vaguely specific

Sunday we went to visit Hasitha and see in person the wonder of Dinali Kiyara, he and Dilini's new daughter. Being gorgoeus wasn't enough though to save her from having one of my umbilical-chord hats inflicted upon her as you can see from the photo above. Hasitha's little boy Kieran is almost the same age as Jacob and it's always fun to see them playing together. Long running disputes over bicycles, tricycles, trains and go-carts were put on hold to facilitate important discussions where it became obvious that the word 'cookie' transcends the limitations of mixed English/Dutch/Singhalese communication.

We also got to meet Hasitha's parents and gorge ourselves on a delicious feast of chicken curry, rice, dahl and prawn salad. The perfect way to spend Sunday!

Posted by Faith at 02:49 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2006

Now where was I...........?

Well, the short version of the last couple of weeks is thus;
Ron has started his new job, Jacob is now at creche four days a week and I'm working four days a week in my new and unexpecetd career as literary translator. A couple of nasty 'flus and colds have done the rounds, we've been to the opera, tried out the new car on the Mornington Peninsula and the Macedon ranges, seen wallabies at the Organ Pipes, bought seeds at Diggers, put in our bulbs for spring, are busy watching brocoli grow, have had more dentistry done in four weeks than in the previous forty years and have found a favourite cafe in which to work for a couple of hours per day.

All in all we're feeling pretty much 'settled' now and are in a routine that looks like being our daily one for a while.

Posted by Faith at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2006

Perdition

I have seen the devil, nay, stared him in the face more like and he lurks in a block of NZ Epicure (thats a cheese) and a Craiglee Shiraz. Or he did.... and then I ate him.

Posted by Faith at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2006

Our tractor

As far as I've ever been concerned there were only two things to be said about the types of vehicle Ron and I bought yesterday:

1)pedestrian and cyclist-un-friendly inner-city-maurauding eco-disasters owned by pretentious prats who would never go 'off-road' in the thing, were making the road unnavigable for other road users, and were using the beast purely to provide a cushioning-zone for their own inadequacies as drivers.

2)the mark of the suburban mum.

Just as well I'm not one for generalisations then hey! It does explain though why, after buying Fergie*, I was then plummeted into the dark depths of Sartrian despair and confusion.

We didn't plan to buy one of these, (lets face it, the only thing I was PLANNING on buying yesterday was some moisturiser) but when we went through the list of things we wanted to do with our car, (get around the city, mustn't be too big, but still able to do extensive travelling with bicycles and camping gear, drive up the alps with snowboards, go off road in National Parks, deliver pet sheep to Uncle Ben) this was the only thing that ticked all the boxes. Without being the size of our entire Amsterdam apartment.

A part of me would be a lot happier with a beaten up old Landrover, the guilt-ridden-Irish-Catholic-Virgo part I suspect. Teeth chattering as we hurtle over the tram tracks, the wind whistling through the gaps between the doors and the body, Jacob bouncing around in his booster seat and the dents and scratches testimony to the fact that we're not in it for the image. 'Cept of course it's just a different image isn't it. I suppose I'll just have to get used to all the extra-creature comforts. And to looking like everyone else. And I'll have to get my licence!

Oh and by the way, Fergie is a 2001 Mazda Tribute v6 Luxury, details schmetails.

(As I've mentioned elsewhere I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

*I've named her Fergie in reference to the fact that these are called "Toorak tractors" and of course the old Fergie tractors. Being a bit broad in the hips she does also bear some resemblance to that other Fergie.

Posted by Faith at 06:52 AM | Comments (0)

April 11, 2006

Impulse buy

Ron and I went out for a coffee this morning before settling in to our planned day which as we both clearly recall DID NOT involve buying a car. Dus, we're both at a bit of a loss to explain how we arrived home a couple of hours later the proud owners of this.

Fully blown existential crisis now in progress. Ron coping somewhat better, my only consolation is I don't actually have a licence nor know how to drive. Just rounds off the lunacy nicely.

((As I've mentioned elsewhere I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2006

Tante Alix

Tante Alix has a dog and a dinosaur collection which themselves are reason enough for extensive gezelligheid but when it's her birthday and she has an enormous chocolate cake as well Jacob is smitten! Happy Birthday Tante Alix.

(As I've mentioned elsewhere I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 12:55 PM | Comments (0)

April 07, 2006

Bloody cold

There were times in Amsterdam when, as I was cycling through yet another rainshower of biblical-sized-raindrops, with a radiant air temperature of 2 C and an icey cold wind cutting down the canals from the IJ, I consoled myself with the thought that at least once I was back in Melbourne it would never seem cold again.

So, why, now that autumn has really settled in here and we are suffering maximums of 18C (a temperature that only three months ago would have seemed to me a reasonable summers day, not a brilliant one, but reasonable...) am I so bloody cold?

Yesterday the central heating man came to service the thing and Thank-God-I-Say because it was freezing here! After he'd left I celebrated by having the heating on ALL afternoon and evening. Everyone in the house is wearing the traditional wilderness fleecies we don at this time of year and Jacob has been FORBIDDEN to step one foot outside without an overcoat.

The Dutchman meanwhile persists in wandering around in a t-shirt and sniggering everytime anyone complains of the cold.

Meanwhile, in the Pijp, Spring has sprung they tell me with sunny days and temperatures soaring to 8 C. I can still remember my spirits soaring with the mercury one day when I realised it was 11 C and spring had well-and-truly-arrived!

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2006

Long in the tooth

One thing I NEVER did in the Netherlands and which is now coming back to BITE me big-time (pun intended) is go to the dentist. Five years. Without going to the dentist.

It wasn't for any particular reason but a combination of the difficulty of finding a dentist who'll add you to their list in Amsterdam, the waiting period for appointments and the assumption that as we were always on the verge of coming back to Melbourne I could always wait until then. Of course, 'then' turned out to be a bit further away than we had planned. Luckily I have teeth of steel, and in 40 years have only had one eensy-weensy-filling that was soooooooo small they didn't even give me an anaesthetic.

Sadly, my gums have not proven to be quite so invincible.

What started out as a check up has turned into two cleaning sessions, two x-rays and potentially three fillings. I'm three visits in and NOT enjoying this at all. And ALL of it is down to simply missing the once-a-year clean. The fillings are small and all a result of plaque building up on the gum line. They certainly wouldn't have happenned if I had been having my annual check up duirng the last five years. The cleaning is rigorous and uncomfortable and there is some permanent shrinking of the gums due to the extended period without cleans. 'Long-in-the-tooth' is no longer just an expression but is staring back at me from the mirror every morning.

Now, how dumb is that! Just to prove a point, one of the holes is in one of my wisdom tooth which as I see it is the only possible explanation for how I allowed all this to happen.

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 01:11 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2006

The A-List

Now that she's safely back in Switzerland and working her way through some character-building jet lag I can safely reveal that the blogger we met in March and with whom we shared the dizzying heights of Melbourne tourism was Elli from Macbebkin. I'm still sooooooooo impressed, it was almost like getting to meet the Queen. But better. 'Cos Elli was kinda interesting. And she blogs. Not to mention ALL those shoes.

What IS weird is that we had to meet in Melbourne. After so many years living just a one hour flight from each other we both had to travel to the other end of the planet to meet up!

Posted by Faith at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2006

Harry Potter comes to Melbourne

Buried away on a middle page of The Age this morning was news of Jan Pieter Balkenende's visit to Melbourne. Ron and I were invited as 'Dutchies' to the reception held at the Melbourne Town Hall to welcome him. Harry Potter claimed to have had the 'perfect' day, first church and then the Grand Prix. Each to his own.

Also present was the fabulous Mr So, the Mayor of Melbourne, famous for his impenetrable accent and being the-most-popular-mayor-in-history-ever-anywhere. Mr So has generated his own cult following and more recently his own MP3. ( you can play it from here) Maybe he could give HP some tips?

Balkenende's visit is part of the 400 th anniversary commemorations, this year, of the landing of the Dutch East India Company vessel ‘Duyfken’, the first known European vessel to land on the Australian coast, in 1606.

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 01:44 AM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2006

Show off

Dominic is one of my oldest and crankiest friends. If you are anywhere near the Blue Mountains in April then you should be popping along to Springwood where he and three fellow artists will be exhibiting their work at Braemer gallery.

Posted by Faith at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)

March 29, 2006

Yes, we have no bananas

It doesn't bear contemplating. Life without bananas.

As the parent of any child between 6 months and 4 will tell you, harmony and happiness and a decent night's sleep all revolve around the provision of an appropriate number of bananas per day. While the government and number-crunchers are concerned about the economic implications of the loss of 80% of this year's banana crop due to Cyclone Larry a far greater problem lurks in the suburbs.

Toddlers are renowned for their inability to be reasonable about things. They don't like changes. Their daily banana has to be delivered on time, in the manner they expect, when they expect it. I don't think long-winded explanations about cyclones are going to cut it. Even if we do throw in the bit about the butterfly, the pretty diagrams and chaos.

And the suggestion that a child expecting a banana might then be content with a pear or apple is just downright embarassing in its ignorance. The price of bananas has quadrupled in the past few days. At this rate Jacob's weekly banana-bill is going to cost more than his day care.

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

March 28, 2006

Weird round ball

Monday morning I was online for the priority sales of tickets to the Socceroos vs Greece at the MCG in May. I'm not the worlds' greatest soccer fan, it is after all only slightly more action-packed than cricket, but this will be worth going to for several reasons.

As the last match of the Soceroos before they head off to Germany for the FIFA World Cup the crowd will be besides themselves with joyful anticipation. As the third largest Greek city in the world (including Greece, where only Athens and Thesalonika have more Greeks than we do) Melbourne is THE place to hold this game. The MCG can hold 100,000 people. I don't think its going to be big enough.

Its amazing the extent to which soccer has become popular in the five years we've been away. Before I left it was a game that you knew existed but didn't have anywhere near the following of real football. (not that I'm into either). You knew all the southern and eastern europeans living here played it but it had no visibility or credibility with the general public and as far as the business-end of sport went in Australia was a non-starter.

Now, you have to fight for a ticket to a venue that can seat 100,000, there's a national league of sorts and the volume of juniors-in-training is apparently, going to give the rest-of-the-world a big shock in a few years. Who'd have thought! And with such an odd shaped ball too?

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 05:00 AM | Comments (0)

March 27, 2006

Autumn

It's autumn here now and the cooler weather is really kicking in with 30+ temperatures for the last four days. Can you hear the sarcasm?

Yesterday we spent a long afternoon gorging ourselves with food and drink and watching a rogue gang of 2-3 year olds tear the place apart. Sitting on the deck with mum, Judy, Kees, John, Abby, Peter and Michelle, and not to forget, Jacob, Queenie, Esther, Beatrice and little-not-so-little Charlie, we wore ourselves out with a feast whipped up by my mum that seemed to go on forever.

Saturday we went to visit Sharon and Dougie. Dougie was my dog but has been living with Sharon since I went to Amsterdam to live so is now shared. She is finally starting to really show her age (15 or 16 -when did Collingwood win the Grand Final?)and it may have been one of our last chances to see her as Sharon has had to consult her vet recently about Dougie's deteriorating condition. As keen on food and walks as ever the only thing letting Dougie down are her hips. Unfortunately they're getting to the stage where she is finding it harder and harder to walk and they seem to cause her real pain when she is getting up or down. I'll miss her, she has always been an amazing dog and before I went to Amsterdam we had a great 9 years together.

(As I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)

March 22, 2006

Arabesque

Last night we road-tested Jacob's new babysitter, Samantha. Self-sacrificing souls that we are we took ourselves off to Arabesque for the evening. Local enough for us to get home quickly if Samantha had any problems but promising enough for us to feel we'd had a night out. The food was delicious and Samantha wasn't driven to call us once all evening so we've declared the event a success and have booked her for the following week! My only quibble about Arabesque is it lacked a bit of atmosphere, the origins of the space as general shopfront/office space being still too obvious.

Coincidentally, I was at the dentist earlier in the day when the owner of Arabesque, Geoff Malouf, appeared for his appointment after mine. I don't know what the dentist did to him but he bore it well, hosting with grace well into the evening.

(as I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2006

Stay! Stay I said.

There seems to be some confusion amongst you Amsterdammers. What nobody seems to have grasped is that Amsterdam was supposed to stay EXACTLY as we left it. Disturbingly people seem to getting on with their lives just as if the world hadn't stopped turning once we were no longer around. Whats THAT all about?

Worse still, Jaap and Edmee have moved to Harlem, Peter and Vanusa are moving to Amstelveen and now BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston is moving to London! Where will it end? Will I recognise anyone when I go back? Next the waitress at Cafe Krull will be upping-and-leaving, the Indian on the Albert Cuyp settling for the suburbs! Stop it I tell you, stop it!

(as I mentioned below I have removed the comments facility, you can email comments to you-know-where)

Posted by Faith at 04:43 AM | Comments (0)

March 20, 2006

It's not over yet......

I'm turning off comments for a while. I'm getting just a little tired of spending so much time every day sifting through the BILLIONS of comment-spam searching for the genuine ones. Just before I go cross-eyed I then end up deleting them all accidentally anyway. If I miss a day then the resulting mess doesn't bear thinking about. My database is spinning.

If anyone wants to make a genuine comment then feel free to email me. You probably know my email by now and if you don't then you could find it on the About page. If you have handy Tips and Tricks re the comment spam then I'm all ears.

Posted by Faith at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2006

Respite

We've abandoned house-hunting for two weeks due to the impossibility of getting across the city and around the inner-suburbs during the Commonwealth games. So, it seems, has everyone else, and it looks now as though it would actually be easier than usual to get around! Still, I think we're both glad to have a break.

Last week we went sniffing around Coburg which despite all my prejudices from the associations I have with the place from my childhood, (the Coburg Hilton etc) turned out to be quite fabulous in spots. It didn't hurt that our friends Adrian and Helen have parked themselves there and we were able to finish off the afternoon with a very pleasant interlude on their back deck.

This weekend our entertainment will be provided by Benny, my brother, who has come down from the-big-shed to spend the weekend with us.

Posted by Faith at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2006

The theory of relativity part III

Its autumn here now and getting kind of cool. That is, during the day it's about 20-24 degrees. Funny to think that only three months ago I would have found that a very pleasant summer's day whereas now it feels downright chilly! I'm wearing a cardigan and scarf. Ron of course, is still getting around in a t-shirt, but then his northern-europeaness goes to the core.

Jacob is wearing a singlet, a t-shirt and a light windcheater. Ron keeps sending him outside in just a t-shirt whereupon either mum or I dash after him waving singlets and jumpers and shrieking "You'll freeze, you'll freeze!"

I haven't blogged much lately mainly because I am now unexpectedly busy translating things. I'll tell you more about it later but it has meant for example the last two weeks I've been effectively working full-time. From home. With Jacob here most of the time. Not fun.

Posted by Faith at 10:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony

Posted by Faith at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2006

Live and gezellig from IJsselstein

Webcams setup, Skype installed, MSN on standby, the Great-Melbourne-IJsselstein-webcam-linkup finally became a reality last night. Jacob was thrilled to see his Oma and Opa in the flesh and I think they felt pretty much the same way. Jacob proudly fetched almost every book he owned and his new doona cover to show to Oma and Opa before retiring to his bath. Reappearing for a final kiss good night he then went to bed happy in the knowledge that Oma and Opa DO still exist, somewhere.

While Ron and I were sipping a glass of wine at the end of a relaxing Monday, Oma and Opa were on the first coffee of the day. The gezelligheid was so tangible we suggested they leave their webcam on and we would do the same so that early morning/late evening pottering could be shared.

An hour later Ron and my mother were sitting watching TV when they heard a strange noise, a buzzing noise. A tour of the house failed to identify any rogue electrical appliances but still the noise continued. It was only when passing the laptop and noticing a flicker of movement from the live-broadcast-out-of-IJsselstein that Ron realised Opa was doing the vaccumming. Loud and clear in Melbourne!

Posted by Faith at 03:30 AM | Comments (0)

Damn!

While deleting a couple of thousand (...and you think I'm exagerating?...) spam-comments that have piled up during our recent on-again-off-again-Great-Optus-Internet-Debacle access issue I accidentaly also deleted any comments posted in the last month or so.

Damn! And sorry to those who have left comments.

Posted by Faith at 03:27 AM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2006

Culture Shock

My father made several trips to Amsterdam while I was living there but never got over the culture shock. The discovery that there were parts of the western world that hadn't completely succumbed to the tenets of Economic Rationalism proved to be just too much for him and he retired dazed and confused to the Albury Commercial Club. His relief when we announced that we were bringing his first-and-only-grandchild back to the universe of little-Johnny-Howard was palpable even from the damp and gritty reaches of the Northern hemisphere.

Which is why I was a tad concerned when he announced he was going to India for three weeks. Call me a misguided fool but India seemd to my mind slightly more challenging? Or would he be better prepared?

So it was with some relief that we met him at Tullamarine this week after his three weeks travelling through India to discover that the challenge had been fairly met. I wouldn't say that he'd enjoyed the trip ("when you've seen dire poverty for three days do you really need to see it for twenty-one?") but it didn't seem to have shaken his universe in quite the same way.

While waiting for my father's flight to land we enjoyed the added bonus of the arrival of the Botswanian Team for the Commonwealth Games. An enthusiastic, if small, welcoming committee sang and danced and trilled as their national team streamed through the gates. Although slightly outnumbered by Games Volounteers and police attendance this did not dampen their enthusiasm or quell their cheers. Our cup would have runneth-over if we had also been witness to the Mozambique team's arrival but Dad beat him through customs so we missed THAT spectacle.

Posted by Faith at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

March 09, 2006

The hazy days of summer

If I hadn't been so busy drinking the 2005 Big Men in Tights I might not have allowed most of the Mornington Peninsula Pinots Week to race past me unnoticed. All that duck too!

Its a miracle I'm not bitter and twisted. Much.

Posted by Faith at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2006

Hanging out with real tourists

One of the things I WASN'T expecting was for a certain newly-Swiss blogger whom I love reading to send me an email announcing "Yoohoo I'm here in Melbourne!" Now fancy that!

Having slipped away from her blog unanounced I won't mention URLs (yet) but needless to say I was 'rapt', as we say at this end of the earth. Ron and Jacob and I were thrilled to share this week's tourist adventure with M*c**b*k*n and JM which included all the excitement of the Melbourne Observation Deck. Ever the organized one I forgot to take photos.

Posted by Faith at 11:15 AM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2006

Posted by Faith at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)

February 13, 2006

Volvo Ocean Race

Sunday we spent messing about with boats as we ventured out onto Port Philip Bay to watch the start of the third leg of the Volvo Ocean Race. 70 foot yachts are a whole new world to me but it's certainly an exciting event and the start (off Station Pier) was great to see close up. The spectator crowd was not as big as the previous week with the in-port race and so we had a nice view quite close to the start.

The excitement was even greater when Pirates of the Caribean took off and lead over the starting line and down through the bay at a cracking pace. There's nothing like the a skull-and-crossbones to add a thrill to proceedings and with a name like that they deserve to win. So much more exciting than a boat named after a bank!

The spectator fleet set off down the bay after the boats including us on our rather slow and lumpy whale-watching boat. We managed to keep up for a good while with a suprising turn of speed from the old-girl before turning back towards the city and Docklands to finish lunch and drinks at a more leisurely pace.

'We' were Ron and Kees and I. Judy opted to stay at home and mind the kids so Jacob got to spend the day with Beatrice, Queenie and Charlie. Just about his favourite way of spending a day at the moment! The photo above is as we were heading down the bay after the start. You can see all six of the competitors. Below is a shot of Melbourne from the water.

You can see some 'real' photos here.

Posted by Faith at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

Fish on Friday

Further on the tourism-or-die project, we went to the Aquarium on Friday. Yes, we saw the GIANT squid frozen in a block of ice. (reminded me of how nice grilled baby blue octopuses taste with a glass-of-something-chilled) We ooohed and aahed at the sharks and rays and the eerie light as you wander underneath the fish swimming around you. Jacob found a friend who was just as interested in rubbing his bottom on the glass at the sharks, thus saving Ron and I some potential humiliation.

Along Southbank and the Casino Yarra bank we stumbled upon an Asian market (a very sanitised-corporate-Asian-market mind you, with all nasty-asian-messiness-removed) and were able to indulge in Green Tea smoothies and Kueh Talam amongst other things. There was also a suprise childrens farm thrown in where Jacob got to chase some piglets and cuddle an alarmed-looking-chicken. Jacob then considerately fell asleep allowing us time for one of those cups of coffee where you pretend-he-doesn't-exist before catching the train home. Succesfully touristed all around, must do it again some time.

Posted by Faith at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

The girl that ate Amsterdam

Just when I had despaired of Peter and Vanusa updating their web site they have uploaded some photos of Analu. She has done one of those quantum-leaps that babies do where one day she is still a baby and the next practically a full-blown adult. She'll be driving by next week!

We saw her in Amsterdam not long before we left and she didn't look anything like this big. What happenned? Steroids for Christmas? She definitely has Peter's eyes (in a different colour) and I'm not sure about the rest but she is looking gorgeous so it must be from her mum!

Posted by Faith at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

Cathy B

A successful Saturday was topped off with a very pleasant Sunday. We are still busy catching up with friends and finally managed to catch up with Cathy B at her place. The car's unlockable lock meant Ron got his first train trip to the west, Newport, the sunday timetable being a fitting way of setting the pace for the day.

At Cathy's we lounged around in a disgracefully lazy way while somebody-else's-child entertained ours. It was great to see Cathy again and also to catch up with Peter and meet his wife and daughter 'licia who was busy keeping Jacob busy.

IF Cathy's hospitality hadn't been so tempting we could have gone to the Pride Parade in St Kilda. The Midsumma festival in Melbourne is always a nice contrast to the Sydney version, much more 'grass roots', bit less flash, less cash, more laid-back-fun. I used to always enjoyed watching the trolley-dolly race outside the Blue Elephant. (picture drag queens in stilletoes on tram tracks with supermarket trolleys)

This years parade saw official entries by a huge police contingent marching in their uniforms, the fire brigade, more MPs and politicians than you could poke a stick at and a couple of schools. Which yet again makes me wonder, just who is voting for Howard?

Posted by Faith at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2006

3055

Saturday we spent in our now weekly routine of checking out a suburb via the auction pages with a view to finding somewhere we might be happy to live. Happily this Saturday left us feeling positive and optimistic after the discovery of an area that seems to have most of what we want but more importantly is still within our price range. The location is good, the locals varied and congenic and the prices leave us a lot of options within our budget. Dus, we are now entering deep-research-mode for Nth Fitzroy/Brunswick! All tips gratefully received.

Our succesful afternoon was only slightly marred then by the mysterious 'locking' of Mum's car steering. After a fuitless visit by the RACV we were cheered up with a ride home in a tow truck and we did remember to drill the driver on what car NOT to buy. (Another project looming)

Posted by Faith at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)

February 01, 2006

When the boat comes in

Our boat has come in! Sterker noch, it arrived on the 9th of January (apparently our posessions were lucky enough to be flung on a 'direct boat' and thus the sea voyage tool less than four weeks rather than the expected six) and everything has been cleared by Customs and Quarantine. Tomorrow it will all be delivered to us. Jacob gets his tricycle back and I ................. what DID we have on the boat actually?

Quarantine are particularly vigilant these days and we had been told that they would unpack all 26 boxes, unwrap everything in them and check it all. This amazed me and I wasn't sure if I believed it until I heard from Judy and Kees, who had 126 boxes + furniture, that when their posessions were released they received a letter from quarantine explaining that they had removed and destroyed one item. A small bag of pot-pouri.

Posted by Faith at 06:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 31, 2006

Going, going gone

One slightly less 'fun' routine that we've instigated is the regular weekend of house inspections. Houses here in Melbourne are usually sold by auction, on the street in front of the house. For weeks prior to the auction, your house will be 'open for inspection' and hordes of hopeful singles/couples/families will traipse through it, inspecting every nook and cranny, commenting on your taste in furniture and shrieking at the photo of Great Aunt Nelly on the mantelpiece. Many of these people will just be your neighbours being nosey. Some of them will then return on auction day to make outlandish bids and argue under the gum tree growing out the front about maxing out the 5th credit card so that they can make one more bid.

As Ron and I want to live in areas we can afford to live in only if we somehow get rid of Jacob we are now in the position of seeking the 'perfect compromise'. This will not end well. What we want is inner city and cosmopolitan with all the benefits of a nice big block and the traditional aussie back-yard for Jacob. It is possible to find combinations of the two but not within our budget!

Its amazing how your more recent experience is abandoned and the ideas you grew up with re-assert command. What I would have considered a perfectly decently sized yard in Amsterdam for at least 4 kids I now pronounce impossible and not big enough for a dog to live in let alone a kid. No matter how hard I try, there is a minimum a kid needs in my mind to happily make a mess!

So, we are now spending our weekends traipsing through other people's houses with a view to establishing just exactly where the boundaries of our compromise will lie and where it can be found. If other people's experiences are anything to go by then this may be our primary weekend activity for six months or more.

The news that Melbourne is now in the Top 20 in the world for unaffordable housing is only the icing on what is turning out to be a rather stale and lumpy sort of cake. When I grew up the Great Australian Dream had been a quarter-acre block and your own home for most of the 20th century. Now, its more like the Great Australian Delusion!

What is also different about Melbourne is that whereas in other parts of the world people expect a bargain if a house is sold at auction here it is the reverse. Houses that are 'sold privately' are usually those that didn't fetch the price expected at auction or where the owner needs a quick sale and is willing to take a bit of a loss.

House-hunting it seems defies the tyranny of distance as back in Amsterdam, our friends Jaap and Edmee and Peter and Vanusa are also engaged in the same activitiy, even if it does take a slightly different form.

Posted by Faith at 05:38 AM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2006

And on the sixth day you shall eat.................

Having rescued my food prcessor from storage I've been enjoying using it lately. After yet another succesful morning hurling money at people at the Vic Market I spent Saturday whipping up batches of ice-cream. One, strawberry and balsamic vinegar and a chocolate one for the-strange-person-who-doesn't-eat-fruit. (My husband .........unbelievable!) With whip/freeze intervals built around a visit from old friends, Adrian and Helen, this turned out to be a very satisfactory way of whiling away a Saturday afternoon.

My brother had left his shed at Kergunya to visit us for the weekend and in celebration Mum cooked us Roast Lamb. Now there's something I haven't had for five years! Ron has never had a roast at all and so we dragged back a leg of lamb from the market and Mum stuffed it full of garlic before popping it in the oven. Add to this the delicious middle-eastern sweets Adrian and Helen bought us from exotic-Coburg, not to mention the whole-fig jam and the day was nothing short of a culinary extravaganza.

Sunday we repented by scrubbing the bathroom.

Posted by Faith at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2006

Market Day

One of the many nice things we've been doing is going to the Queen Victoria Market for our weekly shopping. While my parent's assure me that its full of inner-city-yuppies and has been totally spoilt we decided to brave the yuppie-enclave and have a look for ourselves. I remember going there as a child and also later as a student so it's not just a vegie-thing. There's a nostalgic element as well.

It HAS changed and there are a few of the aforementioned-yuppies but then I suppose they have a right to eat too? I'm sure South Melbourne Market will be cheaper but for now we're happy having fun doing this. Every Friday morning we set off with a vague idea of what we need which is rapidly abandoned in the confusion of the produce halls, we struggle over to the fruit and veg where everything is bought with my juicer in mind, leaving us a bit short of leafy-greens, before emerging dazed and confused from the socks, vietnamese lanterns and mobile-phone covers back in the car park. Yes, we even use the paid-parking which just shows how fundamentally un-Australian we've become!

Posted by Faith at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

January 26, 2006

Not waving.........

Today it was 40+ again. Still not as bad as last week as it looks like there will be only the one hot day this time. Tomorrow we are back to a civilized 31C. Ron is tickled pink as his parents ran from the Netherlands to say that the 'heat wave' was being reported on the Dutch news. No one here has thought to call it a heat wave yet! I promise to stop blogging about the weather soon.

Posted by Faith at 07:59 AM | Comments (0)

January 22, 2006

Warming Up

Here, its 43C and we're waiting for the cool change tonight after a couple of warm evenings (overnight temperayures of 20+). This is what gives all your childhood memories of summer that unreal feeling as life in this heat slows down to a just-getting-by-pace. There are people who get into their airconditioned-cars and travel to air-conditioned-offices and for whom life just goes on as normal but for the rest of us, its a nice excuse to do nothing at all but sweat.

The two dutchmen are coping OK considering and getting into the swing of things by taking long naps. The expression "heat wave" has not yet been mentioned in the papers. I don't think it qualifies yet.

We were going to spend today at the Docklands looking at the VOLVO Ocean Race yachts but with the 43C decided against it. Wisely as it happens as the yachts have been hampered by a lack of wind and only one had limped into Port Melbourne by yesterday. We also had tickets to see Antony and the Johnsons the other night but couldn't quite face the small enclosed space in the heat so chickened out of that as well. Obviously we still have some acclimatising to do!

As for the weirdness of being here? We'll get around to that later. Maybe. Just like all the things I had in my head to say about leaving Amsterdam organising the matching what-its-like-to-be-back-in-Melbourne bits and pieces may prove too much for me!

Posted by Faith at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)

January 02, 2006

And now for the weather.......

Ooooooooooh its sooooo nice and warm here! From -5C when we left Amsterdam to 42C in Melbourne is a bit of a leap but at least it's in the right direction!

A bit busy now so will catch up with more later.

Posted by Faith at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2005

The perils of multiculturalism

While divesting ourselves of our remaining posessions I thought I'd offered one acquaintance a coffee machine. The mystery of why her husband was bringing a van from Den Haag to pick up the coffee machine (I'd already offerred a perfectly good plastic shopping bag) was solved when it became apparent that she was under the impression that she was getting a bicycle.

Coffee machine/bicycle.....these things happen. Maybe it was something to do with her non-existent english and latin-Dutch combined with my non-existent portuguese and cheerful Dutch.

Luckily I am a woman of many bicycles and was able to whip something up that I had prepared earlier and that wouldn't be missed too much.(Sorry Kathy) Of course I could have tried to explain the error to her but God only knows where we'd end up after THAT conversation!

Posted by Faith at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)

December 19, 2005

Odette behaved herself

In the spirit of last things I met Odette at one of our favourite cafes, De Oosterling, in de Utrechtsetraat. This is one place, along with the Ooievaar on the Zeedijk, that I shall really miss. The Oosterling has been there since 1740 and it is obvious in the tilting floor, the nicely worn grooves in the bar into which you can settle your elbows and the plumbing on a warm day.

Odette is almost the only person I know who really enjoys a borrel. Jenever, that is. Young, or Jong jenever, still doesn't do a a lot for me but I don't mind a tipple of the old stuff, Oud jenever. Odette, I should mention (since she seems concerned about my mentioning it) was on exemplary behaviour with no hangovers to nurse and a dedication to the-man-waiting-at-home that was a credit to milk maids all over Holland. And here she was, complaining about my negative portrayal of her on the web! Poor girl, she can't win.

Odette is single handedly reponsible for both the worst-job-of-my-life and the best (in retrospect) and while Dutch to her bone marrow is welded to an armour of irony and cynicism that has found it's home in post-modern-russian-cynicism. Or Vodka, to the rest of us. Ok, Vodka and Oleg, although we suspect he is soft. Anyway, we are going to miss her more than almost anything else because her emails are crap.

Groetjes, Odette en Oleg. Ik verwachht jullie recenties.

Posted by Faith at 09:53 PM | Comments (0)

December 18, 2005

A coffee, tosti and a rabbit

The problem at the moment is NOT too little to blog about but rather too much. faced with the inability too choose and a lack of time I tend to always opt for silence. Luckily for you dear reader you DO get to hear about this Very Important snippet from our fascinating lives.

Friday, after a tip-off from Jaap over a tosti, (toasted sandwhich) I bought this ESSENTIAL piece of equipment. The plan is to buy a second one if it proves as sensational as it sounds as of course two would be much more fun! When I say I bought it that is of course contingent on my having accurately made some rather wild guesses with respect to translating the order process from the French. From the French email I've received I certainly seem to have ordered SOMETHING.

If anyone else has one please let me know and we will see if we can co-ordinate our ears. Lucky I'm leaving Amsterdam if lunch with Jaap is alwasy going to end up being this expensive!

Posted by Faith at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

December 14, 2005

Not throwing stones

Everyone is of course asking us now if we're worried about going back to Australia with the current riots in Sydney. It's hard to explain why I don't think these could happen in Melbourne, or at least why they are unlikely to happen, without going into some sort of long and (most-likely-eye-glazing) potted cultural history of the city and Victoria. But Paul Austin does a good job in today's Age so I'll just refer you there. I hope we're not proved wrong.

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December 12, 2005

The beginning of the end

On Saturday some of my ex-colleaugues dropped by for a gezellig afternoon of koffie-drinken. A sort of last-catching-up before we leave.

We have all since left the company where we got to know each other and, coincidentally, (or was it something in the coffee?) had children, so it was nice to catch up with a bunch of babies in tow. Ise,(4) had an ear ache so she and Jeanette weren't able to make it which left Jacob at 2, the oldest. Then there was Analu, (19 months) Sanne (11 months) and Daniel, a hefty six months! Jacob is going to haver a lot of Dutch pen-friends once they have all mastered chat!

Odette found time from her law studies to drop in and take all the vodka and jenever home with her, Gerit and Sook bought cake and donuts, Vanusa baked a delicious brazilian cake (which we are still munching our way through!), Peter bought his sense of humour and Jaap and Edmee showed off their new bakfiets.

I'm going to miss them all!

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December 10, 2005

Moving

Our street has been unusually busy lately with removal vans and people hoisting their posessions up and down from apartment to street. Seems everyone is moving not just us! The upstairs neigbours are also busy having sold their apartment. Today, they provided Jacob with something to watch and get excited about.

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December 07, 2005

White packing tape no less!

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November 29, 2005

Positive thinking

We Dutch (ahem...) are masters of the art of putting a positive slant on things. Bad or depressing news is ignored altogether or presented as good news. Nowhere is this more apparent than when watching the weather forecast. As Marjon de Hond put it tonight: "If you love clouds and low-hanging skies then today was a wonderful day".

Amen

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November 25, 2005

Citypodding

As we all know new parent's have just hours and hours of free time and are often looking around for something to do in all those empty hours between midnight and six am. Our friend Jaap has been busy coming up with Citypodding, a really cool site from which to download people's podcasts about places they've travelled to all around the world. I'm planning on doing some podcasts myself once my laptop problems have been sorted out but in the meantime it's fun just listening to everyone elses!

Jaap and Sander are now on the path to legendary-internet-millionaire-status after their debut on Dutch radio at BNN this week.

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November 23, 2005

Dinking

Dinking has long been banned where I grew up in Australia. Since I was a teenager I think. So it remains one of the quainter Amsterdam practices that I'll miss when we get back to Melbourne. There's nothing quite like being dinked home over the canal bridges on the Reguliersgracht to Ronnie's tuneless-but-fabulous "Tulpen van Amsterdam" warmed by a couple of extraneous jenever's.

PS. Of course from a practical point of view there's a few other problems-with-this-picture in Melbourne. The distances from A to B, the hills and the lack of canal bridges just to mention a few.

Posted by Faith at 05:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 22, 2005

Blissed out

Once again, my happiness is complete. When will it all end?

Not only has Howard dropped 11% in the polls but a DVD is to be released of the first series of Aunty Jack! All I want for Christmas.............

Click here to read more about the fabulous Aunty Jack.

Posted by Faith at 07:49 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 21, 2005

Scary Super Powers

Coincidence or scary super-powers?

We have rented three different apartments since we have been living in Amsterdam. Can it be purely coincidence that EVERY landlord we have had has then married within a year or so of our moving in? Thats three out of three ladies and gentlemen.

Our current landlord has just returned from his honeymoon. What he doesn't know is that our last landlord/lady gave birth to a baby boy exactly nine months after her honeymoon. True, our first landlord's marriage was not followed up with a baby but as he'd married a bloke it would have been miraculous if it had. Seems we are the nuptial-fairy-tenants of Amsterdam.

Posted by Faith at 06:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yeeha!

Finally the mysterious-invisible-people-who-support-Howard-but-won't-admit-it-in-public are waking up down there!

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A laptop a day

After 'Lill Dell's descent into unhelpfulness last week the entire laptop population around us started falling apart. See, we have an old Mac laptop in a cupboard that we bought second-hand years ago and which we've never had time to get around to using. Since the Mac had everything installed on it that I wanted on 'Lill Dell I dragged it out and started it up. Ok, there were a few minor hiccups, a flat battery, a lost power chord and 'where's the 'on' button', but no more than you'd expect form a PC user struggling with a closet-Mac. Except, that when I did finally hit my stride, it seemed that everything on the Mac, EVERYTHING, was working except the one thing I needed last week more than anything else. Photoshop.

So, after a wasted day it was onto the next laptop. Ron's work one. A useless machine set up for consultants to use so of course there is nothing but MS Office on it. Still, it meant I could access the internet and check my email (although most of my email addresses were still on 'Lill Dell). We did install Photoshop but the laptop doesn't have the sheer strength needed to edit one photo without crashing and needing a reboot. As I have almost a thousand to do it was looking like a loooooooooong week ahead. And after one day even Ron's laptop gave up the ghost and died on the one day a week he needs it at work.

In the meantime Dell support had identified the problem with 'Lill Dell as the monitor, not the Graphics card. We thought this was good news until we found out the price for replacing the monitor. 700 Euros! We can buy the whole laptop brand new with software and accessories for less than that in Australia in six weeks! So now all we need is a monitor to use with our laptop for the next six weeks here in Amsterdam. If you see one on a footpath near you call me!

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November 16, 2005

Look Mum, we can do penalties!

I've never even cared about REAL football let alone soccer but even I'm feeling happy that Australia is going to Germany next year. That will give Jacob two teams to barrack for! And oh Lord, twice as many matches that will have to be watched live at 2.00am from Melbourne.

And while the Australian team is certainly not yet at the same level as many of the WK veterans at least one significant difference has emerged between them and the Dutch team. Australians can kick penalties!

Posted by Faith at 02:11 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

Lil' Dell, they done him wrong

Lil' Dell, (our laptop, a Dell Inspiron) has given up the ghost. We now suffer the-green-screen-of-death with all the black transformed into a lurid green and everything pixellated to hell. I suspect it has something to do with our habit of leaving the laptop permanently-on-since-we-bought-it-in-2003. Of course if you'd asked me I could have figured out that this would be bad for it but NO ONE asked me!

Each night while we were sleeping Lil'Dell here was madly beavering away being sociable, NOT downloading software and music of course, just being sociable, and we never had to wait that few extra seconds when we wanted to use him, just wiggle the mouse and off he went, quicker than a bride's nightie! (Well not quite, it IS Windows) We did turn him off briefly once in a blue moon if he started dragging his feet some but only just long enough to re-start him. Lil' Dell took this sportingly and never indicated that it was getting too much for him, never pleaded to be given a rest, never complained.

The-green-screen-of-death first appeared about a month ago but after implementing a strict policy of "have you turned off the laptop?" Lil' Dell seemed to be coping and we were kidding ourselves that we could go on as if nothing had happened. This head-in-sand-policy was working for us until Sunday when despite a long and restful weekend little Dell just couldn't cope with one more start up. The green-screen-of-death appeared again and despite laying up for several days Lil' Dell doesn't appear to be improving at all. I toyed with buying him a new video card but ironically what attracted me to Lil' Dell in the first place has proven to be my downfall. I fell for Lil' Dell because of his new-fangled Centrino chip with WI-Fi. Seems the video card is included in the chip and doesn't exist as a seperate component.

Posted by Faith at 12:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

watch out for the cyclists

It's happenning again. Liquidated gangsters are littering the streets of Amsterdam and the dangers of cycling have scaled new heights as bullets fly and corpses straddle the bicycle paths like soft-and-lumpy-speed-humps.

OK. I am exagerating. But Amsterdam IS sufferring another of those underworld clean-outs we seem to have so regularly. And the dead are never johnny-average criminals but always the elite, the CEO's and MDs of the underworld. There are two things that strike one about this.

1.For a town with a population of less than 1 million people the proportion of underworld bosses seems staggeringly high. And thats just the dead ones.
2.The Dutch underworld must surely be suffering some sort of leadership crisis by now? All those middle-managers thrust prematurely to the ranks of leadership?

And the only thing cuter than the tours that enable tourists to take in the new murder-sites are the murders that are committed from a bicycle. So Amsterdam.

Posted by Faith at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2005

Try harder next time?

Ron was out catching up with old colleagues and Jacob was in IJsselstein drowning out the locals with his Sint Maarten 'leidjes' so Friday night was the perfect opportunity for me to stay home and catch up on the wool wash, some darning and getting-the-grungy-things-out-of-the-plug-hole.

What I cannot understand then is how I found myself dining at A La Ferme with BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston before getting down at the Badcuyp with the fantastic Soldiers in the army of love. Damn, just have to try harder next time!

Posted by Faith at 12:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 10, 2005

Dutch Housewives

Yesterday I had the pleasure of lunching with Odette at Bazaar where she nursed her hangover away and I tried to cope with a conversation that didn't revolve around packing, sorting, throwing out and "are we going to take the 500 CDs you've never listened too in the 5 years I've known you?". After that we bought some fish on the Albert Cuyp for Oleg's dinner, and snuck in a beer/glass of wine or two at Cafe Krull before finishing off the afternoon doing our grocery shopping for that evening's meal at Albert Heijn.

Loading our shopping onto our handlebars we compared notes on what our respective hubbies could expect for dinner that evening when I suffered one of those out-of-body-experiences where you see yourself from a distance as if you were someone else and could only think "My God, we are SUCH housewives!"

This and the socks-with-sandals and I'm on the brink of an identity crisis!

Posted by Faith at 01:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 09, 2005

To be sure

Its a well known fact that the Dutch are fond of their insurance. One thing I noticed when I first came here is that in general, people don't seem to like change, or surprises. Maybe that has something to do with it? I was also wondering if it has anything to do with the landscape. In a flat country you can see everything that's coming.

So, yesterday, when Ron sat down on the sofa to start the great-insurance-cancellation process I should have been prepared. We no longer own a house or much else but I knew we were still insured to a degree that I personally find mind-boggling. Mind you, the only insurance I've ever taken out was health insurance and that only after the Australian government legislated making it compulsory for people in my circumstances. I don't think Australians are terribly big on insurance in general.

I still haven't stopped laughing at the discovery yesterday that we have been insured all this time against things-that-aren't-covered-by-any-other-insurance, as it was explained to me. (Aansprakelijkheid or liability insurance I believe its called)

Posted by Faith at 12:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 07, 2005

Travelling Light

For people who don't own anything, (or at least not anything in this hemisphere) we seem suddenly to have an awful lot of stuff. There's nothing like hauling it all out from under the bed, the cupboards and the spaces behind the books in the bookshelves to destroy the illusion of travelling light! The five years we've been in Amsterdam I've bought practically nothing (Kthunk! - sound of Ron passing out in disbelief) since we've lived here constantly under the delusion that we would be leaving 'any minute now'. No CDs, no books, no THINGs. (Relatively speaking that is....)

I've been staying-at-home for days now to entertain men-in-suits from removal companies and it's all getting terribly complicated. Removing windows to do the Amsterdam-thing with the gable hook and lower everything into the street, parking permits for the removals van, policemen (no less) to claim the two spaces required for the removal van! (Must admit I'm glad I don't have to do that, don't fancy defending two car parking spaces in the Pijp. Might well never make it to Melbourne.) And thats even before we broach the subject of Australian customs regulations!

Posted by Faith at 04:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 01, 2005

November

It is November.

And that means the Melbourne Cup, NaNoWriMo and as I've just been reminded, MOvember. I don't know that I should be a party to encouraging men to grow moustaches. It would be a bit like encouraging people to wear socks-with-their-sandals but now that I've breached that taboo let's just see how low I can go hey?

Posted by Faith at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 31, 2005

(More) reasons to be cheerful

I sent an email to someone in Melbourne today and received one of those out-of-office replies that reminded me that he would be "vigorously celebrating the Melbourne Cup for the long weekend", as people do in Melbourne at this time of the year. I could count the number of times I've felt homesick since I've been in the Netherlands on one hand, but at least four of them have been when the Melbourne Cup was on.

Now THAT's something to look forward to next November!

PS. And here is what its all about.

Posted by Faith at 12:42 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Well mannered, all around.

It's great when you 'discover' someone or something new. Not new to the rest of the world but new enough to you to get you all excited. BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston and I went to the Concertgebouw last month to hear the Kronos Quartet perform with Wu Man and Amy Knoles as part of October'sChina Festival. The Kronos Quartet were as usual brilliant and both guests were satisfyingly amazing. The program featured pieces by Tan Dun, a composer who amongst other things won an Oscar for the music in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Better late than never? What we heard with the Kronos Quartet was enough to inspire a trip to Amazon. More CDs to pack!

Our seats were on the stage itself, we being not organised enough to book early, thus we had a good view of not only the performers but also the audience. We did notice a bit-of-a-flurry and a standing ovation for two guests who arrived fashionably late, we had arrived only seconds before them and were too busy getting arranged ourselves to take too much notice. (To be honest, I may still have been in the bokzone...) They were seated directly above "Mahler" in the balcony, central and directly over from us so we had quite a good view. Even so, it wasn't until AFTER the break that Kathy peered into the distance and said "Isn't that Prince Willem and Maxima"? A series of discreet but penetrating eye-ballings revealed that indeed it was.

Being well bought up of course we resisted the urge to wave. They didn't wave either which goes to show they have been just as well bought up as ourselves.

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October 25, 2005

More autumn antics

Like clockwork, (and like many Netherlanders) the autumn weather has prompted an I-want-my-penison-now crisis in our central heating system. Seems we can have hot water OR central heating but expecting both is just asking for too much. The ancient system governing these is no longer able to make the transition from one mode to the other.

Like clockwork, this year's lucky winner of the annual Govert-Flincktraat we-want-you-to-repair-our-heater-lottery dissolved into helpless laughter at first sight of our 'system' and proceeded to bandy the word 'antiek' around a lot. The question is not how long it will take to find a replacement part but do they still exist in this universe-and-time-continuum? Do we have the technology to travel back in time and find one?

The owner of our flat is overseas and suddeny not able to read his voicemail, email or sms's. Mind you I sympathise, he is planning to sell the apartment in just over two months when we leave so he is in a tricky position. Let the cranky Australian and the adorable-wee-little-boy freeze to death in the cruel Dutch autumn (Dad's at the office all day so doesn't suffer as much)or fork out and pay up? Suddenly working in a client's office all day is looking strangely attractive.

Posted by Faith at 04:29 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 24, 2005

Reasons to be cheerful..............

Ronnie, (despite his allergic-reaction to horses) is a man of exceptional talents and gifts. Here are two examples;

1)Saturday mornings (when it's my turn to sleep in) he gets Jacob up, dresses him, feeds him, takes him outdoors for his two obligatory trips per morning, does the shopping on the Albert Cuyp and THEN cooks muffins before the two of them wake me up around 10.00ish, Ron bearing a cup of tea and Jacob a warm muffin and looking proud enough to have cooked it himself.

2)In his spare time, (that is when he is not working full-time, cooking muffins, bathing Jacob, putting him to bed, 'doing' the cheap-flights-of-Europe or being led screaming behind a runaway-horse) Ron wrote a book with some colleagues very simply called "Service Oriented Architecture". It has nothing to do with buildings but is nerdy and technical and it's in Dutch but even so I think everyone should use it as their Christmas-stocking-filler this year.

Muffins and architecture, what more could a girl want?

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October 20, 2005

Granny fetish

Since broadcasting my age on the internet I've been getting a whole new class of comment-spam. Now, if I wanted to see a hot-fat-old-perverted-slut would I need to use the internet? Meanwhile the word "mature" has assumed all sorts of diabolical associations.

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October 12, 2005

A goat by any other name

I've done some research and the most common answer to the question "Why is it called bokbier?" is that bokbier is a bastardisation of "Einbeck-bier", this being, apparently where bokbier originates. In the local lingo "Einbeck-bier" became "Ainpöckisch Bier" and from there it's a small step apparently to "ein Bockbier" in German or "en bokbier" in Dutch.

However, for some this theory is just too simple and the PINT (the Dutch society for the promotion of information about traditional beers) goes on to explore some slightly more interesting ideas involving among other things satyr's, Dionyssian celebrations and a brief history of spring beer's in France and Germany and their consumption in the autumn amongst other things. Bockbier is much older than the logic that provides the first explanation. There is no conclusive answer but if you can read Dutch plenty more fascinating details to ruminate on while cycling in the 'bokzone'!

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October 11, 2005

Inspiration and bicycles

Friday night Ron and I escaped the clutches of Bob-de-Bouwer (Bob the builder) and parenthood for a few hours to go and see Beijing Bicycle at the Film Museum.

It was billed as the Chinese version of Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves which was intriguing enough for me. I was expecting something a tad depressing but the film had a strangely uplifting effect despite the relentless progress of fate against our hero. I think it was the direction and camerawork, which were beautiful and also very inspiring. By some strange coincidence, many of the shots made use of a technique I've been itching to play with lately (with still shots though, not moving pictures) and provided buckets of inspiring ideas. Now that I am happily 'freelancing' again, (read, without a client) I may actually find the time to try them out.

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October 08, 2005

40. hmm.......sounds like 36? 32? 29? do you take Visa?

Somehow, I managed to turn 40 a few weeks ago. More than a month ago actually. (Doesn't time fly when you're having fun.........)

The day itself was painless enough. We arrived at breakfast on the terrace of our hotel in Turkey, the one where we sat looking out over the Aegean and Rhodes, (just thought i'd throw that in...) to discover a bouquet of flowers from the garden and an enormous cake cook had whipped up for me. The other guests burst into a spontaneous-and-slightly-embarrasing-but-very-sweet rendition of Happy Birthday, I was congratulated in German, Dutch, English and Turkish and Jacob did a little dance.

After climbing up through the lower regions of Baba Dag to Kilim along the Lycian Way we spent the afternoon swimming before dining on our terrace, accompanied again by the Aegean and Rhodes but with the addition of a bottle of Turkish bubbly.

One advantage of drifting along on the tailcoats of the notorious baby-boomers is that by the time you reach any significant milestones in the age-stakes most of them have been there a good decade before you and wrenched it from sensible/dowdy/middle-aged/grown-up or whatever association it had that you weren't looking forward to and created a whole new set, usually revolving around youth, vitality and shopping.

These new associations are not without their own problems, the crap-exponent seems to get higher with the years, but what is handy is the 'loosening' of ideas that happens. By ditching one set of ideas and introducing another, or several, it becomes much easier to imagine yourself as something other than what someone who turned 40 might have been expected to imagine themselves to be, say, 40 years ago. There have always been people with the fortitude to ignore cultural regulations and stigmatisations but now it's easier than ever with the babyboomers conveniently muddying the waters before you step gingerley into the pool.

And thus, turning 40 has been reasonably painless, more than anyhting its feels like some universal practical joke. Just not quite sure who it's directed at yet?

Posted by Faith at 10:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Leaving, on a jet plane........

We have passports. We have visas. And now finally we have tickets. Three one-way tickets to Melbourne, Australia. Its official. We're moving back. New Years Day 2006 at an imhumanly early hour we will be arriving back in Melbourne to live.

At least for now.

Posted by Faith at 09:30 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

October 07, 2005

....more goats.......

And speaking of bokbier.

I met Odette recently for a natter and chat about all-things-stress-related, an occassion which coincidentally revealed to me the true power and purpose of bockbier. We had planned to meet at the Brouwerij 't'IJ, a windmill in Amsterdam where they brew their own beer. They have recently added a bokbier, the Biobok, to their list of accomplishments so I was looking forward to trying it. (Mind you, they have to do something about the name. It is a killer. More reminiscent of an industrial farming product than a beer.) Unfortunately the molen was gezellig, warm and crowded, not something either of us was in the mood for, so we ended up at De Groene Olifant (The Green Elephant) instead. What a coincedence! They served the Brouwerij 't'IJ's Biobok also so I was able to try it after all. The universe moves in mysterious ways.

I'm sorry to say the Biobock was a sloppy affair, not much flavour and very unstructured and saggy. Reminiscent of trying to drink the local beer in Scotland but not quite that bad. Despite this I soldiered on and tried a second one, and we ordered a portion of bitterballen to give the beer a nudge in the right direction. Unfortunately, there was nothing could save the Biobok (...as I mentioned, with a name like that...) and we were forced to leave in search of more congenial environs.

We ended up at one of our favourite tapperij's, forgotten its name but it's on the corner of the Utrechtsestraat and the plein with the Nederlandse Bank, it being in the direction of my final destination for the afternoon. Here, they were serving the Brand Dubbelbock, a heavier bock but very nice with it. Luckily I only had time for one, it being a Dubbelbock and all.

And here is where a bockbier really comes into its own. As I cycled along the Weteringschans to meet BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston at the Concertgebouw I was enveloped in what can only be described as "the-zone-of-warmth-and-gezelligheid" or, lets call it the Bokzone. Those first bitter autumnal winds couldn't numb me, the grey wet fog descending around my ears couldn't dampen my enthusiasm and it was only with a great trilling of bells that even the amsterdam trams were able to penetrate my new-found sense of wellbeing. THIS I thought, is what Bokbier was invented for! The first strategic line-of-defence against the onset of autumn.

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September 30, 2005

wind, goats and advertising

..........further to the wind and goats theme....

I've just seen the Bavaria commercial for their Hooghe Bock. Now I've never tried the Bavaria bokbier but am more than willing to on the basis of the ad. Its brilliant! There is one shot I would kill to have to a still of, the bok, or goat, looming above from the clifftop the hero of the ad is scaling. (We bockbier drinkers scale a lot of cliffs...) Unfortunately the commercial is not yet on the website so if you're not in the netherlands or somewhere else its been shown then you'll just have to take my word for it.

The bokbier itself looks like it will be one of the 'heavier' bokbiers, more Hertog Jan than Amstel. More November than October. Something to keep in mind. Unfortunately all the brewery brand sites are Flash sites so I can't give you a deep link.

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September 28, 2005

Windy weather and the goat

Its that time of year again.

When the first visitations of bitter autumn winds and that icey Dutch rain are softened by the knowledge that its also time for the release of the herfstbok. Or as they say in these parts, "De bok is los"

For an everyday bok I don't mind Amstel. And I love their latest TV commercial for the herfstbok with its flying goat. Reminds me of many a miserable ride home from Amstelveen when the route was littered with flying goats. Or something. A Grolsch is also nice.

But when its terschelling-cold the only possibility is Hertog Jan's Bokbier. It is a bit like drinking steak so its not something you can do every day, or manage more than one of. But on the right occassion there's nothing quite like it.

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September 15, 2005

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September 13, 2005

Miracles

The unthinkable, impossible and unbelievable has happenned. Today I received a letter from the Amsterdam police that my stolen bike has been recovered! This NEVER happens. IF I ever get time to pick it up (and thats a big IF) then I will be the proud owner of two identical ex-huur Sparta vrouwfiets. Anyone interested in buying a second-hand bike?

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September 04, 2005

Seven Bridges

A relaxed weekend in Amsterdam easing into vakantie-mode again. Saturday night we dwadled over to the Reguliersgracht for the Seven Bridges Jazz festival, always one of our favourites as it's intimacy and low-key profile keeps it accessible and enjoyable. Jacob danced his socks off and enjoyed himself well past his normal bedtime. We also caught up with Odette and Oleg and generally enjoyed the gezelligheid, as we Dutch are wont to do you know!

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August 21, 2005

Silence

Lapland. Back soon.

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August 06, 2005

As Dutch as......

The grand scheme for world domination is slowly but surely coming together. In this afternoon's post came the news that I am at last Dutch! Apparently.

As Ron put it so poetically, "at least now we can leave....". To celebrate I went and bought Maria Stahlie's "De Lijfarts". I enjoyed "Sint Juttermis" so much I wanted to read something else of hers although I must admit I hadn't realised that it would be so long. Still, all those endless summer nights in Finnish-Lapland over the next two weeks I should be able to whip through 594 pages in no time. Its probably still shorter than the Wilhelmus, nee?

In this household of three there are now three Netherlanders and two Australians. Globalisation and its pernicious progress through the fabric of society hey?

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August 04, 2005

Reasons to be cheerful Pt 2

Shortly after yesterday's post about my "cheerful dutch" I limped over to our local GP with my most recent case of sinusitis and the intent to demand antibiotics-with-menaces.

Our GP is called Dr Swaan and his partner in the practice is Dr Pelikaan, (thats Swan and Pelican, if you hadn't guessed) which is nice as it gives you something to muse over while waiting in the waiting room. Yesterday however on arrival I was greeted with the news that Dr Swaan was busy on housecalls today and that I would be seen by Dr Vrolijk. I kid you not! (See yesterdays post)

What with her cheerful surname and my cheerful Dutch there was no need for me to trot out my menaces and my sinusitis has been cheerfully resolved.

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August 03, 2005

Reasons to be cheerful Pt. 1

Dutch is one of those languages where if you don't know a word you can go quite a long way running two english words together and putting 'je' on the end or 'ge' in front, when in doubt do both. And if that doesn't work it will take everyone so long to work out what you were trying to say that you've long since disappeared in a flurry of project plans and font files.

And so we come to 'geconcepteered', or the past tense of having concepted something. Now 'concept' is a noun even in English so its rebirth as a Dutch verb was always going to be a long shot but for several years now it has been accepted by those upon whom I've been inflicted with a reasonable pretence of comprehension. Or something.

More recently however my bluff was called and the ensuing discussion about my "perfect nederlands" (my words) prompted the observation that what I spoke could better be described as "vrolijk nederlands*". Should I charge extra for that?

*cheerful Dutch

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July 31, 2005

Stop the world......

I was going to instigate "Queen Watch", a regular update on what the Queen (of the Netherlands) is up to. This temporary interest in royalty is motivatd purely by the knowledge that my request for Dutch citizenship has wend its way to her office and lies there now awaiting her personal attention, I'm sure.

However I'be been too busy to keep an eye on the queen. In fact I'm struggling to keep up with our own daily activities so have had to abandon that brilliant idea. All we do is work and sleep and drive to Berlin and back. One more week to go and then its two weeks holiday in Lapland. Oh the irony! You live in a country with a cold wet summer and choose to take your summer holiday somewhere even further north! Still, I can't wait!

In the meantime, to pass the time, here is some Jacob. We went to Berlin for three days and when we got back he was DIFFERENT. Visibly older. With a whole little world in his head that we don't know anything about. My baby, my baby!

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July 21, 2005

Your mission.....

...........its just TOO busy!........ we are off for the weekend to Berlin, on a mission to a mission, so to speak. Not all fun-and-games but I'll tell you more about it when we get back and have some breathing space, or not!

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July 12, 2005

Of all things icey

Undeterred by last week's cold snap I ventured into the world of cold desserts. I found a recipe in reliable old Steph's book of wonders for Lemon Granita that turned out to be absolutely delicious. I hadn't realised granita is so blindingly simple to make and the best thing about making it yourself is you can make it as lemony as you like. (I also added a dash of lime). As I like it sourpuss-lemony this is a great thing. It IS a pain to scrape though so I will be investing in one of those scraper things you use on your car windows in winter. Of course they are impossible to find in summer so I might have to beg one off the scharrel-ijs seller on the Albert Cuyp! I had more syrup than I had shallow dished for so I also made some icey-poles for Jacob's growing icey-pole stash.

While leafing through Steph's encyclopedia-of-lard I stumbled across a recipe for Strawberry and Balsamic Vinegar Ice-cream. I love balsamic vinegar and could quite happily drink the stuff and as soon as I imagined it with strawberries I couldn't get it out of my mind. Again, ice-cream is quite easy to make, its basically just whipped cream with flavourings, such as strawberries and balsamic vinegar and the resulting ice-cream was ABSOLUTELY delicious! My problem was that Ron doesn't like fruit and so all the bowl-and-spoon-licking had to be done by me. (Jacob found the balsamic vinegar flavour a bit too strong although he did like it once it was frozen) Four times the mixture of whipped cream and strawberries and vinegar has to be beaten, put in the freezer, removed and beaten again. Thats four times a bowl and spoon has to be licked. Before the ice-cream had even been frozen I was feeling just a tad overfull from the stuff! And rich! And then a litre of ice-cream that only Jacob and I can eat!'*

Of course living a fifteen second walk from Pepinno's, formerley-the-best-ice-cream-in-Amsterdam, all this may seem redundant but oh how the mighty have fallen! This summer is the first under the new ownership without the presence of Mr Pepinoo himself and you only have to look at the queues to see how things have changed. What queues? Exactly.

*Ron had thought he might eat the ice-cream as he often eats things where the fruit has been pureed and the fruit texture isn't evident. Alas, he tasted the mixture once and declared it 'too strawberry'!

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July 04, 2005

I do *click*

A little bit more than a short time ago I was privileged enough to not only be invited to Steve and Fintan's wedding but also to be asked by them to take photos. This was a "kid-in-a-candy-shop" experience and I really enjoyed being able to harrass people with a camera all day. And I was reasonably happy with the results, although I must admit now I can see a lot that I should have done better/different/otherwise. Sigh.

It was actually a very long and exhausting day and the downside is that you don't get a lot of time to talk to other guests or enjoy the festivities. On the other hand you do have permmission to be obsessed with a camera all day and night and no one cam complain if you want to take their photo.

If you're interested you can see some of the photos here. The brief was "B&W and arty".

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June 30, 2005

Komkomertijd

Komkommertijd, and just when you've marked out your place on the terrace for the summer and are looking forward to living the full 'freelancer lifestyle' someone spoils all your plans and offers you work! This is not the way it was meant to be!

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Beach Babes

Beaches are the new urban accessory in Europe with every self-respecting city sprouting one in the most unlikely of places. Paris on the Seine, Berlin, London....you name them, they all in the past few years have succumbed to the fad for urban beaches. Amsterdam being the smallest of these cities in both area and population has to have four of course.

The other evening BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston and I were due for some Very-Important-Gossip so decided to explore the one closest to us, Strand Zuid at RAI. It is the least 'beachy' in amongst the concrete and glass but this made for a nice juxtaposition, maybe you could even term it 'urban irony'? It was however just a bit too 'beautiful people'. Everyone was trying so hard it hurt to watch and this combined with the fact that the food currently on offer was crap meant we quickly retired to somewhere else to continue sorting out who gets to stay on the christmas-card-lists. Amsterdam Plage looks much more my style.

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June 28, 2005

Bijna een nederlander!

Eindelijk! Ik ben bijna een nederlander! Na negen maanden krijg ik een bericht van de IND dat ze hebben "u verzoek om naturalisatie met een positief advies voorgedragen aan Hare Majesteit de Koningin". Maar ik ben heel bang dat Hare Majesteit het nu een beetje druk heeft! Daarom zeker dat de brief zegt het kan nog steeds even duuren, 8 tot 12 weken.

After nine months I'm ALMOST Dutch! Today I received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service that my request for Dutch citizenship has been forwarded to the queen with their recommendation for approval. The Queen at the moment is also very busy, what with a new grandchild and all, so this last step can still take between 8 to 12 weeks but at least the end if in sight!

I haven't mentioned this bureaucratic fun-ride before as it is one of those things that doesn't make for good blogging. Dutch bureaucracy can take on proportions that would defy even Kafka's imagination and has been responsible at times for reducing me to hair-tearing, teeth-clenching, fetal-position-rocking combinations of rage and tears.

And as to why I want Dutch citizenship? Well that's another long and very practical story, to do with pensions, children and the flexibility to travel and live and work in both Australia and Europe. Plus, I'll be dammned if I'm ever going to go through the 'inburgering' process again!

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June 25, 2005

Sint-Juttemis

Well I've finished Maria Stahlie's Sint-Juttemis. And I loved it! 'Masterful' and 'deft' were the cliches lodged in my brain at the end. Now I have to rush out and buy everything else she has ever written although at the moment I'm not even sure what, if any, that is.

As I was reading it through a fog of Dutch I would really love to hear what anyone else who has read it thought of it. Its a very 'post-modern' novel (as they said in the 90's). I was very conscious of the author throughout, her use of literary devices and her handling of characters and their movement from one 'place' to another, bonds being broken and bonds been formed, both between characters and with the reader. It was this that left me so impressed, just how well managed it all was. In the end I found it un-put-downable, just to find out how on earth she was going to resolve it all without leaving me feeling flat? The ending was, in the end, perfect, the only possible ending it could have had. And the whole thing was perfectly set off with a very restrained and very dry sense of humour that manifested itself mostly through the character of Sophie and that would suddenly have you laughing out loud over one sentence.

At least thats what I thought.

PS. I'm turning into a bessotted fan. I've just found out that Maria Stahlie, or Madeline Tolhuisen as she is actually called, lives here in de Pijp. Where? Where? Where? Luckily she has also plenty of other novels for me to read.

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June 24, 2005

Heat wave?

Everyone's talking about the 'heat wave' and its now official, we're having one. Just to prove how relative these things are the Dutch metereologigical bureau defines a heat wave as five days of 25 C or more including three of 30 C. Mild summer weather in some parts, more like a heat ripple than a heat wave. Whatever, its just nice to be warm and dry for a change! Unfortunately it all ends tomorrow and its back to normal transmission. Rain.

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June 21, 2005

Windmills of your Mind

One of my favourite songs ever, (especially when performed by Nana Mouskouri or Dusty Springfield) Windmills of your Mind is my first contribution to Dichters op Dinsdag. (Poets on Tuesday) In future I will try and find something a bit more Dutch, in keeping with my recent forays into Dutch literature, but for this first one this will have to do. Todays theme was 'endless'.

Windmills of your mind (Michel Legrand / Marlyn & Alan Bergman)

Round, like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel.
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning wheel
Like a snowball down a mountain
Or a carnaval balloon
Like a carousell that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it's own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream.

Like a clock whose hands are sweeping
Past the minutes on it's face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
The Windmills Of Your Mind



Round like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On a never spinning wheel

Like a snowball down the mountain
Or a carnival balloon
Like a carrousel that's turning
Running rings around the moon

Like a clock whose hands are swinging
As the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of its own
Down the highway to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half forgotten dream
Of the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in the stream

Like a clock whose hands are swinging
As the minutes on its face
And the world is like an apple
Whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind

Keys that jingls in your pocket
Words that jungle in your head
Why did summer go so quickly
Was it something that you said
Lovers walk along the shore
And leave their foot-prints in the sand
Is the sound of distant drowning
Just the fingers of your hand

Pictures standing in the hallway
And the fragment of a song
Half remembered things and faces
But to whom do they belong
When you knew that it was over
In the autumn of goodbyes
For a moment you could not recall
The color of his eyes

Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On a never spinning wheel
As the images so wide
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of you mind

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June 17, 2005

Barcelona, the queen and me.

I had four very relaxed days in Barcelona earlier this week. While Ron yawned his way through a Gartner symposium I shopped and walked but mostly caught up on my Dutch reading. For the record, I'm really enjoying Stahlie's Sint-Juttemis.

Our first day back in Amsterdam I was doing some shopping on the market when I saw a small crowd accompanied by media-cameras and all. The crowd was in between me and my favourit 'kassboer' so it was with some muttering and general crankiness that I decided we could live without cheese for one more day and took a judicious detour to avoid the fuss. Later I find out the queen had paid an impromptu visit to the market. Even if you're not a royalty fan thats gotta be worth a look? Up close and personal with the queen on your local market? Obviously I have a good nose for an occassion. Not!

Ron now has the flu and Jacob is getting a new tooth that if it is to be measured by his level of crankiness this morning is going to be too big to fit in his head. Dus, gezellig bij ons vanochtend!

Meanwhile it looks as though we may finally get a little bit of summer weather. Now THAT'S something to look forward too!

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June 10, 2005

In the bath

We have lived tantalisingly close to the Badcuyp for years. First 10 minutes walk away. Then 5 minutes walk away. Now for the last year we have been oh, at least a 30 second walk away, ....on a windy, snowy, rainy day, ....with a hangover. And yet despite our best intentions, we've never managed to get organised enough to actually go there. Until recently when we finally popped in on a Thursday evening fo a VERY enjoyable low-key evening of 1940's-Paris inspired guitar jazz. Think it might become a bit of a 'local' for us. Finally.

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June 01, 2005

Hollandse nieuwe

It being June 1st, today is a very important day in Holland.

Oh yes, there's the trivial matter of the EU constitution referendum which is being held today in the Netherlands and at which apparently after much discussion about incidental matters everyone has decided to vote 'No' but much more importantly than that it is the first day of the "Hollandse nieuwe", the opening of the herring season and thus the chance to assess the new stock, as it were.

Raw fish being my thing I find myself on the Albert Cuyp with Jaap this afternoon taste-testing the new season's offerings. The verdict? Not bad, nice and fat, but also not the drop-dead-succulent-melt-in-your-mouth herring of which gastronomic history is made.

Meanwhile, BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston has been engaged in less wholesome pursuits.

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May 31, 2005

Defend the barricades

I generally try to avoid Rokin. Its just too ugly. But today I was in a hurry to get to Amsterdam Central to catch a train to the Hague so wouldn't you know it, ventured along Rokin for the first time in months AND without my digital camera. Obviously just tempting fate!

So, the eviction of squatters from the old Waterman building, the massed 'SWAT' teams, the burning barricades, the watercannons, the paint bombs, the molotov cocktail, the booming Black Flag, the detouring of all trams and traffic for hours on end, and the good-old-fashioned-squatter-politics-theatre WILL not be seen in pictures here.

A brief english report can be seen here although it seems a bit inaccurate. One tram was delayed? Three hours after the action started there were still no trams travelling along Rokin.

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May 26, 2005

Pigs might fly

Lets see now where shall I start?

With Wim and 700-odd pages of loneliness, longing and leaving?

Or with Maria and flying-pigs and transformations?

Somehow Maria sounds much more appealing right now. Based on a very-scientific-sample of 2 I can authoratively say that 100% of Dutch authors send their characters to France for their significant and life-changing experiences. Or maybe its just that there's more room to think in France?

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May 25, 2005

Ooooooooops

Ooops! I've just accidentally deleted about ten comments! Sorry to Marrije, Chantal, Kaat, Robin, Dianne and everyone else who has commented in the last few days.

Multi-tasking. So much trickier than it sounds!

Marrije, its very scary when a native-Dutch speaker thinks reading Wim Kayzer is a brave thing to do!

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Its all Dutch to me

Last year I had some vague idea of tackling Dutch literature. Before this, my Dutch reading had been restricted to Dutch translations of English books, progressing from Harry Potter to travel tales and camera manuals and finally Alain Botton. I eventually abandoned the idea when I realised the same pile of books-waiting-to-be-read had been collecting dust for six months and ALL my reading time these days is being devoted to endless repetitions of "Gonnie en Gisje", various Sesamstraat editions and "Rupsje Nooitgenoeg".

I was recently rescued from this literary wilderness when someone asked me to read Saskia Noort's "De Eetclub" and give them my opinion of it. Now I was hesitant to do this with 'literary' writing but a thriller seemed a straightforward enough genre and its amazing what a couple of nagging emails can do. Before I knew it I'd finished and enjoyed the book AND written a report!

Now they've asked if I would be happy to tackle some more literary works and never one to restrict my activities to my capabilities I've agreed. And I am curious about what happens when you read from a second language. For example, if I think of Tim Winton, so much of his writing depends on very specifically Australian experiences of landscape and place, how does someone from Europe pick up on all this? There is so much in literary works that aren't written 'literally' into the text but written around it by the reader. It will be interesting to see what I make of Dutch literature. And how will Dutch words work on me?

Today a courier arrived with two books from Balans for me to read, Wim Kayzer's "De waarnemer" and Maria Stahlie's "Sint-Juttemis". After checking out the back covers I'm looking forward to both of them but I must admit I practically fainted when I first saw "De waarnemer"! Its the size of "War and Peace"...but in Dutch! O je!

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May 24, 2005

World Photo Day 2005

I am hoping to be able to take part in World Photo Day 2005. Coming from someone who has trouble coping with Photo Friday it may be hopelessly optimistic but then thats not such a bad way to live is it after all?

World Photo Day 2005 is organised by Drew Rossman for June 1st with the subject being people and everyday life and the objective, (he must be American?)to explore humanity through the art of photography. To me it just sounds like a nice project to be involved in. Is anyone else planning to take part? I have a date, a plan and an objective......... what can possibly go wrong?

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May 23, 2005

The Flying Doctor

Today one of our neighbours was carried off in an ambulance. The Amsterdam way. Its not only an ambulance and paramedics who attend these calls but also a firetruck and six burly fireman. The patient, you see, has to come out a window.

The stairs in most Amsterdam buildings are far too steep and narrow to manouver a stretcher around them. This still fascinates me but then I'm Australian, what do I know about steep, narrow staircases?

I didn't take any photos, it doesn't seem fair to invade someone's privacy at a time when they are ill or injured and strapped to a stretcher hanging from a gable above a pavement full of gawking strangers. But I did stop what I was doing and hang out the window with all the other neighbours, giving the patient a cheery wave as they hurtled past clutching their dignity.

Because patient-extraction IS a spectator sport in Amsterdam.

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May 15, 2005

Irony

............is the reassuring words of BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston, "we may be drunk but we're not stupid!", echoing loudly-and-painfully through the remnants of your mushy brain the morning after Steve and Fintans wedding.

The wedding was fantastic, the grooms a vision, and after donwloading 2.5GB of photos (what WAS I thinking of?) I think there may even be a couple of good ones. Will keep you posted.

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May 03, 2005

Working for the man

While Jacob was lording it around on koninginnedag in his crown, pronouncing the world 'mooi', his friend Sanne was being ruthlessly exploited by her parents. Jaap and Edmee spent the day offering "Coffe, Cake and a look in the pram" for 1 euro! 1 euro proved to be too expensive for most takers but Jacob wants Sanne to know he thinks it was a bargain!

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April 25, 2005

We've been invited to a wedding! Steve and Fintan are getting married in the Hague in three weeks. As if this wasn't exciting enough, they have asked me to be their photographer! This is pretty brave of them and I just hope they know what they're doing.

As for me, I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. I'm trying to do some preparation. I've come up with an enormous list of questions for them so that I'll have a good idea of what to expect on the day, I'm trying to visit all the locations involved before the day itself so I'm prepared with respect to lighting, arrangement of people in the space and any ideas stemming from the architectural details or space itself and I'm busying myself looking at wedding photos on the internet in a similar style to what I'm thinking of doing.

Oh, yeah. And I'm planning on taking all shots in colour with the Canon EOS300D although the idea is that the final results will be in black and white. This way I figure I'll have the maximum information to play with in the shots themselves.

Any brilliant tips and ideas would be greatly appreciated as well as nice sites and shots.

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April 18, 2005

Fast Learners

Several months ago we gave Ron's parents our old PC so they could learn how to use Windows, email and the internet. With their 56k modem timed telephone connection Ron's parents were stepping out slowly and gingerley into the digital age. They eventually bought a printer, a digital camera, talked us out of an old laptop we had and we gladly fielded the usual phonecalls about DOS error messages because someone left a floppy in, forgotten hotmail addresses, desktop icons, solitaire, etc.

Which is why we were a little suprised last night when the phone call for help drifted into unknow territory. What message were they getting? Host names? IP addresses? Service Providers? Routers? What were they trying to do we asked?

Why of course, set up a router so that they could access their neighbours broadband connection (with the neighbour's permmission!)Duh! Why didn't we think of that?

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April 17, 2005

Colour (spelt right)

Last week proved a very colourful one with yet another toenail-painting session in Den Haag AND the Picture Perfect Color Management Seminar in Mijdrecht. Who says I don't get around?

Having to travel to Den Haag to apply for Jacob's Australian passport (Just how many passports does an 18 month old need?) was the perfect excuse to link up with BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston and splash out at Aveda. I don't know what they put in the foot bath you receive there while perched on your throne-of-decadence but I've never made it through the shop below without buying some pricey cosmetic, the likes of which I would normally scoff at! Makes the outrageous price of the pedicure seem almost reasonable.

Thursday I then used 7 strips and 2 buses and a tram to travel to Mijdrecht for the Picture Perfect Color Management Seminar. The seminar was exactly what I was looking for, putting all the bits and pices you've heard/read about setting up your camera, monitor and printer into a nice digestible story where it all came together and made sense...... even in Dutch. The journey there was a bit more adventurous than I was anticipating considering that the Seminar registration gave it's location as Amsterdam. From what I saw Mijdrecht is actually a lot closer to Utrecht! But hey, you can never stumble across too many cows.

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April 11, 2005

Kidskitsj

A friend of mine, Jeanette, is busy filling in all those empty hours that working-mothers-of-young-children have renovating old-fashioned children's furniture (with her tongue in her cheek!) and coming up with other creative ideas for children's rooms. She and her co-'opknappers' are together called Kidskitsj and they will be having an Open Huis next weekend, April 17 and 17 at Middenhavenstraat 27 in IJmuiden.

Besides children's furniture there will also be brightly coloured nostalgic toys, clompers, bracelets, and baby bedding as well as koffie and gebak!

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April 10, 2005

The gorgeous skinny lady sings!

The last year has been, I think, completely opera-free. Sadly, despite having tickets to hear Cecilia Bartoli and at least one other memorable-event-that-escapes-me-at-the-moment (!), our babysitting situation meant that not only did we get out of the habit of going to evening events but also out of the way of even considering it. Happily, BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston has jettisoned me back into the-groove with a sudden ticket to De Nederlandse Opera's production of "Die tote Stadt" by Korngold.

It couldn't have been a better choice as I've always had a preference for early 20C opera, I'm a complete sucker for any form of expressionism and the Germans have never rubbed me up the wrong way. Weird I know, a bit teenagerish and I've never grown out of it! Not that I know a lot about opera mind you but I know what I like! Anyway, the Nederlandse Opera production was fantastic, Nadja Michael in the role of Marietta was superb and the whole production orchestra, choreagraphy and cast was amazing to watch. A brilliant and inspiring re-introduction. Poor Ron! Now we have a babysitter his evenings in peace-at-home are numbered!

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April 07, 2005

Spinning silver!

I've been slack about blogging lately. That old conumdrum, too-much-too-blog-about (trivia) vs too-little-too-blog-about (Deep-and-meaningful, ok, so that was never a problem....)

But here comes something really deserving! Tonight we won a SPIN Award! A Silver Spin 2004 award for a project I did last year while working at Proximity Amsterdam. My amazing project managment skills aside, the credit must really go to my colleagues Jaap van Oort (Interaction Designer extraordinaire) and Peter van Driel (Art Director fantastic). Karijn van den Bosch managed the MSN components. Together we won a Silver Spin Award for the Best Online Campaign!!

Yippee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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March 23, 2005

Crazy talk.

Well I may not know who Johan Cruiff is let alone how to spell it but I know my integration is complete and I'm totally-Dutchified when 11 degrees celcius makes me think it might be spring. I've earnt that certificate!

There was a time when 11 degrees was a bitterley cold winter's day and at work we would swap details of hats and scarves, overcoats, layers of tights under our trousers and thermal underwear. This was in Melbourne. The COLD part of Australia.

Now, I'm riding home from work, its 11 degrees and I find myself thinking "You know it feels like spring"! This lunacy is confirmed by roadsides covered in daffodils and croci, weather reporters announcing the arrival of Spring and the streets full of people wearing T-shirts and their best new spring clothes. Nice to be sharing a mass-delusion then. Can the sun be ANY waterier? But at least its there!

February is always a mad bad blur for me, the month in which I finally give up and the greyness takes over. This year it was all the worse as between the three of us at least one has been sick almost every week since Christmas. Finally there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel! Temporarily sideswiped by the theft of the moeder-fiets and a late but hefty dose of a stomach flu I admit but I'm remaining optimistic.

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March 22, 2005

Klootzak!

This is the site that greeted Jacob and I yesterday morning as we stumbled out onto the pavement ready to face the day and cycle to the creche.

Notice the gaping hole where the "moeder-fiets', or 'mother's bike', would normally be parked? The bicycle we bought especially so I could put the little baby seat on a safe and reliable bike instead of the fietswrak I used to use? Some klootzak has stolen Jacob and my's bicycle!

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March 04, 2005

Football architect totalled

Apparently the "architect of 'total football'" died yesterday. Other phrases like "The General", World Cup and 'coach of the century' have been bandied about. It is a sad indictment of the Dutch integration system that none of this means anything to me.

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Be careful what you wish for........

After all my whingeing about our strangely warm and damp winter, bemoaning the lack of snow and the sort of dry cold that clears the air of germs and flus, we have just had the coldest March night ever recorded. Luckily for me I've been able to work from home nearly all week so I have missed out on most of the possible inconveniences of the heavy snowfalls that we've had this week.

I may though, have jinxed our snowboarding trip to Les Gets. For the first time ever we are flying (the prospect of 10+ hours in a car with Jacob leaving us completely unenthused) and Schiphol has been in chaos all week with only two runways snow-free, incoming flights cancelled and various delays with outgoing flights. So we may get to spend 10+ hours in the airport instead.

On the up-side Jacob is getting an extra weeks' use out of his new snowsuit, has been playing riotously in the snow at creche and has added the word 'snow/snieuw' to both his vocabularies. With a big smile to accompany it!

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March 02, 2005

The white stuff

All my whingeing has finally payed off and at this late by-the-skin-of-your-teeth-Mr-Winter stage we finally have some decent snow! While its been snowing most days for the last week or two its never been cold enough or heavy enough to stay around. Just wet enough to make the ride to work a bit more interesting. But this morning we woke to a white world and Jacob had to don his snow suit to go to the creche.

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February 21, 2005

Blissfully Ordinary

We've had a very ordinary weekend. A blissfully ordinary weekend. A weekend where no one threw up, no one was ill, no one lay in bed groaning, no one slept straight through two days, no one was sitting on my knee crying all day. And the washing machine wasn't used once!

I'm sure I'll be complaining of boredom in a week but this weekend was full of the blissfully ordinary. A bit of shopping on the market, a visit (finally!) to the divine Miss Sanne and her over-achieving parent's Jaap and Edmee, a rabbit poached to perfection a la our Steph's mum's recipe and a couple of bok beers and some music with Odette at Cafe Hesp. Its the little things that count.

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February 09, 2005

More gossip

Did I forget to mention that our friends Steve and Fintan are getting married?

Hopeless romantic fools that they are, they too (just like us) have discovered the power of a marriage certificate when dealing with multiple national bureaucracies. Which makes it all the more special when you discover that it's also quite a nice thing to do! They've already been mushily happy together for 15 years or so this is just the icing on the cake.

Quite honestly, I don't know what's come over me lately, years of cynicism are just crumbling as we speak. It's either late-onset-parenthood or the big 40, hurtling towards me in a storm of sentimentality and tears.

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February 08, 2005

What people do when they don't have a weblog.

As far as Domestic Godesses go Ron's mother has raised the bar a yard or two. She and Ron's dad come to our flat in Amsterdam every Thursday to mind Jacob. He does have a place at a creche on that day but they like being able to spend a day with him, even if it means leaving Ijsselstein at 6.30 am so that they can venture all 35 kms to Amsterdam in the peak hour traffic. While minding Jacob they also accidentally clean our flat, mend lights and taps, shop, cook dinner, vacumn the communal staircase and put things away. It takes us a whole week to find things again.

I was mystified last week when Ron's mum mentioned she'd done the ironing. I hadn't actually thought we had any. After all, it is a cornerstone of my shopping policy. After she left I cruised the apartment looking for ironed-things. Then I saw them. A neatly folded pile of ironed sheets and pillow cases. I can just hear them shrieking in shock at the feel of the unfamiliar hot iron!

Still, not a patch on my Aunt Wene though. SHE used to iron her underpants while maintaining a spotless shrine to 1950's domesticity in the suburban bliss of Elsternwick.

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February 06, 2005

Mr Costello

Ok, so the last two weeks hasn't been ALL work, viruses and suffering. Monday evening (nearly two weeks ago)we broke all our Old Year's resolutions and dared the icey, snowy weather to attempt the drive down to Utrecht and see the fabulous Mr Elvis Costello. It just shows how much you can achieve when setting out with the worst expectations. Despite the weather, the traffic jams and our history of never meeting Steve and Fintan on time we managed to all meet up in Utrecht, eat a relaxed meal and still be in good time for the concert.

Mr Costello himself wasn't so lucky, turning up with a virus that left him croaking by the end of the night. After the crowd rejecetd the opportunity to come back another night he threw himself into the rest of the performance with an exhuberance that was awe-inspiring. Even if he wasn't fifty. This apparently was enabled purely by liberal doses of honey-flavoured tea. Despite the audience having to sing the high parts ("Aaaaaaaaaalison.....) Elvis being completely voiceless at moments towards the end of the evening, he performed an hour long encore and whats more in such a manner that you were left thoroughly blown-away by it all. And here was I worrying about seeing another old-fart! He performed lots of stuff from his new album obviously and I have to admit, for me at least, there is nothing that beats the old stuff. God, how sad!

And it wasn't Tom Waits. But there's nothing he can do about that!

The only unsettling thing for me was this. I've seen Elvis Costello perform a few times in more recent years, the Juliet Letters, a couple of Jazz performances and more recently in Den Haag with the Netherlands Jazz Orchestra, but the last time I saw him perform these songs was 20 years ago in Melbourne at the Concert Hall. 20 years ago! How is that possible?

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February 05, 2005

Sanne

I have no excuses, its just been a combination of work, this stomach bug that seems to have taken out half of Holland in the last week, and I'm not sure what specifically but a lot of 'busyness', the side-effect of having us both back at work and no one at home being a domestic godess and organizing our lives for us. (Except for Ron's parents on Thursdays that is.....his mum IRONED our sheets!)

But what better way to start blogging again than with the news that Jaap and Edmee had a little girl last night, Sanne and a cinch at 3700gms. (OK, that's just the bitterness of a woman who delivered a 4070gm baby speaking) Ron and I have that strange euphoria parent's get when they hear that other people have joined the sleepless-tribe, Jacob is thrilled at the thought of yet another little-Dutch-girlfriend (remind me never to bring him to the Netherlands once he is in his teens), just in case Analu is busy you know, and Jaap and Edmee? They're probably just delirious!

Gefeliciteerd Jaap, Edmee en Sanne en geniet van je kleine rose wolkje!

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January 23, 2005

So far most of my freelancing has been of the sitting-in-cafes-and-'networking' variety. I was coping. However, the New Year and the new budgets that come with it in the Netherlands has thrown up a couple of clients and suddenly I'm working full time on projects for at least the next three months.

They're great projects and great work with people who so far seem really cool as well. But it has caused a bit of a ripple in the old tempo-of-daily-life continuum. No time for surfing, lurking, or snarling at other bloggers via a comments pop-up. Ironically, while terribly busy all day with all things interactive and the whole process of creating effective communications for the web, I'm feeling a little cast adrift and isolatd with no idea of what everyone's been up to.

Maybe I should increase my rates?

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High Protein Energy Food

Qua the snowboarding-fitness-programme, inspired by the sucesses of the previous weeks, this weekend I really peaked with the creation of a High-Protein-Energy-Food. Or Date and Chocolate Cake as our Steph rather mundanely calls it.

Mr Atkins would have been proud as this is very Low-Carb. Six eggs, sugar, an enormous block of dark chocolate, a truckload of dates AND a tub of Marscapone cheese and you have an enormous meringue with great big lumps of chocolate and dates in it smothered in a very delicious form of fat. For someone who doesn't have a 'thing' about chocolate I'm doing quite well.

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January 20, 2005

?

Who moved my blogroll?

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January 19, 2005

Baking not sweating

Ok, now that its been established that I need to lose weight AND get fit in seven weeks in order to enjoy our annual snowboarding trip (with pants on) I've wasted no time at all in tackling the issue.

Armed with an enormous tin of Haigh's Cocoa powder and Stephanie Alexander's the Cook's Companion last weekend I baked Miettas's Chocolate cake (250g full-cream butter AND 4 eggs)It was delicious. Just as you'd expect from the late Mietta O'Donnell.

While flushed with this success I stumbled across a recipe for a Chocolate and Zuchinni Cake. The coincidence with the name of Clotilde's weblog was too great to overlook so this was step two in my new-fitness routine. High in fibre AND protein it had to be a winner.

It is now sitting in the kitchen cooling down so I can smother it in melted chocolate and cream. I can just feel my abs bulging to the surface! Or something

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January 13, 2005

Your waitress today.............

We're not big reality TV viewers but were initially tempted to take a look at "Outback Jack", (yup, I know, its taken a while to make it to Dutch television) by the landscape which we recognised from our last month in Australia together. We spent this month travelling around the Kimberley in North-western Australia and the show appears to be filmed in and around El Questro and the Kunnunara region. We camped at El Questro too, but in the el-cheapo BYO-tent-and-get-eaten-by-a-crocodile area, whereas the programme seems to be making use of the luxury top-end options available there.

We were quickly seduced by the irony of sending 12 American city-living model/actress wannabes to El Questro to meet one Australian city-boy model/actor wannabe. Surely they'd have all felt more at home over a diet-frappe on Chapel St in Vadim's home town of Melbourne?

The concept is brilliant though. The problem with the 'Bachelor' idea is that it doesn't appeal as much to a male audience as to women. Solution: put eight models in bikins and have them splash around a billabong trying to catch fish and Bobs-your-uncle! Programming for the WHOLE family!

We love the suposedly adventurous challenges and even more the not-so-subtle-soft-porn filming of these challenges. Does the director actually yell "CUT! Marissa can you catch that fish again but this time with MORE booty!". Is there an X-rated version where the girls catch fish with their cleavage? And we have a lot of sympathy for Vadim whose responses-for-every-situation are beginning to dry up. The poor boy is starting to sound a bit repetitive. Can't the scriptwriters come up with anything better than the same old, .."this journey that we've started together...", ..."I've only just started to discover who you really are...", "..you're a beautiful person on the inside...". It's obvious everyone involved had a hoot filming this show.

Last night however I was jarred from my open-jawed-admiration when one of the contestants mentioned that she had been told that "Australian men like to be waited on" or words to that effect. It was not so much the novelty of this idea, it has about as much to do with reality as the rest of the programme, but my (Dutch) husband's reaction. He seemed to be having trouble breathing and had sunk into his chair groaning, gasping, turning purple and making strange squeaking noises. After some considerable time of hopelessly- over-acted-amusement he summonned just enough breath to wheeze, "well obviously not by Australian women, or they'll be waiting a long time!"

Frostily, this-Australian-woman pointed out, that my mother, has made a huge fuss over him when she's been here. Spoilt him even. some would say.

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January 12, 2005

5 Januaries

My first January in Amsterdam I had nothing to do but wait for my 'verblijfsvergunning', (residence permit) so spent the days walking and exploring. It snowed, quite a bit, and to someone from a country where it doesn't snow in everyday-situations, only on special-trips-to-mountains-especially-reserved-for-snow, having snow on pavements and bridges, cars and bikes, your hat and your nose, was pretty special.

By my second January in Amsterdam I had my permit (but only just!) and had started work and thus discovered cycling-to-work-in-the-snow-wrapped-in-a-flock-of-woolens. I also discovered ice, quickly followed by what-the-road-feels-like, what salt is used for and why you should sleep in and let all the other cyclists go first.

My third January in Amsterdam I was a dab hand and only briefly glanced at the RAI thermometer and it's -11C reading as I whizzed past on my bike. Riding home I loved the sudden silence descending with a snow-storm as I was transformed into a cycling snowman and the road underneath me from a greasy wet black to a crisp crunchy white where my wheels were the first to leave tracks.

My fourth January in Amsterdam I wrapped our new son Jacob up in five layers of clothing and two blankets and a jacket and took him out in the pram and wondered if he could see the snow yet.

So now in my fifth January in Amsterdam I was just a bit startled to discover crocuses (croci?) in the Sarphati Park and blossom on the trees in the Vondelpark! And no sign of snow at all. Looks like we won't be getting a chance to buy that little wooden sleigh for Jacob after all.

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January 11, 2005

Three small things

Now that my bank accounts have returned from their jaunt to other-parts-of-the-Netherlands it was time to reintroduce myself to the receptionist at the Rabobank and confirm all his worst suspicions about people-who-speak-Dutch-with-a-funny-accent. This visit was an effective live demonstration of the proverb, "Never put off 'till tomorrow what you could do today". Or how one silly mistake when coupled with two others has the power to make you look like a prize idiot.

Firstly I had to get my PIN pass de-blocked after having typed in the wrong PIN code multiple times a few weeks back. Could have happenned to anyone. The nice young man at reception was able to fix this in a jiffy.

Then I had to ask him about my brand new account. The one I opened a week or two ago. That I've not yet even had the chance to use. For which I've just received the pass card in the mail. And the PIN number. Which I've lost. Unopened. The nice young man at reception held my gaze for only a nano-second longer than strictly necessary. And ordered a new card and PIN number in another jiffy.

Last but not least I had to mention the money I transferred to my Australian bank account and which has not yet shown up in that account but which has been taken from my Dutch account. The nice young man at reception explained that these transfers can take time and when was the transfer? April. And when did I notice it hadn't gone through? November. And it is now...? It took only a jiffy of significant silence before the nice young man at reception was on the phone arranging for me to consult a consultant.

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January 05, 2005

Essential Maintenance

Both being Very Busy People BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston and myself only just managed to squeeze in a six hour jaunt to Den Haag yesterday for a pedicure.

Enthroned on our vibrating-massage-chairs-with-a-view our feet were bathed, scrubbed, massaged, preened, slathered in sweet-smelling-ungents and suitably fussed over for more than an hour. The whole affair was then topped of with the application of a nail poilish that BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston perceptively dubbed "Fuck Me Red". Our intrepid pedicurist (bravely going where no pedicurist has been for months) confirmed this diagnosis with the revelation that the name of this subtle-shade was "I'm not really a waitress".

Armed with my new toe nails I didn't even flinch when paying the bill which together with the train fare meant my pedicure could have bought a decent meal for two in many a gezellige Amsterdam cafe. Wine included.

Photos may follow once BBC-star-Kathy-Clugston works out her software issues.

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Wham! Kerthump! Blam!

On a nerdy note, Six Apart have released a Guide to Fighting Comment Spam for all you Movable Type users. And all I can say about this;

"As I've mentioned before, Six Apart is fully committed to eradicating comment spam."

is YAAAAAY YAAAAAAAAAAAY! Go Superheroes!

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December 29, 2004

(Knit 1 Purl 1) x 3 sets

As the cornerstone of my pre-snowboarding-get-fit-strategy knitting has turned out to be a complete failure. Even with the no.15's.

I can't fit into my snowboarding pants and as I no longer cycle every day to and from work the only regular exercise I am getting is the daily currant-bun-run to the baker and back with a small tricycle and 11 kilos of attached-boy. The baker just isn't far enough to cancel out the currant buns.

Looks like there is nothing for it but to spend the next few days finishing off all the chocolate in the house before embarking on some sort of organised effort to get myself fit enough to fall down a mountain. Considering the wintery turn in the weather this may even have to involve a gym. Just when I was planning a cheese fondue for New Year's Eve.

This year, (or next year as it still is, actually, 2005) we are going somewhere new, Les Gets. Our first choice was a small Italian village but as full-time childcare for babies of Jacob's age was hard to find in any of these we have had to resort to something a lot less interesting but where we'll ALL be able to have fun. Jacob included. Besides all the obvious snowboarding-fitness-requisites I also have to build up the muscles in my throwing arm as we plan to make snow-angels with Jacob and I don't want any footsteps spoiling the photos.

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Speechless

Just when you've worked out a particularly petty post based on your magnificent ability to whinge about trivial things a giant tsunami goes and destroys countless lives across several different countries and continents making the petty just that much pettier.

Ok, a LOT pettier.

Doctors without Borders

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December 24, 2004

Christmas Eve

At last the knitting is finished. I did think of a few more things I could knit for even more people but have decided to bow-to-reality on this one and STOP! What is it about knitting and babies, once you start you want to see it inflicted on everyone else?

The last few presents are being wrapped this afternoon, Ron is coming home from work early and then tomorrow morning, after opening the parcels that have arrived from Australia, we head off to Ijsselstein armed with kerststol, chocolates, presents and wine to spend the weekend drowning in crumpled wrapping paper, witloff, cheese and gezelligheid! It is strangely warm which is a bit disapointing, I was hoping Jacob might get a white-ish christmas. In Melbourne, ten hours ahead, Mum has just been to the market and returned armed with fresh-from-the-sea oysters and prawns for Christmas day. I hear its lovely weather but quite mild. Good thing too with all those woolies to unwrap!

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas doing what they like doing best, and if that's ignoring Christmas then thats fine too. Special greetings to my most devoted commenters, Bob, Jane and hubby John Doe, Texas Hold Em, luba, napoleon and all the rest. Don't work too hard over Christmas!

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December 22, 2004

Too much Poo

The poo-people didn't turn up last night. I scoured the papers this morning for news of a poo-van traffic disaster but to no avail. Later they rang to say that they won't be coming until Friday.

What AM I supposed to DO with a superflous bag of POO?

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December 18, 2004

Photo Friday: Tacky

......is proving to be a bit tricky. I DO have a photo of someone's bum crack from last year's gay canal parade but don't really want to go down that path. I'm consumed with the ambition to photograph stickiness but haven't found the stickiness or the time yet. Will let you know if I succeed.

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December 15, 2004

Incoming and Outgoing

Ok, Christmas-Knitting-Frenzy-Part-1 is over and a nice woolly package is whinging its way to sunny warm Australia. I hope all that wool gets past Customs? Are they going to rip apart my carefully wrapped parcels of woolies?

And speaking of parcels, I may have mentioned once or even twice before how much we enjoy being on the receiving end of something-too-big-for-the-slot-in-the-door and so we were overjoyed to discover just such a thing from Annette in Melbourne recently. Carefully ignoring the green Postpak adorned with reindeers I pretended not to realise it was a Christmas parcel and opened it there and then rather than waiting another 11 days. Waiting is not my strong point.

Annette sends brilliant presents. And hopelessly overestimates my abilities. Inside was a Patons book of Dinosaurs to knit. This will be interesting as my knitting strategy so far has been to avoid anything requiring me to think and these look a tad more complicated. Some of them even have those graph things so obviously counting and paying attention will be required. Ron, ever the optimnist, has already picked ou the one he wants but we are yet to decide on one for Jacob. Did I say, one?

Also included in Annette's parcel was a HUGE tin of Haigh's drinking chocolate! Truly worthy of our evening ammareto. And last but certainly not least was a platypus tea towel to add to the collection of those we've got from my mum. How did Annette know we didn't have a platypus?

I hadn't realised before that the tea towel thing was particularly Australian but I am starting to have my suspicions. Certainly the Dutch don't do it. (Give linen tea towels as gifts that is) I suspect the English might. But I don't know about the rest of the world? Maybe someone can enlighten me?

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December 14, 2004

Schitterend feestje

Almost a week ago now we had an uncommonly civilized evening for us. I'm a slack member of ABIE and the Australian Ambassador in the Netherlands, Mr. Stephen Brady is a great supporter of our group. And so it was that he and Mr. Peter Stevens offered to host the ABIE Christmas party at the ambassador's residence in Den Haag. Now I just know you'll find this hard to believe, but its not often that I get the chance to poke around an ambassador's residence, so we duly RSVP'd "YES". I did however make a couple of small, tiny, wee, faux pas. Shall I list them?

One:I misread the dress code 'Lounge Suit' for 'Lounge'. Hmm, funky for an Ambassador, I thought. Add to this the fact that it was the first sub-zero day this winter and my decision to wear a couple of blue-sheep and I guess my initial entrance must have been a bit startling to the other guests. They handled it very diplomatically.

Two:I had somehow not noticed that the chappie I had met previously had since been assigned to Argentina and there was a new incumbent. (It happenned in the post-new-baby-back-at-work-blur, or at least thats my excuse) Thus I resolutely ignored the Australian Ambassador all evening convinced he was a waiter.

Despite this I can report, the ambassador has some nice digs with some lovely reception rooms. He has a new cook who can, as they say in the CWA, "do a lovely spread", and was himself charming and very diplomatic under duress. (Well, it IS his job.) Everyone else was beautifully dressed and behaved and it was as they say on Sesamstraat, "een schitterend feestje, wat een geweldig soiree"*. Thanks to Jacob I couldn't get that song out of my head all night.

*Schitterend is currently one of my favourite Dutch words, its one of those words that sounds the way it means. It means, "brilliant or glittering".

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December 12, 2004

still counting.........

Christmas presents 2 & 3 are finished. 4 is almost half way through.
Oh yee of little faith!

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oh the decadence!

Was a time not so long ago when Saturday night started off with a couple of vodka martini's, maybe The Isthmus of Kra or Madame Fang for dinner and then onto some dancing and martini judging, possibly at Tony Starr's Kitten Club or The Gin Palace for example. Then one of those wild-and-decadent Dutchmen lured me off to Amsterdam, City of Sin, where my Saturday nights have been transformed.

Home-made Chicken and Leek pie, knitting woollies for Christmas and ballroom dancing on the BBC!

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December 11, 2004

Your feets too big........

Despite the best efforts of the 'butcher-of-Amsterdam' and his scissor-weilding-assistant (my obstretician and his doctor-in-training) I seem to have escaped the less desirable souvenirs of pregnancy. I still have the bladder of a horse, I didn't collect any stretch marks, varicose veins, backaches or other complaints. Ok, there IS this spare-tyre arrangement where my waist used to be but if I'm honest that has only a tenous link to pregnancy and a more concrete one to the kitchen.

So, when the first new shoes I bought after the event were a size larger than normal I just assumed it must be a 'smaller' brand. But now, just over one year and several shoes later it seems that every single shoe I've bought in that time is one or sometimes TWO sizes bigger than my pre-pregnant feet.

If I ever have a second baby I could end up looking like a duck.

Posted by Faith at 11:10 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

December 08, 2004

Poo

Every second Tuesday evening a small anonymous white van glides through the darkened narrow streets of Amsterdam, stopping briefly at narrow leaning houses where well-tied white plastic bags are hastily handed over to be deposited in the back of the van, before it hurries on its way over the cobblestones and grachten. Its not a special van in any way, unmarked and no different to the van's thousands of small-businesses use every day. The driver sits in the front and directly behind him sit all his goods with no partition between them. On a cold winter's evening I imagine he has the heating turned up nice and high also. Or maybe not.

Because every second Tuesday evening this small white van and a remarkably (REMARKABLY) cheerful driver drop by to pick up all of Jacob's USED nappies. These are then whisked away while two green bags of new recycled disposables are left behind in their place.

You DO NOT want to have an accident with this van.

Posted by Faith at 10:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 06, 2004

Advent knitting

About a month ago I proposed that I was going to knit ALL my Christmas presents this year. After Ron had stopped GUFFAWING I conceded he was probably right and it wasn't such a good idea and went back to knitting patternless-stockinette-scarves-in-extravagant wools.

So now, 19 days before Christmas, about a week before any parcels would have to be sent off to Australia, I've decided to change my mind and reverse my uncommon flirtation with common-sense. This rapid turn around was inspired by my stumbling across a couple of patterns that had the-names-of-certain-close-relatives written all over them. (I can practically hear all those Australian knees trembling from here) Or maybe it was just because giving myself six weeks would have been too easy. Now that it almost impossible to achieve, I feel much more comfortable. At home. Its got that cosy familiar I've-been-here-before feeling to it. And of course it will be just what everyone in Australia is looking forward to, something-warm-and-woolly on Christmas Day when it is 30+ degrees. But maybe I have a far more sophisticated plan? Mobile phone covers anyone?

And just when I'm wavering the new Knitty comes out! So thats what I'll be doing for the next 19 days. Knitting.

Posted by Faith at 03:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 27, 2004

Desmond and God in Elsternwick

While browsing through the comments on Chocolate and Zuchinni I came across Ecritures which led me to photographer Sandy Nicholson's site and there I found, Desmond! [At the Sandy Nicholson site, click on Suburban Stories and then Desmond and God]

Desmond lives a couple of blocks from my mum's house in Elsternwick, Melbourne, Australia. Desmond has been an eccentric feature of Melbourne life for years, pushing his cart full of bibles to give away around the city or other possible sites of fun, er, sin. Chapel Street, (shopping and nightclubs), Prahran, (shopping and transvestities), St Kilda, (eating and drinking) and appearing at any large scale event intended to attract lots of people. Who might end up having fun, er, sinning. His house is, as the photos show, a sight in itself and responsible for more than a few traffic accidents.

Posted by Faith at 04:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 26, 2004

A Pot Boiler

Only seconds after I got home with Jacob this morning after yet another great-tricycling-adventure the front door bell was rung by a young man with a parcel! We love parcels so we let him in and signed with abandon, tore great chunks of cardboard apart, wrestled with cellophane and stickytape, and there it was! Stephanie Alexander's the cook's companion 2nd Edition.

I've coveted this book for years. I always figured there was no rush to buy it, I'd buy it next time, it was too heavy to carry right now etc etc. And then poof! Gone! Out of print! I am now glad I missed out because the 2nd edition is not only full of stephanie alexander's culinary wisdom but GORGEOUS to look at, with a stunning cover, SILVER-edged paper and pretty orange and silver place-markers. Gorgeous AND encyclopaedic! I've come over all trembly....

Posted by Faith at 11:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 25, 2004

Nick Cave and the Memories

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds played last night at the Heineken Music Hall, which is why we didn't go, the Heineken Music Hall is under BOYCOTT for various reasons, not least of them the great St-Germain-disaster-of-2002.*

This morning there was a review of the concert in De Volkskrant which completely validated (ooh, now I'm trilingual, I can write American too!) our decision not to go as it bemoaned the lack of feeling Cave injected into his music, especially the older numbers. Poor Nick, I blame the venue!

The review DID mention that the Bad Seeds had been around for 20 years. This was a bit of KING HIT at 10.30 on a frosty winter's morning over your first coffee. 20 YEARS? I still think of the Bad Seeds as the NEW Nick Cave band. The new-fangled-trendy-not-sure-if-I'll-buy-this version of Nick Cave after The Birthday Party and those fun lovers, The Boys Next Door. Who will ever forget "Door Door" and the classic "Shiver"? Does ANYONE know what I'm talking about?

I can remember going to the Seaview Ballroom in St Kilda, (when it was a decrepit goth hangout, looooong before it became the George) and seeing Nick and the Birthday Party upstairs in the Ballroom. They weren't meant to be using the Ballroom for gigs as it didn't meet building safety requirements and as the crowd danced you could feel the old springy floor moving up and down in what became an increasingly alarming manner. (The Ballroom was probably one of the few venues that would be raided just as often by the Fire Brigade - responsible for building regulations regulation- as by the Police) The floor was bouncing up and down and Nick Cave had stripped down to his leopard skin undies (or was that a Cramps gig?) and sang the longest version of Nick The Stripper ever.

It must have been 82 or '83, I had a fake ID, a Black Russian, Depeche-Mode-hair, a crush on Roland and was desperately trying to look mean. I didn't realise it at the time but I was failing dismally!

*Other reasons include the knee high slush of beer and cracked plastic beer containers you end up wading through by the end of every concert, the fact that they serve only Heineken beer, the complete lack of atmosphere, (Its name 'Black Box' is the most inspiring thing about the place, seriously!), the fact that you have to catch the Metro to get there, the fact that its not the Paradiso, the stupid-token system, need I go on?

Posted by Faith at 12:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 24, 2004

de sint

The Sint arrived in the Netherlands on November 13th to begin his annual tour of the country and assesment of the local youth before pakjesavond or 'parcel evening' on December 5th. On that evening, if you've been good you'll receive gifts. If you've been bad you will be tossed into a sack by the Sint's companion, "Black Pete" and carted off to Spain. Now, ironically, these days most Dutch pay a significant amount of money to be carted off to Spain at regular intervals, but obviously there was a time when this was a more terrifying prospect.

The whole 'Sint' thing is quite challenging for many foreigners, especially if you come from a country with a culture of political correctness. The Sint you see is accompanied by a Morrocan boy, "Black Pete" who is variously described as his slave or helper. As if that wasn't confronting enough he is usually depicted by someone 'blacked-up' as a caricature of a little Morrocan helper.

And so it is that at this time of year you can quite regularly find yourself confronted by the site of a benevolent looking old Bishop reminiscent of Santa Claus, accompanied by a bevy of "Black Pete's", blacked-up 2-meter-tall-helpers, strewing bitter cookies and sweets before them. Even after nearly-four years this still induces mixed feelings!

The problem I have with the Sint and his Black Pete's is that for me the stereotype's they represent always come looming large before them and I still haven't found a way to digest all this baggage, together with the event as a harmless children's celebration and end up with something I feel totally comfortable with. Even at a superficial glance the recipe includes this;

1. The Sint - White, is the 'owner' of Black Pete, benevolent, Christian, Holy, Master, reassuring, European
2. Black Pete - Black, foreign, mischevious or controlled 'evil', slave/servant, does the dirty work, may get out of control, scary, African

Hmm, so lets see, this gives us:
Europe/Africa
White/Black
Christian/Muslim
Master/Slave
Good/Evil

It's a recipe for something hard-to-swallow and an especially interesting one in these times with so much unrest between the white-Dutch and Muslim communities in the Netherlands. "Black Pete" seems to be a particularly Dutch invention and no matter how long he has been helping the Sint and how often he returns to the Netherlands he remains the outsider. His role is to depict the 'other' as it loomed large in Dutch imaginations three hundred years ago or more ago. Shame then that he also happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to so many immigrants who have settled in the Netherlands and that as recent events have shown, Europe is still haunted by pretty much the same nightmares.

Posted by Faith at 04:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 17, 2004

arsenic and old lace

She's so innocent looking. And frumpy.

My new accountant. She's sitting in a corner built from filing cabinets piled to the ceiling with files and archive boxes. At first sight my uncharitable thought is that "life must be pretty easy if you can turn up to work looking that every day". She's a cuddly white-haired lady in what appears to be someone's cast-off fishing clothes.

She understands exactly what I'm looking for. In fact she isn't an accountant at all but the wife of one, who bothers himself with important-accountant-requiring clients while she provides the simple services that clients like me need. A BTW number* Someone to fill in the impossible form I have from the tax office. She goes further. She will also claim back all the BTW I pay on business related costs. "Business related costs" turns out to be a fairly flexible term. It's scope gets steadily broader. It is also apparently retrospective. She'll do things for me monthly. I thought a couple of visits per year but for a fee WAY below their normal rates and of course depending on what I earn, because I am just starting, she'll do things for me monthly.

I can see the train coming but by now I am too fascinated to move away from the tracks. If she was 20 years younger and in a suit I would have walked out long ago. But she's a frumpy late-middle-aged lady in a cast-off gardening outfit and its the combination of a veneer of ineptness with a very smooth deviousness that has me fascinated.

Twice, not once but twice, when there was a question that she or her 'directeur' husband couldn't answer she suggested I go home and ask my husband to call the relevant government department to verify exactly what applied in my case. If she'd been male I would have decked* her.

I leave everyhting in her capable hands. And with the added thought that I'm probably going to end up either on tax fraud charges or buried under her floorboards. I'm not sure which but I'm now totally committed to finding out. For a monthly fee.

BTW=GST or VAT
deck=verb. Australian for punching someone so hard they "hit the deck" or the floor.

Posted by Faith at 05:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 13, 2004

Uitverkocht!

I've been trying for weeks now to find someone who would go and see the fabulous Mr Tom Waits with me, with no success. WHO ARE these people in my life? Isn't someone screening them? How did I end up knowing so many I'm-not-crazy-about-Tom people?

Not to be put off I logged on to buy 1 lonely-sad-ticket for myself and it's SOLD OUT!

Tom is lucky. The last time people refused to go to a concert with me (you don't want to know how regularly this happens) the performer-in-question died.

Posted by Faith at 10:21 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

November 12, 2004

kd lang - barefoot and pregnant?

We ventured down to Utrecht the other night to see kd lang at the Vredenburg. Hooking up with BBC-Star-Kathy-Clugston for dinner at Goos we then met the-very-late-Steve-and-Fintan at the venue. The concert was the first of kd's European tour and she was in fine form, 'consumate performer' was the over-used-cliche that kept springing to mind. Besides a voice that could peel-your-socks-off, she also managed to be witty, smart, dignified, barefoot and obviously having fun. This despite a rather-too-enthusiastic-Canadian in the audience and someone else piping up with the considerate question 'Are you pregnant?' (Maybe it was the barefeet?). It will take a European tour to excise the memory of Utrecht from her mind!

The show was a good mix of torchy covers at which she just excels and a few of her own numbers including some from her current album. For me the highlight was the Patsy Cline number Three Cigarettes In An Ashtray. Having a secret-Patsy-Cline stash back in Australia I may have been slightly biased towards this number anyway but if you'd heard her sing it I'm guessing you'd have felt the same.

***To give you an idea of how good this concert was I'll just say this. Utrecht is only 32kms from Amsterdam but the trip from Amsterdam to Utrecht, with a 8km detour to Ijsselstein to drop Jacob off at his grandparents, took 3 hours. Because of traffic jams. At 3.00 in the afternoon. Returning to Amsterdam at 11.00pm we then ran into another one on the freeway. This is why we NEVER leave Amsterdam.

But it WAS worth it!.

Posted by Faith at 11:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 11, 2004

Babble-on

While we were in Istanbul our Turkish guide interrupted his normal delivery outside the Blue Mosque to foray into the history and general-shape of Turkish Islam and all the reasons why Turkish Moslems were unlikey to be extreme fundamentalists and shouldn't be confused with fundamentalists from other parts of the world. And how most Moslems no matter where they were from were not extremists and that the Koran in its most usual interpretations actually forbade the use of violence.

At the time it struck me as very sad that he felt the need to do this and also a tiny bit annoying. Didn't he realise that his audience, a group of Netherlanders + one Australian, all came from reasonably sophisticated, well-educated, multicultural countries that had welcomed immigrants from all parts of the world for decades and might be expected to be able to work this out for themselves?

Then of course we landed back in the Netherlands to discover that some brainiac had BOMBED a Moslem PRIMARY SCHOOL for God's sake. Seems the guide in Turkey knows a bit more about people then I do! (But then I'm the one who said Howard would never win an election in Australia and three, THREE terms later is still unable to believe that anyone, ever voted for him. I mean WHO are these people?)

Since then things have been getting weirder and weirder, Mosque's have been attacked, and burnt, apparently one Catholic school as well and yesterday morning I did my usual Nu thing to discover that the air space over Den Haag had been closed, a man in his underpants had been arrested, everyone was looking for a Syrian, grenades have been thrown, officers injured and a house in the Hague was under siege.

The rest of the day was particularly spooky as there was no more information forthcoming from the Police, Army, Government or anyone else about any of this until well into the evening. The entire day was spent then greeting everyone you met with WHAT THE FUCK is going on and rumours were rife.

I have no idea which way all this is going to go but the Netherlands definitely has the feel of a tinderbox waiting to go off right now. The Dutch tolerance for immigrants is famous but for most of the Netherlands it was only ever tolerance. More than a few Netherlanders have explained to me this way; the other side of tolerance is "couldn't give a fuck". There are only some areas where diversity is embraced. For the four years I've lived here racism has been a constant presence and recently there have even been attempts to shape immigration laws based on the country of origin of the applicant.

What makes it ALL SO UNREAL is that living in an area like de Pijp, a multicultural suburb for over a hundred years, all of this seems so far away and removed from daily life. I go to the Moslem Ethiopan butcher on the other side of the market because he has the best cuts, the Turkish grocer because he has vegetables I can't find anywhere else, a Dutch cheese stand on the market because, well, he sells cheese and I buy cheap 3-for-one toiletries from Pakistanis on the Albert Cuyp. On the corner of our street I pass an Islamic cultural center and my son is in a creche where some of his carers are wearing headscarves and there is only one child out of six with two Dutch parents. In de Pijp there isn't just tolerance but a genuine acceptance of diversity.

Posted by Faith at 05:26 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 10, 2004

Elena and I have been missing appointments with each other for nearly two weeks now so it was nice to finally meet and have a coffee together this morning.

Our initial natter revealed some spooky coincedences and points of common interest after which we went to the Albert Cuyp to continue investigations while checking out fish and cheese. Its amazing how a network like the web can converge to these two points sitting in Cafe Krull discussing childcare, architecture, botanic gardens and Italian cooking.

Amazing and brilliant, is there a fractal to illustrate this?

Posted by Faith at 12:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 04, 2004

Tot ziens!

We're going to Istanbul to live it up in the Pera Palas* for the weekend. I hope everyone else has something nice to do?

Tot ziens!

*Thanks to a bargain basement package deal!

Posted by Faith at 08:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Scared people are scary

The whole "politics of fear" thesis seems to be converging in, well, a scary way! We have been watching The Power of Nightmares on the BBC over the past three weeks, which details the ways in which governments use fear to maintain their authority.

Michael Moore demonstrated the power of fear nicely in "Bowling for Columbine" in his trans-Canadian-border experiment.

And here in the Netherlands at the moment young morrocans are saying they're too scared to walk the streets, moronic white-extremists are arrested in Den Haag for threatening violence against the people who scare them, and everyone is waiting, scared, to see what the reaction to van Gogh's death will be.

Scared people vote in people like Bush. Scared people are very scary.

I'm going back to my knitting.

Posted by Faith at 10:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 03, 2004

The Big Noise

Yesterday Theo van Gogh, filmmaker and column writer, loudmouth and sometime-lout, was shot dead here in Amsterdam. On the street. Near the Oosterpark. In broad daylight. By a cyclist. (Well, this IS the Netherlands!)

I didn't agree with MOST things Theo van Gogh said or wrote, which is pretty much true for everyone who wasn't Theo. As others have pointed out, there weren't many people with whom Theo hadn't had an argument about his opinions. (For the Australians, he was a bit of a Philip Adams with views that were a bit more Alan Jones)

But he didn't deserve to be shot.

The ONE thing I did agree with Theo about is his right to express his opinions. Although I usually didn't like hearing them and worried about the influence someone in his position could wield over people who weren't going to examine what he said with great detail. But still, he had the right to express his views and he never backed down from defending them or (unlike the Bushes, Kerries, Blairs and Howards of the world) never tried to hide behind obsfucation or half-truths. He was resolutely honest about his opinions. And thats something that these days should be applauded. No one deserves to be shot for that.

So now everyone is holding their breath waiting to see what happens. Because unlike the death of Pim Fortuyn, this time it does seem as though amoslem extremist is responsible for Theo's death. And this is not a good time for that to be the case.

Last night on the Dam thousands of people gathered to remember Theo with a "noise", a big noise, with drums, horns, rattles, saucepans, bicycle bells, tram bells, whatever. It was deemed the most appropriate way to remember someone who made a lot of noise and whose noise generated even more! Lets hope the politics around his death doesn't generate so much noise that everything else is forgotten.

Posted by Faith at 09:59 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 02, 2004

the first tuesday in november

There may be an election on in the States today and I'm not about to say that its not important, God knows, I'd be the first to cheer if Bush fell flat on a handy-sharp-object, for all sorts of high-tone reasons, (world-peace, democracy, his soul) but also for the cheap-but-easy-satisfaction of knowing how much it would piss off John Howard. But as EVERYONE knows, (don't they?) the REALLY big event today will be held at roughly 3.00pm EST in Melbourne, Australia and that is The Melbourne Cup!

Its 'the race that stops a nation', the one about which Australians get all political, poetic, drunk and misty-eyed. The race is run over approximately three minutes and yet the TV coverage starts at 5.00am and continues for at least twelve hours. It has spawned cliches that refuse to die and maybe for good reason. "The race that stops a nation"? well it does! The race that "defines a culture" ? Well as Leapin' Larry L points out;

Now the Netherlands are NOT a horse racing country. They have something akin to 'trap-racing' or is it "the trots", but even these are far and few between. So unlike the States, the UK, much of racing-mad-Asia and the middle-east, no one here has ever heard of the Melbourne Cup. And as they don't have a tradition of horse-racing events here describing it is difficult. No context. And while the race is televised around the globe even the sports cafes here don't show the race live. Well, its at 5.00am.

I don't know what it is about the Melbourne Cup but its the only thing-australian that I feel compelled to follow from over here. So, I'm in on a sweep, (I hope, Cathy?) and when I wake up it will all be over, but I will be watching the video, streaming from various sites. I'll also be showing it to Jacob, his first Melbourne Cup!

Sigh........Melbourne in springtime, sunshine, rain, jasmine, men in frocks, and the Melbourne Cup!

*Even Google celebrated the Melbourne Cup!

Posted by Faith at 12:58 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

November 01, 2004

Movember

Having spent some time recently discussing moustaches (here and here) I was intrigued by the concept of Movember in Melbourne, Australia.

Movember is a very laudable attempt to raise awareness of men's heath issues in Australia but by encouraging men to GROW A MOUSTACHE!

I quote from the web site;

This is the second year that Movember has been held, you can check out photos from last year on the site. Girls who can't grow moustaches are also encouraged to participate by supporting the campaign although it doesn't mention what girls who CAN grow moustaches should do?

Its a fun concept (maybe by Urchin?) although I beg-to-quibble-over at least one of the published FACTS on the site;

I think Number 5 in The Rules says it all;

It may be dark, cold, wet and miserable here in the Netherlands at the moment, sartorial splendour may also be thin-on-the-ground, but for November at least, I'm glad I'm not in Melbourne!

Posted by Faith at 12:33 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 29, 2004

Photo Friday:Still Life

This is my first ever entry in Photo Friday. Its a disapointing beginning but I've decided its better to make a start and post something (ANYTHING) rather than wait for the right day, which quite frankly, may never happen. It was taken with any one of series of disposable cameras after our Canon G2 was stolen in Spain in August*. (Bastards, bastards, bastards!) What I particularly liked about this was the corny composition, accentuated by the almost painterley appearance of the scenery, which I then exaggerated a little, (but not much!) with Photoshop. Its as flat-as-a-pancake and very still.

*Footnote: Yesterday I discovered that my Visa card which was also stolen is being used daily at toll booths in and around Barcelona, despite having been cancelled, blocked etc back in August. Anyway, its been cancelled again so the COMPLETE BASTARD who has the Visa card, probably the camera and MOST importantly the memory cards with the 100+ photos of Jacob, Ron and I in and around Poncebos is in for a rude shock tonight on his way home from work. I hope it well and truly FUCKS UP his weekend big time. (Phew; Deep Sigh. I'm Ok now, I'm over it, no really......)

Posted by Faith at 11:02 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 28, 2004

Crumpler Surf

In my pre-Dutch life in Melbourne I had a Crumpler bag. It's now in a box in the back of my mother's house being too old and daggy to bring to the Netherlands with me. I've never seen many crumplers here but recently they seem to be having a bit of an European debut.

My ex-colleague Jaap was talking about getting one not-so-long-ago and a similar discussion is in progress on macbebekin and this morning at Cafe Krull they were there in the most recent edition of NL20 as the-must-have-accessory (except they seemed to think they came from America?).

Spurred by this and a camera-bag-inspired-existential-crisis* I've been trawling the internet and noticed one thing about Crumpler I HADN'T known before. They make some damn KEWL internet sites.

Crumpler Australia (made by Sputnik)is brilliant and you must try ALL the buttons, bells and whistles, just go mad clicking, to make sure you don't miss out on anything. Then I went to Crumpler in the States which was a bit dissapointing, a bit too cleaned-up and corporate. Crumpler Germany were on the right track, true Crumpler style with some nice German twists. And finally Crumpler Europe which it turns out is just Germany in disguise but with a nice intro. (how scary....?)

After that it was all down hill, Crumpler in the Netherlands, well we can only live in hope. Crumpler Japan was suprisingly, the most dissapointing site. Given the Japanese penchant for bizzare sites this was a great let down, or is its ordinariness what make this site bizzare in Japanese terms? Crumpler UK was also disappointing, I thought eccentricity was meant to be a British skill?

PS. I hope you read everything about Chicken Tex.
PPS. How come I never have clients like this?
PPS. Are there more Crumpler sites out there?

Posted by Faith at 01:36 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

October 27, 2004

Number crunching

On a SUPER-NERDY note, it hasn't escaped my attention that I'm not the only one who has had to go to some trouble of late to ban IP addresses. (I'm just soooooooooooo perceptive)

Brian Weatherson has thoughtfully published his list of banned IP addresses so I have combined it with my list and you can download the "IP Collection 2004 Vol I" from here should you wish.

Download Banned IP addresses list. (Right click and choose "Save target as" or double-click to open the list in IE...excuses for all the assumptions in these instructions)

Footnote:It was interesting (and scary) to see just how many IP addresses WEREN'T in both lists.

Posted by Faith at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 25, 2004

Mars to Earth....

Having spent almost four years immersed in Dutch life and culture, (Dutch job, Dutch friends, Dutch hubby and Dutch baby, strangely enough, NOT Dutch food!) I've decided its time to extricate myself to some extent and tak