Happy high five!

It’s a miracle. I’ve discovered there’s a DIY-er inside of me. One that actually finishes stuff. 

Did some awesome things this week!

1. Photoshoot.

I’m a terrible photographer, but a while ago I decided for my blog to take better pics. I’ve learned a lot since then. And now… I did a photoshoot of my beautiful pregnant friend! I’m still not very good, but I was pretty surprised how good it turned out.

2. Bear.

Made a bear cake for my pregnant friend (who is really not me! But I’m respecting her privacy, so am not showing a full picture of her). The cake is not that special, ‘cause I bake more often than I DIY, but I like the colours and flavours. There’s vanilla cake, cinnamon cake and chocolate cake.

Friday.

So after the very sad news my aunt had passed away, I was going through a lot of crazy things.

One moment so mad at myself for being too busy to visit her, other moments feeling better. Feeling guilty for feeling better.

Feeling joy seeing my students, who gave a lot of love this week. Most of them not knowing I was so sad.

So, here we are at the end of the week. The beginning of a weekend I do not want to start. Tomorrow is the funeral. But this is life. And we better celebrate it, than sit on our sad butts.

And because life always has a bright side, I better look at it today :-)

My five top things:

1. A nice present.

Our intern is leaving us and gave me two sorts of tea, chocolate and a box for tea. She is so sweet.

2. Villeroy and boch.

We have very expensive mugs, but we love to use them everyday. Why wait for special occasions? These are the espresso cup, the coffee mug and the tea mug (which I used for my cappuccino that morning).

3. Dinner date.

I saw my sweet and funny friend (and niece) Latoya and her boyfriend again, after months of not seeing her. She cooked us a delicious pasta and a Salad Caprese. I will leave out the part where we watched old videotapes of us lip syncing to the Backstreet Boys.

Oops, sorry for the weird iPhone-is-taking-a-picture-shadow.
And btw, the strawberry mint tea is great! 

High five for Friday!

Can’t say I’ve had an interesting, inspiring week.

Can’t name five highs. So I’ll just post a pics of something pretty i found this week. And the five things I love about it.

1. There are soooo many cute icons to choose from. I change them constantly ‘cause I’m not satisfied yet.

2. It’s mostly pink.

3. There are lots of dots.

4. I get very happy when I look at my iPhone.

5. I have an icon that calls my hubs when I tap it. It’s a picture of an apple. Because he’s an AppleFrank Applefreak.

Linking up with Lauren. Happy weekend!

The app is called Cocoppa. Have fun ;-) 

High five for Friday!

Happy Friday everyone!

How was your week?

My highlights of the past few weeks:

1. Premiere Sister Act

My friend Mark got tickets from a friend and asked me to go with him. This show is a must see, so hilarious and the music is great! 

2. Seeing Les Miserables

A friend of ours, a great theatre teacher, directed Les Mis on the high school where he teaches. It was great.

And the best part? My husband, in a spot in the back, conducting the whole piece. And wearing a bow :-)

3. Home made Dutch pea soup

I don’t think I can explain this Dutch soup. It probably doesn’t seem that good if you see the pic. But it’s delicious. A thick soup, made of green peas. Yum.

4. A little break.

We had half an hour left before work so my intern and I got us a nice McDonalds burger. Did anyone read my Le MacDo post? I’m very curious what a American Macmenu looks like :-)

 

5. Watching Sex and the City.

While I was watching a rerun on tv, my hubs was playing with his Ipad. He overheard some whining from Carrie and immediately said: “Is she breaking up with the jazz musician?” I laughed and kissed him. Because he was right. That means I watched this show way too many times.

Happy weekend!

Linking up with Lauren from www.frommygreydeskblog.com.

High five for France!

Oh what a lovely week it has been. We’ve been spending a couple of days in Normandy, France. It was cold, but we enjoyed our days with some shopping, cooking, eating and watching movies.

My five faves of this week:

1. Driving to France

It took about six hours to get to Normandy. My hubs drove the whole way, singing all the time.

2. Basilique in Lisieux

It was peaceful and quiet, because of so little tourists in this time of year. So we got to take pics without other people on it and walk slowly through the basilique.

3. Les macarons

First time I tried it. Delicious! And now I know how they’re supposed to taste, I want to try making them sometime. Have you tried it? It seems to be not that easy.

4. Wine and food.

Lots. Of. Wine.

The French are serious about it. This is my hubs in the supermarket. So much too choose from!

And food... well, what's not to love about food. Hubs tried some new recipes.

5. Le MacDo

And yes, we went to the McDonalds one time! 

French McDonalds is just like Dutch McDonalds. Except when you have to order. Stay tuned for my Macdo-post this week! 

My hubs made pacmans from the French cheese. Not kidding.

Have a great weekend!

Linking up with Lauren!

High five for Friday... or Saturday

After weeks of being silent on the blog, I decided to push myself, make some pics and write that Fridaypost. Well, at least, if it were still Friday.

Here in Holland, it’s almost midnight, so technically almost Saturday.

But over there where you are, I still have time :-)

So here we go!

My faves of this week:

1. My hubs buys me the Cosmopolitan every month. :-)

2. Morning cappuccino’s are the best when I can’t seem to wake up!

High five for holidays!

Back with a High five post!

What a lovely Christmasbreak it has been. 

As I told you in my previous posts, hubs and I went to Egypt on vacation. 

 

These are my holiday high fives:

1. Presents!

We celebrate Christmas with our family earlier. We got awesome gifts!

I got the dvd boxes of Private Practice and Grey’s Anatomy. Not a surprise, ‘cause I ask for the new season of Grey’s Anatomy every year with Christmas. But I'm happy with it!

And my hubs gave me a fantastic Ipad Mini. I LOVE that thing! It fits in my purse :-)

2. Our Christmastree.

We didn’t have a real tree this year, but I made it comfy anyway with a small fake tree and decorations. Cute, right?

3. Mini Santa.

Our nephew. We bought him a mini Santa pajama.

Cutenessssss!

4. Egyptian Christmas.

This is always a big event! Music, dancing, lots of people in a huge tent. And an incredible dinner…

Not to mention the cocktails at the pool, and being in the sun all day long.

I know, I'm obsessed with taking pictures of food...

5. New Years Eve.

We celebrated it with some dear friends. And there was fooood!

Bruschetta, spinach quiche, home made herb butter, fish and lots of other good stuff. And of course a lot of wine, prosecco, champagne and white chocolate liquor…

Hope you had wonderful holidays too!

I wish you all the best for 2013 and hope you keep following my little blog.

Happy new year!!

High five for Friday!

I’ll stop counting the Friday posts. It annoys me I can’t do this every Friday, so I don’t like counting it anymore. 

Anyway, how was your week?

These are my highlights from the past two weeks:

1. Beauty and the beast.

I saw this performance by kids we used to teach. So proud of how good they’ve become! Don't have a pic, sorry!

2. Christmas decoration.

It’s a bit early for the Dutch, but I’m so in love with al those Pinterest ideas that I got the boxes from the attic and started decorating.

Don’t you just love it?

At daytime.

High five for Friday, no 11.

Happy Friday everyone!

How are you feeling now the fall is really here?

I don’t like the rain and the grey skies, but I do like to relax at home and watch movies with a cup of tea. 

Here are my highlights of this week:

1. A day at the spa.

Sauna, steambaths, bubble baths, fresh fruitdrinks, a massage and my husband.
I could breathe. I could relax.

And nope, I don’t have pics of ourselves swimming around in our naked butt!

2. Grandma and grandpa’s 55 year anniversary!

We went to church with the whole family and then had a nice dinner together. Here’s the happy couple:

I know, I look a bit different on this pic, right? It’s because it’s my sister :-)

We’re not twins, but we could be! 

3. Working on my home office.

I’ve been drilling holes and hanging stuff on the walls and it begins to look nice. Not quite there yet, but here’s a sneak peek:

I love color!

4. Polishing our weddingrings.

Looking all shiny again! This is a pic from the wedding.

Photography Erick Kicken @ KVX.nl

5. My crazy husband.

Sent me a sweet postcard.

Plays the dog Sandy when the kids are rehearsing a scene from the musical Annie.

So funny, the kids always look at him thinking,
"What is he doing?!"

  

I linked up with Lauren from From my grey desk.

Happy weekend everybody!

High five for Friday, no 10!

My 10th Fridaypost!

I’m linking up with Lauren again, from the From my grey desk blog.

My high fives for this week:

1. DIY-ing my home office.

I suck at finishing projects. It’s a miracle I finish blogposts. My DIY projects are mostly never finished. For my Dutch readers, remember this? It has two coats of primer and a colour on it. But it’s not even near to what I want with it. And remember that cute apron I was sewing? Still has pins in it.

Anyway, I started decorating my home office and it’s going to be awesome. In like 2014.

The supplies. I admit, all from Ikea. I live three minutes from one.
Hello addiction.

High five for Friday, no 9

Yep, Friday is here again.

I don’t have lots of time to blog, but I try to keep up the Friday posts. High five!

My highlights of this week:

1. A couple of students dressed up and scared people in a park here in The Hague. So much fun!

The audience could ride through the park on little trains, so we had to try that too of course.

How stupid I'm the only one doing "yay". Thanks kids.

High five for Friday, no 8.

Yay, Friday is here!

How was your week?

Mine was themed Halloween! My hubs and I run a team of twenty actors in a themepark here in Holland and this fall break has been a full, exhausting week, but so much fun!

This is already a highlight of the week :-)

Here are the other highlights:

1. Franks birthday!

We had a lovely lunch, just the two of us, and then had a nice party for our family and friends.

Have I mentioned I love him? Well, I do. LOVE him.

2. Katie’s gluten free apple pie.

Lovely Katie (the girl from the art jars) made Frank delicious little apple pies for his birthday. Frank has recently discovered that gluten free food is better for his health. But we’re not really into baking gluten free. Cooking is not that difficult (though we’re not that strict since he's not allergic), but baking is something different! Here are Katie's pies:

Cute and delicious!

(I’m such a bad photographer. I pimped this photo using Instagram. I promise I’ll get better.)

3. The Little Mermaid.

This is my ultimate favorite Disney movie EVER! I watched it a thousand times when I was a little girl.

Tuesday we went to the musical. It was lovely to see the mermaids flying, to hear the fantastic music and to see the great costumes. But I didn’t like the things that were different than the movie.

For example, in the movie I loved Flounder, who’s always around and so darn cute! But his part was quite little in the musical. And he was anything but cute...

But, I did enjoy this musical! 

Funny thing, we ran into two of our students that evening. This is me with student Daan!

4. Dinner with friends.

I love having dinner with friends. So we do it often. With lots of friends. Sometimes we cook, sometimes they cook, sometimes we go out. This time our friends cooked us a delicious meal!  

Dessert was really funny. Our cooking friend saw these little cakes at the bakery and they had such funny names, he had to take them with him.

“Recession cakes.” Cute little cakes for a nice price. So everybody can afford it. Recession cakes. I can see the humour of it!

What it is exactly? Two hazelnut merengues with a cream of
coffee inside and on top whipped cream with a little snow of cinnamon.
Yum, yum, yum.

5. My brand new DKNY watch.

I am so in loooove with my new watch! I’ve never bought a watch before, because I always take them off when I’m teaching, rehearsing or performing. But I find it annoying to pull out my Iphone to check the time when I’m teaching of in a meeting, so I bought a watch.

A beautiful watch.

I was searching for a small elegant one, it had to look like a bracelet and I wanted some bling. Check, check and check!

Cute, right?

 I first wanted the silver one, 'cause I liked the bling on it. But this dark coloured one was so much better on my brown skin.

Anyway, I'm linking up with Lauren as usual.

Have a great Friday and a happy weekend!

High five for Friday, no 6.

This week was a hard one. The fall wheather arrived, I didn’t sleep well and I’ve had some tough talks to do for work. I don’t like this rainy, cold wheather, I get annoyed by missing hours of sleep and I don’t like to tell people bad news. So it kinda sucked.

But that’s life. And in this life, there’s still a sunny thing in all this rain, which is High five for Friday!

How was your week? Tell me in the comments below!

These are my highlights:

1. Dinner with friends.

Remember when we had a nice vacation in France? The cute house belongs to friends. To thank them, we cooked for them last week. Frank made some awesome pasta with sardines and I made tiramisu. We talked so much I forgot to take pictures!

2. A lovely postcard.

These days not many people send postcards. Except one of my aunts! She loves to send sweet cards. Every birthday or holiday I receive the cutest cards from her. Today this one came in the mail:

High five for Friday, no 5.

Happy Friday everyone!

After a weird week of not sleeping much and lots of coffee, it finally became Friday.

My high fives of this week:

1. About me.

I worked on my “Meet Sabrina” page! It’s not yet what I want, but it’s a start. I’ve read a lot of blogs and their about me’s, but I can’t figure out what I want to be online and what not.

It must be personal, but not too. Colourful, but not a chaos. What do you miss in my Meet Sabrina-page?

2. Body rock.

I hate sports. Don’t get me wrong, dancing is sports too. But I mean the gym, anything with a ball flying around and running around in teams or alone. But I have to stay fit, so I have no choice.

I used to go to the gym, but I got bored. Then I started running, but I got bored. I’ve tried classes at the gym. Boring.

High five for Friday, no 4

Oh gosh, how the time flies!

Yet another Friday.

Since the schoolseason has started quite busy, I haven’t been able to write about other stuff, but I’m sure I’ll write more later.

Here are my high fives of this week:

1. A day off!

It’s rare in our life that we have days off. We (hubs & I) work lots of hours to achieve our goals with our company and constantly move forward. Especially when everyone’s in this economic crisis, you have to outstand to survive. Luckily, we survive. So we must be outstanding, right?

Anyway, a lesson I’ve learned the hard way, is that you have to take a break sometimes. And there the day off came in.

I welcomed it. I loved it. And the next day I went back to work with a smile!

High five for Friday!

(Okay. Before you go ballistic on me. This is part of a project I’m trying. And the people who join this project can’t read Dutch. So there it is. I’m now blogging in English too! (I mean… I’m trying to. Don’t shoot me.)

Remember when I told you I wanted to do a weekly project? I wanted something nice and cute to blog about every week, but it couldn’t involve a lot of work so I won’t quit after two weeks would have the time to do it.

Well, I found it!

I like reading blogs from all over the world and I saw this great blog from a woman named Kate. A hairstylist who posts videotutorials for your hair and writes about stuff like home, food, beauty and lots more.

Really great to read for the girly girls among us, check it out here.

Then I saw she posted every week a High five for Friday.

And in that post, she mentioned five highlights of her week. How cute!

In the end she said you could “link up” to Lauren too, her sister, from another blog.

I’m a total newbee in the blogworld, so what is this linking up thing?

So I clicked. And there was Lauren, at her blog From my grey desk, doing the High five for Friday posts. And having a huge list of women who linked up to her blog, who are also posting the High fives! It’s so funny to read what everyone has been doing, what things were special that week for them and to discover new blogs.

And so, here are my five favorite things of last week!

1. La douce France!

My hubby and I went to a cute little house in a nice and quiet place in Normandy, France this week. This house belongs to friends of ours, and is so cute you’d wanna hug it!

Take a look:

Isn’t that adorable? I loved this vacation. (Thanx H, D senior & D junior!)

2. Instagram.

I told my readers in my last blog how I lead a busy working life and still easily bore myself on any break. So then I try to discover new interests. (Those of you who can’t read the Dutch post, I discovered Pinterest. And DIY-ing. Did I mention I’m not a good DIY-er? Btw, you can use the Google translate bar to read the post in English, but it translates litterally. It's ugly.)

My discovery of this week has been Instagram. Taking pics with your Iphone and then screw them up give them a nice effect with Instagram. This whole post is filled with Instagramphoto’s, so you can see for yourself.

And yes, I know, I’ve had Instagram on my Iphone for months. And everybody said how great it was. It just wasn’t love at first sight. Again, don’t shoot me.

3. Food!

This will probably be one of my favorite things every week. I love food. I just do. I’m not gonna tell you more, ‘cause it will be obvious after a couple of weeks.

This was my favorite meal this week, steamed mussels with some French bread and a good glass of wine:

Although… “It’s a bit crunchy”, I said to my hubby. First I thought it was just sand, but then I spit something out... It was a teeny tiny crab!!

As a really good husband, he laughed at me. But then he spit one out too. Ha!

Turns out, lots of mussels in this pan had a tiny crab in their mouth (if anyone knows why, please tell me!). I guess this was just a sign of very fresh mussels?!

Anyway, I loved them too much to stop eating. I know, it’s gross.

But mussels are one of my favorite things, so I just threw out the crabs and kept eating. Here you can see the crabfamily, and one of them still inside the mussel.

4. The American Cemetary in Omaha Beach, Normandy.

Very impressive. So many graves. So many men who died fighting. Over 9000

men lie there. 

(That's my hubby btw)

We walked around, reading all those names and touching gravestones. It’s amazing how they all keep it clean and tidy. The white gravestones are still bright white. The grass is green and healthy. It screams out, this place is important, we have to take good care of it.

Good work people.

But then I wondered. Who are these men? How did they look like? Where they scared? Who is the serious one, who loves to make jokes, who’s everyone’s friend? Are they tall, short, blonde? I took a picture (yep, an Instagram) of a stone. A little yellow rose lies in front of it.

I took a picture of this one.
Ernest W. Kneeland.

Who was this man? I just can’t imagine. And yet, I’m so rude to take a picture of his grave. So now, curious as I am, I wanna know who this is. I’ll probably never know. And that’s okay.
But this man fought for us. Is it that much trouble to just show some respect before we step on this man’s grave and take pics?

The yellow rose was one of the very few flowers I saw there. So many people who visited, but so few flowers at the graves. I am probably just being my weird me. But I stepped on this man’s grave, and took a picture of it, without even knowing him. Isn't that weird?

5. High five for Friday!

I don’t want this first post to end dramatically. I was just so touched by this amazing place where all these men rest.

So, number five of my favorite things this week is this post itself. My first High five for friday. (And a huge high five for Lauren too, for this incredibly fun idea!)

Happy weekend everybody!

Wanna write your own High fives and link up to Lauren too? Go to her blog From my grey desk.

(I promise my post won't be this long every week!)