ALS Day
This year’s ALS Day was held in Artis Zoo. Hein had to work in the morning, so we arrived muc later. We got there at two, just after the formalities had ended. From what I could gather, not that many people had shown up. The Valscherm foundation doesn’t attract too many new members, while the number of older members steadily decreases. Vascherm has been instrumental in the founding of the Dutch ALS Centre and they couldn’t have done it without Vincent Straatman, their inspiration.
I loved seeing Vincent and his wife and Jan van Atten. Vincent was unable to speak anymore. Sherida, his wife, had put the alphabet into 5 schemes. She called out the names of the schemes and letters and, by blinking, Vincent made clear which schemes and letters he meant. Sherida was a lightning-quick interpreter. Still interested in us and our daily lives. Jan van Atten could still write and did fervently. Oh yeah, and Artis is a very archaic zoo with animals in cages that are way too small.
Tenis
This month’s theme is tennis. Of course, we were heavily invested in Martin Verkerk’s tennis matches in Paris. Moreover, we went to the ceremony in his honour in Alphen. Moreover, Ward managed to win a set against his dad for the first time. For the first time in years, we organised a tennis tournament with our friends and their kids, including a trophy that hadn’t changed hands since 1988. And finally, we ended the month with a youth tennis tournament thrown my our tennis club, where both Ward and Floor managed to win prizes.
Homepage
I took a look at my homepage’s statistics again. This month I got 3600 hits. Not too shabby.
Musical
Yesterday, July first, was the day the 6th grade’s farewell musical premiered. I didn’t have too much faith in the whole thing. They started rehearsing way too late and Ward wasn’t too pleased to be rehearsing his part, more like angry and resentful. Only in the last week before the big show did I regain some of the t faith. And it turned out to be a fun show. A bit more messy than Floor’s performance. But it did have more individual roles, so it was a bit more complicated. I was put in the spotlight as the playwright and after the show I was lauded by grateful parents, to whose compliments I responded by winking merrily. And Ward sang a beautiful duet. In all honesty, I’d already written this song for the previous musical, which had been as much of a hit then as it was this time. This musical also marks the end of our children’s primary school days.