It's a funny thing. Yesterday I got an e-greeting from my mother for the 4th of July. I panniked a bit. Was it the 4th? Had I completely lost my sense of time? Thankfully it sent it a couple of days early. And, in case it would have been a more festive day I had prepared a special meal. I made the most wonderful enchiladas I've ever made. All I have to say is, "Never underestimate Pork." I think the American Pork Council (if that is the name by which they go) would be proud. Eva's brother, over to burn some music cds, said three times, "Man, these are good, did you make these?" Yes I did. It's a far cry from the version that my mother and I used to make back when I wanted the cheese-only variety. Like I said, I'm up to stuffing them with peppers, corn, pork, rice...you name it.

Back to today.

Nothing much happened as far as the day went. Things got interesting when Eva came home and we went out to go for a driving lesson with her dad. Not only is Eva up to driving with a gear-shift, she has nearly mastered the art of reversing. Someday soon I'll have to take her out myself and we'll spend a whole afternoon doing 3-point turns, star shapes, pulling into parking spaces, alertness, mirror adjusting, shifting while the car is slowing down, using the clutch as a break... I was very proud. I know I didn't show it, but I was beaming back there in the blind-spotted little white Citroen Berlingo.

And then we started talking about apartments. 90 Euros being the difference between new/bigger and current space. I'm all for it. If we end up staying for more than one more year then it will be well worth it. It's more home-like. It has a tub. It has several rooms. It has a terrace for god's sake. (a very small one) I truly think we'd go mad here in this little apartment if we stay longer than the schoolyear. But who knows. So we went back and forth about it. Eva was the pro-change person yesterday and I was the lets-think-more-about-it person...and then today it's completely in reverse.

The night had us deciding that we should take it, I should get a job (any kind...postal worker to designer to pizza maker) and we should plan on staying in Belgium till we figure out exactly what we are going to do next. We should plan on staying here until Belgium becomes our legal safe-haven, as in we become registered legal partners. Doesn't that sound ultra-formal?

So sitting around having a Russian beer (having a beer not being something that is in our daily ritual at all) Eva and I sorted things out. It started with the apartment and ended up being a night of discussing plans and futures. It moved on to her job and prospects of others. It did whirlwinds with us making a pact that we would be better people. She's going to try to be less stressed, and I'm going to try to be more organized. :) We made a pact that we wouldn't lose ourselves in daily humdrums or beneath loads of temporarily-important-looking nonsense. That we'd both try to be the people we knew before we hitched ourselves together, and tonight it seemed like the friend I used to visit in Belgium was sitting across from me telling me stories.

It was a beautiful thing.

IN THE NEWS:
The European Commission has attacked as "beneath contempt" a campaign in Britain against the euro currency featuring Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. Cinemas in Britain began showing on Wednesday the ad in which British actor Rik Mayall appears dressed as Hitler, parodies his famous salute and declares: "Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Euro!" (one people, one empire, one euro).

What I didn't know before they mentioned it on the BBC World Service...was that some europeans consider(ed) the Euro as the way Germany would take over the continent. If they can't do it by force, as they tried to several times in the last century, then why not do it by economic means. Hm. Interesting. Parinoid, but interesting. But then again, we don't really understand all of those deep-seeded feelings against the Germans that still exist here. After all, the history really isn't that old.