Lazy Weekend

  • August 17, 2009 3:24 PM

After so much traveling, Thomas and I made a deal that we would spend our first weekend back in Brussels with no travel plans. It was a fantastic, lazy weekend. Here’s what we did…

Thomas made pancakes! He used a Barefoot Contessa mix and added a chocolate strawberry bar I got in Sweden. The first one was a dud but the others turned out okay. However, I’m starting to miss some of my nicer kitchen supplies that I left behind in storage.  I’m not sure what I was thinking…

We met Baby Reagan! While we were out of town, Ali had a baby girl and we finally got to meet her. Other than looking a little tired (understandably), Ali and Shannon seem to be falling into parenting very naturally. I was very excited to hold Reagan – she was just so sweet!

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Ali and her baby

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Such a curious little thing

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Dallas holding the baby

We biked 9 miles! Nine miles here really isn’t much, the ground is pretty flat, but I was excited to practice riding with traffic. Drivers seem to be very used to bikes here, but I would much rather prefer to stick to the sidewalks.

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Dallas on her bike

We relaxed in the park! I love laying in the grass…napping, cloud watching, soaking up the sun. We took a break from our bike ride at Parc Cinquintinaire and rested in the grass.  It was great encouragement to finish a picnic quilt before Summer is over.

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Thomas laying in the grass

We napped on the back porch! We moved our little folding bed back out onto the porch for a breezy, shady nap time place and took a little afternoon snooze.

We cooked dinner together! Since neither of us is much of a cook, we like to pool what skills we have and cook together. I made pan-fried pangasius and Thomas made mashed potatoes and salad.

There’s a few more photos from Saturday posted on Flickr:

On Sunday, Thomas drove me and my sewing machine (on his motorcycle) over to Sarah’s house so we could work on our quilts for our online quilting bee, Sew Connected 3. I’m still working on sizing up everyone’s squares so they fit together, but at least I’ve got a vision. Hopefully I’ll have some photos soon.

How was your weekend?

Geocaching in Brussels

  • June 28, 2009 11:17 PM

Last week, a friend asked if I could help introduce her kids to geocaching. Sure! Thomas and I are big geocaching fans and I’m always excited to get new cachers hooked.

Geocaching is a treasure hunt using your GPS. People have hidden treasure boxes all over the world and logged the coordinates on Geocaching.com, sometimes with riddles to solve. You can look up the coordinates, plug them into your GPS, and find them. Most geocaches have small prizes in them, and the idea is that if you take a prize, you replace it with a new one to keep it always full.

On Friday, my friend, her kids, and I headed into the forest and found three geocaches. Here they are with their prizes.

R and J show their geocaching treasures

In the first cache, I left a travelbug.  Travelbugs are items that have been marked with a special dogtag with a serial number.  These items are not to be kept, but instead, if you take one, you’re expected to log it on geocaching.com and move it to a new geocache. That way, the owner can track the journey of their travelbug.  I’ve launched several travelbugs over the years, but only 3 (not including my new one), are still traveling.  The longest has been going around Sweden for almost 5 years.  I also dropped one off in Atlanta before I moved, and it’s already traveled over to Italy.

Last month, Thomas and I went to a Brussels geocaching event set up as a flash mob. A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse. Our flash mob met in Grand Place, and when the clock struck 19:15, we opened our umbrellas for 15 minutes, hopefully capturing it on the Grand Place webcam, and then quickly left.

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Unfortunately, Thomas and I don’t geocache as much as we used to, but I had fun with these caches.  If you’d like to see some more photos from the Umbrella cache, they’re on Flickr:

Photo Ketchup

  • April 16, 2009 4:09 PM

If I’m getting sick of my photos, then you’ve got to already be sick of my recent posts.  I am still behind is posting all these, so here goes a big photo link dump.  Sorry.

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These are the last of the Georgy trip photos. I really had a great time with her, and she couldn’t have had better weather while she was here. This photo shows the park that is just two blocks from my house. We went there one afternoon to soak in the sun, people-watch, and play frisbee.

We went on a hiking day trip with the A-Club to the Vallee du Ninglinspo in the Ardennes. The forest and hills were gorgeous and very different from what I’ve seen in the US. I’d like to find some good places to camp in that area so Thomas and I can go back there.

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On St. Patrick’s Day, we went to the downtown celebrations. It was a gorgeous day and my classmate from Gent joined us. We sat around and ate brauts, drank Guinness, and watched some weird sport played with wooden sticks and really hard balls.

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These photos were from way back when we first moved here.  Can you believe that we’ve been here for over 100 days now?  Crazy!  Anyway, we were touring some of the towns near Thomas’ office, Mons, Braine le Comte, and Ghlin to see if we wanted to live there.  There were some cute towns, but we’re both glad that we settled in Brussels.

I still have more photos to post, but they were places we visited that deserved full posts.  I’ll try to get them on here in the next week.  In the meantime, I have some crafty-goodness coming soon.

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Full Moon

  • March 11, 2009 10:49 PM
Full Moon - March 2009 - Brussels, Belgium

Full Moon from my back porch

Au Revoir

  • December 30, 2008 4:23 PM
Christmas Lizard

Christmas Lizard

The past couple of weeks have been busy, with packing, Christmas, and a family emergency. I am very ready for some down-time. I just wanted to post this quick note to say Happy New Year, and let you know that my next blog entry will be from my new home in Belgium.

–Dallas (on my iPhone in the Atlanta airport)