked the dialogue and language files, which I had to delete and reinstall the expansion.. Happy happy, joy joy...

On to playing!

The game itself is pretty OK. Nice adventures, a storyline that is interesting from the start, everything you need for a good game. A lot of improvements have been made to the engine by Obsidian (the creators of the game). It runs faster, saves and loads faster, less bugs, and so on.

Except in the game scripts. I have had to reload old savegames a couple of times, because I got stuck "between actions". By this I mean that I once had a situation in which I could not walk out of a building, because it was not allowed (I was in a fight). I could not finish my fight, because everyone thought I had already finished it...

Autosave is a BITCH. The game automatically saves every now and then. This is not time based, but on action. Whenever you enter a building, or walk through a portal of some sort, you get a savegame.

After a huge hard fight, which I just won, I entered a town (reason 1), I went into the second chapter of the story (reason 2), and I did a major area transition (reason 3). No savegame, and of course, I counted on the autosave, since it saves about every time your character moves one screen, and I died.

That sucks! Big time. I even thought about not finishing the game, and just put it away, deinstall it and read a book. Luckily I didn't, because now I tought myself to save quite often, and I really really like the game. A worthy expansion of a fantastic game (this far).