My Blog
My musings about the world, self publishing, living abroad, and my author career.
Daily routines
I am getting more used to being home alone, and structuring my day. It's like I'm exploring my own inner motivation. I could just sit around and read Facebook all day, though more than a day of that and I'd go crazy! I've found that setting out my laptop and notebook...
Carless
When we first planned to move here we assumed that we would swap our British car for a Dutch one. But within the first few months we realised that we didn't actually need it. My husband commutes to work by train (or bike) and pretty much everywhere that I went with...
Stamped with a loving kiss
Rocket boy came home from school on Tuesday with pink all round his lips. When I asked him if he'd had anything to eat or drink at school he said no. After more questions he smiled at me and told me it was a good secret and I'd find out the next day. We've been...
Carnaval
This year as well as enjoying Carnaval celebrations at school we went to a parade. Carnaval is not really celebrated in the area we live in, as it's more prevalent in the south of The Netherlands where it's more Catholic. Because it is a celebration of the last...
Speculaas planks
The Dutch are very good at biscuits and pastries. And one of their specialities is called speculaas - this is often translated as gingerbread into English, but it's more of a biscuit that gingerbread generally is. One of the features of speculaas is the very detailed...
A new look
I've been thinking about getting my own domain for a while, and over the weekend I took the plunge. I've also been playing around a bit with settings and things. All old links should still work but now also have new urls. Hopefully it now represents, a bit more, where...
I wrote a novel!
I've finished my novel. It is over 69000 words long, includes nearly 5000 unique words, and took me 15 months to write. Though I've had the idea for much longer than that. I started writing it by hand, but then switched to computer. Partly when I realised how many...
Two children at school
So I now have two children at school. Starry girl takes delight in telling me that I miss her. And I do. The house seems very empty. Very quiet. When it was only for a couple of mornings a week I always had a list of things to get done before I was on pick-up duty....
Meal planning update
Almost a year ago I posted about a new method I was trying for meal planning. So I figured it was time to post an update! My meal list has stayed pretty much the same, though with a few additions (toad in the hole how could I have forgotten you?!?). But the main...
More on a multi-lingual house
In a previous post I talked about language learning, specifically learning Dutch. About juggling a home language and a community language. But the reality is that there's always some cross-over. English is so prevalent, and the Dutch generally so proficient at it,...
Health visitors v Consultatie Bureau
So with starry girl about to start school I thought it was a good opportunity to think about the differences between preschool child health care in the UK versus the Netherlands. Though I guess I'm really comparing what happened in the two cities we've lived in, as I...
2017 writing
Well, I amazed myself with what I managed to write last year. I wrote nearly 114 thousand words, which is an average of 312 a day. That is over twice what I aimed for at the beginning of the year. And I wrote every day: holidays, visitors and Christmas...