by Clarissa | Feb 9, 2018 | family, food |
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...
by Clarissa | Feb 5, 2018 | personal, writing |
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...
by Clarissa | Feb 2, 2018 | writing |
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...
by Clarissa | Jan 29, 2018 | family |
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....
by Clarissa | Jan 26, 2018 | family, food
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...
by Clarissa | Jan 23, 2018 | dutch life, family
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...
by Clarissa | Jan 16, 2018 | dutch life, family |
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...
by Clarissa | Jan 9, 2018 | 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...
by Clarissa | Jan 1, 2018 | family, personal, writing |
As in previous years I’ve been thinking alot in the last few weeks of what I’ve acheived in this year and what I want to do in 2018. Looking back My goals for 2017 were: Dutch exams write every day time with family every day proactive The two big things...
by Clarissa | Dec 28, 2017 | family |
Again we have had our stockings hanging on the wall for Sinterklaas and advent, with an activity to do every day. Here is what we’ve done this year: Sat 18 Sinterklaas arrive Sun 19 See Sinterklaas in Bussum, put shoes out Mon 20 smile at everyone today and look...
