Today at work I played with an iPad for the first time.

It's indeed a great product but it's not for me, I think.

I made a mind map with several French words that I often confuse.

I used Xmind.

Today I received a package with a paper that I wrote 16 years ago, in high school.

The package didn't contain a note, nor did it have the name of the sender. I thought that perhaps Ettie or my parents had sent it, but I couldn't understand why. Thirty minutes later, when I took a picture for this article, it dawned on me that Niels had asked me for my address recently.

A great surprise! It was fun to read the paper. Papers like this motivated me to learn to use a computer. Teachers would tell me that my handwriting was so awful that it was hard to read. I believe this was the first document I created with Microsoft Word, after using WordPerfect for years. The title page was made in Microsoft Publisher.

I was 15 years old when I wrote it and remember the process (and the stress) quite well. Good times!

We're both under the weather -- colds and that sort of thing. It's tiring since we don't sleep very well; hopefully it will be over soon.

Anyway, it gives me time to do some homey things. Two years ago I tried growing some herbs. That went well until most of them died when I forgot to water them. I'm trying it again. I'm growing only 1 herb this time, to minimize confusion. It's chervil, or kervel in Dutch, which is a popular cooking herb in the Netherlands. A few weeks ago I actually dreamt of chervil soup.

Today I spent quite some time on my French. I'm reading my first real French book in years, Salut et Liberté, which is a nice challenge. It's a detective story, 45 pages long, and it's good way of getting (re)started with a language. There is a lot of dialogue, and a story that makes you want to turn the page to see what's going on.