The other day, we didn't feel like cooking because we had just conquered a mountain of dirty dishes and it was getting pretty late. So I went to Patrick's fry shack, our favourite address for Belgian delicacies.

As usual, I didn't order mayonnaise on the fries because we are such incredible cheap-skates. When I returned, Mrs.B took the mayo out of the fridge and catapulted a large dab on her fries.

'This mayo tastes funny', she complained. 'And it's all lumpy. I think it's off.'

I looked on the pot to check the preservation date.

'It smells funny too', she continued.

'No wonder', I said, 'this is no mayonnaise. It's garlic sauce.'

The land of Belgium is white with snow. It's the first real winter in years, so we're teaching Wolf everything he needs to know about playing in the snow. I thought him how to make a snowball and throw it at his mother. Then his mother taught him how to make a bigger snowball and throw it at his father.

It escalated from there on.

Granddad brought my old sleigh, so we put Wolf on it and sleighed to the ice-skating rink. It took him a while to get used to the idea, but after a while he made good progress - pushing around a kind of support sled. The lady at the entrance let us take our sled inside, so when Wolf was tired I put hm on the sled and pulled him around. At the end, he even succeeded in making a whole tour on his own two feet, while I kept him upright under his armpits.

In any case, he was making much more progress than his mother. She clung on to the sideboard for dear life. In the end, she tried to 'skate' to the other side, but then the bell rung and we had to come off.

This weekend, the inside of our house was snow white too. Not because we had left all the windows open during the night while a snow storm was blowing over. No, I'm afraid it was all my own doing. After putting plasterboard on the ceiling and on the new wall in the bathroom, I had to fill in the gaps with plaster. This is an annoying job on its own, but then you have to sand everything and refill the gaps that remain and sand it again and... You get the idea.

After an afternoon of sanding I stopped and went downstairs, only to find my wife ironing in a living room filled with white mist. A couple of hours, the mist had settled, so now the whole house is covered in plaster dust.

And the worst part is that I haven't finished yet, so next weekend we'll have some more 'snow' inside.

I finally figured it out: now you can add your name, e-mail, website, etc. with your comment, so no more 'Anonymous said this' and 'Anonymous said that'.

Unless you want to remain anonymous of course...

Today was a big day for little Wolf, because he went to school for the first time. Anxious mommy and worried daddy brought him to the school gate in the early morning. It has been snowing here a lot these last couple of days, so we literally had to wade through centimeters of snow to get there.

Wolf was a bit apprehensive when we waited on the playing ground. When the bell rang, we found his teacher and met his new classmates. After all the toddlers were sorted, they went hand in hand in pairs to their classrooms. We went along to help him get his coat off, but we had barely taken his winter hat off when he stormed inside to check out all those cool toys (he barely has any at home of course).

And that was it. No tears, barely time to give a goodbye kiss because he was too busy prying toys out of other childrens' arms, no drama, nothing.

We scuffled off to the big city, to do some shopping (it is the winter sales period, hooray!). When we returned, Wolf was still as cool as the Fonz'. No mad dash to escape the clutches of his teacher, no never-leave-me-here-again. He said he had played a bit, and done a bit of painting and stuff. Painting! He's never painted before! It's a first, but for Wolf it was all in a days work.

It's hard to impress a toddler these days.

Hi there and welcome to the brand new Bartlog! After four years and a bit, I thought it was high time for a major overhaul of this dusty old weblog. I bid farewell to Thingamablog, the blogging software I've been using all these years. It served me well, but it was becoming a bit cumbersome. It kept all my posts in a database on my home computer, and once a month it had to re-publish a large part of the complete weblog. So after a couple of hundreds of posts, this process would take more and more time. And generally, I would have to try several times to get the first post of the new month published, because the server timed out or cut the connection.

Speaking of servers, I also bid farewell to my Telenet server and hired me some webspace at Versio.nl. This finally enabled me to work with server-side applications, scripts and databases. After much pondering and studying, I decided on Drupal instead of Wordpress to manage this weblog. Drupal is a full content management system (CMS), and as such it can do more than Wordpress, which is more focussed on weblogs. But it has been a steep learning curve, to say the least. So at the moment it is functional, but I'll be tweaking it over the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, I was not able to import my old posts directly into Drupal. This means that I have to copy everything one post at a time to this new location. As you can see, I've transferred about one third so far, but it'll take me another couple of weeks to finish the job. However, I still haven't managed to transfer the Haloscan comments. I hope I won't loose them, but on the other hand I really don't feel like copying them one by one, as you can imagine.

For the fans of my photos - I get quite a lot of attention from picture hunters - this new weblog has a nice feature: a gallery of all the photos that I posted.

Last but not least, I've finally created a domain all for my self. Instead of going to http://users.telenet.be/be.bartlog/bartlog.html you can now find my adventures at www.bartlog.be. I think we can all agree that this new address is slightly easier to remember than the old one. Even I got it often wrong.

So a very happy 2010 and I hope you'll enjoy the new site!

The Efteling in winter

My little niece Hebe in the arms of Pardijn, one of the theme park's mascots.

The Efteling has a wonderful collection of antique merry-go-rounds. Some of them are still powered by steam engines.

The entrance to the magical forest...

Santa's gonna bring me a really nice present!

I just can't wait. So excited!

No more work, well at least not this year. Thirteen whole days of peace and tranquillity. By that I mean of course that I won't have to do the daily commute to Brussels. Because there will be other work. There are ceilings to be installed in the bathroom and the room adjacent to it. And then there's the Christmas shopping, I still have to buy most of my gifts. Of course we also have to visit my parents and Mrs.B's mother and her godmother and then there's the New Year's party for which some friends of ours invited us.

All in all, I'll barely have time for myself.

There is a reason why people don’t take cows into their house as pets. They would piss and poo all over the floor. But who would guess you’d run the same risk with your toddler’s cuddly toy cow?

The other day, it was a bit hectic when we all came home. I was busy in the kitchen making the evening meal. Mrs.B was on the telephone with her sister. Meanwhile, Wolf was happily playing along with his little friends: Bear and Horse and Booh. They were the children and his was the parent, teaching them to use the potty. An innocent game, you know how children imitate their parents.

But then, someone who shall remain nameless and who was too busy calling with her sister had forgotten to empty the potty after Wolf had done a wee. So when Booh went on the potty, Booh’s bottom became wet. And when Wolf noticed that his little friend had dripped all over the floor and living room table, he decided to clean it up himself.

He is such a clean little boy, I don’t know whom he gets it from.

So he used Booh’s pee-soaked bum to rub it all over the living room floor and table. Meanwhile, Mrs.B who was still talking on the phone just looked at her son play and didn’t notice that something was wrong.

It was only when I came in to set the table that I noticed that something was very wrong. It was as if someone had mopped the floor. Then I realized that Mrs.B hadn’t mopped the floor. Then I noticed the potty and the wet trail leading from it. And then Wolf showed me Booh and I could feel that Booh’s bottom was very very wet and very very smelly.

So in the end, Booh went into the washing machine, while Wolf’s negligent mother mopped the floor and cleaned the table - with water and cleaning agent.

Today, we celebrate the fact that I'm one year closer to senility, incontenence, loss of hearing and gray hair. I'm already senile and I don't listen, so I guess I'm halfway there. And I'll probably loose all my hair before it even has the chance to turn gray. So one day soon I'll piss on my shoes in a public toilet and drop stone dead in the act.

As old people tend to spend more and more time napping, I got pijamas as a birthday present. Wolf and Mrs.B practised singing 'Happy birthday' for two weeks, but when the cake came out he refused to sing it.

We went to a child-friendly restaurant in Antwerp this Saturday. And indeed it was child friendly, but the food wasn't that great. I had pumpkin soup with partridge as a starter, but there was so much pepper in it that I didn't taste the fowl - although it didn't taste that foul (please forgive me for that piece of old git humour). Mrs.B had something with speculaas, but again the speculaas was overpowering.

We both ordered the 'saddle of hare with autumn vegetables'. The meat itself wasn't bad, just a tad too well done, but the vegetables were a bad choice. All in all, it wasn't exactly the kind of quality you'd expect for the price we paid, and in the end Wolf was so tired that he never got to play with the other kids in the play area.

As you can see I'm really getting the hang of this old-fart-grumbling thing. Give me another couple of years and they'll glue me to a chair behind a window of an old pensioners home before I'm fifty!

PS: if you really must know: 38