8 am and the work week starts again, yuck. Crammed on an overly full bus (last week was wonderful, school holidays, so much calmer). And BF is off to see his brother in Norway for a week, so it'll just be me and our crazy cat. I wonder if I'll be able to do anything useful, instead of vegging out in front of the television? It's all up to me...

I slept from midnight 'till 11.15 AM. I really needed that!
I woke up around 6.30, thinking "I'm late, why didn't my alarm go off?!" for a split second, before realising it was the weekend and dozing off again.

Plans/ideas for this weekend:
- reading the last part of my grandfather's notebook on the war
- doing laundry
- eating mussels with Belgian fries
- try to find places to put the objects I got from my grandmother's house
- go to a classical music concert
- write

Why does my dream in life come at the bottom of my list?

It's funny how we each have our habits To read about yours where PM's are concerned. With regards to ordinary e-mails, I'm pretty obsessive myself, I can't count how many times I check my mailbox. Usually, I only find junk mail and newsletters, but still I obsess.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Paris, taken outside this time.

The arch in front of the Louvre:


The inner garden of the Petit Palais, a beautiful building, inside and out:


A faraway view of the Grand Palais:


Three guesses...


And the former entrance to a church, which was too pretty to not take a picture of:

OK, so I have a slight paranoia issue. When I receive PM's, I sometimes wait to read them because I know I won't reply immediately. Thinking that the person will see that I've read the PM and wonder why I haven't answered.

So what are your PM habits? Do you sometimes wait to read them, or do you read them as soon as you know you have unread messages? When you send PM's, do you check regularly if that person has opened them?

To answer a question: I didn't know my grandfather particularly well. He died when I was 19, but his mind had been muddled by dementia quite a few years before that.

I remember dancing on his toes at a wedding party when I was very little.
I remember him obsessively reciting the Greek alphabet as well as singing a popular song about his home town (het Ros Beiaard van Dendermonde).
I remember playing cards with him:
- manille with four people (usually, from the age of 12, while sipping home-made cherry liqueur my grandmother made)
- crapette (russian bank) with the two of us
- bataille (war) between the two of us, which we did until far into his dementia, because the rules are so simple
I remember playing an invented card game with him in the later stages of his dementia, which was a mix of Rummikub (a game my grandmother loved) combined with the three card games mentioned above. I couldn't understand the rules he was making up as he went along, but I still won

I plan to transcribe his little notebook account of his military campaign. Nothing spectacular so far, but some interesting details. And most of all, it's interesting because it's real and it's family history, a story he never talked about.

As I'm going down memory lane, I thought I might as well post a picture of the alabaster bird I now own and which I remember seeing in my grandparents house (mentioned in a previous blog).

There's History, with a capital letter. The stuff you learn in school or read about in books. And then there's history, with a small letter, the individual stories that so often are forgotten.

I'm reading history right now: my grandfather's account of his 18-day military campaign, trying to stop the German invasion. Or, more realistically, trying to delay it as much as possible.

May 1940; he was 22 at the time. At 22 I was studying at university, not a care in the world except love troubles and exams; he was living the beginning of World War II.

We visited the Louvre once during our stay in Paris. It's an enormous place, which is why for our visit we had to choose a theme/period. I have 'a thing' for ancient Egypt, so we explored their collection of beautiful artifacts, stunning.

Fortune cookies are rarely found in Belgium, but yesterday we got 'lucky'.

Mine read:
The only people who never fail are those who never try.

I'm a very obedient girl. Sometimes So here are some pics of Paris, as requested.

The famous Louvre pyramid, from the inside and the outside:





Two pictures from inside the Louvre, a spacious hallway, and part of a mural painting:





And pics of the art deco vase I bought at the flea market, once with two other glass pieces of mine, from (I presume) the same period, and once more in close-up:

Mayhem at work yesterday, my boss will be on sick leave for a month (she's been in and out of burn-out for a while now) and other 'shit' flying around.

Anyway, I have a horrible dilemma... I don't know which pics to post first! I still haven't finished posting my summer road trip pictures, I haven't posted anything from my trip to Germany at the end of last year, and now I have pictures of Paris too waiting to be seen. Dear oh dear, what will I do?