About Me
Hello dear visitor, I cincerely hope you enjoy reading my blog, and maybe you want to know more about the person behind this blog. My name is Tim De Jong and I think to get to know me better starts with describing the passions in my live, my hobbies. My biggest hobby is hanging out with some friends, drinking beer, plainly enjoying life, which I try to do as much as possible. I also like meeting new people, making new friends, and I am generally very curious about other cultures and habits. Luckily my current job as a PhD student allows me to meet more people than ever.
This first hobby is shortly followed by my passion for music. Not only do I like to listen to all kinds of music, from metal to folk, country to pop, and recently even opera, I also like making music myself, playing the guitar, the mandoline and singing too. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you would run or not when I start singing. Making music is also related to my first hobby; while I do enjoy making music on my own, I really love to play together with some friends. Some of you might remember the illustrious trio called Shagwell, that played almost everywhere for free beer.
Next to music, also photography is becoming a very big hobby of mine. After being dissapointed with my photographing capabilities on my travel to Scotland in October 2006, I decided to buy a decent single lense reflex camera and really try to improve my skills, which I’m still busy doing. Some of my pictures are already available via my flickr site for your enjoyment.
Last but not least, I enjoy reading a lot. I am a very curious person and by reading I can at least satisfy that curiousity to some extent. I like reading about history, mythology and far destinations that I hope to see one day. Currently, I’m also reading a lot about photography, to try and improve. Furthermore, I also like reading fiction, mostly also with some historical or mythology background, that’s probably why I also adore Tolkien’s novels…
So, that’s a bit about me, probably there’s a lot I forgot… so finally, I want to ask you, if you know me a bit, to post a short statement about me in the comment section here. After all, almost no one believes a bloke bragging about himself. So by asking, you, my readers to post something about me, people can get a more subjective, maybe even less boring view, about me 
Damn…I did not know I could yak so much about myself
I’ll take this opportunity to write something about my old time friend Mik. Brace yourselves…
The first time I met him was back in the summer of 1997, on my very first day at my new high school – as I had changed high schools. I knew a couple of people there, but they were not in my class, so I pretty much had to start making some friends in my own. I remember the guys who were kind enough to show me around school and introduce me to their friends. Among them was this Hanson look-alike guy who said my hairdo made him think of Ernie. That wasn’t Mik, but one of Mik’s closest friends. Mik was -and is- another kind of person. He couldn’t pass for a Hanson brother, nor does he find my haircut resemble that of a Sesame Street character. Mik was the laid back guy who kept talking about Star Trek episodes I had never seen. He always packed his sandwiches in a lunch box.
Throughout the years Mik and I built a couple of websites together. One of them was the infamous “Synchronisier Liste”, on which we would poke fun of Germany’s habit of lip-syncing foreign movies. ‘Die Nackte Kanone’ was one of the entries, as well as ‘Totaler Zurückruf’ and ‘Verschwunden in sechzig Sekunden’. Another – very infamous – website we created was the “Anti R&B homepage”, which also featured so-called poems by one of our strange teachers. He found out eventually, and I had to call Mik from a phone booth to get him to remove the site’s content.
There are also a lot of things about Mik I cannot remember, because they happened during the many nights we got drunk together.
Since I moved to another part of the country I haven’t seen Mik in a while, but I’m sure we’ll meet again (some sunny day).
This one time, at band camp…
Butt seriously, from the bazillion crazy episodes from my life that featured Tim’s awe-inspiring presence I would like to select the following:
After extensive research and minutes of planning Joep, Tim and I went into Landgraaf to buy supplies: yeast, a bunch of herbs and lots and lots of honey. We were going to make mead, a honey-based alcoholic drink enjoyed by vikings. We couldn’t find any decent yeast, so we decided that ordinary bakers’ yeast would do. And we were right, sort of.
After the preparation process, which I am forced to keep secret, we had a nice amount of mead. A not so long while later we tasted the mead and though it wasn’t ready, it tasted nice. So we had a whole glass… and another. And a few more. We all got very cheerful and talkative, but there was no real hint of huge alcohol content or other strange stuff.
I got on my bike to go home and started pedaling away. At some point the road started curving and going up and down in a place where I knew it was supposed to be straight. My next memory is waking up on the kitchen floor (I got home miraculously) with my ferret running over me and licking my face. I made it to bed and was suddenly awoken by a milestone, Tim’s first text message ever!! The content has by now become legendary: “Bacaca”.
You think about that, boys and girls!
Next week I won’t tell you about the time Tim and I rode our bikes to Aachen and a gay guy calling us “Lieblinge” tried to get us drunk. (Tim let him!)
Best thing I remember right now was one of those rare days it actually snowed. Not just drizzled some white stuff from above, no this was the REAL stuff. It made a kind of blanket of snow of a few centimeters, but it was enough to have a jolly good time.
We spend the entire afternoon building my last ever snow man in Tìm`s frontyard, go sledge-riding through the forest (more on leaves than on anything else and the leaves got into your face and mouth as you thundered downhill and straight into a ditch) and had a snowball-fight which was wholly unfair. I believe there even survived some video footage of the event. :S When I finally resolved to peddle back home it took me more than two hours and a lot of skidding and sliding over icy patches but somehow I made it home safely.
@ Pieter; still not over the Ernie-remark I see… I`m sorry to have scarred you for life. I still got that problem with my mouth and keeping it shut. :S
@ Christian: Uiteindelijk ben ik er wel overheen gekomen door met Ieniemienie te trouwen…