Wilgje.net

It’s been quiet around here. Very quiet indeed. I’ve been meaning to update, I’ve had many posts in my mind regularly, but I’ve been too busy with other things to do it. It’s the age-old excuse everyone has for not updating their blogs, but however tacky it may be, it’s true. Not all things I’ve experienced have been good, but I’ll try and tell some of it here. And there are interesting ideas and news items I still want to write about of course. My future is as always quite uncertain, but I know it will be a busy year. Please pin me down on this one: by august I want to be an MA in ICT and Translation (because I want that on my CV!). See ya! ;)

I’ve been living in Castricum for a while now, and things are going well. My interior is improving bit by bit, I’m finally getting the feeling I’m coming home when I get here. All’s awesome on that account.

When I was still painting the walls here, before I’d actually moved in, I noticed the massive amounts of mail my mailbox gathered each day. When I’d been gone for a few days, I’d find that the mailman had stuffed the last bit in there with force. I always feel better with an empty mailbox and I got sick of all the excess paper, so I started trying to get rid of all unwanted stuff.

So when I moved in, my first move was a NEE/NEE-sticker (which says ‘no, I don’t want local newspapers and no, I don’t want flyers with commercials etc’). That solved just a fragment of it, at least the big heaps of newspapers were gone.

However, the previous inhabitants got a shitload of mail. By a shitload I mean, at least 4 pieces of it a day, varying from ads to loans to payments to magazines to lots of porn I never wanted to see. During the move, they picked up their mail several times, each time claiming they were going to cancel or move the services.

At the time I had two things: his phone number and her e-mail address. First I tried calling the guy, let’s call him Guy. I talked to him, he said ‘sure I’ll come pick up the mail next weekend’, I stayed home all weekend and called again. No answer, no Guy. I tried that again, then it actually succeeded because I said I’d throw it out if he didn’t drop by. He solemnly pledged to move all the services in his mail. He didn’t, not even a single one of them.

Some time later I’d gathered a new big pile, and I thought I’d be kind. I asked for their new address in an e-mail I sent the girl, let’s call her Girl. I happily got it, because Girl knew it’d be way easier to have a free mail forwarding service than to pick it up themselves. I sent them a costly package by mail once, knowing it’d solve nothing.

Anger was building up, but now I had a tool: their new address. At that point I started keeping up with whatever I got, how I dealt with it and what the result was. Everything I could easily send back with the right address on it, I did. If I found an easy phone number, I called it. I made absolutely sure every service was moved instead of deleted. Perhaps that’s evil, but then I couldn’t resist. It was the one way I could show them how much I care about their mail getting to them properly!

I have some stats for the amount of mail I got. I started this file on 5 april 2010, lots and lots of mail had already passed before I started indexing it. So that’s 5 months worth of mail. The file shows I’ve had mail from 27 different companies, and most of them didn’t get the first notice of the address change. I missed a few things while indexing, so I estimate I got around 85-90 pieces of mail (27 times 3, give or take a few, some companies were really persistent). A few themes were big with them: scouting, charities, diabetes and porn. The charities were particularly difficult to cancel. The highlight of this adventure was when I got a nice anonymous package delivered. Two cockrings, addressed to Guy.

Now my mailbox is relatively quiet. I do still receive Quest, a monthly magazine full of fun facts. Quest doesn’t care if their payment gets bounced or their letters get returned, I still get the magazine. It’s good reading material for in the bathroom. Next to that, I still receive mail from WWF (bunch of sad pandas they must be) and every now and then a new type of loan. I wonder when they’re going to send me flowers. They’d certainly look better on my coffee table than that pile of paper…

Well I’m posivitely flabberghasted. Here’s why.

I’m one of very few people, I imagine (perhaps I’m wrong), who’ve never considered being overweight as anything other than their own fault. I blamed lots of factors in my life, but nothing which I had no control over. I thought it must be the eating pattern I had when living with my family (my mother is overweight as well), combined with the lack of exercise. Since I only tried to go on a diet once and failed miserably at that, I figured I simply wasn’t trying enough.

Yet I don’t eat lots of food, like people have always assumed. I’ve witnessed the astonishment of many friends as I claimed to be full while they expected me to want at least a second plate. I’ve never liked those responses, yet I can’t blame them. If I saw a fat person I’d think exactly the same. The problems I have with eating are a) I need more vegetables b) I need to ignore things like one-euro-snacks at train stations c) I need to schedule my eating pattern a bit better. These factors are reasons for being a bit overweight, but not for being like me. I gained weight over the last couple of years, doing nothing at all different from when I didn’t gain much weight before. Oh and you might not believe this, but I actually tend to forget to eat. Or drink. It doesn’t make much sense really.

A few weeks ago I had an introductory meeting at my new physician. A few days before that meeting took place, my dad collapsed from heart failure, and he was admitted into the hospital. It was bad but he’s still alive and back home, thank goodness. It’ll take about half a year before he gets to go back to work again. When I went to the meeting with my doctor, I was more than a bit shaken up by this (I don’t want to go down that road) and I told her about that. She asked if anything was bothering me and I started about my weight. I’d get a dietitian and a blood test to rule out certain malfunctions in my body.

Parallel to this story, is another story about my dentist who told me ‘hey you don’t have much saliva’. I said ‘well I have next to no tears either’, which was determined last year. He ordered a test at the hospital to exclude a disease which might cause both, called Sjögren. So Friday morning I went there and the surgeon asked me about my weight, and I thought ‘not this again’. He asked me about a number of other symptoms which I could confirm. Really, talking to a dental surgeon about your digestion is the weirdest thing ever. Then, he explained he asked me this because he thought my thyroid (NL: schildklier) wasn’t working as it should be, and there should be a blood test to confirm that. Well of course I’d already had that blood test a few days earlier. The results were just in and they confirmed it: my thyroid is working too slowly.

With my thyroid not doing its job, a diet wouldn’t have helped a thing. If I get a cure for my thyroid, I get a cure that will help me lose weight, decrease my paranoia, depression and fatigue, and fix other more minor problems I’ve had. Now all I need to do is wait until I get to see the doctor on Wednesday, and I will be a lot wiser for it. With a cure I might just lose weight for the first time ever. I can’t wait!

Well this is quite annoying. My alarm clock doesn’t function anymore. That is, it works fine, it would still scare the shit out of all the customers like it did that day in the store when I bought it. But nothing wakes me up anymore. I’m supposed to wake up at 5:00am, but there are a few scenarios that occur almost daily. Option one, I switch off my alarm clock in my sleep and I wake up later. Much later. I’ve only once overslept later than 7 am, but I generally oversleep at least an hour. Today I woke up on my own at 7. Option two, I snooze. And snooze. And snooze. And snooze. Until it’s at least past 6. Then I think, ‘wait how many times did I hit that button?’, and I calculate it must have been at least 6 times… but I never recall any of that. And then there’s option number three, I switch on the radio in order to wake up a bit and I end up falling asleep to the sound of a lullaby (when you’re tired, AC/DC songs are lullabies too).

Well apparently this means I have some catching up to do when it comes to sleeping. I realise now that I have been so incredibly sleep-deprived for so long, that it’s made me accept that 4 hours a night with regular disturbances in the middle of the night was all I got. Now I go to bed at 9 or 10 pm and I don’t even wake up at 5. This started me thinking, because I have two options: panic and try to keep up with the ‘get up at 5′ schedule, or take that extra sleep and go to work later. Given my flexible work times I’ve decided to go for the latter, which means I’m actually awake when I show up for work nowadays.

In the mean time, I’m going to have to find a new alternative for waking up in the morning. I’m considering getting me one of those Philips Wake-up Lights, but I don’t know, that’s mighty expensive for something that might not even work for me. Currently I’m quite out of other options though. A wake-up light, a foghorn, a bucket of icy cold water over my face and a marching band in my bedroom, now that might work. Hey percussion dudes, you might want to try a little harder. And bring more drums.

Yesterday it (finally) came to my attention that apparently in Castricum there’s a plague of brown rats. Afraid of ending up writing an FML, I visited a meeting that was held last night, during which people were informed about the status of the problem and measures already taken. This meeting also allowed people to ask questions and make suggestions. The representatives were 2 members of the town council, a member of KAD (who get rid of plagues) and Rentokil (who cooperate with KAD).

Now, I was wondering why I should go there since I haven’t seen any rats or signs of rats, but I thought I’d better be safe and check it out. The good news is, it probably won’t concern my area since all the houses there are new and have proper sewers. But most of the people I saw live in the older part of Castricum. Through the sarcasm and anger I heard several (shocking) facts:
- These people have been dealing with this issue for fifteen years. For the longest time, the town council got complaints but haven’t responded. Juicy detail: upon the question of how many complaints there were and how they were dealt with, there was no reply from any of the represented parties. I got the impression they haven’t been very adequate in the past.
- In cases where Rentokil did show up to fix the problem, they did their job poorly and they were apparently unsuccessful.
- The old sewers are made of glazed stoneware pipes (NL gresbuizen), which is a weak material and has disintegrated at certain places. That is where the rats can exit the sewers. Apparently these pipes should have been replaced years ago, but that hasn’t happened. One lady complained the maintenance in her street was now 6 years overdue.
- It took ages before people even had an inkling of where in Castricum this problem is going on. Of course the people who live in it know, but it would have been nice to know how widespread this problem is. There was no map, only a small indication of places that have been investigated. This brings me to the next point.
- Three neighbourhoods have been investigated. Actually only two-and-a-half, since one neighbourhood was only partly investigated. All the places they checked showed clear signs of rats. They would NOT admit, however, that it was an actual plague.
- In 1998, the Dutch government decided that consistently checking for rat plagues was no longer in their best interest. Since then, there has been no consistent data about the existence and/or nuisance of rats in the Netherlands. The reason why they cannot call this a plague is because they have no actual recent data indicating ‘normal’ values to compare against.
- The focus of this meeting was very much primarily put on what people have to do in their own homes in order to prevent rats from entering them. There was no insight into what the town council is going to do about the problem in public places, or if the sewers are finally going to be replaced.

People were very angry, and rightly so. I haven’t seen even one rat or met any of these people and this outrages me too. This is one big pile of negligence and governmental failure. I just hope this problem doesn’t move towards where I live.