:: @ Choepie’s ::

Wednesday today… just about 1 week ago, an email entered my box at the office from a good friend of mine in Belgiu, Iris, announcing that she was collecting some money for a gift for Dirk and Saar for the barbeque they launched for next saturday. In addition to the regular email, she kind of joked requesting me to come over. I actually forgot about the party. It was in Belgium and I had no real plans to go over anyway. Normally that weekend was the weekend of a famous festival I used to go to when I lived around : Pukkelpop. (But this was organised earlier this year). 20 minutes later I had my flight booked and I only told it to Iris and my father, as it is his duty to pick me up on the airport.

The barbeque was good, no heavy party but just plain good. It was more a big chatsession than a party anyway and when I don’t move I tend to get lazy and sleepy, so at about 1h30 I decided it wasn’t a bad idea heading home for a good sleep…. All credits go to Bob, who had the perfect timing of starting to prepare his famous Irish Coffee, so I let my ride home leave alone and gave it a try…. 6 hours and 5 bottles of whisky later the damage was done and the battle was won.

I’m being so lazy on this blog… really, I have -ty pictures on my phone/camera made with the idea of putting it into my blog, but I can’t be bothered spending the time in the evening in front of that screen. New-York State of mind that must be it… I got like 10 projects in my head but none really progressing and some are blocked for whatever reason… catch 22, there are a couple of ways out of this situation : don’t do anything, in an attempt to force projects over their due to date. (example of this : swim everyday 10 lenghts in the pool, action : none, will resolve soon : the pool closes in 9 days), this is a goal that will easily solve itself in time, so I can’t be asked anymore. Stop smoking is still on my top list. But I should find a good addiction to replace it with. Doing sport isn’t even considerable, I can’t get of my desk every hour just to do ‘a bit of sport’. Drinking water is too boring to fill my day with and beer is to tricky to go home on the bike after the job. So far the ’stop smoking’ project, a bit of a stall there. A while ago I started studying CSS, and I did an attempt to restyle this very site. I really did, I even had a warning on here that you might see some changes… well nothing changed, the project is like halfway and there it hangs… I’m sure I will throw it a away one day and by the time it gets ugly weather here in spain, I might give it another try. Will hang at 50% again anyway.

First of all… a lot of apologies to everybody who received an email from me with the title : look at this… One thing you need to know : I DIDN’T SEND A MAIL LIKE THAT !  Its a virus named W32.Skenkly.a@mm

Please read this so you know what to do to get rid of it :

Dutch :
http://www.virusalert.nl/?show=virus&id=1433&name=W32.Skenkly.a@mm 

English :

http://www.virusalert.info/?p=virus&id=1460

Good luck.

I do need some holiday… I have 15,38 days left for this year… that’s not too bad. I’m not going to spend them in returning to Belgium though.. I need some REAL vacation… thinking of going to one of those islands of the ‘Islas de Canarias’. Need to check out some things… There are some options : I take my bike with minimum luggage and start riding and see where I end… I take my diving gear and do to the south of Spain and get my advanced licence. … It’s both appealling… I’m not quite sure yet… Luxury problems !

After a rather tireing diving weekend in Islas Hormigas, Bob came over from Belgium.. I had to work on monday to wednesday so I had to keep a bit quite during the first days of the week… at least that was the plan. A deadly mix of Bob and Gareth isn’t good for such plans. We had to go out almost every night and although I kept it all quite civilased, their was still some recuperation to be done from the divingweekend. At the end we drove thursdaynoon to Valencia to get the rest I was longing to for weeks. Isabel was with us and the fact she was about to give birth in 3 weeks, assured us some easy time on the beach. Besides the danger of a Sunburn (I felt asleep on the beach :-)) and the dangers of a ‘Chiringito’ which served excellent Caiperiña, all went ok. A chiringito is a small wooden beach bar, so Imagine yourself at nighttime sitting/haning/laying in a beachstool, looking at the reflexion of the moon in the sea nipping from a caiperiña… it’s nicer than a bite from a German Sheppard if you ask me.

Ana was a bit stressed up, I guess a combination of 5 weeks in Edinbrugh, a diveweekend the day after and the lack of lazy time at home made her looking forward some time on her own at home. I can imagine you’re looking forward to that, but being with friends and family on a beach shouldn’t wind you up either. At the end, we were all there to relax and enjoy. Well we picked up Lutz from the busstation, it was a bit of a shame that the plan was to return the day after, but we still manage some short quality time. Saturday we headed back to Madrid for a rather heavy night out in La Latina. The fiestas of La Paloma started of, and although La Latina is not in the fiesta area (the zone of the church of La Paloma is just next to La Latina) most of the tourist get confused so La Latina joins about every fiesta that goes on around it. Bob, Luisme, Lutz and I ended up at daytime home… bad music but still shitloads of fun. Lutz requesting Shakira several times to the DJ, is something worrying thouth.. we should keep an eye on him.

Bob returned to rainy Ghent this morning… I couldn’t say he was looking forward to it, he managed to get one of the best weathers in Madrid, it’s extremely mild for being August… it even cools down at night. Ok it’s warm during daytime,but not unbearebly hot… the weather can’t get better than this… 30/35 degrees during daytime, blue sky, and at the evening, some slight breeze and a bit fresher (not enough to wear something else then a T-shirt).

Thursdaynight, skatingnight… I made a bad fall though last thursday night… luckely I wore my wristprotection. In the beginning it didn’t feel too bad, but one hour later, my thumb began to hurt and another hour later, it became blue and swollen up. Firdaymorning it looked like one of those famous ‘morcilla de Burgos’, blue and a saucise form… couldn’t move it and therefore couldn’t do anything with my left hand. Around 3pm Naxto was about to pick us up to go down to Cartagena for another excellent diving weekend. We stayed at his mothers’ place.

The dive center is great : Islas Hormigas , it has a couple of dives in a Natural Reserve and starting from about a month ago, they used some quota on the amount of divers allowed per day. Because the quota just started, it was difficult to get a dive in there… but then again, I’m the luckiest boy around, so we managed to get all 3 dives in the Natural Reserve !!! Even the owner of the place was surpriced how I managed that when I was about to pay at the end of the weekend… I had ‘El Bajo de Dentro’ and ‘Bajos de Piles’ 2 diveareas.
The flipside of the quota is, that it’s fucking expensive to dive in the reserve… 30 euro’s each dive (tank+boat) isn’t cheap.

First dive (Ana, Isabel, Naxto and me) went a bit difficult… Ana had trouble compensating, so she stayed at 5m together with Natxo for a few minutes… I was already down, but didn’t knew what was going on and started to think something was wrong,…. starting to worrying under water is about the worst thing you can do, it’s very fast you enter into a downwards spiral and before you know you are panicing without a reason… I managed to calm myself soon enough but the few minutes of worrying made my very heavy breathing and my airconsumption go up way to much… I had to make my security stop after 33minutes ! Not after seeing some enourmous Mero’s and Moray eels. The second dive I went alone with Naxto and this one was relax, I did 42 minutes with my 15l bottle and we saw a whole bank of Baracuda’s, an enourmous squid and whatever other fish I can’t name… I should study on this somehow, one day. The very same saturday night we organised a barbeque in the divingcenter… not too much beers though but got stories and good fun. Iit was for the fact that our sundaymorning dive was sheduled at 8 o’clock in the morning… (we swapped it later for the 9o’clock one….) that we decided to go to bed around 2h30…. Sunday morning was a hard time… lack of sleep, a good breakfast did some miracles… I guess the fact I was very tired made me nervous going into the water, so I notified Naxto that I wasn’t 100%, I thought it was a good idea to let my buddy known. It ended up as a fantastic dive. Very relax, another improvement of my consumption (46minutes) and great views of a group of Mero’s (Dusky Grouper) which couldn’t be bothered while eating, you almost had to push them away if you wanted to pass…. another (single) Bracuda and a big Ray !!! (though from some distance….) it might be very common to some people, but I have 13 dives on my account and I haven’t had the opportunity to look around too much, too busy with breathing and keeping myself a bit leveled.

Deadly tired we headed back to Madrid around 15h sundaynoon to arive around 19h30, just in time to empty the bags and open the door for Bob visiting from Belgium…. Together with Bob and the neighbours we had some sushi prepared by Ana (something she learned from some Japanses while in Edinburgh) , sitting on the swimmingpool. Around midnight I dropped dead in bed… couldn’t anymore… yet another weekend very well spend…