Family feest

I may have turned 40 a couple of weeks ago, but due to holidays the celebration with my extended (Dutch) family only happened today. Actually, I'm typing this sitting next to my mother in law. :)

We've had a totally full house this afternoon, adults and children. A lot of fun, and for the first time this year we got the BBQ lit! Something that I've simply been too tired / lazy (delete as appropriate) to get it set up...

Due to family illness we had to make sure that the house is made totally gluten free before the party, and ensure that the food has no gluten in it, and isn't contaminated during preparation. A lot of stress, but also great to have everyone here. And if course this is just one day, the family have to live with it every day! I'll stop stressing when I hear that everyone is feeling fine tomorrow morning.

Eating in the garden, and kids doing gymnastics behind us whilst we eat and drink. Our little man loves the company as well :)

Ah, 40 is still good!!!

Getting cultured

I've been living in the Netherlands for a long time, it's been that long since I called England home that I can't remeber and I feel far more at home here than in there. 

With the Brexit and subsequent rise of open xenophobia I thought it was about time to really make this country my home. After all I plan on staying here for a very long time. So this morning, with a toddler in tow, I went to the town hall to ask about the process. It sounds less painful than I imagined and so I'll be starting it in the coming weeks.

Next to the town hall we have our culture centre. I'm ashamed to say that since it has been rebuilt I haven't been in. (It used to be a theater that I went to a couple of times). These days it houses, amongst other things, a restaurant, galary and 2 (iirc) stages.

With the sun behind the clouds, over the buiding I thought I'd give myself a challenge to capture it. So, toddler in one arm, shopping and handbag over my shoulder I tried a one handed shot! I. The circumstances I was quite happy with it :)

(Though nowhere near either Lori or Caroline's standard though Calie ;p )

Focus beam

Today was a very long one. 11 hours door to door to the office and back and a very complex discussions has me quite exhausted! 

So today... A bulb picture again! These have a beam lens on then and are quite bright and I was quite curious as to what the lens would pick up.

Yet again, the lens impressed me! Getting the satin finish of the refelctor in the lens and the LED itself is beyond what I was expecting!

Folding wood

So... I've decided to start cross posting my photo blog here. I'm not sure that I'll mage it everyday as I'm manually writing both posts as I can't find a way to automatically cross post from WordPress... Anyway, lets start with today's post!

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Whilst sitting having lunch today (yes, I stopped long enough to eat away from my desk!) I noticed another tree trunk stool in the corner of the canteen.

Whilst chatting I started to look at the way the wood had grown folding in onto itself. So, apologising to my colleagues, I went across and tried to get low enough to grab a shot. I think with a movable light source I could spend hours and fill a months pictures from the it :)

What's black, white and red all over?

Ok, here is a quick test using my mobile to write a post. The keyboard is quite good, so hopefully it'll work well - I just hope that my proof reading is good enough to correct my sweeping mistakes :)

So what's been going on in my life? Well a lot as it happens. The new project in the office is starting to gather pace and I'm learning new things about angular and single page applications all the time. Considering how worried I was about getting back to a techie role in actually quite happy with the progress that I'm making and how quickly I got back up to speed.

I'm still loving the camera on the phone. I'm managing to upload daily pictures to my photo blog again. I just hope it continues. Aside from throwing it down the road once when running and now having it needing a new screen and housing the phone is really awesome! If you're interested there is another selection of pictures here from what I have uploaded. Lots and lots of back and white. And one single one of red!

Which I'm pleased to say is the colour of my hair again after another wonderful trip to the hairdresser last week! A couple of hours relaxing is lovely, and the conditioning head massage is just heavenly.

And... I finally got a decent distance under my belt today. I feel a little ill (I feel hung over, though I haven't drunk much... I think it's tiredness from a couple of late nights) but forced myself out of the door. Once I got into my rhythm I stated to get into it. 3 x 20 minutes normal running, with each one followed by 1 minute fast running and one minute recovery. With a 1 km warm up and 5 mine cool down it managed 12.3 km in total. The farthest I have effect ran! And at an OK pace too!

Right time for a night cap and prep for a back holiday here in Holland tomorrow!

Btw writing this is quite doable on the phone, well done to Google for a good app! Now let's see how the publishing and adding the pictures goes!

Clouds, the number 10, freaky bones and a little bit of red...

Another morning waking up way too early! No real reason, but I thought that I would use it to post again :) (Sorry!)

So what has been going on in my life? Well, lots!

I'll make a sandwich post- good, bad and then good :p

So, the first good, totally materialistic! Last week I got a new phone, my old one probably got dropped one to many times and the battery was shot. It went from two days life with some use to 6 hours with no use :O Not good...

And so when I heard that Huawei were releasing a new flagship I thought I would give it a try. They have done something different with the cameras in this phone - rather than one camera they have two. There is nothing special there - after all HTC and LG have done this before. However, Huawei don't have one high res, one low or one normal and one wide angle. No, they have one colour and one monochrome. This allows the phone to collect way more light for pictures as the monochrome sensor doesn't have the filter needed to collect colour information, depth information (as the sensors are a little apart it is slightly stereoscopic) and most importantly for me a dedicated monochrome camera - not simply a desaturated colour camera, but an actual monochrome one.

The pictures that the monochrome came makes are just truly amazing. I can't stop using it (and annoying other people who think that the world should have colour in it :p). The rest of the phone is also pretty great (if you can live with the Android skin, which so far I can), but I guess it is a sign of the times that I was totally in love with the phone and then realised that I had no actually used it to make a call! (I have since and can say that the call quality is better than anything I have used so far - both phone and speaker calls).

So, pictures!

The bad... Well, it seems I am going to have to go under the hospital again. When I was a child I had lots of operations for cysts etc in my hands (and have lots of others in my wrists, ankles, feet...). Over the last couple of years I have had pain in my thumb which has been getting steadily worse. I didn't do anything about it until now because a) I was afraid of what hey may have to do and b) I really didn't want to get it in the my transition (stupid, but there you go).

Anyway, I was referred to a specialist clinic by my GP and... It turns out that my body wanted to be special. Simply being transsexual was apparently not enough. No, it turns out that I probably have Oliers Syndrome. 1 in 100,000 and it means that I am prone to the cartilage cysts in my hands and feet that I had as a child and in my left hand they have come back. It also means that I have quite a deformed bone structure in my left hand:

Sorry - maybe there should have been a content warning there!

Anyway, I have to have a CT scan on my hand to make sure that the bone has not de-calcified to the point where it is going to be difficult to fix. After that the doctor will help me make a decision about doing something about it, or leaving it until the pain becomes too much to bear and then doing something. Not the news I wanted, but then again it could have been worse news. Watch this space...

So, the good! On Monday I celebrate 10 years working for the same company. Most of that time has been good, and due to vacations the celebration was held last week. Lots of posters around the building saying how long I have worked there and a lunch organised with very English sandwiches, cream and jam scones, brownies and cheesecake. Yum!

And parlour games, a speech, pressies (a Tardis teapot - awseome! - and a selection of English tea and shortbread buiscuits - again, yum!)

And a picture for our hall of shame - I am the last person to go on the wall downstairs, the next person will start a new wall of shame for those who have stayed too long :p.

A great lucch, and a reminder of why I have worked there for 10 years!

Right, I hear noises from a little man, and it's time to get ready to go and get my hair dyed red again :),  so I'll leave you now with the picture for the wall :)

I'll always have history

To be fair I think this post could end here - it kind of says everything that I am thinking right now :)

But, I'll go into details a little for you instead :)

Go back 12 months and I was really hoping, thinking that once I got the recovery of the operation out of the way that I would be able to just simply be me and go through life the best that I could.

This week I got the realisation that as I work with the same people as I did before I transitioned, and as I am open with them that this isn't going to happen. There needs to be a middle ground somewhere.

I am not an activist, I long for a quiet life where I can disappear into a corner. I have to say this is something that I am ashamed of - being very visible is an important thing, it's just something that I do not have in me. I'm not going to shout from the roof about my history no matter what.

But, I do not, and am not going to hide it either. If there is a reason to bring it up then I am going to being it up. Whether that is to do with the little guy for people who know us well. He is my son, when people ask how we got him, and we know them well enough they are going to be told - if we don't know them well enough then I guess I'll settle for the "it's complicated" answer :)

And... If I find myself stumbling on words, catching my sentences before I say them, and generally feeling uncomfortable and not able to join in a conversation for fear of outing myself then I am going to have to look at the situation and make a decision on what I do.

This is what happened this week - and was the impulse for the first post in three months (gulp!)

We are forming a new team in the office for project (which I am not allowed to talk about unfortunately...) and were discussing getting the team together and moving to our new team room. Someone suggested getting facilities to help move our desks and computers (the desks move as a couple of us have special electric standing desks - so when we move the desk has to move too).

When moving the computers came up we decided to as IT Services to give us a hand - there are a lot of cables, dual monitors and heavy workstation machines to move. And I had to catch myself. You see 5 years ago I could have picked up the work station and moved it anywhere in the building. Hormones have ad an impact on that, and so I very nearly outed myself by saying so. And after that was very guarded in what I was saying and kind of left the conversation a little bit. And felt very, very uncomfortable.

So, I asked the new guy for a walk - the sun was out and so a walk away from the office seemed inviting - so that I could tell him my history. We are going to be working closely over the next few months and I don't want to be catching my sentences again. On top of that, he seems reasonable so I was hoping that it would not be an issue.

Of course seems and is are two very different things and the nerves start straight away - once you say it you cannot undo it.

But... It went well, he thought it was great that it is possible for me to be myself and has been no different to me since I told him than before. Phew.

There was one very bad thing though - the sun, it disappeared at the farthest point from the office and we got wet in the rain!