Author Archives: Sjroep

Sailing lakes with the Brons

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I had a longstanding appointment with the Brons. We were going to go sail. So off we went on Saturday at 8.00am from Nijmegen to Almere. We headed off with three boats, three instructor and 15 something people.

I sailed with Merijn, Heleen, Miriam and Alex.

On the map you can see how we sailed.

The pink line represents the first leg. This was the part of learning to handle the boat and experiencing the coldness of the weather. We were sailing towards an island called de dode hond (the dead dog). We lunched there with a nice campfire to warm up a little.

The second leg (blue line on the map) was to go and have a coffee at Spakenburg. A quaint old fishing town.

After coffee we were in for some more wind and cold. The green line shows you the third leg of our journey. As you can see we were going from left to right (port side to starboard) to conquer the wind coming straight at us. The trip back was exhausting and cold. After two hours everybody was thoroughly miserable and cold, wishing for a hot drink and a stove. We only got it after four hours, but then the feeling was great. Hot drink and a great meal made everything seem worth it.

Room divider

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Heleen and I bought ourselves a room divider at Woondock.

This one.

Next to this one we also bought a divider with 16 sections. Delivering them (because it’s a cash and carry concept) would be two times 60 euros. So we rented a van for the day. Looked at the size of it on the renting site and decided it would be big enough.

But we forgot the door is of course smaller than the van itself. So we had to drive home with only one divider and ask Woondock to deliver the other one to us.

Seriously bugger!

Heleen’s laptop

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Heleen has got an old laptop leftover after she bought herself a new mac. The old thing was running on windows and terribly slow. I decided to give it another life with a linux distro called Ubuntu.

And what do you know? The thing has speed again with the same feel as my mac has. The operating system is intuitive and nice looking. Throw out your windows OS and change to linux.

Special food

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When mum and dad are here I always want to make them proud with some special food. I had been walking around with the idea to implement tea in a dish. When staying over at Maaike and Patrick we ate at a Birmese restaurant. We had a dish of fermented tea leaves. I made a marinade of onions, soy sause, rosemary and green tea for the steak. Delicious.

Training mum and dad

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So my mum and dad came by to see where I live. Heleen and I asked them to take their bikes along so we could do a 40 km trip.

We forgot that we cycle this course with race bikes. Yikes! But they made it. Both of them wheezing because they have a cold. Other generation, made of stronger stuff.

Although later on we could see the effects of the bike trip :)

Going to live in NZ?

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Heleen and I have been toying for over a year now with the idea of living abroad for an extended periode of time (read two years something). The idea is for me to finish my studies in about a year and a half, so we would be going abroad in about two years.

So where to go? After our New Zealand (NZ) trip this country scores very high in our list, even though Maaike (my little sister who lives in Christchurch) said she didn’t want me there. She’d rather have me somewhere in Australia or Tasmania so she has a place to go for holidays. Tough luck for her.
One of the ways we could go would be through Heleen’s work as a physician. My experience abroad tells me that accompanying partners always find something to do. If anything, I’ll start fabricating kayaks from wood and become a craftsman.
We found an organisation that helps GP’s move to NZ to do locum work; NZ locums. On the 15th of April we have an appointment with them in Amsterdam to see how it works and if Heleen’s comfortable with the organisation.

Workshop

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In September 2011 I started a project together with six other psychosomatic physiotherapy students. This project is a part of my studies to become a specialist in psychosomatic physiotherapy. Back in September 2011 our student group got an assignment from Fysiotherapie de Jong that entailed “yellow flags” (Yellow flags are an indication for psychosocial and behavioural risk factors that maintain and/or aggravate health issues).

Physiotherapists in the Netherlands have guidelines telling us that we should screen for psychosocial risk factors and it’s a part of our education to learn how to screen for these factors. The request of Fysiotherapie de Jong was to find out what the best evidence is to screen for yellow flags in their private practice and to implement that instrument.

We found that a good way to screen for yellow flags is to assess a patients illness perceptions. Wrong perceptions can lead to yellow flags. Tomorrow our group is going to have a workshop with the physio’s in Joure to introduce illness perceptions as a screening method and teach them how to work with these perceptions.