I am sitting in my very favorite coffeeshop,  Dubsea . Over the years, I have probably spent more time drinking coffee and eating Mighty-O vegan donuts here than anywhere else. I’ve also had some of the most important conversations in my life here, even if I didn’t always know it at the time they were happening.

I came here around 12 this afternoon. It’s now 4pm *snicker*. Shortly after I got my first coffee, Sibelle walked in. What followed, after I walked up to her and said “Ma’am, I want to make a complaint” was three hours of totally amazing conversation. I am collecting inspiration to draw on for what kind of impact I want my new job to have. I have Sibelle to thank for today’s dose and Jan for yesterday’s.

The day started a little rocky because I needed to sign over all the documents for my mom’s van and send them to my brother. So, you know, signing the title was another concrete reminder that she’s gone. My brother had a really good idea to donate her van to an animal rescue group where he lives in NC. This has been a struggle for me. So many memories of my mom involve her boxy white 1989 VW Vanagon. If I wanted to know where my mom was hanging out, I’d check the usual places for signs of her van. When I was getting ready to move,to the Netherlands, I shipped the van to Cedric in NC, thinking he would get good use out of it and go camping with his dog. Well, Cedric has a truck and turns out he didn’t really need a van. While we were in Cologne, he said he wanted to donate it. I know it is a really great idea, I am just having a little trouble letting it go out of the family. Really, my first instinct was to have it put on a ship to Rotterdam and I would get it from there and drive around Europe. Hello. I know. I barely drive Astrid 8000 miles a year now, what the hell would I do with two elderly cars?

So , I sniffed up the tears and went to the post office and sent the documents off to NC. While I was standing in line, I noticed that they now have Wonder Woman stamps!!! You bet I bought a sheet, exclusively for framing. I thought that was so cool, Wonder Woman stamps. If I still lived here, I would be writing extra letters just to send mail with these stamps!

I am sitting at the long table at Dubsea and the women at the end of the table are having a huge discussion about their sexual choices. Whoa. I am not sure if I should put my ear buds on out of courtesy or if I should give their conversation the space it clearly needs – public airing.  Well, the question answered itself, one party left.

I have another 90 minutes before I am due to meet my tenants. The point is to hear if they have decided to stay another year or if I am going to need to make other arrangements. I think they will stay, since the housing market here is pretty competitive.  In the mail, I had 8 unsolicited letters wanting to buy my house, as-is. Umm, no thanks, creepy property tax stalker types.  They range from the down home aw shucks kind of letter to the would be sophisticated types with made up names that sound like pharmaceuticals. I haven’t finished opening the mail, I kind of got tired of it.

Tomorrow, I’m off again. I’ll be landing Thursday morning, heading home to unpack and shower, and then off to the TechSummit, where I am expected. I guess that means that I can’t be watching movies the whole flight home. It’s a good thing I watched three on the way over 😉

While I was waiting for the bus this morning in the drizzle, I got a message from Delta that they already knew my flight out of Amsterdam was going to be delayed and that there would be downstream impacts on my connecting flight. Because it was early, the buses were only running every half hour and then when I got to the train station, there were two stranded trains so the airport trains were not running every 6 minutes like normal either. Fast forward to going through the security lines, which where slow moving and full of extra checks, even the priority ones and I made it to the gate just as they started boarding.

Due to exceptional headwinds, they were already predicting an hour of extra flight time. Yeah… so when I got here to Portland, I missed my connection and the next flight available isn’t for another 5 hours. I did the only thing you can do in these kinds of situations… walk to collect steps so your Fitbit competitors don’t get too far ahead of you because you spent 10 plus hours sitting in a chair. Luckily, Portland has a Burgerville inside the terminal. Burgerville is something of a local awesomeness that Lawyerella introduced me to first. And then we got my mom into it as well. It sort of became the theme that whomever would be driving past Portland or flying through it would bring Burgerville veggie burgers back for everyone. One time we even brought 30 back – we called from another exit. It’s funny, it is something I hadn’t thought about for years and suddenly there it was. In honor of my mom’s favorite I ordered the Anasazi burger (veg) spicy. It brought back alot of memories.

I have been thinking about that lately, memories and the trajectory of my life over the past few years. Especially now that I am at another crossroads point and going to start something new in terms of my worklife. And it’s been nearly a year with GG. I wish I could say I had some shining insights to share that would solve multiple problems but it’s not that far along 😉

Anyway, by the time I land in Seattle tonight, it will be somewhere around 5am Dutch time so I am pretty sure that I will mange to fall asleep in record time. I have a list of things and appointments to take care of between now and when I leave again on Wednesday.

A quick note to let you know that George is stuck in one of those very unhandy collars that has him banging into everything. The vet called today while he was having his teeth cleaned to let me know that there was a pretty big growth over his eye and it would be a good time to remove it before they couldn’t. So, poor George is now walking around with a pirate like right eye, complete with stitches. Henry had a wart between his toes that needed to be removed. Amazing what they find during teeth cleaning. It’s a bit of a nursing ward here since naturally we were sent home with two types of pills, an eye salve and gum gel.

Poor George will be banging around until the 27th with his awkward headgear. I modified it with scissors so he can at least eat and drink slightly easier. His urine was too diluted to test so that still needs to be collected. An attentive reader sent me a link on how to collect a specimen from your dog, using the previously mentioned soup ladle or a cookie sheet, depending on which one you think your dog will tolerate more…

It is election day here in the Netherlands. GG got a pass to cast her ballot in Amsterdam instead of Rotterdam so we followed her to the voting place, where she proceeded to unfold an enornmous poster sized paper and armed with a pencil, made her choices. The voting system is differrent here since it is a multi party system. You vote for your party choice first and then one person from that list. However, each party might have anywhere between 1-100 people on their list. From all the votes, seats are assigned based on the number of votes. So even the smallest parties have a chance of getting a seat or two. From there, a coalition has to be formed from the parties for the government to go to work. Mostly it works out.

And as for me, tomorrow morning I am telling my immediate coworkers that I am moving on to another role. I am excited to do it, since I feel like I have been carrying around a secret. It will also make things suddenly very concrete as they will have to figure out what they are going to take over…

There’s a great deal of press coverage over whether or not Geert Wilders and his party would win here, building on the UK and US elections. While final results won’t be in until Friday, right now, that’s not looking so likely 🙂

I know, I was wondering what happened to myself! 😉 You know it has been too long since you last wrote when the entire WP interface looks different.

The boys are having their post dinner nap, the dryer is running and I have the Game of Thrones soundtrack on repeat. I’m taking a break from work for the moment since I started today with a lengthy tasklist and I only added to it. Only one item actually got checked off today *sigh* and I added six more items.

When I last wrote, I was waiting on the details of the offer from HR. Well, let’s say that turned out to be “Thanks but no thanks” kind of thing. I advocated for myself and the responses were mixed. In the end, a week later we came to an agreement and on International Women’s Day, I accepted the offer. I thought that was a pretty good example of liberation! That was Wednesday, by Friday my manager had already asked me to postpone my departure from 15 April to 1 May. I agreed to it because she’s been an incredible inspiration to me and I know that she had a very concrete reason for asking. But inside, I was stomping my feet and scowling. It will be announced next week officially. Before then, I need to tell my immediate coworkers because I think it would be unprofessional not to. It makes it hard for me to sit still in meetings though 😉

Banjo today. I’m working on the tune “Shady Grove” which manages to involve some complicated technique with every single bar. Just when I think I have reached the end of the bar and can breath again, here comes the next one. Paul makes it look so easy *sigh*.

GG and I went to the Roze Filmdagen Festival last night and saw the movie “Southwest of Salem”. It was pretty powerful documentary. Now that the worst of the weather is past and the sun is out, we’re practicing our cycling. Let me tell you, the tourists are already here and in full swing on their rental bicycles. I am reminded that when the weather is good and you have properly inflated tires, riding a bike is like being set free. I actually make sound effects while I ride my bike, like braking noises and when I take a sharp turn, there’s a swoosh sound that I make. I know, it’s a little weird, but probably not the craziest thing Amsterdam has ever seen 😉

Off to Seattle on Saturday for another 3 day trip. I need to take care of some stuff, including tortillas. So, try to schedule that snow for somewhere else, won’t you?

We all went to the vet on Friday and the good news is that Lientje’s kidney values are staying stable and she even gained two ounces so that’s exciting. Henry and George are both going on Wednesday for their teeth cleaning, that’s less exciting. But they are 11 and it has been 2 years since the last cleaning. George’s kidney values are a little high so they would like me to collect a urine sample. The vet said the easiest way to do this was to use a soup ladle… I think I know George well enough that if I were to suddenly show up with a soup ladle while he is writing his pee-mail, he would immediately stop what he was doing and check the ladle out. I think I am going to have to figure out another method 😉

to go… the strong windstorm that socked Europe last week caused KLM to cancel my flight back from Munich. Not just my flight, of course, but 90 in total. The earliest they could get me back was Saturday morning… that was not an option. Ultimately, they found a space for me on Lufthansa on Friday night which was better than nothing. I had long day in the airport on Friday, pacing Terminal 2 back and forth – go ahead and quiz me on the terminal layout and location of amenities.

I’ll spare you the details of my frustration with the local cuisine, with the exception of the reason that I decided not to go to the group dinner on the second night. On the daily special of the menu, it said “Pan fried calf’s head” . Yup. I knew that was not something I wanted to see in my range of vision. Turns out I made a wise choice since the next morning my colleagues advised that it was a bit like a Game of Thrones banquet with entire animals being served at the tables. I don’t think I am an unreasonable vegetarian, I just know there are some things that I do not want to be part of or look at. Pan fried calf’s head is one of them. I also think it is a waste of money for me to go to a dinner where I won’t be eating anything. So it was off to find a salad bar that resembled a bad version of the 80’s era Pizza Hut ones but with sauerkraut. For eleven euro, I had a salad that involved a large amount of pickled vegetables which was unusual flavor in a salad but not bad!

The past two days I have been one of the roaming proctors in a hands-on DevOps workshop, with 100 participants. So, today I am working from home so I can get everything in order, catch up and recharge the introvert battery. I’ll go to the office tomorrow. It’s the 1st of March. This morning I had a conversation with HR about the potential new job. I’m waiting now on the “written”copy of the information and then I will need to make a decision. In theory, this afternoon I could be sending an email that says “31 March is my last day so get your complaints in fast”;)

The contractors next door are hammering away again today. It comes down to turning up my music loud enough to drown out their air compressors 😉

I must say, one of the best perks of Schiphol is being able to hang out in the KLM lounge. I can sit here in relative solitude (it is a big lounge) and I have a coffee in front of me and a Spa rood. I am plugged in, at a long circular table with the headphones in. This is the way to wait for your flight. I am only looking at the clock every 5 minutes 😉 I don’t need to leave for the gate for another hour so I have plenty of time.

Why am I here so obviously early? Well, at home, the pets were picking up on my travel stress even through I was trying to keep it from them, including not packing my suitcase while any of them were in vision range. But they knew something was up because they were barking at everything and running back and forth. For all our peace of mind, I decided to leave for the airport a little early.

I am off to Munich today. Short flight comparatively speaking to the usual ones. I have two days of training on the latest and greatest features of VS 2017. As a bonus, I get to see my colleagues from Western Europe, who I like a great deal and don’t see nearly enough considering we live on the same continent. I usually see them at NerdCamp or NerdCamp Light. Since those will no longer be taking place in Seattle but Las Vegas, I don’t know how often I will be back in the Pacific Northwest. That’s kind of a strange thought. Not that I can’t buy a ticket myself (and have before) but it was a rhythm of sorts, knowing when I would be in Seattle each year.

Of course, if I have the new job, I won’t be invited to NerdCamp or NerdCamp Light anymore. I think I am okay with that since everything is recorded anyway for people to watch at home or on their vacations. 😉

How much my life has changed in the past four years. If I think about where my career is going, that’s a surprise because I didn’t see this path coming without leaving the industry entirely. Now it seems as if the job I have always wanted (and training ground for the grown-up job I want to have) is within reach. It’s definitely a reason to be doubly grateful and to make sure I do not let it slip through my fingers.

Little C has a new family member, a puppy named Mika. I am a fan in general of puppies and the name Mika or any variation thereof, such as Mikha, my dragon cat that was Lientje’s companion for the first 11 years of her life. I’m going to visit on Friday after I am back. Turns out Little C has to go through a round of treatment we were hoping she could avoid. In the meantime, Mika will need to go to puppy school so she doesn’t grow up to be the boss in the house (she’s a Husky mix).  It’s my privilege to be cheerleader and a reminder of what happens when your pets do not know you are the boss 😉

I think somewhere, I must have a yen to be a teacher. This morning, at 830, I was standing in front of a class of 25 11 year olds. The goal? No, I wasn’t practicing my Dutch – rather it was to teach them to create their own computer game. I’ve done this a time or two or three and I always enjoy it, even if I am totally nervous the night before.

The class this morning was awesome – they were funny, rambunctious, curious and eager to learn. I’ve learned to pair them up with each other so they will keep each other on track and figuring stuff out. It is only supposed to be an hour of code but we went easily to the 2 hour mark with other teachers stopping by to see what was going on. This is a school doesn’t have a lot of resources.

After that start, I was ready to rock. 😉 It was off to the office. There was a meeting scheduled this afternoon from someone in charge of National Empowerment Plans and I really wanted to talk with him. I  am glad I did – I shared with him the plan that Little C and I made up for our business/foundation over the summer and he asked me if he could take it back with him since we solved a problem they had been trying to address. I told him that Little C and I are available to consult with his organization 😉

After that, it was off to the dentist to pick up my new nightguard. I managed to put so much wear on my last one over the past three years that it broke over the weekend… I know what you are thinking… impressive, huh? After that, it was off to home to finish out the afternoon.

GG is off at Wintersport. Not sure if that is one word or two but it refers to the practice of going away for a skiing holiday in the mountains of Europe during Feb. I haven’t actually done it yet, I am still getting the hang of taking summer vacations. Next year, I might try Wintersport. As it is, I ended last year with 10 leftover vacation days. I have 26 per year and I never manage to use them all because there are also national holidays. I have to work into it, gradually. 😉

I’m off to Munich on Tuesday for a quick two day training. Unfortunately, it is not adding to my four new countries per year. However, the summer vacation plan that I am noodling on certainly will.

As for the weekend, well, I am going to get started on my spring cleaning. Including the refrigerator and the windows. The weather is getting warmer, tonight I turned the heat down to 15 degrees C, which means it won’t go on at all.

for sure. It started last Thursday night when I was going to start the dishwasher up. I went to the kitchen and opened the drawer to reach in to get the tablets for the dishwasher. Right there, shocked by the light was a rat measuring about 6 inches long without the tail. I slammed the drawer shut and screamed. In that order, no less. There was no way this was allowed to continue… so off to the utility room to grab mops and my bamboo gardening stakes, door to the garden open and GG positioned on one side of the kitchen to keep it from coming further into the house.

With a highly elevated blood pressure, I pulled the first drawer open. No rat. Then the drawer underneath that one, no RAT. Ugh. So then we had to go all around the kitchen island, cupboard by cupboard. Coming back to the original drawer, I could see there was a hole in the back of the cupboard where the pipes go down from the sink. Aha, that must be where it disappeared to. In the meantime, I saw what attracted the rat… my recycle bag of Nespresso capsules. So now I have an overly caffienated rodent to consider as well.

Only thing to do is bar the access. So, I delegated GG to writing messages in Dutch to exterminators so that someone would come Friday. No way was I spending the weekend with this kind of access. You might wonder what were all my pets doing during this? Sleeping under their various blankets, COMPLETELY undisturbed by the idea that this might be considered failure to perform their job responsibilities…

Friday morning, a really nice technician  came and took apart the base of the kitchen island and spent some quality time blocking the access point and taking other precautions. It was quite handy, GG called City Hall and they transferred her directly through to a line that translates to “Lose Your Beasts”and this is how 30 minutes later, we had him in house and taking things apart. He did tell me that he thinks rats are disgusting and never quite gets used to them, even in his line of work.

After that excitement on Friday, I needed a weekend of non rodent related experiences so Friday night we went to the Escape Haarlem with GG’s friends. It’s based on the WWII history of the building and Haarlem. It was very clever and hard to solve – we did though. Saturday afternoon, I went by to visit Little C since she was due to be discharged Sunday. She was up and about, looking good. I didn’t expect it to be otherwise but it is nice to be able to hug someone and not worry that you might accidentally disconnect them from something 😉

Sunday afternoon was time for brunch and we might have agreed to set up a jam session/brunch for next month. Details to be figured out…

Oh, and really what I was trying to do all weekend was distract myself because late Friday I got a message that HR wanted to talk to me on Monday. That’s not really ever a good message if you have ever worked in the US 😉 So, we met Monday afternoon at the end of the day. I have been offered the job to run the National Empowerment Plan 🙂 We still have to agree to terms and then I will need to sign a new contract but the job itself is mine, if I want it. Do I ever!!! It will start 1 April so as not to leave my current manager completely in the shit.

So, that’s kind of where things are today 🙂

P.S. Cedric and Dylan, Happy Birthday (Monday). Here’s hoping that 41 is a year to remember – after all, it started out with you being here with us all so it can only reach total awesomeness, it is going to be YUGE. 😉  love you!

I’ve got to do something with how I am feeling right now. I spent most of today at the hospital waiting for Little C to come out of surgery so I could tell her bad jokes, the latest job situation and make other silly remarks as part of our continuing quest to improve our irreverent behavior. That was a success because around 1345, they brought her out of recovery and she was in possession of her mental faculties. That would have been the moment that I would have expected her to make the most of and pretend not to know anyone 😉

I got there around 1030 this morning because I knew that I would only be watching the clock so it made more sense to take my stuff and work from there. The beauty of internet access. I camped out on the floor they would bring her back to and acted as if I completely belonged there. A fine example of bluffing your way in. Turns out her partner, Edwin, was sitting in the patient lounge probably 15 feet away but I couldn’t see around the wall. Once we ran into each other, we had a long conversation about development, the cloud, etc. You know, the stuff that takes the waiting off your mind.

What I didn’t realize I was holding at bay until I was on the tram home was all of the memories of the last time I was waiting for someone to come out of surgery. My mom. She came out of it, they asked who her favorite child was to check her mental faculties. She gave the same answer as she had before going into surgery “I’ll never tell”. It is hard for me to see people I love in a hospital bed. It makes me feel so powerless because I would much rather spare them and do it for them. The logical side of me is aware that it would certainly not solve the problem, totally inefficient use of resources. But the emotional side of me wants to put on full scale armour and wade into the mess, tossing my dear ones behind me like some overdone cartoon.

This morning, when I started my meditiation (which is really hard work), I tried it lying in the bed with the timer set. See, normally I sit in a chair to do this but the pets come and try to sit on my lap or get attention because they are thinking “”Hey, look! She’s sitting there doing nothing right now.” Today, I really wanted to focus on Little C so I thought if I try meditating while I am lying right next to the pets, maybe they won’t figure it out. Except Lientje stepped on the timer and turned it off, without me knowing so I ended up going way longer… never a dull moment.

I know that sometimes I express myself awkwardly. Or more like the Dutch word, onhandig – which means unhandy. I like unhandy better because it fits more of what I feel. I have this enormous gratitude that the surgery went okay and that I have this amazing woman with her affection for stripes and Star Wars as my friend. At the same time, I am conscious of how frail each one of us really is. So, like I said, I am not really sure what to do with all of this. Except throw it on a page…

Over the past week, since the inauguration, the news seems to get worse and worse. I’ve stopped reading the news first thing in the morning because it puts a heaviness on my whole day. And I am an ocean away.

With each executive order, my concern for those of you at home grows. For some of you, this is the moment you have been looking for and probably will do fairly well under all of these orders because you don’t fit the demographics being (or soon to be) targeted. For far more of you, you do. For my friends and loved ones, the wonderful normal (in my book) people that you are, I want you to know that you are always welcome to come here and escape. Come for whatever time you need.

I worry about all the gains that the US has made to be a more egalitatarian society are being undone. I worry that the exceptionally privileged are determining the rights and benefits for the majority of people who rely on standards, laws and services to make it right. I worry about the effect for years to come as these orders will certainly be contested in court and then reattempted and contested again.

I worry about the fact that these orders make the world a less safe place, for Americans and everyone else.

For those of you resisting, we stand with you here, in the local protests and funding the organizations who are taking the protection of freedom and rights to the only available medium, the courts. We stand with you through acts of compassion and belief that the good in each of us exists. When all else fails, we try to find a way to laugh such as  if it really is going to be America First, then surely the Netherlands Second?