Uncle Biek

Boy this long weekend was all but fun due to a persistent headache that was torturing me day in, day out. It started Thursday afternoon already but then still seemed like a ‘normal’ headache that would go away later on, like it usually does. And at first it seemed it would.

Friday morning, however, it was back and didn’t feel like leaving anymore. I went to work as usual but there it just got more severe and after eating up just about the entire stock of aspirins I went home early to give it a chance on leaving. Again, it didn’t. So that meant I had to cancel my date with mom and Hans for the evening.

The on Saturday morning it was as good as gone so I was pretty happy that it had only lasted roughly one long day. Unfortunately it wasn’t gone for long and started to come back again quite rapidly. As a precaution I phoned up my sister and excused myself for their party that night because with my headache I would be no fun to have around plus that the prospect of loud-ish music wasn’t the best at that moment.

As soon as I closed the shop I went to bed with a cold and wet towel wrapped around my head after having taken in a few aspirins again. This worked quite well actually and when I woke up again at around nine thirty I felt pretty good. So I took a cool shower and head over to my sis and bro’s to catch a glimpse of their party. It was nice to see them again, even though the returning headache cut that visit a little short again.

They said that if I felt good enough I could come around for a bbq the next day, a date I had to cancel too because on Sunday my head was thumping like before. It was a bit of a strange headache, by the way, constantly on the front right side of my head while usually it’s more like a bond around my head and going down my neck and spine. Odd.

After sleeping most of the Sunday away in my (thankfully completely darkened) bedroom I finally lost most of the headache and it was reduced to a slight lurking in the background one.

Monday morning it was completely gone but the date I had planned for that day still couldn’t go through. We had planned on joining another classic tour drive but dad cancelled out and since Bas had already let me know that he couldn’t make it there was no one left to take with me so that wasn’t going to be much fun going alone anyway.

And to top the weekend off I crashed out terribly during the GPRT sim race we had yesterday, messing up that evening as well. I guess I’m not that good at having long weekends …

So … how was yours? ;-)

Last night during snooker at Jaap’s place, we all had a good couple frames. My first two frames unfortunately were just as usual: crap. The next one was already a bit better and the last few were simply good. Good enough for my present form anyway.

The strange thing is that when we were still playing competition snooker I was always super strong in my first frames. No practice needed, just unpack the cue, get to a table and play solid snooker from frame one and slowly get worse during the next few. Somehow it seems I’ve turned into a (very) slow starting player and really need to loosen up before I’m able to pot some balls. Odd, must be an age thing.

Bas on the other hand had a couple of excellent first frames, he was knocking in twenty plus breaks at a few visits each frame and there was little we could do to stop him from winning those.

We may have been influenced by the snooker World Championships being aired at the moment, somehow that has to work as a morale boost of some kind.

At the end of the evening we, as is almost usual on snooker Tuesday’s, went home a little too late but hey, that’s all in the game. :-)

I’m writing you this when it happened but will not be able to post it before tomorrow morning because my internet connection, or to be precise: my phone line, got disconnected just a few minutes ago and this moment of disconnection was so unbelievably bad timed because tonight would have been my first race with the GPRT in a very long time. Somehow it seems it just wasn’t meant to be.

Tonight would have been my great re-entree in ‘the racing scene’ which sounds awesome but is actually nothing more than me racing online with the GPRT again, for the first time since a (too) long absence. As you might remember, hardware problems had caused my gaming PC to die out on me and although it hasn’t been fixed yet, I did manage to get my previous machine setup so it can run rFactor, our most used sim. It now runs in such a way that I can race online with the guys once again which is all that I need for now. I want to race again. Period.

At first I thought it was a rFactor server hiccup, because those do happen from time to time, and when I switched my screen to the server’s it showed that everybody but me had disconnected from it so I restarted the server to let everyone reconnect once again. But when the server had restarted nobody joined it for a few minutes which is odd. Normally after a restart everyone is waiting for the server to come online and join in directly, but tonight nobody did.

After waiting a few minutes more I turned to our forum to see if there were any problems and then the scale of the problem became a little bit clearer to me: I lost my internet connection. No wonder nobody could join, the server wasn’t even visible online. Duh! So I cursed at the bad timing, reset the modem and waited until the ADSL connection kicked in, which is usually after a few seconds. Again though, tonight was an exception. The modem came back online as usual but no ADSL connection could be made.

To determine where the problem was coming from I tried the phone next and that’s when I found out that there was no dial tone. No dial tone meant no phone line, which in terms meant ADSL couldn’t work either. Damn! I called the service line on my mobile phone and the ever friendly tape I got told me that there was a ‘problem with the network in my region’ and that it would take until tomorrow morning seven o clock to get it fixed. Right. That’s it then.

Next I phoned Bas to explain the situation and why the server had gone and then called dad to tell him that he possibly wouldn’t have internet tomorrow. He asked me if I remembered that there had been a notice about some maintenance work being done this Monday … Obviously, I didn’t. Well, so much for returning to the track. It is simply not going to happen tonight, that’s for sure. So I’m just going to watch a movie now and hope that tomorrow everything is restored to normal.

Have a nice evening all.

OKR stands for Oranje Klassier Rit which is an annual cruise for classic cars on Queens day here in Holland. This year was the first time I joined in and also my first classic car cruise with my Volvo since I’ve got her so in more than one ways this was a special day.

And that special day almost didn’t even happen for us, as the weather Gods meant they had to do some playing up there and spoil our fun. The forecast for this week was: Monday sixty percent chance of rain, Tuesday had fifty percent chance and Wednesday, the day of the cruise, had a whopping seventy percent.

Dad and Margot, who Bas and I initially were going to be joining on this day, pulled out because of this nasty weather forecast but we decided to just wait and see what would happen on the day of the cruise. And what happened was one of the best days over the past few weeks.

When I woke up I could see blue skies and the sun braking through, which was of course a good sign, but the closer time moved to the moment where I had to leave and pick up Bas the worse the weather looked. It got dark and small drops of rain were already falling from the sky. When I walked to the car it had already began raining a little harder so I thought I’d just drive over to Bas and see what we’d do with the day. We had made alternative plans in case the rain would come through and spoil our drive.

But after this small rain shower the sky cleared up and started to look great again. While we were driving to the starting point of the cruise the weather became better and better. Upon arrival there it was a sunny day and we walked around in our t-shirts. It’s amazing how fast things can turn around.

We did a bit of a detour while getting there and could barely get our starting number and description before the lot went on their way. After the first couple of miles my Volvo started to make a weary noise so we stopped to check it out. It didn’t sound too harmful but you never know, do you? It turned out to be a slightly moved rubber ring so we continued.

Due to this pit stop we completely lost the connection with the group so now Bas got in his element on reading the cryptic route description. He did an absolute marvelous job and we proceeded so nicely that we caught up with the group a lot sooner than we had hoped. Over the entire day we saw a few specific cars numerous times because of their inability to read the route as good as Bas could. We had lots of fun at their expense.

The trip finished at one of the best locations I’ve ever been to with one of these classic car events: a small pool of water with a music chapel in the middle where a jazz band was live playing very nice music. We had a drink and a last look around at all the cars and then went home again.

All in all it was a long but very nice day and we should definitely do this again. Soon. :-)