Listening to Avicii. That Wake Me Up When It's All Over song, the one that somehow got under my skin and into my head earlier this year. Miss 10 just asked me to 'play it again' and so there I was, trying to work out font colour for the photograph below, listening to that music.
Miss 10 heads back to school tomorrow, after the last week of school holidays where it seemed Autumn had arrived. As traditionally happens ... 26 celsius is predicted for next week.
Ms 28 and I rushed off to ER early on Saturday morning, 5am actually. We were mostly the only ones there but that didn't help. Turns out you're not meant to race off to ER, you're meant to go to the after hour-doctors however ... we were both concerned about abscessed wisdom teeth and the possibility of blood poisoning. She had never had pain like it and I found her pressing a plastic ice pack directly onto her face.
They loaded her up with an IV painkiller and anti-nausea meds. We walked out there sometime around 8am I think. The IV dose worked for quite some time but there's no real way of avoiding pain when you have wisdom teeth actually pushing your real teeth out of their socket.
Turns out she needs 6 teeth, in total, removed. She's looking into that tomorrow ...it can't be too soon I suspect.
Yesterday was full of 'things that had to be done'. Two trips to the emergency pharmacy on the bike, the supermarket too. Cleaning the house in preparation for another lovely guest ... Inge, the Belgian living in New Zealand. She's back home for a visit and had a 24 hour window of time just for us.
And there was the pavlova to cook for the BBQ at 1.30pm and then ... once there, Fiona committed to filling my glass while we caught up with Ruth and Lucy. Marc, Charlie and Benoit too. And Tom, the lovely Belgian doctor, just home after some years spent living in NZ.
It was a day full of the most marvelous folk really.
I was running on 3 hours sleep and crashed out of this world sometime after 10pm. Feeling so tired that I felt ill.
Today has been a new day. Gert, Miss 10, and I spent the morning spent talking with Inge and Elise. Then I had a few more hours of sleep after our guests had returned to the Westhoek - home for Inge when she's in Belgium. Elise starts school in the morning too.
As so often happens here in my world, it's been a magical, difficult, exhausting, quietly superb couple of days. Inge and I spent quite some time comparing our experiences in each other's countries. Same same but different would best sum them up.
I would love to write of the good, the bad and the ugly of the immigrant thing but perhaps that's for another day, when I'm less tired than tonight finds me.
I noted the following quote in one of my journals. It's a favourite, by Susana Fortes, and I found it in her interesting book Waiting for Robert Capa.
And the photograph ... it was taken at Herculaneum, in Naples. I spent some hours wandering there one hot summer's day.
