Walking around the "zwartven" in Hooge Mierde

This evening we went for a walk to the zwartven again. There were big clouds, that's always a nice photo opportunity.







And of course, interesting insects......










And the famous: "zonnedauw". A very small plant that catches insects with its arms...






Hooge Mierde is well known for its horse breeding stables, here you see some horses running around. We saw those when we walked back late in the evening. Not bad for a 300mm tele shot with almost no light.

Again: some pictures

Yesterday I saw this beautiful flower in our garden....







And this "hommel" approaching a rose.









This our guitarman Patrick at the rehearsal....










.......Close UP......








And of course, there's also work to be done. Here is a new gaspanel, finally ready after testing, and after solving many small difficult problems.....








When driving back I saw a truck with this funny sign on the back....








And finally......after some work and many spareparts, Marions bike is ready again for road service. I only have to replace the front tyre, because that took a beating in the crash.......

Still a very busy week

After 2 days of Simatic training, a project meeting, the rest of the morning in the steel hardening company for service and an afternoon of catching up with emails, I finally have time for testing the gaspanel in Schiedam tomorrow. That wil finally be the end of a very busy week.

busy day

Pfff. Today was a busy day. In the morning there was a meeting with the labour unions about the new social plan. But before that I had to go to a customer of mine that had PC trouble with a kiln after work on their power supply. They had a PC standing by ready to be configured, but first I had to pick it up. Went quickly in their office, picked up the pc, but then the $%^@% lock of my car jammed and I could not get it open. Had to go in from the backdoor of the car. But that was not all. Unfortunately there was a serious accident in the street of our office. So had to circumnavigate around that. This was for me the first time I attended these union negotiations with the management. After that my co-worker put good old dos 6.22 on it I could install the application and drive back to my customer. Everything worked fine, but they also needed their old programs. Ok, it was on a CDROM, but the PC could not read that in old dos 6.22. I have 2 laptops, 1 with cdrom and no floppy, one with floppy and no cdrom. And I need to install those files with a floppy. So this is how I did it: first start my -normal- laptop with windows XP, put their backup process-files from the cdrom on the usb stick. Then, by using my 2nd dos/windows98 laptop copy the files from the stick on the desktop. Unfortunately, for some kind of reason I could not copy the files on the floppy. So, had to reboot in dos, and then xcopy the files by hand to the floppy. There was only 1 thing left: can the new PC read the floppy.......and it did! Long live old dos.

Just some pictures......

Here's a lama looking kind of nasty at me.....









Here's a "hommel" looking for some food.....








Here we're trying out some new guitars for the band.









This is me playing at our wedding. I don't need another guitar, I like my Ibanez musician '81 very much.

The garden after the rain

All plants really liked the rain that fell on them last week. Everything starts to grow very fast now in our garden.







There are still some small droplets of water on the leaves of our big "hosta" plant......






And here's a hungry "hommel"

Wedding pictures are ready

Check out this link with our wedding pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/pcj.willems/HuwelijkPatrickMarion?authkey=FFlVXyuuugE

Cooking and walking

The roses are already out in our garden......








Had a nice dinner this evening: one of my favorites "Nasi boentjies"







After that I went for a walk at the "zwartven" and saw this buzzard....








And this "meerkoet"







Here it's a little bit closer, but there was not a lot of light, had to do it with 1/20sec shutter at 300mm. But not bad for a "handshot".

Photo album

Check:
http://www.cig.canon-europe.com/a?i=1JmMYymrKE
for my latest photo album

Cake! (again?)

When you say the word "Cake?" at our company.......

.....the people instantly become very happy and like the idea!

2nd day after the wedding....

Here's a picture of the "bouquet"......








The co-workers of Marion put a lot of money in a very big loaf of bread. It was about 1 meter long......











If you look closely you see a 2 euro coin.....









This is the bread and the money after "dissecting" it.

The day after the wedding

The guys at work gave me a very nice new camera, it's a real super-present and I'm very happy with it. This is something I wanted to buy already a long time. It's a Canon Eos 400D, and the nice thing about it is that I can re-use the big flash, the 70-300mm zoomlens, the 28-105mm zoom and remote control of my old and sturdy analog Eos 500N.
Here are some first pictures, but I still have to get used to the many high-tech features of this camera.




This is a macro of a plant standing at my mothers' house window.









Here's my big friend Rens.











Here's my lovely Marion with Amber











Here's a "Roodborstje" that caught a fly for her little ones......






This is our rabbit "Snoopy".







We got a few loafs of bread with money inside, here's Marion, trying to find it.

Wedding Day!

Today is the big day, this is me in my suit at my parents' house.
Today there is many rain, sure hope it will all go allright.....








The wedding car......just arrived at our house where Marion is...










The wedding flowers......










Here we are at the "Postel Abbey" making pictures. It is raining quite a lot but you cannot see much of it on the pictures. Marion had it very cold over there.....









Here we just arrived at the town hall.










Here we have dinner, the food was very nice. This is my brother in law Pieter with his son Rens








They decorated our bedroom.......first we had to clean up before we could lay ourselves to rest after the super party we had today. Despite Marions motorcycle accident we could still open the dance and dance a little bit. The band played loud and everybody was very happy after the party. More pictures will follow.

Picked up wedding gown and suit

Today we picked up Marions wedding gown and my wedding suit at Koonings.

Last rehearsal with the band for Friday

Yesterday evening we had the last rehearsal with our band before playing at our marriage party on Friday.

Funny Animals!

"Moulin Rouge" on Splinter, Beers rocktheater tryout

R1 Sjaak restarts his R1 after river crossing in Congo

Bachelor party!

This weekend they abducted us to the "Castelhoeve" in Castelre for a bachelor party.





First we had dinner in Hoogstraten, after that we got a very nice presentation of the 5-year 255.000km trip around the world of R1-sjaak. We even got a change to sit on his bike! Nice guy and nice trip!







On monday we had some bad luck however. Marion drove her diversion off the road. She only had some bruises, no broken bones luckily! The bike has only plastic damage, she even drove it back from Werkendam to Hooge Mierde! Powerbarbie!