The First Part of Everything I Haven't Written

I have a huge cup of tea in front of me right now, because I have a feeling that everything I have to write is going to take a long time. Actually, if I wrote everything I have to write, this would be like the 8th Harry Potter book. So I'm not going to write everything, I'm going to edit out a little bit. But, I'll try my very hardest to write all of the important things.

The first thing we're going to skip over is two weeks ago, because nothing very exciting happened then. I had a cold, I ran horribly at practice, and other than that I can't remember anything (actually, maybe that was the week before... I have no idea). On the Saturday of that week Peter, Taiana, and I had a surprise for Milja, because her birthday was coming up on November 26th. For her birthday Taiana and I bought her a session of "koe knuffeling" which is "cow hugging." I think it's something we should start in Wisconsin. Maybe the Link brothers would be willing to lend us some of their jerky cows for hugging? The only thing I knew about koe knuffeling before we went there with Milja was that it was a day of relaxation where people spent time around cows to help them relax. It took an hour and a half to drive to the place where the koe knuffeling was, and we didn't tell Milja before we left what she was going to do, so the whole way there she was on edge trying to figure it out.*
After a while of driving all of the countryside started to look much more quaint, and farm like than the land where I live. Really I was just waiting to see a sweet old woman walking through a field of tulips and wearing her Dutch clogs. Milja still didn't know what we were going to do when we drove up the driveway to the barn, but she figured it out pretty quickly since there was a sign there that said "koe knuffeling." Peter, Taiana, and I had to leave, because they don't want people watching, since obviously that's not very relaxing. We went to a nearby city and were just planning on walking around, but it turned out that Sinterklaas happened to be coming to the Netherlands once again on that Saturday (seems a little bit suspicious, don't you think?). The whole city was pretty crowded with all of the Svarte Piets, the little kids, and Sinterklass's whole entourage. We still spent the day walking through the city, but it wasn't as quiet as we had been planning on. Still we got in a fresh stroopwaffel each, and time for coffee and cake at a cafe. Also on our walk my camera was suddenly broken. But yesterday I finally used some serious force to make the lens go back into the camera, and now it works again. We'll see how long that lasts... but it will teach you: if something's broken you just have to push on it harder.
When we picked Milja up from the koe knuffeling, you could tell that she'd had a lot of fun, so our birthday present was successful. There's lots of pictures of her lying on the cows, and actually it does look a little bit relaxing. The cows here are a lot cleaner and nicer looking than our cows in Wisconsin.

On Sunday almost everyone from TDR had a race in Tillburg, which is also about an hour and a half drive. At this race there were way more people than at any of the other races, and also some girls from Belgium. There were a bunch of races, all of them that were different distances and age groups. My distance was 3,7 kilometers, with the Junior B girls. It wasn't actually raining on Sunday, but it had the night before so the entire course was really wet and muddy. There also weren't a lot of really big steep hills, but more than half the course was made up of twists, and turns, and tiny steep hills. Most of the hills were about like a ditch you find on the side of the highway, and at the bottom was a huge puddle of mud. I ran way to timidly on all of these hills, way too slowly the whole way, and over all the race just did not go well. My time was worse than the times I ran in 4 km cross country races at home, which is depressing to see. But hey, there's more races coming. I loved watching everyone else run. One of the girls from "the" TDR team won her 2km race, and it was so much fun to watch her. The way the fastest girls run seems so effortless, it's like they're not even tired.

That's the first week that I skipped. We're half way caught up!

*Just a warning to anyone who might want to drink a cup of tea in front of the computer: Sometimes you might try to take a drink out of the tea but its too hot, and then you might move really fast, and spill the tea all over the desk your sitting at, and then the tea might spill all over the papers that your supposed to use to learn Dutch. I've known people who've had it happen to them before.