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With my colleagues, I created the tiniest precious metal smuggling ring.

In 2005, klik’s uncle died of throat cancer. We didn’t know him very well, he was a bit of black sheep in the family, but we had visited him in his apartment when he was already ill and had a lovely time with him. One of his interests was making jewelry: he had several tumblers to polish pebbles, lots of silver plates and silver wire and the tools to work with them.

When he died, his estranged daughters (a sad story in itself) refused the inheritance, so it befell to klik’s aunt (his eldest sister) to clear out his apartment. And of course she had to decide what to do with all of his stuff. She found the silver, and at the time klik was working with beads and stuff like that, so we got a box with all the tools and materials. And like with many of these things, it was stored in our spare bedroom. There it lingered and soon became part of the mountain of… stuff.

So when we cleared out the spare bedroom, we found this silver. It also included plates made by a company that buys up your old silver, purifies it and then makes plates out of it so you can use that to cut pieces from. We hadn’t done anything with it since we got it, but it is valuable: roughly 100 euros, if we weighed it correctly. We didn’t want to hold onto it, but selling it for money would not be according to the spirit through which we acquired it — it would feel like dishonoring the uncle’s memory to sell it for cash.

It turns out that one of my colleagues makes silver jewelry. I offered it to her, and she was interested, but she wanted to pay for it — which we didn’t want to do. But she thought we shouldn’t just give it away. So we agreed that we would give her the silver, she would make a brooch out of it for klik’s mother (it was her brother, after all) and keep the rest of the silver as ‘payment’.

That left the problem of getting the silver to her. She lives in the UK, I live in the Netherlands. We were supposed to meet with the team in July, but that fell through. And you can imagine that I did not fancy sticking the silver in an envelope and writing “jeweler’s silver” on the custom’s declaration of such a heavy packet. So ideally, we’d do the transfer by hand. She was going to my company’s annual user conference in the US this year, but we had our annual Texel vacation planned in that week, so that fell through as well.

But this past Tuesday, there was an event by my employer in Amsterdam. Of course I would attend, and my manager, who happens to live in the UK, would attend as well. He agreed to take the silver (I also gave him a small bag of chocolate kruidnoten as payment) and smuggle it into the UK. Two days later, the same event would be held in London, and both my manager and my jeweler colleague would attend that.

Apparently the bag was scrutinized closely, and while the silver must have shown up on a scanner and it had several sharp edges where pieces had been clipped off, nobody made a problem of the silver.

He called it “the tiniest precious metal smuggling ring” — and it worked. We’ll worry about getting the brooch back later, when it is finished.

May 31st, I submitted my resignation from my job. It was a long time coming, and it was not a coincidence that I had not yet taken any holidays this year: I have been saving them up or this occasion. So tomorrow (the 13th) will be my last day. I have a month’s notice period, so the 30th will be officially my last day — but I have enough time off.

I feel ambivalent about leaving. I like my teams, and I like most of the company culture. But there are some factors that make that I can’t progress professionally there, and I have found another position that seems to be a much better match.

It’s been an exhausting time between resigning and now. Not only do I have to deal with my own ambivalence about it, but I also have to manage the emotions of the surprised/shocked/defeated reactions of my (soon-to-be-former) colleagues. I have been falling asleep on the couch just about every evening, and I’ll be glad when it’s all done.

Of course, I want to go out with a bang. So I asked the team to vote on the treat I was going to bring: either macarons, the chocolate sprits cookies or soft chocolate chip cookies. I had made those cookies with matcha (after this recipe) but those were not too popular — the matcha made it bitter, and my colleagues have the palate of a toddler! So when the cookie option won in the poll, I was thinking of what I would do.

Saturday, I baked a batch of these cookies, but with cacao powder substituted for the matcha. And it was a complete failure! I was a bit panicky: I had promised to make cookies, and some colleagues are coming to the office specifically to say goodbye to me and to eat cookies. Worst case, I would have to get some of those chilled cookie dough rolls from the supermarket — but that would definitely feel like defeat.

So I did some research, and found a cookie recipe that needed some ingredients that I didn’t have at hand. I planned to go shopping at noon (grocery stores open at noon on Sundays) so I had the whole rest of the day to bake. But then I noticed that there was a video to accompany the recipe, but then I noticed that the video, even though it was a chocolate chip recipe, was not of the recipe that I had found, but a different recipe! I really like Dorie Greenspan’s personality, so I was very interested in her basic chocolate chip cookie recipe. And lo and behold: I did have everything for that!

So I made two batches of four trays of cookies each: one of the basic recipe with milk chocolate and walnuts, and one with darker sugar, a whiff of cinnamon (which is barely detectable, next time I will add twice as much) with bitter chocolate and macadamia nuts. It took me all afternoon, but now I have two mountains of cookies to bring.

I’m looking forward to our vacation, and to starting at my new job on July 4th.