Flirt

There! Finally did it. I can now officially say that I have flirted, and even with some success. Of course I did not have the actual guts to talk to the girls, but I did what I do best at parties: I danced. In the course of the evening (enter alcohol) I developed a way of letting a girl know that I am dancing 'in her direction', and though a massive round of hugs stayed out, she was obviously flattered (note the difference with "obviously, she was flattered"). Ego vs ostrich-style: 1 - 0.

It was a funny weekend altogether: friday evening I was rather unwell (my ear had been playing tricks on me all day long and I HATE AS/400 for being the most uncommunicative platform this side of Alpha Centauri. It would seem IBM is all about stability, but speed and flexibility are at the bottom of the stack of things to do: oh yeah, we thought about performance at first, but then we got worried over some important stability issues, like will the server still work after being eaten by a junior Pluto-inhabitant (hey, I'm in a spacey mood tonight!) or will the green on black terminal not loose color when repeatedly flushed through the vice president's secretary's brother's water closet, so anybody can see why we didn't really get to it. Oh, and we made our own controls for the futile pieces of user-friendly software we tried to make, because we thought MS wrote some really bad ones, and we wanted to prove we could do even worse.
Just letting of some air there (well I have been flatulence-laden recently): writing software can be a frustrating job. fortunately, at times, things work really well (I believe this happened somewhere in june 1932).
I managed to help Ilse create part of her Myro-wanderings (this couple who had a great idea for creating a software for schools. Bummer that they have no naming standards on the database and that figuring that labyrinth out in Access is still a lot easier than their home-brewn reporting tool - still: a nice effort. Interesting to see how hard databases can be if you don't have experience with them. I'm still convinced though, that it's not very hard when you start to see the big picture. You're doing great, Ilse, don't give up, and sorry for the very unstructured lessons: when we both have some more time - one of your many holidays, I presume - we'll start again from scratch, and I'll try to avoid giving you jobs that you don't have the technical background or experience for just yet. I did not mean to confuse you, but my head was at first full of snot, and then full of afterthirst.
By the end of the weekend, Ilse managed to create a report using crosstab queries, multiple joins, nice formatting and the right content: you would NOT have made it this far in the Myro-editor.

Then came saturday: first, I got to sleep till noon, which was great: my ear didn't hurt anymore (mostly) and I woke up a lot less grumpy. I wasn't all well though, because by five o'clock, I fell asleep again on the couch, while the kids were singing along to K3! (I'm proud to say that my kids got to hear Beethoven, K3 and Morphine on the same day, and they enjoyed all three) When I woke up we ate and then the kids went to bed, and their gorgeous mommy went up the stairs to do some work for school (a teacher's job may be very nice on some accounts, but when you're a motivated teacher, you do put more evening time into it than is generally expected). At about 22:20 (I was actually planning to get to bed after finishing a chapter in my book - American Psycho: anything you never wanted to know about fashion awareness and psychopaths), I got a messenger call from Ilse: could I come up for just a minute. Lots of ideas went through my mind at the time, like: does she want to show me the finished version of the report she'd been working on, will I be treated with a 3 hour love massage, is our roof leaking or is her sexual urge beyond control? None of the above: my favourite artist had just sent her a message asking whether I already had plans for the night!!! Six sentences, a bang in my own head and a kiss for the best wife I had so far (just kidding), later, I was on my way to his 'kot' and just minutes later we were in l'Heure bleue, a nice pub with messy settings and groovy music, exchanging solid money for liquid Westfleteren (unfortunately no Chimay, and because of a misunderstanding with the barman I even drank a Tripel, which tasted OK because it was my third Westfleteren =) ).

We chatted about his options on making money: he has some plans for the 'next big thing' on the internet, but of course I cannot tell you what that idea is, because maybe you could steal it and grow a bankaccount on his creativity. Well, maybe if you pay me a lot first =)

After the pub, we went to a birthday party (in 't Magazijn - not sure that I could find this place again), where we switched to regular beer and dancing, and where I tried my 'moves' on some really cute looking girls: it was really hard not to feel cheap, but I realised I was just doing what so many others have done before me: using your natural (this is true: my son is genetically developing the same dance moves as I am - says Ilse. Cool huh?) assets to make an impression on the other sex with no other intention than to feel good about giving and receiving attention. Oh, this is probably where Ilse will say: why do you always have to make things so complicated.
Anyway: it worked and I feel good about it (I think I needed that). A bit sorry for Stefaan though, because he is a lot more shy than me even. When I get a little drunk, I loosen up enough to talk to nice women and be nice to less nice women and have a conversation that seems to be interesting to both parties (regardless of sex) and lasts longer than "Hi" - "Oh hi". When he gets drunk (hardly ever a little drunk I may say), he loosens up enough to look just a little longer in the direction of women and then to drink some more. Actually, his presence motivated me to go for it, because I wanted to prove (zhengming in Chinese, as I know now) that it is possible to overcome your fears and shortcomings (he knows I'm also somewhat a sociopath). This is my firm belief - most of the time =) I guess it didn't work out for him just yet...

So I look at the clock in my cell phone for the first time since leaving home, and I see it's 4 in the morning (maybe that explains why the dancefloor was losing its attraction to people). OK, so I have some three more hours before my kids are going to wake me up and expect me to play with them: time for a quick snack (fries just across the street) and then homeward bound (great song by Simon and Garfunkle). A little before that, Ilse had woken up to find me still out, but a quick phonecall reassured her enough to fall back asleep by the time I got home: good on you, dear! I nearly crashed the bed when I tried to undo my pants, and I will not deny that old uncle Alcohol had some influence on that, though I wasn't all that drunk at the time. As always when everybody's favourite harddrug is in my brain, however, I completely forgot what I talked about with Ilse in the half an hour before we decided to take a nap (to my surprise and my good fortune, it seems I haven't yet changed my cell phone clock to daylight saving time, so it must have been 4:30 at that time). As she was not mad at me when she woke up, I must have managed to miss telling her about the orgie I attended - just kidding (Hello Ilse).

I have the greatest kids: Ruben stayed in bed until 7:30, after which he didn't mind me snoring for one more hour (he did have the computer to himself, but somehow I got the impression he was just very understanding towards my impending hangover - I must check on him snooping in the liquor closet =) ) and Anne slept till about 8:30 (the time I had agreed on with Ruben). From there on we had a gentle morning (I was impressed with Anne's great bike riding on our way to the bakery), and by the time Ilse got up (11:00?) I didn't have the slightest hangover and I was even in a good mood (dancing to the everpresent K3). I did enjoy the quietness of the bath (when you have kids, you will understand how listening to Millionnaire can be called quietness) I took, and after we had dinner (macaroni and cheese with pieces of ham and spinach), I got picked up by a co-organiser of the Autumn Walk by the parent's association of Mariavreugde: it was time for me to help host the 'Just Past Halfway'-café. I did not really have a good time (this is not the kind of socializing I'm good at, and certainly not with the remainders of last night and a lack of sleep), but the Walk was a great success. I'm glad, because I like the man who was behind it, and I wish him all the best. In the mean while, Ilse and our kids actually DID the walk (Anne was by far the youngest to actually finnish the 5 km walk - I wonder if we are slave drivers to our kids, or our kids are just fit, or all the other parents are just not interested in that kind of health - next thing you know there'll be an HDTV in their room and some pills for the depression).

Sunday evening I had to help Ilse some more, and I got a little nervous over not having any time left for studying Chinese, but she was nice about it and let me escape with a decent though not perfect result at about 22:00, which gave me an hour or so before my eyes dropped. I felt it was enough, but I will have to study some more tonight.

Actually, that's what I'll do next! Hanyu here I come.

In short: I have the best family there is. Thank you all.