Have you seen me?

Like it or not, everyone has a limit, some point past which body and mind conspire to say, "no more." For me, that point was sometime around Saturday, August 23rd, when at least four weeks of sleep deprivation and physical exhaustion finally caught up with me in the form of a nasty cold that I'm still trying to shake off over a week later.

In the two weeks leading up to then, I had been walking the streets of Amsterdam, averaging 20km (12 miles) per day according to the GPS tracker I bought, carrying a 10 kg (22 pound) camera bag with me every step of the way. By night I would take the train back to Den Haag, where our friends Karen and Joost graciously let us stay with them, and stayed up as long as I could to edit photos for a deadline which was already receding in the rear-view mirror. In between, I would try to steal a few minutes with Amy and Sofia so that they would remember who I am. My diet consisted of anything you could eat while walking, mostly hot dogs, Diet Coke, and snack cakes (including my new best friend, roze koeken). In retrospect, the surprising thing isn't that I got sick in the end, it's that I wasn't found floating in a canal, dead from junk-food poisoning. Oh, and did I mention the unseasonable and unphotogenic pouring rain?

If it sounds like I'm complaining, though, I'm really not. It's true that I would probably have enjoyed the job more if I weren't already exhausted from crunch time at my day job, or if I wasn't sleep-deprived from having a new baby, or if I were 21 years old and indefatigable again. But it's still an opportunity to do something I love and get paid for it, which doesn't come along all that often.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have 9,200 photos of canal boats to edit.