Diary

I haven't been writing as much as you're used to. I have had a difficult week. Maybe I started working again too soon. Working was difficult for me. Each day seemed like an insurmountable eternity.

And Saturday was a hectic day as well. Relax after a hard week of work? Come on! Today two paviours came to tile our front yard. A good friend dropped by to bring me a new video recorder we bought together. Julia went to our former home to help two relatives, who wanted some of the stuff we have to spare there. And we also went for dinner at "De Leemer Hoef" again, this time with two friends.

All in all it is a little too much. But there is a positive observation: This week I have felt a sort of peace inside my body. It is difficult to explain. But I do think it is related to the Androcur. On these pages I have more than once referred to the flogging effect testosterone seems to have on men. And now I feel this force is reduced! Is this the truth, or is it just wishful thinking? Time will tell...

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This weekend I didn't have to go back to sleep during the day, so I thought: "Then I can go back to work too..." It didn't turn out to be very easy! You know, I often wonder, why a working day has to last for 8 hours anyway. Do employers really think, the number of hours you work in a day is a measure for the amount of work you do?

It looks that way! But my own experience is very different. A few years ago I had been ill for six months (RSI) and after that I was allowed to start working carefully with 6 hours a day. That was great! I was very motivated, there was enough time left for myself and it is very well possible, that I did even more useful work, than I would have done in 8 hours...

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Today I took Androcur for the first time. I got the stuff from the chemist's two weeks ago already, but it didn't seem like a good idea to start taking it while I was still feeling so ill after my operation.
I haven't noticed any effect yet, but it is a fact: I am officially on 'mones now...

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I have finally created an English language version of my Eye-witness report on Baby Blue. Trust me, this is worth reading!




It is one of the greatest theatre events I ever saw. And when I had seen it, I immediately wanted to take part in it. So that is what you see above: There I am in the House of Angels, massaging Julia's feet.

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A very good friend of mine celebrated his birthday, but I couldn't come. I haven't left the house yet. Fortunately I do get some fresh air, because I can sit on our back porch. But a ride in the car? "I'd better not..."

Julia did go to the party and she had a great time. She stayed there quite long actually. She met a former colleague of mine there.
Colleague? Yes, it was even more than that. At the time I was a project leader and he was one of the members in my team. So there you have it: Once upon a time I was somebody's 'boss' too! I don't expect that to happen so easily again...

But I was a different person at the time. Or so it seemed. I went to work wearing a neat suit and tie every day. If you do that, you are trusted to take on a responsible job. Your knowledge and experience don't really matter that much, as long as you have a 'professional' appearance. That's the way it is in the World we live in...

This brought back a lot of memories to me. The period I am talking about now must have been 1996/1997. I was driving around in a posh leased car and stayed in a hotel on weeknights. All at the expense of the company. At the time I was making a real effort of being/becoming a Real Man. I also went for a 1500 meter swim every night in the hotel pool to become stronger and more masculine.

Of course I was living a lie. I am very good at that. After all, I am an actor! But this life didn't make me happy. Maybe it was even partially in reaction to being 'sir-ed' all the time, that I started to wear women's clothing more and more often in the safe privacy of my hotel room during the same period...

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After my return from the hospital several days had passed before I first switched the PC back on. But I did have so much to tell you! Fortunately I was able to set de date right on the diary entries to make it look like a day-to-day report for you...

I am really disappointed by the pace at which I am recovering. After the first afternoon I haven't fainted again, but I have to restrain myself very much to prevent it from happening again. On top of that I hurt my leg quite badly when I fell onto the side of the bathtub, so that made it difficult to walk for some days...

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When you are hospitalized, you are forced to refrain from smoking.
So by the time you get out, you have kicked off already!
Then you have two possibilities:

• Starting again
  
• Not starting again
  

Hmm...

Let's be honest: We all know smoking is bad for your health. On top of that the combination of estrogen use and smoking is particularly harmful. It has been clear for a long time that I would have to quit sooner or later, But when?
"Not today, not yet", I always thought. Very understandable.

But now it is a different choice! Shall I start smoking?
"You'd better not!"
Am I right or am I right???
Well, there you have it!!!

I visited some quit-smoking-now sites for increased motivation (I used to avoid those like hell). And this is what I found:
"You have to turn a switch in your head. You mustn't say: 'I am no longer allowed to smoke, I'm loosing something I love', but you should say: 'I no longer need to smoke, I'm loosing something bad' instead..."

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This picture (which I took two weeks ago from my little window in the roof) expresses the feeling of my discharge from the hospital very well. I felt "On Top Of The World", to quote another song text...

And I also thought I was able to handle everything again and that I had completely recovered. Well, that wasn't the case. It took my by surprise when I was sitting on the bathroom toilet at home. I simply fainted! I rediscovered myself on the bathroom floor. I tried to get up, but I fainted again, this time half-way in the bathtub (which was fortunately empty)! Somewhat later I was able to reach the landing, but I fell for the third time. Julia found me there, all covered in sweat.

I think the guys at the hospital had forgotten to tell me something about staying in bed and taking it easy...

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Yes, the operation went very well.

I got a place in a ward with only women (purely by chance). Both the other ladies in the ward had much greater problems than I had. One was there for a bypass operation, the other had to be operated because of cancer. The fourth bed in the ward wasn't occupied yet.
When I arrived the nurse asked me how I would like to be addressed, so after that I was consistently ma'am-ed all the time. Very nice!
Within an hour it was my turn to be taken into the operation room. But first I had to completely undress and put on a special shirt for operations. And there I went! It was just like I'd seen it in the movies. You see the ceilings and fluorescent lights passing by above you. There is a nurse at both ends of your bed chit-chatting about the latest gossip. Julia was allowed to accompany us up to the entrance of the operation area, sort of a 'clean room' and so she did!
Clean rooms are familiar to me and the operation area was very similar. Head-caps, mouth-caps, special coats... They put one of those head-caps on me as well.
The most unpleasant experience was really the prick with the infusion needle.
Then it went straight into the actual operation room.
It is a pity I needed to cough just when they wheeled me in there, because in these clean rooms they don't fear dust, like I'm used to, but they fear bacteria...
The anesthesiologist shook my hand and then walked around me to put some stuff into my left arm that put me to sleep within two seconds...

When you come round again, you are in the 'recovery room'. I had to spend quite some time there, because my data wouldn't come out of the printer... A printer in a clean room? You wouldn't see that in the semiconductor industry! Solvents in the ink, dust from the paper... But a printer does not spread bacteria, that's true...

Then I was taken back to the ward. All day I felt very safe and completely at ease. All around me plenty of medical personnel was available to act in case of the smallest sign of mishap. Julia came to visit me in the afternoon and my sister and brother-in-law came to visit me in the evening. I had a TV set and a telephone at my disposal. Delightful!

But the night was difficult. Of course I couldn't sleep. I'd slept almost throughout the day! Of course I couldn't smoke! Smoking is prohibited throughout the hospital! Of course I had to put out my TV and my bed-side light. You wouldn't want to disturb the other patients, would you?
So there I was. Wide awake, without any distraction except the misery of the patients around me. The other ladies in my ward had a difficult night as well. And in another ward, across the corridor, things were even worse, I could clearly hear that. All this was not enjoyable.

The next morning I was briefly examined by a doctor and he told me I could go home that day.
Great! I wanted to leave as soon as possible! But it took quite a while before all the red tape had been handled. I had immediately called Julia with the good news, so Julia called the hospital to ask at what time she could come and pick me up. Oops! A little to soon. The department head didn't even know yet, what the doctor had told me...

So I had to stay a little longer and I witnessed the arrival of the patient who was to occupy the fourth bed in our room. "Yes, you will be in a ladies only ward", the doctor who took her in said reassuringly. The guy, who had come along with her to bring her to the hospital looked quite suspiciously in my direction. I don't think he really believed this to be a women's ward... So be it. If he doesn't understand it, he will just have to admire it, as we say in Holland.
I was up and away very quickly anyway...

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Tomorrow I will be operated. No, it is not what you think! This is an operation, not the operation. That one is still in the distant future.

Several attempts have been made to cure my hemorrhoids in a less intrusive way. They put little rubber bands around the base of some hemorrhoids which then die because the circulation of blood is stopped and disappear within a few weeks. It did give me some experience with the gynecological position even before I am officially a woman ;-)

Normally this treatment is sufficient, but that doesn't work for me. So the doctors have given up on that idea. Now a complete ring of material will be removed from my intestine. They use a machine for this they call a 'stapler' because it actually uses staples to connect the two parts of your intestine together again.

It does not sound nice at all! Fortunately this will be done under complete anesthetic, so I won't have to witness it all myself. I will try to see this as a kind of 'dress rehearsal' for the 'real' operation...

I was quite nervous about what ward they would put me in afterwards. I do have an 'F' on my punchcard in this hospital as well (As a matter of fact, I got this 'F' even before I got my 'F' from the Gender team in Amsterdam), but I was still afraid that the other women in a woman's ward would see me as an intruder. And having to be in a man's ward would have made me feel very out-of-place.

But it turns out this hospital has mainly mixed wards, so there is no problem at all!

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The first Saturday of the month is T&T-evening in Eindhoven. This time I didn't have to work behind the bar nor did I have to have another laser treatment. At first I didn't feel like going there at all! Every month to the same place? Let's just stay at home and relax this time! But we did go and I didn't regret it. I met a new friend tonight.
Ze has only recently discovered that the simple boxes 'man' and 'woman' are too restricted to category everybody. But fortunately ze isn't too upset about the whole thing. Ze does have a life! On Saturday afternoon ze had been out on the street playing music.

So what instrument does ze play?
The hurdy-gurdy!
What is that???
Good question! A hurdy-gurdy is an instrument from medieval times. It is quite unlike the instruments we know nowadays. Its sound vaguely resembles that of a bagpipe, but a bagpipe is a wind-instrument and the hurdy-gurdy is a string-instrument.
It looks a little bit like a violin, but there is no bow. In a hurdy-gurdy the strings are made to sound by a spinning disk. That produces the characteristic sound many people describe as 'whining', but the enthusiasts immediately recognize it and enjoy it. Another difference with a violin is you don't have to adjust the length of the strings with your bare fingers. On the hurdy-gurdy you use keys for that instead.

Well I am one of the 'enthusiasts'. I really like music played on the hurdy-gurdy. The Dutch folk group Pekel is an example of a group that uses the hurdy-gurdy. You can hear it very well in for instance "Jan Mijne Man" and in "Cupidootje"...

I love music. I also love the physics and mathematics involved in musical instruments and the way they work. Unfortunately I cannot really play any instrument at all myself. The only way I can produce music is with the aid of a MIDI-sequencer.

But it so interesting to talk with musicians and people who build instruments. And tonight I got this opportunity just because I came to the T&T-evening!

Someone has pointed me to a better place to hear the hurdy-gurdy in action:

http://www.midcoast.com/~beechhil/vielle/sounds.html

In "short sample" and especially "The dining table" you can hear why the hurdy-gurdy is sometimes called the synthesizer of the middel ages. In these samples you hear only one hurdy-gurdy...

(Earlier T&T-evenings: July, June, May and April).

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I thought it was difficult to believe I got the 'green light' already, but everyone around me believed it. Well it isn't true! On Thursday the gender team has made the decision to give me a 'yellow light'. And that means exactly what I told you already: I can start using Androcur, but I won't get Estrogen yet.

The results of my blood- and urine tests were in and those were very good: No strange diseases, neat cholesterol level, normal hormone levels (for a man), liver functioning normally. No problems! So there is no medical reason to deny me my treatment. They gave me my recipe...

We were glad with this result and so we felt like doing something nice. I tried to persuade Rudy to plan a tourist's route for us by asking for a 'route without freeways'. But he wasn't able to do that. After some thought he said: "Route without freeways is impossible!"
Gee, come on! I know that! There are but a few bridges across the great rivers that divide our country and the roads on these bridges are all freeways, but he could have tried to keep the amount of freeway to a minimum!

OK! We'll solve it ourselves. So we took the exit off the freeway to Abcoude and headed south. We drove via Baambrugge towards Vinkeveen. A nice little road. It is so narrow that I had to go backwards two times to allow a car from the opposite direction to pass us. Along the road you see farms, luxury villas, old sheds and there were also some empty lots, so if anyone is interested...

We passed through a very narrow tunnel with a traffic light (the tunnel is also too narrow for two cars to pass each other, that is why the lights are needed) and then we were in Vinkeveen. The villas were even more posh over there and there were no empty lots left. Every now and then we could catch a glimpse of the Vinkeveense Plassen ( the Vinkeveen Lakes) between the houses. Then it seemed like there was no other possibility than going back onto the freeway...

No, wait! There is still the N201, the road towards Hilversum. I remembered that to be beautiful from the first time I took it (back in 1990). Although it is a detour, we decided to try that. And it still was nice. On the right hand side you overlook the Loosdrechtse Plassen (Loosdrecht lakes) and on the left you have Hilversum Canal.

From Hilversum I wanted to go south again, but apparently a road was blocked there, because no matter what I tried, we always met a sign that said we couldn't go any further. It made me pretty nervous and that is probably why I hit a curbstone when I took a right turn a little too sharply. Ouch! I shouldn't have done that. Fortunately the wheel didn't come off.

So if Evelien cannot find the way out, we can always switch Rudy back on. But guess what? Rudy tried to take the same roads I had tried! There is still nothing wrong with my sense of direction. OK, then let Rudy take us back to the freeway, there was no other option. Rudy knew how to get there: Just join the city-wide traffic jam. The traffic in Hilversum was a complete chaos. It must have had to do with this closed road...

Then the worst thing happened: Rudy bailed out! Instead of his pleasant voice giving us directions an awfully loud noise burst out of the speakers. So we stopped by the side of the road and I, yes I :-(, opened the bonnet. Maybe the GPS antenna had been damaged? I couldn't find it at all! I did notice a plug, that had fallen out of its socket. "He's working again", Julia suddenly shouted from inside the car. I hadn't touched anything yet! But it was true: Rudy was working perfectly again as if nothing had happened. But what about the loose plug then? It may have fallen out, when I hit the curbstone, but it didn't seem to do any harm. Well, I plugged it back in and we were on our way again...

Back on the freeway that is. We first stopped at an AC-restaurant to recover from the shock. We would have liked something savory to eat, but there was nothing like that available, except for a complete meal. So we took another white beer instead...

A beer fills your stomach too, so we were ready to go on. Ready to go home, but we were really still looking for a nice place to eat out. Er... Didn't Julia tell me about a nice restaurant she discovered the other day... Very close to our home, at a distance of two miles to be exact...

"De Leemer Hoef" is a child-friendly restaurant. It is an ideal place for families with children to have dinner. There are lots of activities for the little ones, while the grown-ups can enjoy the delicious food. We only came for the latter and we were not disappointed. Julia ordered a three-course surprise menu and I ordered a salad as a starter and a tournedos (i.e. beef) as the main course.
Julia got a pearl-hen with cranberry sauce as a starter and her main dish was a fish we hadn't heard of before. She said it was the nicest fish she ever ate! My salad was very nice too with pine-tree seeds, curly lettuce, curls of 'Old Amsterdam'-cheese and much more. The beef was 'medium'. Medium sounds boring, but the French have a much better way to say this. It was: "A point", which means: Exactly right. Not 'well done', because it was still red in the center and not 'red', because there was no blood coming out of it. This is the best way to enjoy beef. I also had a very good knife, which enabled me to slice the meet into very thin slices so that we could even better see how well it had been prepared.
When I finished that, I couldn't eat any more, but Julia had ordered a three-course dinner, so she still had to eat a desert. I tasted a few bites of it and it was very nice. Pistache flavored ice-cream in a delicious sauce. But I was glad I didn't have to eat any more.

So if you are looking for a child-friendly restaurant with a good kitchen, you should check out "De Leemer Hoef"...

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Everything has been arranged, isn't it? Of course. Just some forms to fill out. It took us all evening to fill out these forms. The two of us! So that is a total of six hours of unpaid work, because I have to transfer to a new employer. I didn't ask for that...

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I have to admit it: I'm addicted to PSP. So what's that? A new drug you haven't heard about yet? No, don't worry! PSP is the 'Personal Software Process'. It is a way to develop software quicker and better and producing a better quality as well.

Creating software is my profession. I am always interested in ways to do that in a better way. So in the Summer of 1997 I discovered the Personal Software Process by Watts S. Humphrey. One of the great things about PSP is that you can improve your way of working as an individual, without having to involve the rest of the company.

PSP has two main points of focus: Planning&Tracking and Quality. And both are handled in similar ways: You start out by making an estimate, record data while on the job, gather the data when you're done and evaluate the way you did this job.

therefore it is important to gather detailed data on what you are doing. You can use those to make better estimates in the future. And it is important to learn something from the data you gathered to find ways to improve your way of working.

Good idea! Reading Mr. Humphrey's book made me very enthusiastic. So even before finishing the book, I started gathering data a on my way of working. But that is a lot of work! When I got home I was often busy for twenty minutes to feed the data I had jotted down over the day into the computer. There had to be a better way to do this!

So I wrote a little program in 'Visual Basic for Applications' to ease the job. It is just an Excel sheet with a button you can click when you start on a new task. If you do that consistently you build up a whole database of information about what you did and how much time it took.

On April 30th... 1998 I got that working and from that moment on I continuously, day or night, work or holiday, Winter or Summer, recorded a load of data! This is not normal, we can call this an addiction...

But this weekend I was transferred from my old employer to the new one. So I was kind of expecting my company laptop to bail out at Sunday morning, 0:00 AM, but it turned out to be even worse! On Friday afternoon I already had a problem logging OFF. And all weekend the laptop was dead! That's nice! I was not able to record my data. I did get symptoms of abstinence. I was pacing around, didn't feel like doing anything, didn't get a good sleep. Well,well, well,well, well,well,well...

Maybe I should quit the whole PSP-thing. Or maybe I should devote a page (or twenty) to it on my website. Anyway, this experience has made me think...

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