Koraal Tabak with the dogs

This was the last morning we could go to the beach (where dogs are allowed) with the dogs before they'll start stressing out because of the fireworks. The fireworks here on the island are pretty loud, which I actually love, oddly enough. It just feels right some way or another, guess it's because I grew up with it. Anyway, we went off to the beach and I took plenty of pictures and even filmed sometimes. 

Here is a clip I've made and a couple of pictures :)

Playing around

They're both pretty bad swimmers... One (Rex) splashes A LOT and the other (Maxie) basically jumps in the shallow waters... As you can see here 

Rex, or as I often call him 'sexy Rexy'. Don't ask, it rhymes...

Some other car arrived!

Lucky shot! 

'I never played with sand! How dare you ask!'

Got everything out of the car back home, and they jump back in... Not really willing to get out. (I got the chance to go in the house, grab my camera and come back outside.)

Christmas spirit

Since my last post was a bit down, and I want to stay in the Christmas spirit, I thought maybe share some of our decorations here :) It's not all as these were taken a while back, but it's nice and jolly if you will. I especially love the tree which smells so nice! I always think Christmas whenever I smell the pine tree smell :) Hmmm happy smells!

Crush lost my car (dream)

Blogging at my parents' place just is not working out for me :( I wanted to blog so much things but, yeah... Did not get the chance. Anyhow, the dream I just had:

I was in Boston (I tend to dream that often lately...) and I was walking around with a friend of mine I've had since primary school. We had to walk since a crush of mine borrowed my car. So I had to walk. We went to a gathering where he was as well, and after the gathering we walking together the three of us, he was walking a bit faster and I almost had to jog to keep up with him, resulting with my friend being left behind a bit. Either way we were walking to where he parked my car, but in the middle of it he said he was late for another place, so he gave me the keys and pointed in a general direction where he parked my car. 

So my friend and I walked to the parking lot, only to not find my car. It was an old black car and there were many so I had to look carefully if one of these were mine. None of them were. So we walked further, so far that eventually we were at my house. Still no car. My friend told me to call him and demand that he shows me where he parked my car, since he borrowed it. But I was hesitant to do so. I did not want to bother him. It would be fine, I was just not looking hard enough. 

And I woke up. Issue is, that this does state my personality a lot. I am trying to stand up for myself more, but in the environment I am in now, this is almost impossible :( But I did stand up for myself today :) It's a start in the right direction! 

Happy holidays!! 

 

Photography

I decided to open a new blog dedicated to my photography. Here's the link: http://stephanievhphotography.blogspot.com

And this is one of the pictures I've posted on there which is one of my favorites!

Gotta love my little island Curacao :)

   <3

Home for christmas! Meet the dogs

I am home for christmas! And I have an excellent camera that I tried out today. My models were my parents' dogs (I also consider them my dogs, especially Rex since we've got him while I still lived at home). And they will be for quite a lot of photos too. I just love taking pictures of them :)

So here they are:

Maxi 

Rex

I love the quality of the pictures with this camera! And I still have a lot to figure out with the features. Great photography times ahead!

<3

Placebo live @ Ziggo Dome (8 Dec 2013)

This will be one of those super excited posts! Yesterday I was at the Placebo concert in the Ziggo Dome, and I have been looking forward to this for quite some time. Actually since the last time I saw them live which was at pinkpop 2009:

 

Better quality than my iPhone pics. It was great not having anyone standing in front of you :)

I was so lucky to be able to stand all the way in the front for that concert! You see some snippets here and there when I was in the shot of the audience... I still cringe whenever I see myself in the video. But anyway from that time when I first saw them, I wanted more. And I wanted to at least see them in concert when it's not a festival, and I took my chance! Granted the tickets did not come cheap, I had to pay 50 euro's for my ticket which as a student without a job is pretty much my food for a week. But it was all worth it! And I would go again in a heartbeat! Of course if I had the money. Above is one of the pics I took at Pinkpop 2009 :)

So yeah I was at the concert hall half an hour before the door opened, and there were already quite a few people standing in line. So after we got in, we had to place our coats and bags in a locker, which took a bit of time, and I had to wait for my friend for a bit. Yes this annoyed me a little bit because I kept seeing all these people pass me by getting better spots than me while I was in the line longer. A bit selfish I know, that's also why I kept it inside either way. We got decent spots and even though there were some tall guys in front of me (i'm pretty short), I could still see the stage fairly well. 

The opening act was a band called TOY and it wasn't my style to be honest. It felt to me like they were trying too hard to be eclectic. Next to that the light show they had was very annoying. Most people had their eyes shut or turned away from the stage. I couldn't look at them either. The light kept flashing directly at you so you only saw their silhouettes and because the lights were flashing in all colours, it just felt like you were tripping since you started seeing those spots you get after an intense light hits your eye. That for a bit more than half an hour was too much. So I was happy it was over. Don't get me wrong, their music was good, just I've heard it before and I wasn't impressed. Also it just was not my style. 

Then for the show we all came for: Placebo!!! The first song I didn't know, which annoyed me a bit, but from there on I sang along with every song. Yep I guess I was one of those annoying people in the audience. But I got a lot of smiles at me from the people around so I guess they didn't mind :) Maybe because they saw how happy I was to be there jumping and singing along and stuff. I absolutely LOVED the concert! Yes I am biased, so you shouldn't ask me to critique them because I've been a fan since I was in high school, which is almost 10 years ago (damn I'm getting old!). 

At a certain point two very tall guys (that were under the influence of drugs if you ask me) came standing in front of me. I'm too nice, because if I see someone in the crowd looking forward and trying to pass, I let them pass because in my mind they're trying to get back to their friends... How wrong was I. They stood right in front of me and kept talking the entire time. I could follow their conversation better than I could hear the music. Apparently they got in for only a couple of euro's and didn't even know the band. They made fun of the people that were looking forward to it for months and they were here standing in front somewhere. I kinda got pissed off, I mean fine that you don't know the music is okay, but you don't go to stand in front of short people when you're clearly very tall (nearing 1.90 meters) and then talk instead of listening to the music! So I just sang louder whenever they tried to talk and jumped a bit more against them when it was the appropriate jumping time. This annoyed them a little bit I guess because they didn't talk as much anymore. Thankfully after about 4 songs they wanted to get more beer so they left! I still enjoyed the songs Placebo played while those douchebags stood there, but I enjoyed it much more when they were gone :D They played about 1 more song and then left the stage to wait for the encore. Which of course came pretty fast and so more singing along and jumping and dancing :D They played the new album of course, but also classics such as Special K, Every You Every Me, the Bitter End, Black Eyed and Kitty Litter which naturally I all love. There were a couple more songs I would have loved for them to play, but I mean if they would've played all the songs I would want to hear live, they would have to play at least 5 hours. And I do understand that that would be a bit much ;-) 

Afterwards I asked my friend if he liked the concert, since he wasn't biased. And he actually did :) If he didn't he would have said so I do believe. I'm still so happy I got to go! It passed by so fast though, even though they played for about 2 hours.

So here is a very amateural picture of mine and more professional ones I got from the internet :) 

Sorry for the quality, it's an iPhone picture...

Last 2 pictures from the Ziggo Dome twitter account. (@ziggodome)

Nail polish: Jesse's Girl Intensity Nail Color; Glee

As there's people working in my bathroom at the moment, I figured I might as well post something about the polish I'm wearing. It's kinda funny how they're (the workers) getting rid of the tiles in the same rhythm as the music I have on right now though. But anyway, let's proceed to the nail polish!

I bought this one more than a year ago in Boston and have gotten many compliments on it. Sadly we don't have this brand in the Netherlands, but we have many nail polish brands so I can't complain :)

Somehow I thought this color was names Island Girl, no idea how I came to that conclusion since that is nowhere written on the bottle. The color is Glee and it's pretty and sparkly! 

The bottle Jesse's Girl, Glee! And yes there's a drop of polish right next to the G. Happened when I just bought it :( 

The polish does not cover that well, so I had to put 4 layers of it on, but the result is very pretty! And also Christmassy! Here some pictures of my nails in different light :)

Tried out something different here to make the pic... Not sure if I like it, kinda looks like one hand is strangling the other... But you do see how the color looks in the shadow vs a bit more light :)

And here's a pic of how the polish looks in the light.

As you can see it has a green/blueish and gold shimmer to it. It's not a gel-like polish, so for me that's a good thing since it'll stay on longer - not easy to peel off. I really like it :)

<3

Throwback Thursday: Music

Because I absolutely cannot live without music, I figured why not do a throwback thursday with a song that I loved in the past? So without further ado, here is the first song ever that I can remember loving. 

Sinead O'Conner - Nothing Compares 2U

I think I was 2 or 3 years old and I was absolutely convinced that Sinead was crying in the video. It is a bit of a depressive song but somehow it touched me as a toddler and I still love the song to this day :)

<3

Small Christmas shop

As I was catching up with a friend I've known for almost 20(!!) years now, we passed a cute little Christmas shop in Amsterdam centre, so I figured why not share this deliciously yummy christmassy stuff? So here are a couple of pictures :) 

I am really excited for Christmas so there will be many more christmassy posts coming up ~ just so you know :D 

"I'm so excited! And I just can't hide it!" 

They had so much cute stuff! And we were very afraid we might accidentally bump something over and break it, thankfully that did not happen!!

Sorry for the quality, but as you can see everything was super expensive so we did not buy anything. But it's a nice store to visit either way :)

Random picture of the Christmas decor in the street, this one really reminded me of a DNA strand! Yes I find that cool, I'm a nerd :)

<3

Spooky nightmare

Yup I had a pretty intense nightmare last night, whereby I woke up all icky and sweaty and scared and afraid to fall asleep again even though my eyes did not want to stay open, which made it all more scary for me somehow. Aaaanyway let's get this story typed out now!

I was talking to my supervisor in Amsterdam about job opportunities and he mentioned a group in New York that performed excellent research in retrotransposon activity. Well I did prefer to do my research in GBM, but this sounded very cool as well, so I agreed to it. Catch was I would live in a student zone in NYC, I didn't mind since I'm used to that and as long as I have a place to stay in the beginning I'm happy. I figured I can always look for a different place there if it didn't suit me.

I was in NYC, walking down the street, it was daylight and very busy with many students running around and throwing with water balloons and having fun. 

Picture from google

I was with my sister and we just bought/rented (?) a house outside of the city. I didn't mind having to travel over an hour to work as long as I had a nice place to rest (doesn't sound like me here...). The garden was dead and the house looked like something from the 60's. But hey, my sister was happy with it and I didn't mind. Then the weird stuff started. There was

a lot of wind sometimes in the middle of the house, weird sounds... I remember talking to my dead dog and being happy that she was at my side and protecting me. I also had to tell my parents that she was very thankful for the life she had living with them. I was starting to worry that now that I openly accepted the link I had with my dog's spirit that maybe other spirits would also show, perhaps the bad kind. This scared me.

The weird stuff in the house continued, I got locked up in the washing room and could not get out. I screamed and kept hitting and kicking the door and called for my sister who was just in the other room, and all of a sudden she opened the door, like it was never locked. She never heard me, just wondered why I was taking so long. So we figured at that point that we're dealing with an evil spirit. She went to the bathroom and my parents came by to check on us. I kept looking at the bathroom's door, since I did not trust the silence, but my parents were not worried. My sister took very long so I decided to check it out, only to find that she was hung by the chain from the toilet. She was dead. 

We were all very shocked and because it was getting dark we figured to all sleep in the same bed so we'd be by each other's side. I then had an out of body experience where I saw the phone-cord choking all 3 of us at the same time, when I saw us waking up, I woke up from the nightmare. 

What also scared me was that my teddy bear positioned so it was looking at me. It always sat at the exact same spot so this is just normal, but at that moment I had to place the bear somewhere else. It's been a while since I've had a nightmare like this, and my morning was not fun because of it! So I was happy I was meeting a friend in the city.