It is the East and Juliet is the Sun

The invitations

 This week was all about the invitations! On Monday we finished them and they went postal! I spent a good amount of time writing addresses, filling envelopes and assembling the whole hoopla. I'm quite pleased how they turned out! Right now we're waiting for the RSVP's and last week we already received a bunch of them. It's so nice to see that people appreciate you inviting them and really look forward to attending! 

An update

So much to do, so little time! :) Here's an update!

• First batch of wedding-invitations went out yesterday! Right now we're waiting for replies, even though the RSVP isn't until August 11, hee hee. I can't wait to see who'll be there on our big day and our party. Exciting! (in the meantime....http://www.marijnenmyrthe.nl)
• My birthday last week was fun! The whole marriage-license-thingie was way more official that we'd thought, which made it extra special. I received some neat gifts from friends and family. Marijn gave me musical tickets (I get to choose, I think we're going to see Wicked when we're in New York), a small (pink!) camera and we're going to adopt a manatee! How awesome is that? I loved it! Check them out  http://www.savethemanatee.org/. I think we'll be adopting Ariel. Her description says: "Ariel was just two weeks old when she was rescued with her mom Amanda. She is a regular at the manatee education programs, lifting her head out of the water to "smile" at the visitors."  I love smiling manatees!!!
• Marijn and I have been working a lot. For work, for freelance stuff, for design assignments...you name it, we've done it. We've also been busy with the new place. Last weekend, we got curtains! They're very pretty and match our home beautifully. Plus they were pretty neccessary because...
• We've bought a Wii a couple of weeks ago, and we love the Wii Sports stuff. But since we didn't have any curtains, everyone could see us play tennis or bowl or wahtever. It even got to a point that random people who were hanging in front of our building we're cheering at us! *oops*. But it is so much fun, that Wii. We've also bought Mario Party and although the music drives me batty, it's awesome!
• The weekend before my birthday I spend at Jennie's in Badhoevedorp. It was her 10-year wedding-anniversary (and she's only one year older than me! *gasp* hee hee) and we did some shopping, scrapping and preparing for her bbq-party on sunday. We took Mila for a horse-riding-lesson and her pony decided to do her own thing...Mila was bouncing through the air while Mary-the-Pony flew out of the rank...oh man, I think my heart stopped for a moment. Of course this stuff happens when I'm around and while Jennie is getting us hot cocoa at the cafe! Thankgod Mila was allright and we spent the rest of the weekend praising her for being one brave and tough cookie. Can't wait to have kids of my own *sigh*. Although I think we'll stick to ballet instead of horsebackriding!
• Tonight and tomorrow I'll spend at my parents' house. Merel will get her diploma tomorrow!
• On Friday I'm having a Wendy&Myrthe-day. I'm taking a few hours off in the afternoon to do some shopping, gossiping and eating with Wendy. She's been home a lot since pincess Madison was born, and although Maddie truly is the most gorgeous baby in the whole stratosphere, Wendy really needs a fun afternoon. Shopping, the SATC-movie and dinner it is! Can't wait.
• This weekend we're going to do some balcony-work. It's still pretty empty and we're in serious need of some plants (not too high maintenance please, I'm not very good with them), herbs and some new furniture.
• Marijn's mum and sis are coming over on Sunday and we're cooking Thai.
• I've been trying to change a habit: I've been sooooo tired the past few weeks that I've been sleeping a lot while commuting to and from work. Even the sight of a train makes me snore! But I've tried to stay awake and do some much needed reading, i.e. I've finished two chicklits in two weeks. I can totally recommend 'Certain Girls' by Jennifer Weiner. She's one of my alltime fave writers and this new book (which is a sequel to 'Good in bed' is amazing. The first writer who can make me laugh and cry within one chapter. I'm not sure what the other book was...hmmm it wasn't very impressive. I'm hoping to expand my chicklit-collection again soon!

And yes, there'll be pictures soon! Promise!

 

This morning

I turned 28! Yay for me! And also yay for Marijn and me, because today we're getting our marriage license and choose our officiant! :)

I hope you'll have a lovely day too! (and I'll be sharing pictures soon)

More good news!!!

Look who graduated! It's my little sister Merel! She aced her exams with one 5, two 6's, two 7's and three (!!!) times an 8!!!! I'm so proud of her, I think I've told the whole world already!

  Do you have any graduates at home right now? Do you remember that *I'm-invincible*-feeling from when you greaduated? I'm floopy all over again! Yay! :)

Check it out!

Check this out, how cool! :)

http://www.paperandpictures.nl/designteam.html

ETA: thank you for all your well-wishes! They mean a lot to me! I don't have a definite outline yet what I'll be doing for P&P, but I hope to be able to share more soon!

Sunday morning

I love sunday-mornings, especially in our new house. It's so light in here, so white, so calm. Sunday mornings usually consist of hanging around in our pj's, doing some work on the computer, having the tv on in the background, making breakfast (today: clubsandwiches) and taking little naps on the couch. Mmmm.

   

 

Something else

Yesterday, Monique and I used our lunch break to get some ornamental stuff for my new place. The garden center that's located right next to the uni I work, has beautiful stuff, and it didn't take me very long to fill my cart. I bought all brownish and white-ish colored stuff to decorate a cake plate that has been collecting dust over the past few weeks. And some bills. And some screws and nails. And a bit more dust. That's a shame, because the darn thing was pretty expensive. So last night I started working on it and finished it this morning and I'm pretty pleased with the results :) It's still missing some stuff, but I'm getting there!

Here's an impression of my friday-night-project:

 

 

Three cards

In addition to yesterday's layouts, I'm posting three cards I made recently. Not very exciting, but I do like them though. Hope to be scrapping some more tonight!

A Dare and a Sketch

Last night we sent out our last Royal Lemon newsletter. Yes, the l;ast one, because there are going to be some major changes in our little organization. Hopefully it'll lead to some more time for doing the things I love!

Here are my two layouts for this newsletter:

 

Traditions part#1: Herring on Saturdays

I thought it would be fun to jot down some traditions we have, with friends, with family, and just between us two. Might be fun to make an album about someday.

So today we're starting with a tradition that has been around for a while now. On Saturdays, we always have a large market in the city-center. Marijn and I get up quite early to shop for fruits&veggies, cheese, bread etc. We have a standing date with a group of friends that we find each other at the herring-cart at noon.

The perfect opportunity to eat some (raw) fish and share some gossip. You might not think it, but guys are just as bad as girls when it comes to gossip. Everyone usually goes out on Friday-night, so Saturday-morning is usually the perfect opportunity to eat hangover-food (apparantly raw fish) and tell each other who-did-what-with-whom-last-night. The best part is that the past few weeks, it's been lovely weather and we don't have to bring umbrellas and wintercoats anymore.

So you're probably thinking: raw herring? wtf? Let me tell you that this is very Dutch and that the rest of the world probably thinks we're a bunch of loons. The herrings are being cleaned right in front of you and you can either eat them dipped in raw onion cubes or on a bun (also with onion). You grab the herring bu it's tail, dip it into the onion and then try to eat it as graciously as possible (which never works). On the pics you can see our friends Willem, Hanne, Pol, Dirk and Matty share this gross and stinky type of food (which they love and would give their right kidney for if needed) with Marijn, who's a big fan. I'm not a fan and I'm the only one. The thought of raw onion alone makes me want to hurl. So usually I just provide napkins, get the gossip-train going or eat some fried fish with garlic-sauce. Or in this case, I take pictures. It's a good tradition though, usually we manage to occupy a table at the herring-cart for more than an hour, after which we continue our day in a café or on a terrace where we drink large amounts of coffee and water. It's always fun, we always have loads of stuff to talk about and we use our time together to plan dinner-dates, parties, film-nights and trips before everyone goes their own way to work, home or to hit the shops. Yes, this is probably the best tradition we have at this moment!

 

Week in review

It's been a very busy week! Here are some highlights:

Last weekend Marijn and I went to the city to look for wedding-bands. We had a pretty good idea what we wanted and found them for a very reasonable price at the first store we've visited! It took us about 25 minutes to find them, try them on, order them and make a down payment! They'll be ready the first week of July. They're very simple and plain, white gold bands, a bit modern without being artsy. Marijn will have a bigger one that won't be polished, so it'll have this more rough look. Mine will be polished so it'll look nice next to my engagementring. Another thing we can cross off our list!

On Tuesdaynight I went to Jennie's to see her new home (which was lovely!) and to prepare for our meeting with the seamstress who is going to make my wedding dress. As some of you may know, I haven't been looking forward to the whole dress-shopping-thing and find it the least fun part of the whole wedding. On wednesday-morning we went to her house and she was very very nice, thank god. We stayed for about an hour and I started off with showing her some pictures I'd found on the internet and she told me what would look good (and what not) and after that we chose a beautiful color fabric for my dress. Then she dressed me in a top and a skirt and started showing me the possibilities. Everything went smooth and we've designed the dress together. It'll be finished on July 16th. I was so glad Jen was with me, because I was ready to cry during the whole session, but the seamstress was so sweet and everything will be okay. Right now I'm just very happy that it's over.

Jen and I spend the most of wednesday shopping for wedding-related items. Unfortunately, the underwear-store we wanted to visit was closed and the cake-people didn't want to make my cake. Hmmmz. Right now I'm looking for a new baker to make our cake....

On Friday, one of my colleagues died of cancer, which left our whole university grieving. He was a well-respected and friendly teacher and had only been diagnosed with cancer two months ago. Everything went faster than expected and he died early friday-morning. I'll be attending his funeral on Wednesday :( 

Today, Marijn and I went to the city to do some shopping and meet up with the guys for herring and coffee. The weather was lovely and we spent some time chatting and catching up on a terrace in the sun. Loved it! :)  We also did some shopping: we ordered beautiful curtains for our new home and they'll be ready in three to four weeks. Can't wait! We also bought stamps for our wedding-invitations. Marijn will be working on designing our invitations tomorrow. They're going to be very pretty! :)

I'll hope to post some new pics soon!

More cake-options

I already showed you the cake we wanted for our wedding day, but since then, I've found some more appealing options. Thank god I have two wedding-days to organize, because *seriously*, kudos to all the ladies who can make one definite choice for their wedding! On one of my favourite blogs (Hostess with the Mostess)  I've found these, and now I'm in love all over again. Do you think I'd be able to make these, like as an extra to serve with coffee after the bbq? I might try to do some baking this weekend! :)   

Pics of the casa

Please keep in mind that it's still pretty messy everywhere, but we're getting there! Yesterday they finished the floors, and this weekend we're cleaning out the balcony and start putting everything in place. We have lots of decluttering to do! And hopefully our new tv-cabinet will arrive soon...

                 

Still no internet

But on the bright side, we're almost finished! Last weekend we spent some time hanging our paintings and photo-canvasses and mum and dad dropped by to help hanging some shelves. My scraproom is getting so pink and pretty!

Tomorrow our flooring will be finished and hopefully, later this week, we can get rid of all the junk that's been piling up on the balcony. After that, we're pretty much done! :) Then we'll start decorating the balcony and decluttering the storage room in the basement, but that's not nearly as important as all the 'inside-stuff'.

I'm very very tired, but am very happy with the way our new casa is turning out!

We survived!

We're there! Living in our new house and everything! Here's a summary of an eventful fortnight:
~ The floors turned out gorgeous, but couldn't be finished because part of the concrete wasn't dry enough. So now we're living on 80% floor and 20% concrete. I hope that will be solved this week.
~ Moving went really well! We got so much done on Sunday that we decided to move everything except the kitchen stuff and start sleeping at the new place starting Sunday evening. It must be a record: within 3 days of getting the keys we were already living there! We were the first ones to have moved into the building.
~ The kitchen was delivered on monday and installed on tuesday. it turned out so gorgeous! I'll post pictures as soon as I can. We've been cooking and wokking and grilling and baking and we love it!
~ Turns out I'm useless when it comes to assembling Ikea-stuff. It's just too hard, even with the drawn instructions and everything. Thankgod mum and dad came to help, because I was getting nowhere.
~ The people at the telephone-company messed up everything and now we don't have internet at home, which will take until sunday! *gasp*. I was sitting on the couch and Marijn asked what I was doing and all I could say was: "have no clue, just sitting, am bored out of my skull". I did however beat all the highscores of Minesweeper and Spider Solitaire. I'm a sad sad person. And a bored person apparantly.

Right now we have two radiators that are leaking, half a house without floors, a balcony on which you cannot sit because it's crammed with junk and garbage, 2 highly unamused bunnies that refuse to leave their cages, a bathroom without a shower (just a showerhead) and no lights (just a construction lamp), 26 bags of crap, 14 unopened boxes, 12 things missing, about 7 things broken, about 10 juvenile delinquents that set up camp below our balcony, 4 calls to the police about said deliquents, no neighbours that are actually living in our building yet and guess what....I LOVE IT!!!  i *LOVE*  OUR NEW HOUSE! :o)

I hope to have internet asap (or there'll be serious flinging-things-out-of-windows-action-done-by-me) and then I'll post some pics.

Day 2

Yesterday was a long, long day. Marijn had to get up really early to be at the new place @ 7AM. Floor-panels were delivered but they managed to drop them off almost a block away from our building, so Marijn and the neighbours had to do a lot of moving. Bright side: the floors are going to be so pretty! I did some stuff around the old house, cleaning, packing, laundry and such. In the afternoon they delivered our new washing machine and dryer, and we're both over the moon! We'll never have to wait in line to do laundry again! A new machine that doesn't smell! Awesome. It's installed and everything and yesterday it has run it's first test-cycle.

After that we went to Ikea with Marijn's mum. We had more on our list than we'd originally thought: tons of shelves, an extra mattress to put on top of our regular ones, two cabinets for storage, a rug, a new desk chair and some small stuff like an extra pan, lights, pillows, frames and such. Shopping and figuring out the delivery took us almost four hours, so when we got back at 9PM we were knackered. Marijn's mum dropped us off at the new place and after unloading we went home. The rest of the stuff that didn't fit into the car will be delivered on May 5th. We were a bit bummed that they couldn't deliver sooner, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad.

And now it's already saturday. Marijn is already at the new place to instruct the floor-laying-people, who will be working all day and should be finished tonight. Tonight Marijn's mum and sis will help us move some stuff. First things on the list are: balcony furniture, garden stuff and all of our clothes. Tomorrow will be our big moving day....I'm quite scared!

Home owners!

It's ours! Yesterday went by so fast! At 2PM we got to the new house and the inspector-man was already there working on his report. It took us two hours to finish the detailed inspection, and as turned out, there are still so many things not okay....even inspector-dude was pretty shocked! But we did some serious bribing and got the builders to finish the radiators today, so flooring can be finished tomorrow. So far, aside from some minor details, everything is going well, and those 200€ for that inspection-report was *so* worth the money! At 4PM everyone left and Joachim, Lea's hubby, arrived to start finishing the walls. I'm not sure what it's called, maybe dry-walling or plastering, but he and two other guys worked all night and it turned out amazing! I'm so happy with the results!

Here are two pics from yesterday!
 

Marijn had to get up really early today because the floor-panels would be delivered at 7AM and I stayed at home to do some packing and cleaning. The new washingmachine and dryer will be delivered between 2PM and 5 PM, so I'll be heading to the new place at noon. After that we're heading to Ikea to buy some new stuff...we're in need of a new desk-chair and some shelves. I'll try to keep my blog a bit updated and try to make pictures as soon as flooring will be done tomorrow!

Can't wait to scrap these

Look at these girls, they're craaaaaazy :D . Before ScrapCamp starts, we have a whole day of groceries, shopping, preparing and getting ready. We end the day by going for pancakes in a fanshee schmansee restaurant near our Camp-location. And this is what happens after a hilarious and exhausting day. Yes. They're pretty awesome! :)

 

48 hours and counting

In 48 hours we'll have the key to our new home! I'm very excited! Here's what our next week will look like:
~ Thursday: 2PM we'll get the keys. Inspection with officials. start finishing walls.
~ Friday: floors will be delivered. Washing-machine and dryer will be delivered. walls and radiators will be finished. Going to Ikea for some stuff.
~ Saturday: Floors will be put in and finished. Packing at old house.
~ Sunday: Mum, dad, sis, MIL and several other people will help us move half of our stuff. Rebuild all closets in new apartment. Sleep in new house! Move the bunnies too!
~ Monday: Kitchen will be delivered in the morning. Friends will help us get the whole thing into our apartment. Finish new bedroom and new scraproom.
~ Tuesday: Kitchen will be installed. In the evening, we'll move all kitchen-related stuff. Finish reorganizing kitchen.
~ Wednesday: Packing up last things at the old house and do lots of cleaning.
~ Thursday: Moving more boxes and furniture. Finish cleaning at old house.

And then it's done.
Man, I'm scared.

Mini-album

This is the album we did at ScrapCamp. I loved the way everyone's albums turned out...those were some inspired ladies! :)
Here's an impression of mine:

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