So, she woke up in the middle of the night....

I probably would have kept on sleeping and missed absolutely everything. But she leaped out of her bed (like she's probably never done before...and this was 2AM) and raced to the window. I was still sleeping. She had been awakened by the sounds of people shouting in the parking lot below us. The shouting escalated to blows as she stood at the window. Fortunately, things broke up rather quickly. It was a Friday night, and I think some folks just had too much to drink. Poor Lies was wound pretty tightly, and I thought there'd be no chance of getting her back to sleep for hours. But we both were pleasantly surprised that some 30-40 minutes later we both drifted back off to sleep, very thankful that we live on the 4th floor. The next morning (better late than never), we registered the altercation with the police so they could give a little more attention to our parking lot.

The week thereafter, actually last week, brought beautiful weather. Lies and I rode our bicycles to church in the morning. When we came back, we parked our bicycles in front of the flat with the intention of using them again later that day. We ended up driving our car to a park to enjoy a walk in the sunshine. It was a very relaxing afternoon. And good thing, too, because when we got back to the flat we discovered someone had tried to steal Liesbeth's bicycle. Fortunately, they succeeded only in ripping the bicycle lock off the frame, but the lock's latch held fast around the tire, preventing said someone from riding away. It was a good thing that the would-be thief wasn't around when we came back, because whatever my wife would have tried to do would probably have been much more successful than the thief's aborted theft. I was the innocent bystander, and I had my hands full enough! I thought it rather rich that my bike wasn't good enough for the thief.

To prevent this post from being too somber, I include the photo below from a trip Lies and I took with the Diederen family to Wassenaar, a park that border's one of the royal family's castles. Pictured below (l-r): Geert, Marieke, Rapp; above: Anke, Lisanne, and Mariloe. Not pictured: my wife who snapped this picture.