With the extra A as the Dutch say it. The Nuclear Security Summit is over and all the major traffic routes are operational. Which was a good thing because this afternoon I had to go Den Haag for a customer meeting. Their location is directly across from the US Embassy which was probably not a good place to try to get near during the Summit. From my understanding, most of the center of Den Haag was closed off. However, by this afternoon, we were in good shape.

Tomorrow it is off to Houten, outside of Utrecht. We have approximately 100 of our customers coming to talk about modern software development. I know, that is a topic that you are jumping out of your chairs with enthusiasm to discuss! Well, for this crowd it will be. Having gotten five different meetings out of today’s dress pants, I feel like I can finally send them to the dry cleaners. Tomorrow I will have to wear something different since I was at the office twice today and I can’t get away with it again!

The boys go to the beach on Sunday with Renee and their doggy friends. She takes a group to the beach every couple of months or so. And I am going to Brussels, to catch up with an old colleague from Seattle years ago. She moved to Paris to get her masters from the Sorbonne and then ended up working in Brussels.  I am looking forward to taking the train down and spending the day hanging out with Barbara and seeing the differences between Belgium and the Netherlands.

I have something even more exciting to share. Tonight I found out that Boy George is going to be in the Netherlands a week from Monday. OF course I bought a ticket! He’s performing in Tilburg, which is by Vught and the nuns. Culture Club’s “Colour by Numbers” was the first cassette tape I ever owned. I was 9. I have been a Boy George fan ever since. When we were living in New York, Lawyerella and I went to see “Taboo” on Broadway which was the biography of Culture Club. Boy George was in it but not as himself and I think it only ran a week. That’s the closest I have ever been to seeing him live. That is about to change. I am so Excited!!!

I remember having all of these enormous Boy George posters in my room. And one time, I was smarting off to my mom and I just pushed her beyond her limits and she tore my posters down. That was declaration of war. I wanted to look like Boy George. All my friends were into Duran Duran but they were just too pretty and normal looking for me. I was already a weirdo 🙂 You might get why my mom would sometimes say that she hoped I would have kids just like me… of course, the steady streak of non conformist that each of us has comes from my mom. We didn’t always disagree about music. I remember her also telling me that “the Ramones were like the Beatles of my generation” and she could understand why I liked them so much. She was also the only mom who would drive me and my friends to Ramones concerts and wait for hours for us to be done. And to really get into the spirit of things, she would have made signs on poster board for the windows of the VW vanagon saying “Ramones or Bust” “Follow me to the Ramones” etc. In other words, my mom was hella cool. I just didn’t get it until I got a lot smarter, past my 20th birthday.

That’s who George is named after, Boy George. Henry is named after Henry Rollins. You could say that they are named after the two men that I admire most and who shaped my attitudes. I think it would be really cool to have dinner with both of them at the same table. Unlikely to happen in my life but cool all the same.