It’s not a secret, Mojo is a fan of tanning his belly.



But honestly, have you ever seen a cat as ridiculous as this?



But watch out, he doesn’t like to be made fun of!



And the view from our dining room in near-infrared.

We appreciate when visitors give us a hand with our house!



Ryan’s Mom Ilyse came for a week and painted a lot of walls and windows.

We focused on our new house all winter, and last weekend it was time to take a little break away from home. Off to Piccadilly circus!



We took the train to Brussels and then the Eurostar straight to the center of London.



My friend Richard had crafted a walking itinerary for us, so we could see the obvious sights and interesting neighborhoods.



So it won’t surprise you to find the house of parliament and its famous Big Ben:



Or a red and black guard with a furry hat watching the palace.



We took a nice stroll in Hyde Park, and that was most of the first day.



Despite this photo, we actually didn’t take the metro and walked about 50km over the weekend.



On day 2 we were up and running pretty early, and the streets were completely empty for a while.



Except for drunk people looking for their way home, after a night at the pub:



And of course, tourists as soon as we reached the neighborhood of St Paul’s Cathedral.



There is a very nice footbridge linking the Cathedral and the Tate Modern museum, called the Millenium Bridge. In the latest Harry Potter movie it gets destroyed by Death Eaters, but fortunately that was just special effects.



Along our walk by the river we stumbled on a wonderful little city market with fantastic produce and edible things of all kinds. We bought a bunch of lunch supplies and dried/canned things to bring back home.



Continuing along the river you can see some more famous sights.



Notice the very nice weather that we had at this point in time.



Just past the tower bridge on this side of the river there is a cute street called Shad Thames with funny little bridges between houses across the street.



And the last photo to show you what our cupboards look like, with jars of all kinds of beans, nuts, flours and so on.



We took advantage of being in a big English-speaking city to buy plenty of new cookbooks, and we’ve been making terrific food from them ever since we came back. Too bad that we’re so lazy with blogging about our food, because I’m sure some of you would enjoy our recipes!

Around the end of April the weather was perfect for a few weeks, and on a sunny Sunday we went to the forest with my coworker Kris, is girlfriend Lisa and their dog Scrubby. This forest had an eclectic collection of themes.



We took the path called the “Milky Way”, where there were models of planets along the way. The distance between planets was to scale, and after a few kilometers we reached the sun. In this representation of the sun, Scrubby found it logical to run in a circle around Kris as fast as she could, “her belly to the ground” as we say in French. She’s still young and she has A LOT of energy.



Very amusing. Around the corner from the sun there was this alignment of radio-telescopes listening to the stars.



And a bit further along that array we strolled through a transfer camp where an unbelievable number of Dutch people were deported to concentration camps during the war.

Well, it’s been a while... Everything is going well in Groningen, now that we live in our own little house and it’s all functional. I’ll try to give you some excerpts of the story.

We moved in our house on March 1st, then survived for 3 weeks without a shower while our bathroom was being renovated. Then I got very busy at work and barely had any brain cells left for home. Then the fam came to visit and help build storage. Then some relatives came for a couple days, which brings us to the photos of today, taken in a tiny fortified village called Bourtange right on the border with Germany.



This village is built in the shape of a star with canals all around, which looks awesome from aerial photos but obviously I don’t have any of my own as we stayed on the ground.



Just around Easter the spring poked its nose and all the trees and flowers in town have come back to life, what a pleasure.



Stay tuned for the next photos!