Dear future hubster

Dear future hubster, you know you're doing something right with your housewarming/dinner/movie night parties if at some point you realize that you and the other hosts are in the kitchen/on the balcony, and your guests don't even notice your absence. 

Dear future hubster, sometimes I try to meet all stereotypical expectations. Meaning I work the pizza dough dressed up to the nines, wearing heels and make up. Then the next day I wonder why my eeeeverything is so sore. It's hard work, pretending to be a wonderwoman.

Dear future hubster, another stating the obvious moment: cooking is a beautiful allegory to life. Nothing good will ever happen if you are not willing to get yourself dirty. Cooking, just as life, is a messy business. But if you decide to put up with the mess, the outcome is so worth it. You may be covered in what looks like baby food spat out, but you still feel quite like a princess.

Dear future hubster, Christmas feelings don't always come to me easily. Sometimes they don't come at all.  It's not easy, when you haven't been through the usual indian summer-chilly fall-early winter stages, when it rains but doesn't snow, when you get a sunburn in early December, when all the Christmas decorations look just out of place and fake. There are moments, however, when you can't help it. On a gray Monday morning, when all of Belgium is on strike, and there is not a single bus or tram to be seen on the streets, and people move around on foot or by car, quickly, hands in their pockets, or carrying boxes and gift-wrapped packages - it's all there, The air is cold and fresh, the city feels unusually quiet, you can almost smell the glühwein in the air... you can't deny that the jingle bells have started sneaking in. And then, get to any given airport on any given morning after 15 December. No matter your destination, you will always se...

Dear future hubster, it's probably no big news to anybody who's ever had one, but the human brain is a powerful tool. Mechanism. Organ. Thing? It can present you with endless and rather unsettling versions and scenarios of should be-s and what if-s and how-s, keeps you awake at night, carefully planning your reactions to those pre-planned events you can actually have no control over. Then, when you're thrown into the deep waters of conditions you couldn't have planned for, the very same brain just accepts them as reality and goes with them, refusing to even help you feel odd or out of place. (Yes, speaking from own experience, thanks for asking.)