I have recently found that cooking is an excellent method of dealing with all the stress that surrounds my studies. Especially stews, which is real winter food, are nice to do. They usually require little preparation and have to simmer for an hour or two. Giving you time to clean up the mess you made during the preparations.
I also enjoy luncheon dishes, as they are often things that I usually don’t eat, and allow me to eat something warm for lunch, which just bread with something on it won’t.

So this afternoon I attempted Philly Cheesesteak sandwiches, and this evening I made a wonderful goulash . I served the goulash with noodles for me and my parents, and potatoes for my siblings, as they don’t like noodles.

The final serving of the goulash I made.

I forgot to take a picture, so this is the final serving (mine) of goulash with egg noodles The yellowy things are potatoes, the red is bell pepper and the brown is the meat.

The philly cheesesteak sandwich I made was delicious

The cheese is cheddar (which I now love) and the toppings are mushrooms and onions.

Recipes:
Goulash
Philly Cheesesteak

I blogged about this before, and it really irks me. People who behave annoyingly during exams.

Take for instance today’s exam, there were six different types of exam being taken in the tennis hall of the sport complex, and while they all started at the same time, they ended at different times. These are some of the things I found most annoying:

• For the love of god, do NOT wear high heels to an exam if you expect you will be done early. I really don’t need to hear you STOMP by on your way to the exit. Even more annoying was that some of the invigilators also wore heels. >.<
• Please blow your nose before the start of the exam. Hearing over 400 students constantly blowing their nose is very distracting.
• Take cough drops with you to the exam! I swear, this one person was coughing so much I was seriously thinking of clobbering him over the head.
• When you want to ask a question either do so a) quietly so we don’t hear or b) loud enough so that we all hear the answer to the question. Half-whispering is annoying and distracting

Thankfully I’m done with my exam, and my next one is in five weeks, hopefully most of the other people will have shaken their colds by then!

This is the first of hopefully many questions I’ll answer, as a part of my new blogging idea. Today’s questions is a combined one. Nadine wanted to know why I chose to study medicine, and Kaylee wondered how old I was when I decided/knew I wanted to go to medical school.

I must say that I don’t really have a good reason. Nothing of this ‘I want to go to Africa and save the world’-stuff. I suppose I first decided I wanted to do something medical when I was around 11/13 years old, because that was when I started watching ER. The doctors in ER were so incredibly cool, racing around, spouting all this medical jargon of which I didn’t understand anything, saving people’s lives like that. I think I decided I wanted to be a doctor then and there.

I still don’t know how I stuck with the same dream for 5-7 years, but somehow I managed. I wavered from time to time, but my resolve to go to medical school was only strengthened when I started to watch Grey’s Anatomy, House and Strong Medicine (not necessarily in that order).

Over the years I’ve often wondered if I would get in. Especially when my grades started slipping a bit in 5th and 6th grade, but overall I’ve always known that I wanted to go. I didn’t even have a back up plan when I applied! When people would ask me that I would always say something along the lines of: ,,Perhaps I’ll do Chemistry, or Physics, or Law, but for now I’m not even allowing myself the option that I might not get in.” I suppose I didn’t allow that possibility because I didn’t want to freak out, and believe me, that didn’t really help.

I still often wonder on what grounds they thought I was special enough to make number 8 on a list of 300 people, but I’m just glad I made it that high on the list. Now that I’m in, I realise that even though some of the courses I have right now might not be the most interesting, I still really want to become a doctor.

So yeah, when I grow up I’m going to be a television doctor (jk.)

(Please keep in mind that if there are other things you would like to know about me, all you have to do is ask a question in the comments! The questions can be as weird as you like )

So this question thing seemed to be a really good idea. Which is why I’m adding it to my previously non existent blogging schedule, which now looks like this:
Wednesday – Answer a question posed by a reader
Rest of the week – ????

Yeah… I need to work on that. For now, please ask me loads and loads of questions, and I’ll answer the first one on Saturday.

However, feel free to exclude all potentially embarrassing questions, the internet doesn’t need to know everything, kay?

(You can e-mail me the questions at questions @ forever-thinking .net, or you can simply post your questions as comments on ANY entry.)

This question was put to bloggers by Ann, on her blog. On an entry that had the same title. Because it’s difficult for me to decide what I should otherwise blog about, I decided to answer her question.

I suppose I still blog just to be present online. The internet knows I don’t really update all that much. Before it was since I didn’t really get out much, due to being at home for 4,5 months. These days it more because I’m not really sure what is interesting to blog about, and because I’m not sure what I’m allowed to blog about, since I had to sign a confidentiality agreement.  (We’re not allowed to crack jokes in the dissection room, so I have to wonder whether we’re allowed to blog about it too..)

Coming back to the online presence however, it really is the main presence I still hang about and blog occasionally. I don’t really like it when I read comments on blogs and there’s no possibility to find out what the commenter’s like. Therefore, I still maintain my blog, and an about page.

I’ve also been toying with some ideas to make me blog more, and I’d like your opinion on them. Would you be more interested in reading:
- An entry about a question asked by someone about me every week?
- A new part of a story written by me every week?
- Or entries like I’ve been doing all this time?

I’d be interested to hear what your opinions are about all these things. Feel free to shoot them down too if you don’t like them, and of course feel free to make suggestions. Anything is welcome

Believe it or not, but when I was younger I could be a real brat. (These days I’m more of a goodie goodie two shoes. ) I would steal sweets from the sweets jar, and eat them in my room. Read in bed, even though my mother had already said that I should turn of the light and go to sleep, and in general (occasionally) not do as I was told.

I remember this one time very vividly, it was at my grandparents house, where I was staying for a few days. My grandparents didn’t have an impressive amount of toys so I usually brought my own, or stuff to read, but they did have a few barbie dolls in one of the bedrooms, which I would play with.

One day I decided to ask my grandmother if I could wash their hair, and of course my grandmother said no. So, like any good girl, I did it anyway. I washed and dried their hair, shaking the excess water off by holding them in my hand and shaking them about, and I didn’t think my grandmother would be any the wiser.
Until she entered the room and saw the tiny wet spots on the wall where the excess water had landed. She asked me about it, but I ofcourse said I didn’t know anything about it, and that was the end of that.
From then on, whenever you entered the room and looked hard enough, you could still see the spots on the wall where the water had dried.

My grandparents house was put on the market last year, because they wanted to downsize, and they handed it to its new owners at the beginning of September. I’m happy for them, because they now have a lovely new apartment, and because it’s what they wanted, but I’m also said that it’s no longer theirs. It held a lot of great memories, like this one.

After 4,5 months of basically doing nothing, I’ll have my first lectures as a med student tomorrow!

The past two days have been introductory days at the faculty of medicine, and I’m sure glad that I decided to sign up for them. Who knew that a single faculty could be this big! I’m probably going to get lost a lot searching for the more hidden away rooms that only have numbers (as opposed to the bigger lecture halls which mostly have names.)

I also had a lot of fun getting to know my fellow students. There are two bachelors starting this year, the regular bachelor, which is taught entirely in Dutch, and the IBMG, which is an international bachelor, taught entirely in English. I’m in the English programme, and as such there are a lot of foreign students in my year. We have Saudi-Arabians (since this programme was mostly funded by Saudi-Arabians), Scandinavians, Germans, a girl from the UK, and even a girl from the US. I probably left some nationalities out, but that’s because I don’t know where everyone in my year is from yet! xD

I must say thought, that after 4,5 months of doing nothing, suddenly having to walk up and down a lot of flights of stairs, and around a lot in general, the entire experience is a bit taxing, and is tiring me out. Especially since today we were schlepped from the faculty to the hospital, and from the hospital back to the faculty for lunch, and then back and around the hospital for introductory stuff.

Yes, I think I will have a lot of fun this year, being a medical student!

This is something I wrote during my holiday. I’m not entirely happy with it, so I’d very much like some feedback.

That afternoon I made my way to the playground to sit quietly and write. At first I was alone, but nothing much came of writing. I simply didn’t have the inspiration. Then after a while a mother and three children showed up to play volleyball; the mother and the younger child against two older children. They weren’t very good at it, but they seemed to have fun.

I observed them for a while and they didn’t really seem to notice me, which was fine by me.

When I got sick of the swing I sat on I moved to the slide. It was worked into the side of the hill at quite a steep angle. The highness of it all made me feel on top of the world, and then I saw a spot that was even better of observing, if only it hadn’t been fenced off, and there was a way for me to get there.

As I watched the little boys, that had appeared a few minutes earlier, on the swing swinging away happily, standing on the swing, going almost horizontal, I suddenly felt the urge to do something crazy and dangerous. Sliding down the slide was neither really, but it felt like it was both, so I did it.

That afternoon nothing much came of writing, but I was happy just observing.

This is goodbye, but don’t worry, not for long. I’m only leaving for three weeks of summer holidays! We’re going to Germany, which believe me, sounds a lot more impressive than it actually is. I do live in the Netherlands and about 80 kilometres from the border. We sometimes go just to buy groceries.

Anyway, whilst I’m having a great time in Germany with my family, I’ll leave you with this.
Have a great summer!

Sometimes music can send you the most conflicting messages. Take now for instance. I’m trying really hard to concentrate on looking forward first, and backwards second, and forgetting about certain things in my past. So far it’s been going okay btw.

However, then I listen to some random songs from my music collection (which is a bit thin right now, since the death of my old hard drive also murdered my carefully constructed music collection) and half of those songs are like: Don’t forget what’s in your past! Go back and find out where it can take you!
The other half is like: Oh come on, what’s in the past is in the past etc. You should really focus on yourself right now!

So now the question is, which songs will I need to keep listening to…