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.

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.

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

“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!

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!

My handsome, wonderful boyfriend seems to have been able to successfully restore my blog from the netherworld of hackdom!

So, now that we’re speaking of reincarnation (albeit in bloggy form), I had a thought today about my previous lives.  And I have already covered my beliefs in the hereafter and yes in a very abstract way I do believe in reincarnation. Anyway, here was my thought:

I think I must have been a cat in a former life.

Seriously, not only am I perfectly happy lounging around lazily in dark rooms, I also have this inhuman love of canned fish. Really, it’s a pretty normal occurrence for my lunch to consist of a can of tuna or mackerel or sardines and maybe some fruit or a glass of milk.

And I was also probably Irish at some point too.

I have an endless fascination with Irish mythology and I was truly taken by the Irish country side while I was studying in Carlow. After living abroad and knowing what it feels like to be away from my birth home, I think the place that’s still closest to my heart is Ireland, more than anywhere else I’ve been.
And besides all of that I think I could live off of potatoes. I have yet to meet a form of potato that I don’t like.

And I love soup. That’s neither here nor there, it’s just another odd little quirk of mine. I seriously looove soup. In fact, if anyone has a recipe for breakfast type soup, please send it this way. So between my love of seafood and potatoes and soup you can imagine how New England clam chowder makes me swoon.

And now I’m hungry.

But how about you? Do you have any quirky traits or tastes that make you think you might have had a former life or two?

I mean, it was here, but it was showing up as having a parsing error. I have no idea what that means but when it didn’t go away CB checked it out and found that I had been hacked.

Some sort of Chinese something or other and in the end, my wonderful, helpful, loving fiancè was able to restore everything but the theme and the plugins (all I used was the SEO, Akismet and Stat Counter anyway, and those are reinstalled).

In a way this is good as I was constantly griping about my anorexic sidebar and the desire to change themes.

In a way it sucks because I had 3 days worth of stuff I wanted to blog about but I played video games instead and now I have no recollection or desire to revisit the topics. And I was friggin hacked! I feel sort of virtuviolated.

But anyway, everything appears to be okay now and I’ll be back to my usual blathering very soon. If anyone has suggestions as far as a look for my blog, please let me know. I’m open to any and all suggestions.

Unless you’re a hacker.

Then I’ll kick you in the nuts.

However, I thought it best to tell you about what happened Monday and I couldn’t see a good place to segue into a Dutch schlageresque song. It’s kind of hard to stay upbeat when you feel so beat up.  Much of my physical pain is subsiding (though my wrist is hurting more) and the longer I’m able to sit in one place, the more I’ve made the mistake of reading the news.

I usually avoid the news because it depresses me and considering the month I’ve had, I don’t need to be more depressed, but this week I found myself clicking around the headlines and reading about things like the Maori protest in Auckland, the court’s decision to uphold Prop.8, the GOP trying to find ways to deny the first ever Hispanic woman from a place in the Supreme Court, and Israel’s Knesset trying to pass a law to imprison anyone who denies Israel is a Jewish state.

What most of it boils down to is discrimination, for one reason or another and it really makes me feel sick to read the comments of the “Joe the Plumbers” out there who find any reason they can to put down those who are different than them. I can’t say I know much about council seats in New Zealand, but the disgusting amount of racism in the comments blew me away.  And I won’t even get started on Prop. 8 cause that’s just asking for trolls. But again, the comments I saw? I can’t understand how people justify some of their own heinous opinions. These people are minorities who protested peacefully for their rights to be represented as human beings and they were mocked for “pissing people off by wasting their time in traffic”.

Are you kidding me?

I doubt that the African Americans who no longer have to drink from separate water fountains feel as though the Million Man March was a waste of time.
I doubt that the women who vote on every election day think that the suffragettes were lazy or whiny for demanding to be treated as equals in society.

Point is, the world is really bumming me out today. So before I limp off to rest my rear (and back and arm and toes), I’m going to do my best to stay positive and upbeat, and in doing so, I’d like to offer you all a happy little song to be lodged in your heads (disclaimer: I never said the song is actually any good, but it is upbeat and chipper).

Heb je even voor mij (loose translation: do you have a minute for me) – Frans Bauer

We’re not sure what’s wrong yet, but it doesn’t start up and this computer, the only one between us, is not super new or even moderately new. Since CB often works from home and is also still working on his doctorate and I am now working 4 days a week and am rarely home during the day this computer is sort of defaulting to CB until we’re able to afford a new one or able to get the other one fixed.

Sadly, my ability to upload digital pictures died along with CB’s computer so I won’t be able to participate in Jientje’s “A Thousand Words in Idioms” for a while, but I hope some of you do. It’s a really fun meme. I have pictures sitting on my memory card for this week and when we do get a new/fixed computer I’ll be sure to catch myself up.

In the meantime, I have what some of you have been waiting for (except for Goofball, who was watching “Mijn Restaurant“): our picks and pans from the first Eurovision semi-final! After 8 hours of house cleaning, two buses, a tram, my biweekly maatschapelijke orientatie class and a bike ride home, I sat down with CB(who had dutifully taped the show on the DVR) and recorded our reactions to each of the 18 songs showcased in the first semi-final. Embedding them all here would be a pain in the ass, but I’ll link to the videos and you can watch whichever ones you like.

1. Montenegro
   - Disco lives in Montenegro! And it’s very, very horny.
2. Czech Republic
   -Super Mario and Captain Marvel had a love child…and it’s doing a bad Borat impression.
3. Belgium
   -You could tell Patrick had a cold.
4. Belarus
   -These guys have been watching waaaay too many Monster Ballad infomercials.
   -Is that chick naked under that sheet? And is she holding sticks?
5. Sweden
   -CB’s comment was “ABBA goes Pet Shop Boys” and “her dress looks like a jelly fish”
   -I say pop-opera can only work in The 5th Element. They need to pick one or the other.
6. Armenia
   -Egyptian goth
7. Andorra
   -CB says they should have spent an hour teaching the girls how to pretend to play the guitar.
   -I don’t think they could afford fake guitar lessons…they couldn’t even afford costumes.
8. Switzerland
   -GooGoo Doll wannabes…they tried waaay too hard to be cool.
9. Turkey
   -Hadise doesn’t have a stellar voice to begin with, but it was really lacking for her performance. I liked the costumes though…very cool despite the magenta.
10. Israel
    - Themessage was good (unlike their song “Push the Button” a few years back, but their voices just didn’t blend well, and that’s sort of important in a duet.
11. Bulgaria
    -It’s like Conan meets the Legend of Zelda. On stilts!
    -Said CB? “Woah. Her hair.”
12. Iceland
    -CB says this is classic Eurovision style and we both thought it was a very pretty, very nice song and performance. I think the fact that Iceland was able to afford costumes and enough plane tickets to send the whole group is a miracle in and of itself.
13. Macedonia
    -When they opened, we started laughing. Then CB told me I really should have a drink because his beer was making the whole thing much funnier. After a minute or so though, we realized the song itself actually had a decent sound.
14. Romania
    -Pretty costumes but not enough of an instrumental section.
15. Finland
    -CB called this Eminem meets New Beat. I call it further proof that white people shouldn’t rap. And what the hell is up with the fire jugglers?
16. Portugal
    -CB really liked her voice, which I also thought was very nice. The music was really fun and they get extra props for working an accordion in there.
17. Malta
    -The song was written by a Belgian. We thought the singer had a unique voice and presence.
18. Bosnia-Herzegovina
    -The music was okay but it was more theater than song…would’ve fit well in Les Mis.

So, there you have it. Our picks and pans from Tuesday’s semi. The ten countries in green are the ones from this round that are moving on to the final. We’ll be watching tomorrow night for the other half of the competitors and I’ll try to get a review in there for you too.

We’ve done a lot for the wedding this past week, despite being stranded over night in NYC (sound familiar? as in yes, we got stranded over night again, just like last year in Atlanta). In fact the stranding was almost a plus because we got to spend a few hours walking around Manhattan. I have some pictures to post from that when I have more time.

Also this week I got my wedding dress, we ordered our rings, chose a menu for the reception, chose desserts for the dessert table, met up with one of my bridesmaids (who drove across the state to see me), had Seder with my family, and got my hair cut. Needless to say it has been a busy week and I have received one guest post so far. I plan to schedule that one to post while we’re en route to Niagara. I just want to remind my other guest posters to send your post to my Gmail account at koriekleinATgmailDOTcom.

It’s good to see you guys and I’ll try my best to check back in again soon.