Got there before the birds. Red currants, very sweet raspberries, and five blueberries. There will be plenty blueberries and blackberries later on. All on the roof terrace
[UPDATE] And strawberries too, from the living room balcony. Y says eating them is more fun than picking them.
Red currants coming along nicely on the roofterrace
A lonely raspberry is changing color, plenty of blueberries in the making
and especially pleased with how many blackberries lie in our future. Or the future of the birds around the house of course. Whoever gets there first 😉
Fred is back!
We already wondered if he was still around, but this weekend he made an appearance. We first saw him two years ago, and nicknamed him Fred, after an Amsterdam fashion label ‘A fish named Fred‘.
Today is King’s day, our national holiday. Normally it turns the entire country into a giant orange colored street festival and fleamarket, but this year we’re all at home. It’s been dubbed Woningsdag, or ‘houseday’, which differs from Koningsdag, King’s day, in its first letter only. In my head King’s day is the start of ‘flag week’, as April 27th is followed by May 4th Remembrance day, and May 5th Liberation day, the only three days in the year the general population flies a flag. The Netherlands isn’t at all big on flag waving.
This year it seemed there were more flags visible around our neighbourhood than last year, regularly with the telltale folds of newly bought and unpackaged flags visible.
When Y woke up and came downstairs we unfurled the flag together and mounted it next to the front door.
While I was busy in the garden, two coots in the watercourse behind our house were fighting over who would get a partner.
(If you click through you’ll see a video. It appears that Flickr doesn’t facilitate video embeds.)
Today E and I concluded we have a cool event space right around the corner. While we were thinking about whether or not to do an unconference this spring (we decided not to, in the car to France two weeks ago), I realised a building around the corner from us seemed to have new occupants. Until then it had only been in use on Sundays by a local church community.
The building itself is from 2007, when this area was newly built, and it was intended to serve as theater and community meeting and event space. A few years later it went bankrupt, and since then it wasn’t used except for Sunday services.
But late last year it has re-opened, under the name De Kamers (the rooms)
We visited today and saw how it is a very informal and warmly decorated place with lots of daylight. With a number of different spaces, a professional kitchen and large outside area. Perfect for unconferences like ours, where creating a relaxed informal atmosphere is important, and very close to our home, almost like it is an extension of it. It left us imagining what we could do with it. It would be a shame to not use a beautiful facility like that. We will receive an indication of costs soon, to help us guide our thinking as to how and when we might put that venue to good use.
