Over three years ago, I made a life-changing confession to the woman I may now call my wife. Last year, we had a big celebration, where we visited the Lion King musical and I went ice skating for the first time in my life. We wanted to do some similar things this year, albeit a bit smaller. So for this year we planned to go skiing (also an I Never) and maybe go have a high tea.

Two weeks before our anniversary, on Thursday I believe, I started having a nasty cough. I didn’t think much of it, as I usually get some sort of cold in October/November.

That Sunday however, exactly two weeks before our anniversary, we were startled to find our cat Jolie going into labor. We knew she was pregnant; Lena had wanted to breed a litter of Maine Coons for a long time. However, Jolie wasn’t due until one week later, which is very premature for cats. As a result, Jolie’s hormones weren’t completely ready and Lena and I were tasked with feeding the kittens every two hours.

Meanwhile, Lena fell ill as well. Coupled with the lack of sleep brought about by this sudden arrival of cats, we both found no opportunity to recover. The day before our anniversary, I even came down with a fever.

And so it came to be that on the day of our anniversary, we had to hand-feed our kittens every two hours and spent the rest of the day (and the day after as well) in bed. An emergency visit to the doctor’s office after having a 39.5 degrees fever revealed I had pneumonia. Fortunately, the antibiotics I got for that allowed me to regain some of my strength. Meanwhile, the kittens grew up and needed to be fed less often, further reducing the pressure.

Unfortunately, this entire ordeal meant no skiing adventure for me. Luckily, having kittens was a new experience for me too, so it’s not a completely I Never-less month.

Pictures? Pictures!

 

 

 

This story goes back a long way, even before I did I Never. Back when I was still in University and living in Enschede, I had a hobby similar to I Never, called Crazy Ideas. The crazy ideas were more related to food and were a lot wilder than what I’m up to these days.

At Huize Entree, where I lived, I became known for these experiments. One fateful birthday, for this very reason, my housemates got me an ice cream maker. However, this was near the end of my study time, after which I kind of left it to lay around. As time went on, Lena moved in and we got to throwing a lot of our old things out.

Except for the ice cream machine. I really wanted to keep it, and try my hand at making ice cream one day.

This month, the time was finally there. Unfortunately, I didn’t make too many pictures, so you’ll have to make do with my walls of text.

So, first of all, I decided I wanted to make cactus ice cream to make up for September, where I wasted my cactus fruits. However, it turned out that none of our supermarkets sold cactus fruits, and because it was Sunday, I was unable to check the fruit market.

On Monday, Lena told me that the fruit market also didn’t have any cactus fruits. However, she got me pitayas, which is also the fruit of some form of cactus. So on Monday evening, I started working on preparing the ice cream batter. It had to cool in the fridge for another day, so today, on Tuesday, I was ready for the final step: making the ice cream.

Preparation for the batter.

Today, I got the batter, took the ice cream maker’s bucket out of the freezer, attached it to the mixer and turned it on.

And it did nothing. The mixer made some noise, but it didn’t spin. I don’t know if it’s been like this all the time or that it broke somewhere during all the moving.

Anyway, after a trip to the shop, I did end up with a bit of ice cream, even though it’s not of my own making.

I was pretty excited to be making ice cream though, so I’m going to try to get my hands on a new ice cream maker and try again.

It has been a long while since Lena and I took a vacation with just the two of us. Actually, the last time we did was back in 2015, when we went to Hamburg. Lena also told me of the times she went to Valkenburg and how much she liked that, so we decided to take a long weekend to the South.

We went to Valkenburg on Friday, where we stayed for one night. After that, we traveled to Antwerp on Saturday, stayed there for two nights and headed back on Monday.

We definitely enjoyed our time together, and away from our daily lives for a bit. Oddly enough, even though Valkenburg is actually in the Netherlands, our time there felt more like a vacation abroad than our visit to Antwerp. Valkenburg has a lot to do and to see, the scenery is very mountain-like and is obviously designed to attract tourists. Antwerp on the other felt more like we were in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, with big buildings and lots of construction.

But in both places we walked around a lot and saw many things. Valkenburg is known for its man-made caves, of which we toured two. In Antwerp, we spent our first day in the Antwerp Zoo, and some shopping before traveling back on the second day.

But, enough yammering, time for some pictures!

No Medley = cocktails!

Nom nom, heavenly mud!

The entrance to the caves. I’d never been in these kind of caves. I liked it a lot. The temperature was nice and cool with the heat outside. It was pretty creepy at some points too, especially after the second tour, when Lena and I walked to the entrance by ourselves. If we stood still, we would be in total silence. And you’d walk past a lot of “rooms”. The realization that something could be hiding in the dark, just right in front of you, was pretty haunting.

We had a lot of fun at the Valkenburg castle ruins.

It really was quite something to see.

Quite the view too.

Limburgse vlaai!

Coming back from the Wilhelmina tower by cable cart.

Not sure what to say here. It just was a nice photo-op ^^

We found these fakies on the Antwerp Saturday market. Funnily enough, there were also about 4 stalls selling bunnies, guinea pigs and all kinds of birds, which is unheard of for Dutch markets.

Antwerp Zoo fun.

They had a birds of prey show, which was very enjoyable. One cheeky bird just kept coming back for treats while they tried to get it into its cage.

Did you know that the people in Antwerp are insanely irresponsible when it comes to zoos? You could get really close to these penguins, which some people saw as an opportunity to pet them. At another part, we saw someone getting within petting distance of a bird that looked ready to strike, and one parent let their child drink out of a fish pond…

That’s it for this month! I’ve been promising to do something tasty for some time now, and hopefully September can give me that opportunity!

In the most recent team shuffle at work, a set of seven development teams were spawned, following the naming convention X It. For example, there’s Pay It, Sell It and Ship It. The team I was assigned to supports my colleagues on the Customer Service department and was therefore named Care It. However, the team quickly received the unofficial name of Team Carrot, due to the similarity in the way they sound.

At first, I found it kind of a dumb name, but, as nicknames tend to do, it grew on me. This then went the opposite direction, leading to our team adding carrots to pretty much everything.

Now, for our internal direct communication, our company uses Slack. For those who don’t know Slack, I’ve heard it’s pretty similar to Discord, though I haven’t used Discord to compare functionality. Anyway, one of the fun features of Slack is the ability to very easily add custom emoticons, including animated GIFs.

Last week, one of my colleagues found The Cult of the Party Parrot, and added a whole bunch of those parrots to our Slack. I couldn’t resist converting the parrot into a carrot, so I used my morning off to fiddle around and edit the GIF.

It’s not the greatest GIF around, but I do have some ideas on how I could have done it differently, so I guess I learned something, which is what I Never is really about. I don’t know if I’ll ever be in a situation where I can apply this new knowledge, but it was fun nevertheless!