Melinda & Cristiano

A couple of weeks ago I ordered some T-shirts for Cristiano and me from Threadless, when they had a “all-Tshirts-10-dollars” sale. I finally have got them, after having to go to a Delivery Office and pay 3 pounds extra import tax and 8 pounds handling fee. I find the handling fee a bit ridiculous, cause if they hadn’t checked it and just sent it straight to me, they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of handling it. Instead they decide there’s an extra import tax on it, giving me extra trouble to have to pick it up and adding a handling fee on top of that! Now I haven’t been that long in the UK, but does this happen often? Do they always check everything? Or is it (like in Holland) that once in a while you can be unlucky and they check what it is?

Anyhow, I finally have my T-shirts and I just love them (see pictures)! I really like the whole idea behind Threadless; everything is basically user-generated. Anyone can submit a T-shirt design and people can score the design. Based on the number of scores, the average score and the comments people leave behind the Threadless team decide which designs will be printed. Next to that you can collect points by submitting photo’s of you wearing Threadless T-shirts, with which you get extra store credit and thus, more reason to buy more T-shirts. The T-shirts themselves are funny and pretty, in a very unique type of way. I have a lot of Emily Strange T-shirts, but these are just so much cooler.

So what are you waiting for? Get some T-shirts!

I haven’t posted much lately (being 2 weeks in the Netherlands), but that’s going to change. The next couple of weeks are going to be busy, busy, busy. So what’s on my schedule:

Sunday 26 August and Monday 27 August: Notting Hill Carnival
Saturday 1 September and Sunday 2 September: London Film & Comic Con
Saturday 8 September and Sunday 9 September: BarCamp Brighton

If you want to follow/see more of what I’m doing, check out my Upcoming page.

For my 6th or 7th birthday I got a jokebook from some one (no clue anymore who) and I drove my parents crazy with repeating all the jokes (at least all the ones that I understood). One of the (well known) bad ones was:

Q: When does a Chinese man go the dentist?
A: 2:30

Exactly 2 weeks ago, one day after I decided to visit Holland for a while, my tooth started to hurt. Well, I thought it was my tooth that hurt. I mean, I had never had any cavities and I wasn’t really sure what’s supposed to hurt then. It started out with not being able to bite properly, because the gums around the tooth hurt a bit. I thought it wasn’t too serious and decided not to do anything about it; I was planning to see the dentist the next week, when I was in Holland, anyway; a couple of days wouldn’t matter. After four days though, the pain worsened, I couldn’t eat properly and when I pressed on the gum, pus came out. This really freaked me out and being the optimist I am I started imagining all the possible scenario’s. What started with “The tooth will have to be filled.” turned into “I need a root canal!” and eventually ended with a “They’re going to pull my tooth out!!! And then I won’t be pretty anymore!!!”

I still decided not to take any action; it was a Sunday in a place where I didn’t completely understand the health insurance and didn’t even have a dentist, and it was one day before leaving to Holland (where I did have full health insurance and a dentist I’ve been going to for 13 years). The dentist only had a spot for me on Thursday, but after some pleading I could also stop by on Tuesday afternoon after all the regular appointments to have a quick check. So Tuesday (one week after it started hurting) the dentist finally had a look at it and told me it was “just” an infection of the gum (actually from cleaning too intensely). So no root canals or tooth pulling! I did, however, have to come back on that Thursday for my normal appointment and he would give me an anesthetic and “clean the whole thing out”. He also made some x-ray photo’s, just to be sure there wasn’t anything else.

That Thursday the dentist gave the local anesthetic and within 10 minutes he was done with cleaning everything. Since then the pain has almost gone completely. So that’s the end of the story, right? Wrong. The dentist also showed the x-ray photos which he made 2 days earlier and asked me what I saw. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking for and just pointed at the gum which was infected. I was completely looking in the wrong direction. Turns out that my wisdom teeth (both bottom ones, didn’t make a photo of the top ones) are ‘horizontally impacted’, meaning they’re not growing upwards, erupting through the gum, but heading straight into another tooth. Not that they’ll bulldoze through the tooth or anything like that, but if left like it is it could get infected.

Meaning they’ll have to be pulled.

And because they’re horizontal, the top has to be sliced first before the root can be pulled.

I am so not looking forward to that.

It’s been a very busy week for me and I haven’t had time yet to post about any of the stuff I’ve done. So here’s a quick overview of what I’ve been doing. Reviews will come soon, I promise.

Tuesday: Went to Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix
Thursday: Moo’s Hot and Sticky Summer Party
Friday: Read all the summaries of Harry Potter Books 1 to 5 and reread Book 6 (in 9 hours!)
Saturday: Patiently waiting for HP Book 7 and then madly reading once it was delivered :D.
Sunday: Still reading HP7, went to an evening preview of Transformers (very cool!!), continued reading HP7 till 4am and finished it

Okay, I know, I know. I had promised to write in “the next couple of days” and big surprise…I didn’t. So, what been going on with me lately? For starters, I am now officially Dutch. Last October I applied for the naturalisation procedure (sounds creepy, like some weird medical treatment), filled in all the forms…and tada!! Half a year later, I’m an official cheese head.

Nowadays you have to go the naturalisation ceremony to pick up the official letter; you don’t turn Dutch until you’ve picked it up. As most of you may know, I was kind of dreading this, expecting you’d have to sing the national anthem or put your hand on the bible, swear, etc. or something corny like that. Luckily it wasn’t anything like that. It was actually more like my “propedeuse” or bachelor ceremony; some guy you don’t know holds a speech, everybody gets called to the front, you get your degree/paper/whatever and it’s all extremely boring.

I will absolutely try this time to write a bit more then usual. I’m not going to promise anything anymore, cause that just doesn’t seem to work anyway.