Lilac Colored Glasses

First, before anything else, I wanted to share our wedding photos with you all. You have been with me, more or less, throughout the duration of my relationship with CB. You’ve heard it all and I just want to be able to share some pieces of our two special days with you. So, if you’re interested, the polished up pictures can be found here.

Second, the big news…

Here is my new blog!!!

It’s called A Patchwork of Daydreams and I’ll be prettifying it up over the next few weeks, but it is, for all intents and purposes, ready to go.

All I ask is that you respect my request to restore anonymity to my blogging. I’ll have an alias and C.B. will be getting a real name alias. I fell in love with my Cabana Boy, but really, he has become so much more to me than that pet name I dubbed him with so early on in things. Rex and Luna will be keeping their real names, you know, so things don’t get too confused.

And as to why I picked something that I didn’t even give you all as an option, well, I’ll tell you.

It was down to Terminal Verbosity and Porcelain in a Paper Cup World. C.B. and I were sitting out in the giant wading pool he bought for the back yard (that’s what happens when he can’t find good supports for a hammock…he goes and buys a giant blow up pool) and I asked him which of the two he liked better. He felt (and I agreed) that while I often do run off at the mouth (fingertips?), there are also times when I’m short and blunt. And I also felt like if I used Terminal Verbosity I’d end up with a jet engine motif on the new blog. Porcelain was the one that actually appealed to me more, but it also focused a bit on a negative aspect of my existence, which is that I never quite feel like I fit into my environment. While it is true, it’s not necessarily something I want to define my personal thoughts day to day.

I also started to mention the chasing butterflies idea and how it had come from a post I’d written that really spoke a lot about who I was, and that’s when I remembered another part of that post. The part where I said: I chose the unknown over stability…because I’m a daydreamer. My life is a patchwork of my dream driven decisions, and I suppose I’ve led a life less usual than some due to this fact.

And there it was, the title for my new blog.

So there you have it. Lilac Colored Glasses documents the last three years of my life and it will always be here in some form or another, although I may password protect it once I’m pretty sure you’ve all found your way over to the new place. Once I do so, you are more than welcome to email me and ask for the password. Chances are I’ll give it to you, I just want to assure my anonymity.

Thank you all again for making this whole blogging thing so worthwhile for me. enjoy the photos and I hope to see you over on A Patchwork of Daydreams.

Now, help me pick one out.

I’ve come up with several potential names for my new blog and I’d really like it if you all could give me your input/opinions.

Violet Sky
Snagged from this song by MIKA, an artist whose music I’m really growing to love. I really relate to the concept of a perpetually shifting identity in the song, plus I’d be keeping the purple imagery, for consistency-sake, although I guess that contradicts the concept I’d be trying to embrace.

Porcelain in a Paper Cup World
Snagged from this song by Kerli from the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack. Not only does it reference one of my all time favorite books, but it also sort of reflects how I often feel out of place in the world, be it stateside or here in Europe. Plus tea parties can be whimsical and fun or alternatingly formal and severe. I guess I’d be juxtaposing my own nature onto the concept of a tea party.

Painting Flowers
Taken from yet another song, this one by All Time Low. If you get the wrong colored rose bush, why not paint it to look how you want it? Another reference from Alice in Wonderland, I see this as a much more entertaining and beautiful metaphor for the making lemonade from lemons thing. Not that I don’t like lemonade, but the idea of painting flowers, in my opinion is much more aesthetic. And personally, while life has given me many flowers, most of which I have, in some manner, been thankful for, they are rarely, if ever, the color I’ve wanted them to be. I’ve had to make due and try to paint them as I see fit. Some have turned out much prettier than others.

Butterflies and Bubbles (alternately Chasing Butterflies/Bubbles)
This one is referencing an original post of mine, here. That post is probably one of my most accurate and insightful observations regarding myself, my own nature, and my reactions to my own culpability. I sum myself up very well here because really, no matter how old I get I will always be chasing those butterflies and bubbles, sometimes to the point where I run myself right off the edge of a cliff without knowing it.

Terminal Verbosity
This is a last minute addition because damn. If you can read and understand all the stuff I just wrote and you’re not drooling on your keyboard by now, you should be able to get why this name popped into my head.

So yeah, please weigh in and give me some feedback. My next day off is Sunday and I’d like to make some steps towards moving then.

The hearty green liquid was bubbling and roiling in the pot in a satisfying “double double toil and trouble” sort of way this afternoon as I prepared my laaaate breakfast/lunch of split pea soup with a slice of multigrain bread and a pat of butter. I was feeling pretty crappy, to be honest (still am), as we’d stayed out much later than usual last night despite my sore throat and gushing sinuses (summer head colds are the yuck). And all for the sake of seeing Eddy Wally, a septegenarian Flemish shlager, perform in the Sint Baafsplein for the Gentse Feesten. And trust me, he definitely wasn’t the fantastic discovery I mentioned in the title.

But let’s back track a bit, shall we?

CB and I decided to go to the Feesten yesterday evening for a few hours, but first we tried to go for some take out Chinese (I admit, the self pity from Friday hasn’t totally worn off yet so I’m occasionally making crappy food choices). After discovering that the Chinese place as well as the nearby Turkish place, and also the neighborhood grocery store were all closed (stupid we rioted in Brussels and created a totally dysfunctional country that no one is particularly proud of Belgium Independance Day), we decided to eat at the Feesten. We biked to the center, parked our bikes along the water and headed off towards the Sint Jakobsplein. It started to rain so we went a bit out of the way to the Patershol to seek shelter that wasn’t jammed by festival goers and ended up stopping in a crowded bar for a Rodenbach (my favorite Belgian beer).

After the rain stopped CB and I headed towards the Sint Jakobsplein from another direction. I was totally intent by now on hitting the Senegalese stand for some African food (still not the fantastic discovery, although the kuku na nazi was pretty awesome) and was caught totally by surprise when I heard someone calling my name from across the street. I looked at the woman who was calling me and waving as she crossed the street. She was smiling, stropke swinging, as she approached us.

I had no idea who she was.

Until she said, “I’m Felicia. I read your blog! Lilacspecs! I’ve commented a couple times. I was hoping I’d see you out on the street some day”

And I was like “…”

Cause how cool is that!!! Someone who reads actually recognized me on the street! And it’s a fellow American expat who moved to Gent to be with the man she loves. I was pretty gobsmacked, let me tell you! So Felicia told us that she was on her way to Bataclan (we were too after we ate) so we said we’d meet up with her there, which we did (after I got my African food and CB got some vegetarian non-hotdog and non-hamburger with a mojito cupcake…which had some of the best frosting ever, by the way).

And yay! What fun! It was so nice to talk to someone who is…well…basically in my exact situation (except that I think she’ll be more likely to find work faster when she wants to). This is Felicia’s first Gentse Feesten so her boyfriend Yves is making sure she drinks her fair share of beer and sees plenty of the different sites, including…you guessed it, Eddy Wally.
Which is how we ended up neck deep in drunken schlager lovers swaying their arms and chanting along to all the oh-so copmlicated “la la la la la la” lyrics that make up the refrains of shlager music. And the music? Okay, soooo not my thing? But the companionship and the rare discovery of a fellow American in Gent? That, my followers, was a real treasure!

Oh, and Felicia, if you get to reading this post before you travel, here’s a few links of my past posts with some Dutch music that is well known (including that finishing number that Marina covered last night) as well as one of the first Dutch songs I actually understood some of the words to. Enjoy!:

Vandaag is rood – Marco Borsato

I took a few days off from blogging, mostly to let you all bask in the beauty of my last post because it’s been dreary and rainy and I have been less than inspired following what I wrote last. Sometimes I manage to write something that surpasses my own expectations and then I seem to stall out and it takes a few days to rev back up. I don’t know if it’s because I know the next thing I write won’t equal what I just wrote, or if writing that quality of material just sucks the writing juice out of my head and I have to give my author gland (you didn’t know about the author gland?) some recovery time. Either way, I still don’t have much to say today, but I did want to tell you that I got a bloggy award this week from Jientje, and here it is:

“The Humane Award is in order to honor certain bloggers that I feel are kindhearted individuals. They regularly take part in my blog and always leave the sweetest comments. If it wasn’t for them, my site would just be an ordinary blog. Their blogs are also amazing and are tastefully done on a daily basis. I thank them and look forward to our growing friendships through the blog world.” Recipients of this award should write a post about it, linking to the person gifted the award, along with ten of their own nominees.”

I want to award this to any of you who leave comments here. It’s so hard to try to choose ten people when so many people stop by and read and leave their mark here, so if you’ve commented on my blog, please feel free to take this award for your own blog (or print it out and make a badge for yourself if you don’t blog).

Now, the crux of this post: Jientje says in her post that “it’s because I “met”her I started blogging in English in the first place!”
It was this comment that got me out of my procrastinating rut and inspired me to finally harass CB into installing a whole new sub blog so that I could start blogging in Dutch.

If you have the time, especially my Dutch speaking readers, I would appreciate it if you stop by my shiny new Dutch only (I can translate for you if you’re English speaking and still interested) blog, Komkommertijd, and feel free to make any suggestions/corrections. I need all the help I can get!

Okay, so.

Things have been sort of quiet over here the past few days and I’m just not finding anything good to write about. There will be some things coming up next week but the only thing really happening this week is my language proficiency test in Brussels on Monday.

Thinking about it makes me want to vomit.

So let’s not talk about that until after I make it through the day.

Anywho, I read a few other Anglo-expat in Belgium blogs and recently one of them asked her readers to comment with any questions they had about her moving/living abroad experience.

Have I done that yet? And if so, it had to have been a long time ago cause I know my archives pretty well and I can’t recall asking that.

Therefore, I’m asking you all for your questions. I know I have a mixed bag of readers here so I’m sure there will be a lot of variety when I say that I want you to leave a question for me in the comment section. Any question you want. It can be about expatriation, life in Belgium, learning Dutch, questions about the US.

Anything you want, just ask away. This weeks posts are yours to command!