A short bit of my book
Hey there everyone!!
Time for the weekly book post. As some of you may know writing (or any creative process) can be the easy part. Getting the work seen by other, well, that’something else…
So to that end I’m continuing with the plan of a little bit of the book every week. At this pace the whole book will be here to read in another five to ten years
Or you can place your order on the link listed below…
This little bit comes from July of 2020
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Myself and NIls finished emptying out the old bike shop location on Tuesday. Tossed the last of the stuff including the desks out at the dump. Everything else has been brought to the Spuistraat where the pop-up is located. I’m very happy to be out of the old shop, no reason to go back there again. But I’m also very sad having thrown out everything, emptied my old life and tossed it into the dump.
The desks were just the best. We had picked them up a little more than four years ago when we were moving from the Kerkstraat location to the Prins Hendrikkade. Bente Hughes, the office and P.R. manager (amongst many other jobs and functions she held over the years), had been looking online at the IKEA webpage and a few other shops for desks at the new location. I was on my way out the door and started talking about the desks we had when I was a kid.
Back then (which would have been the early 1980’s) my mother got us all desks to do our homework from school that were put into our rooms. They were big old wooden desks. Very solid, one of them even had a green slate top. The kind of desks they don’t make anymore. She would get them as offices and universities would modernize the workplace for computers and the coming “paperless office”.
I left the bike shop for a bit and when I came back Bente was very excited. She had been on Marktplaats, basically a Dutch version of CraigsList and had found the same type of desks that I had been talking about. A few days later myself and Nils drove his moving van to the Nieuwendammerdijk in the north of Amsterdam to pick them up.
The Nieuwendammerdijk is a dijk/levee located across the harbor in the north that is absolutely lovely. A single lane one way road with old leaning Dutch houses on either side. It’s consistently voted one of the prettiest lanes to go for a cycle ride in the country. Being a very narrow lane we were wondering how we could get the desks loaded into the van. Fortunately the house had a back entrance we could easily access. The couple living there were converting their basement into a B&B and needed to clear everything out. We took the desks, a couple of chairs and they even threw in an old liquor cabinet. That liquor cabinet was the first thing we had installed in the new shop. As far as I know it’s still there, screwed to the wall in the old office, everything else has been moved or thrown away.
