Mirjam's website

In the beginning of December last year, I heard a group of Belgian guys on Radio 538 (a Dutch station) with an amazing performance, completely a cappella. A few weeks later I heard them again at the Dutch radio, at the Serious Request campaign of 3FM. Just take a look at this clip from Radio 538, I’m sure you’ll be as amazed as I was at that time:

On their website, I saw that they were having a show on June 6 in Amsterdam, so I directly bought 2 tickets.

After waiting for 6 months, I finally went to Amsterdam yesterday with Fenna, a colleague from Ernst & Young. It was amazing! Their show was made up of all kind of songs and tunes from movies; there was a James Bond medley, a Walt Disney medley, and of course Grease . Their voices are beautiful and their performance is very funny, and they’re also doing all the instruments by voice: drums, trumpet, violin, guitar; you name it.

Really, if you have the chance to see them, do it! I highly recommend it. Here’s another clip of a song they did at the show (the original from the movie is already my favorite, this one is absolutely amazing!):

Tags: amsterdam, voice male

Last weekend, my sister and I went horseback riding in Zeeland. Together with my moms we went to a tiny camp site next to a horseback riding school. It was a birthday present for my sister, who celebrated her 31st birthday on Sunday May 30.

On Saturday we had a 2,5 hour ride along the beach and in the dunes with just the 2 of us (and the guide of course). Too bad we had some rain, but that didn’t stop us from having a great time!

On Sunday we had a 3 hour ride, but this time our group consisted of 6 people (and the guide), which made it more difficult to control the horses on the beach. But the sun was shining, and the nature was beautiful again!

My mom made some pictures which I copied to my Picasa album, you can have a look at the ‘Pictures’ tab on my website. Enjoy .

Tags: birthday, family, horseback riding, sister, zeeland

At one of my clients from work, the following poem is painted on the wall. It’s an interesting one, so I took a picture of it to share it with you:

Today
Outside my window, a new day I see
and only I can determine what kind of day it will be.
It can be busy and sunny, laughing and gay,
or boring and cold, unhappy and gray.
My own state of mind is the determining key,
for I am only the person I let myself be.
I can be thoughtful and do all I can to help,
or be selfish and think just of myself.
I can enjoy what I do and make it seem fun,
or gripe and complain and make it hard on someone.
I can be patient with those who may not understand,
or be little and hurt them as much as I can.
But I have faith in myself, and believe what I say,
and I personally intend to make the best of each day.

I searched the internet to find out who wrote this poem, but all I can find is ‘author unknown’.

Tags: poem, work

When I drove home this evening, I heard about this video on the radio. It’s Jamie Oliver telling the Americans they have to cook more. I totally agree! That was one of the things I was surprised about, that lots of people don’t cook regularly :-O. My land lady used to call me ‘the lady that cooks’, because I cooked every night (which is totally normal for me). My colleagues also told me a story once that they were at a house warming of friends, and these friends were really proud about their new kitchen with every new high-tech appliance you could imagine. When my colleagues (Italians, so also used to cook every evening) asked whether they actually used the kitchen, the friends told them “we’re cooking every Thursday!”

Tags: america, cooking, jamie oliver, ted

Today, it’s exactly one year ago I started my internship in San Francisco, at Novedge. This was the start of a period with lots of interesting, fun and amazing things, but also some difficult times, when I wanted to be with my family but couldn’t because of the 12.000 km between us.

During the 6 months I spent in the US, I met great people, visited beautiful cities and sites, gained knowledge about the American culture and lost my heart to a beautiful, diverse, and interesting city: San Francisco. Franco gave us a tour through Silicon Valley and Stanford University, Cris and Gabriela showed me San Francisco from the top floor of the Bank of America building, Carolyn took me to tiny theaters with amazing performances, and Nora showed me around in Berkeley and Oakland.

After my final presentation in July, 2009 (through Skype ) I traveled along the west coast and later on, the east coast and learned a lot about American history and the diversity of the country (from New York City and Las Vegas, to Washington and the Grand Canyon). It’s been an amazing experience!!

And now, I’m graduated, found a great job at Ernst & Young and have been working there for already 5 months. Time flies, it really does! My life changed, a lot has happened in only 365 days. Every day is a new (learning) experience, having such a diverse, fun and challenging job. Hopefully this will last for a long time!

But often my mind flies to San Francisco…. This little movie already had a place at my previous website, but it also deserves a spot here, I just love the movie!

Tags: america, internship, novedge, san francisco

A disadvantage of working full time is that in most cases, the weekend is fully packed with stuff like (vacuum) cleaning, grocery shopping, washing my clothes, and “cleaning up the week”. Because during the week, I’m really good in postponing errands to the weekend since I don’t have very much energy left in the evenings :-p.

Today is just like one of these weekend-days. First I had to clean up, then I went to the recycling station to get rid of all the mess, next stop was the pet shop, and then I went to the mall where I visited several stores to run all my errands. Back at home around 2 PM, pretty tired of running around and a short night (went to bed late, and can’t really sleep in anymore).

But luckily the weekend has 2 days, and usually I have all my errands done on Saturday (except today… didn’t do the vacuum cleaning :-s), so I can spend Sunday on other things . I rather call these things ‘todo’s', in stead of ‘errands’. The difference to me is that todo’s are fun and not that urgent.

Last week has been rather busy. Started with a new project at work, spent most of the week on collecting documentation so we could test the SOx controls. Unfortunately, several documents weren’t prepared yet, and our deadline is very tight, so it’s going to be an exciting day on Monday: are we going to make our deadline?!

I also had my mid-year review last Tuesday! Beforehand I collected a few reviews from managers, and they were all good, so the mid-year review wasn’t that exciting. But it’s always nice to hear that people are happy with you and you are performing good .

Tags: weekend, work

It’s been a long time since I wrote my last blog post… I had some problems upgrading Drupal and getting all the modules working properly again. After several attempts, consulting the forum and spending lots of hours, I was just sick of it and decided to start an entire new website, using WordPress. It’s always fun to try something new, and the first impressions are really good!

This week I’ll use to fine-tune my website, getting all kind of fun and handy plugins. Hopefully I can get back to the regular blogging within a short period of time!

Tags: website, wordpress