My IKEA Cabinet

My Cabinet, originally uploaded by gniezen.

The cabinet is finally done! For work-in-progress photos you should check out my Flickr photostream. My parents are coming to visit me tomorrow! They arrived with Emirates in Dusseldorf (Germany) today and travelled by rental car to Valkenburg, a small town near Maastricht in the Netherlands. Tomorrow night they're staying over in a hotel in Eindhoven, and they will be travelling through the Netherlands the whole of next week. I hope to join up with them next weekend in Amsterdam!

The new academic year starts on Monday, so this will be the first time that I'll be on campus with all the students there. My supervisor and promoter have also returned from their holidays, so I'll probably have a few meetings with them during the week to discuss my progress and on how I need to proceed from here.

I've signed up for Dutch for Beginners classes at the university, starting on 7 September. The schedule is quite intensive - two hours every Monday evening and two hours every Wednesday evening! It runs for the entire semester, so I hope to be a lot more comfortable with speaking Dutch by the end of the year. So far it's been getting easier to understand and read, but it's really quite difficult to try and speak it properly if you have Afrikaans grammar and constructs running around in your head.