Buddy, Bear, Brexit and Learning To Speak Dutch

Last night, I was in bed by 11.50pm… asleep by 12.45am and awake by 5.50am… thanks to wheezy moped guy… I awoke with a sore hip, sore back, headache and feeling washed out… 😦 Bear got up to go to the bathroom and popped a muscle in his lower back, so he’s shuffling around carefully. See, we’re definitely getting too old for this shit.! 😀 Spring is in the air this morning… there are crocuses and narcissi coming up on the road verges and our buddleia, Buddy Jr. is rapidly turning green… and starting to blossom on the lower branches.! 😮

Bear has today off, and is down in the basement looking for the extra cable to thread his speaker cable around the room rather than over the sitting room door, where it currently is and keeps falling down from. It’s been in danger of being yanked out of the speaker base a few times, so it really needs to be moved. I’m going to get the vacuuming done that I didn’t do yesterday, although I did get a meal plan sorted for the week, the laundry sorted and the bathroom cleaned, and went with Bear to help with the grocery shopping, so it’s not like I sat on my butt doing nothing.

I got a Brexit letter yesterday from the local council, telling me that as some point between now and December 31 2020 I will be invited to apply for permanent residency in the Netherlands. I was given a temporary residence permit last March in case the UK left without a deal, but as they now have a deal, it’s not necessary for me to have one as I’m eligible to stay under the transition period regulations. By January 31st 2021 I will have permanent residency here. Yeay.! \o/

Now to learn the language… hahahaha.! No, seriously, I’ve been trying to learn the language since before I moved here in November 2010, Bear said he’d teach me… yeah, another alien concept. He can pick up languages really easily and taught himself to speak English when he was a teen, he can speak French and German and knows Belgian, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Latin, some Polish and a little Irish… and yet he won’t teach me to speak his native language. 😦

He was perfectly happy for me to teach his children English, who are now top of the class in English lessons and his own English has come along in leaps and bounds, but my Dutch is piss poor. I can understand a lot more than I can say, because I don’t pick up languages easily and have trouble with pronunciation, which is worth laughing at, apparently, but not worth correcting.

Tonight’s culinary offering is Spinach, tomato and preserved lemon pilaf.