My parents and brother are flying back to America.

CB and I are about to watch Dogma and munch on the olives we bought at the huge market in Brussels South.

I will be filling you all in on the past 10 days, including some bits about the wedding plans and some pictures as well as the next stage of my life in Belgium, but first I need a day to decompress.

Love to you all and thank you for all of the comments on my last post. It’s so wonderful to be part of the bloggy community and you have all made me feel very at home here.  And thanks to my real life friends that stopped by as well.  I miss you.  Thank you for making me smile.

My family arrived on Friday and we had no trouble getting them and their luggage from the airport to Gent.  CB took Scooter to the house to settle him in while I waited with my parents at the B&B until their room was ready.  Afterwards we went to Het Pand, the university “club” building for a lovely dinner, dropped my parents off at their place and went out for some drinks and late night fries with my brother.  I can’t decide if he was more impressed by the alcohol content in Duvel or the huts on the side of the road for guys to pee in.  Either way we had a fun time before turning in for the evening, aside from the air mattress for my brother deflating (the lack of comfortable sleeping arrangments and his allergies ended in us finding him a few rooms at different B&B’s around Gent so that he could sleep on an actual bed).

CB’s parents picked my mom up on Saturday morning and took her to their house to make Thanksgiving dinner.  My mom is a real trooper, offering to make a meal for 7 people after travelling across the Atlantic the day before, but she was determined to have Thanksgiving with both of our families and it was so wonderful for me to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year.  While Mom was in Lochristi cooking, dad and I took a walk around some parts of the city center and had a cup of coffee (he has a new found love of koffie verkeerd, which is simply espresso and a whole lot of steamed milk).  CB hung out with my brother for a few hours before coming to pick up dad and I in Cabanadad’s car.  We went to CB’s parents’ house in Lochristi and had a delicious dinner: roast turkey, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry chutney, salad, pumpkin pie, chocolate cake and homemade ice cream from CB’s mom and CB finally told his parents the big news.

We’ve been engaged for 2 weeks.

Yes, CB proposed to me two weeks ago on Saturday and I said yes and we are officially engaged!!!!!!
I have been wanting to tell you all SO BAD but I had to wait until CB told his parents and sister first because they read this blog and well, yeah, you understand I hope.

Yesterday was also the end of my Lilacspec’s Mama’s Birthday Giveaway.  My mama will be telling me her favorite comment tomorrow and later tonight I will be tallying who commented the most as well as throwing all the commentor’s names into the random number generator so that I can contact the winners before our trip to Antwerp on Wednesday.  tomorrow we’re going to Bruges for the day and Tuesday we’ll spend in Gent.  My mom is taking plenty of pictures so I’ll try to post some good ones in the next few days.

Forty hours before my family was due to land in Brussels, I was on my hands and knees shoveling sand and broken shards of stone and brick out of a gully between the wall and the broken floor tiles of our front room.  CB was mixing cement and grunting (which was kind of sexy, although the trousers rolled up mid-shin and the green rubber shoes killed the sexy pretty quick) as he carried bucketfuls over to seal up the sandy trenches in the entry way of the house.

Thirty six hourse before my family was due to land in Brussels, CB and I were taking a late night walk to the barber shop to see the hours of operation for the next day.  When it gets long enough for me to braid it, it’s time for the boyfriend to get the hair cut.

Twenty four hours before my family was due to land in Brussels, we were cutting and measuring carpet to lay in the living room and running to the kringloopwinkel (Belgian equivalent of Goodwill) to look for last minute furniture.

Seventeen hours before my family was due to land in Brussels, I was sitting on a bus on the way to the city center to buy a new cell phone because I accidentally washed my old one with a load of laundry I was trying to get finished. Yeah, that’s right, I bloody washed my cell phone, that’s how absent minded this past week has made me.

And now, thirteen hours before my family is due to land in Brussels, CB and his dad are still working on the bathroom (no, it won’t be even close to finished, but they tried their best and we will have a working sink, bathtub and heating), the kitchen is clean, the dishes and laundry are done, the living room is as cozy as possible and I’m just about to get my anxious and excited self into bed and the oblivion of sleep so that the next several hours can slide by as quickly as possible.

Goodnight everyone, I can’t wait to tell you all about the time I get to spend with my family!

It has been hectic around these parts, to say the least.  With my parents and brother arriving in four days, CB and his dad have been busting their butts to get the bathroom as close to finished as they can.  They’re doing an amazing job and once it’s done I’ll be taking some pictures to show you a bit of a before and after (I’m pretty sure there is a before pic floating around somewhere).  In the meantime I have been cleaning like I have never cleaned before…and I mean that seriously.  As a kid I was pretty adept at getting out of any kind of heavy manual labor and I was equally successful here until this week.  Suffice it to say I snarked, we exchanged words and I was properly put in my place.

So now I’m cleaning and making lists and receiving more lists of cleaning stuff and getting to bed before midnight this week is looking fairly impossible.  I’m also typing with a severe White Spirit induced headache so forgive me if my coherence is weak.

So where was I…oh, yeah, my wisdom.  See, here’s the thing.  CB and his dad typically work together in the bathroom and they do so in Dutch so I rarely understand more than small fragments of the conversation.  That leaves me pretty much by my lonesome while I’m puttering around doing the other things that need to be done and so I find myself doing what I did while I was living alone.

I talk to the cats.

And they are more than happy to hang out in the kitchen while I stumble around muttering and asking them where stuff is or what I should do next.  For example, I had several things to do before my class at 4:00 today.  I got most of them done (dusting and reorganizing the book shelf, vaccuuming the floors, dusting any surfaces I missed while dusting the day before).  I was also supposed to do a money transfer from CB’s account his dad’s but when I looked for the piece of paper with Cabanadad’s bank account number it was gone.  I looked through the garbage, in both rooms, through numerous piles of paper (if you live in Belgium you learn quickly NEVER to throw away any paperwork, regardless of how useless you think it might be) and I couldn’t find it.  I felt really badly and I sent an instant message to CB telling him I’d lost the paper and we’d have to ask for the number again.  Then I took several dishes and some garbage downstairs with me to the kitchen, as I’d planned on mopping the floor.  Once I got there I realized there are still several piles of random stuff that needs to go to the attic and the floor was not doable yet.  That’s when I saw the recipe for paella that CB had jotted down off the internet last night.  On a hunch I flipped the paper over and lo and behold, there was the bank number!

“See!” I cried to Rex and Luna, “I’m not losing my mind, dammit, he’s losing it for me!”

They didn’t really appreciate the amazing gravity of my statement so I told them I would blog it.

And here it is.

Around this time last year Megan from Velveteen Mind created a little something called GoBloMeMoFo in response to November’s NaBloPoMo, a challenge for bloggers to blog every day in the month of November.  That might not sound hard but I did it last year and believe me, it sucks the sanity and every last ounce of creativity right out of your brain.  Hence that lovely little badge in my sidebar from Heather saying “NeenerNeenerHaHa, I am NOT blogging every day in November”. Anyway, the tagline for GoBloMeMoFo was “save the bunny, save the blog” and as I was new to the blogging social network thing, I, in all my enthusiasm, wrote up a guest post for Megan’s blog.  Unfortunately, so many bloggers wanted to save the bunny that my post wasn’t ever posted.  I have corresponded with Megan about the post, however, and thankfully, she has kept it this whole year and was kind enough to send it back to me this evening.  So here it is, folks; my attempt at saving the bunny:

These last two posts have sparked a bit of contemplation here in the overgrown labyrinth of my brain, the part that takes any time at all to examine spirituality.  I read a lot of blogs and of the ones that talk about the spirituality or religion of the blogger, none come close to what I have built for myself as far as spiritual framework goes.  There have been many times that I’ve read a blog entry that is pro-Christian or anti-atheism and I have longed to comment.  I’m not sure why I never have; or perhaps that’s really a lie.  I do know why I hesitate to comment on posts regarding spirituality or opinions formed from the morals of a particular religion.  First of all, I am afraid of offending the blogger.  Everyone has a right to their own beliefs, especially in their own blogging universe, so who am I to risk raising ire over a controversial topic? Also, to be totally honest, I was born into a persecuted religion.  I’m used to being discounted for being in the minority.  Even when I revised my own personal spirituality I was criticized by many, and so I try to avoid even thinking about religion (or my own personal lack thereof).

I was born into a Jewish family.  Funny, when people hear that they automatically ask me which of my parents was Jewish.  They both are.  All of my grandparents are/were Jewish.  Most of my immediate family practices some form of Judaism.  We are a family that has always been proud of our faith and has tried very hard to keep it alive.   I am very proud of my heritage and feel that it is important to pass the culture of Judaism on to my children.  That being said, I’ll tell you right now that events in my life, and my own skeptical nature have led me to the personal conclusion that there very likely is no God.  I could go into my line of reasoning and try to validate to you readers why this is so, but really, that is not my intent here.

Once I decided that monotheism was not my cup of tea, I looked into all sorts of religions; Hinduism, taoism, atheist, agnostic, wicca, Buddhist, you name it, I researched it.  Being somewhat of an academic minded person, I figured the best way to decide what I believed was to research all of my options.  I found that,while I can’t bring myself to believe in God, I have a hard time saying that I 100% don’t believe in any form of outside influence on life in general.  I don’t just mean for people either.  One thing that makes me believe that every creature on this planet is not so much mulch in the making is personalities.  People and animals have individual, distinct personalities and the intricacies of such a thing lead me to think that there is more to creatures in general than simple biological functioning.

What do I believe about the afterlife? What I know for a fact is that there are neurons in every single brain.  And those neurons fire electric impulses throughout the whole brain.  Electricity is energy and according to the laws of physics, energy cannot be destroyed, so the electricity in my brain, the energy that causes me to be me, can’t just end when my physical body does.  Maybe when I die my energy will disperse into the atmosphere.  Perhaps the next time I will resurface will be in the form of a lightening bolt in a thunderstorm over Bombay in 50 years.  I’m comfortable with that.  It means I won’t just be snuffed out, but it doesn’t fill my head with promises of paradise either.  It means I live for now, not some unprovable future reward.  I do good things for people in need for the satisfaction I get from altruism.  I have faith in myself and those who I love and who love me.  I can worship anywhere; the woods, on my way to work, in a church, a synagogue, an altar.

Do you hate me yet?

I hope not.  I respect all of you for who you are and your beliefs.  I hope you can do the same for me.  When I read a post about atheism and how horrible certain movies are for promoting it to children along with a lot of pro-Christian documentation along with it, I cringe.  I’m pretty close to being atheist.  My boyfriend is assuredly an atheist.  I don’t plan on raising my children with the belief in God.  When they ask me about death, I plan on telling them a similar version of what I told you.  I won’t have them say prayers, or grace, or anything involving beliefs that I don’t embrace myself.   Does that make me evil? Or damned to Hellfire (been there, done that…been damned that is, never actually seen Hellfire in person to my knowledge)?

I do plan on teaching my children about the culture in which I was raised.  I will explain to them the Jewish traditions and tell them some of the stories I heard as a child, but it will be as fairy tale, not fact.  I will make it a point to let them know that they have to have faith in themselves in order to even begin to have faith in anything else.  I will leave their options open and I will encourage them to respect others, despite any differences there might be.

I guess that’s about the best I can do.  And please, don’t be like me…do feel free to comment.  There is no judgment here.