Like the rest of the world, The Netherlands is trying to get a handle on the Corona virus and what it means for public health. From last Thursday’s message of being careful not to infect the elderly and others with compromised immune systems to Sunday evening’s announcement at 1730 that all cafes, schools, gyms, massage parlors and others were to be closed for three weeks effective in 30 minutes, there was a pretty significant shift.

This is a weird situation to be sure. As I sit here, downstairs in the office, the dogs are in their big bed. Olive is sitting in the middle of the conference table (aka Oma and Opa’s dining room table from the 50s) and Pickle is trying to get himself in and out of the mailbox. GG finally has permission to work fully digital – which was a big step for her employer. Today she was among the first 2500 employees who they were going to enable the video features of Skype for. 😉 Of course, that means that there’s an upgraded standard of grooming required when video functionality is added!

For my classroom, we’re digital. It’s interesting because we’ve always been able to run the program fully online but we chose not to since the interpersonal contact is critical. It seems to be working well, I think that is primarily due to the group already being formed offline.

That is the positive thing that I see could come from this period. That Dutch society (employers and institutions primarily) begin to see and experience that flexibility is not a bad thing. That requiring people to show up 9-6 in order to be productive is not a guarantee, that allowing people to work from home for what ever the reason creates more room for inclusion in society, that it’s good not to commute excessively, that there’s a lot of unpaid work that happens and that perhaps you can look at how you encourage that to be shared. Stuff like that.

I have been reading the news from Seattle again, since the news a few weeks ago about the outbreak. That’s an unusual feeling. Since the middle of 2018, I had sort of distanced myself from Seattle. After all, since I wasn’t going to be an employee anymore, I wouldn’t be returning to Seattle for nerd camp anymore. Of course, when you are starting something new up, then it tends to take all of your time and focus. Now I have a little more time to do some deep thinking about stuff that isn’t related to the company. That’s still there as a constant pressure but there’s not much I can do at the moment since everything is contingent on what happens 6 April. Will everything open up again? In the meantime, I can do some more reading, writing and creating. I think I might like that.

Take care of yourself.

Here I am, looking out the hotel room window into the green shutters and terra cotta walls of Bologna. It’s just after 830 in the morning and the church bells have stopped ringing.

The sunlight that is shining down onto the roof tops has a color all it’s own. It’s different from the sunlight that we get in Northern Europe. Somehow not as clear bright but a rounder bright. It’s the difference between a LED lamp and a softer watt bulb.

I’ve been here since Tuesday and will go home tonight. I’m working on a EU project and every four months, they meet in a different country. The next one in June will be in Lisbon and the one in the fall will be in Rotterdam.

I’d like to stay a bit longer. I’ve been doing a great deal of walking, in part to get some breathing room as too many people around me all day long makes me cranky and impatient. Also because the food here is really heavy, different from the countryside. And also to see more of the city because it is beautiful.

On the other hand, it will be nice to sleep in a bed where my feet are not hanging over the edge. 😉

Tomorrow after work, we’re off to a weekend in the woods again. A place for the boys to run free and a place that’s quiet and free from too many stimuli. I plan to spend the whole weekend breathing in forest air and walking until all the thoughts in my head have worked themselves out. 🙂

Today Mom would have turned 80. I can’t really align the weight of that number with the liveliness and fiestiness that my mother displayed. I don’t think that for her it would have marked any sense of slowing down or taking it easy. I don’t know that, of course. But when I think about her and how ageless my mother always seemed to me, 80 seems like it wouldn’t have been much different than 60.

I think part of this comes from the fact that we never really knew my Mom’s age as kids nor as young adults. Mom had a very strong belief that her age was definitely not our business. I don’t remember questioning it, I knew when her birthday was. I remember one time I finally saw a piece of ID that had the year of her birth on it. 1940, that was eons ago. I think I was probably in my late 20s before I even knew that.

Turns out that my mother did things a little differently than most of her peers. At the time when lots of young women were starting families and stopping with working, my Mom was out having a career, moving from embassy to embassy and not settling down. She was 33 when I was born and 38 by the time Rupert came along.

I am not really interested in people’s ages. I don’t really think they say a whole lot about the person or where they should be. I know that I don’t really think about my own age as being a point where I should wear responsible shoes, drive a respectable car and join the PTA – to paraphrase Weird Al. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “Well, you are probably more than half way through your life expectancy, what are you going to do with the time that you have left?” Then I think concretely about what I can do to make sure that I am not taking any moment for granted.

Today I went walking with the dogs and my 88 year old walking companion. We talked about her recent solo trip to the east of The Netherlands and how she was still conflicted because while she enjoyed it, she felt that with only old people around her, that wasn’t the mix of active minds and viewpoints that she enjoyed. The dogs were happy to be out after all the rain yesterday and Henry ran the entire way home, which was fun to watch. Kind of like a small dog dogsled team without the snow and the sled.

GG and I went to the Old Harbour in Rotterdam for Mexican food and margaritas to toast Mom. And now, after a good Mexican coffee and rainy weather outside, it’s time to grab the dogs and a book and read.

Love you, Mom, always.

I’m sitting here, looking out the window, at the sparrows that are darting by and the random cats that just went running out into the field. George is sitting on my lap, shivering from excitement, as he just had to bark ferociously at two dogs that were going by. The boys both have cataracts now, due to their age, but it doesn’t seem to impact George’s ability to continue to believe that everything he can see is his domain.

The way this works is that George sits on my leg and braces his paws against the arm of the sofa. In effect, I am his office chair since this enables him to look directly out the window.  Henry is curled up next to me and under a blanket since our second long walk of the day involved more water, including me making the decision that it was probably just a muddy crossing so I should keep going. Until I ended up to my shins in cold muddy water and had the good sense to turn back.

I’m not entirely sure where we are. I know that the cabin is located just outside the boundaries of a nature reserve. Early this morning, the boys and I walked through the woods and came across a herd of deer completely unexpectedly. Wow, they move fast once they start and they are loud!

We got here last night, in the dark. What should have been an hour and fifteen minutes driving time turned into four hours, due to traffic. I love watching how quickly the boys shed their age when they are somewhere off leash with lots of new smells. As much as I try to take them with me everywhere in the city, it’s no substitute for being able to run free.

My goal is to spend this week doing something different, figuring out what I need to process and move forward from. I’m also hoping to fill myself up with positive energy since normally this time of the year is definitely not my favorite and one where I really miss my Mom. My goal is also to survive the dog farts, George just let one rip in my lap.

GG came along with us. She will go back to civilization to spend Christmas with her family. I am relieved to not be participating this year. It’s not like it’s an excruciating experience. However, it’s not something that I enjoy and this year I am deciding to do things my way.  So far, I haven’t gotten any feedback but that’s probably more to do with the fact that her family tends not to have “discussions” like we do. They are more mild mannered people 😉

I believe today is the Winter Solstice so it should be the shortest day of the year. As my Mom would say, as of tomorrow we are heading back in the right direction.

Last night I had the most intense dream, one of those dreams that even when you wake up and know that you are awake, you continue to have the feeling that the dream is the reality.

In my dream, I was deeply involved in a conversation that I have never been able to have. I was able to get through all of the questions that had been running through mind and actually ask them to the person. I didn’t clear answers, or not ones that I remember.

When I woke up at 3AM, which is my usual time every night for wake up and look at the clock and remind myself that there are 3-4 more hours of sleep time available, I continued the conversation. I was awake and I continued the conversation with the sensation that the other person was also present. I still had things to say. The last thing I had to say was “I forgive you. I am done carrying this with me. I wish you peace.”

All day long I have felt like there is an enormous weight gone out of my life. It feels literally as if I have been freed. The closest experience I have had to this kind of feeling is when I had an intensive accupunture treatment that they normally use after trauma. I feel that same lightness today. It’s a feeling that I have been able to hold onto because today has certainly not been stress free. Nor have any of the daily stressors been eliminated. So it’s not like I woke up in a Disney movie. 😉

Being me, I have tried testing it. Like just now I tried thinking about the person, to see if the usual feelings would come up. Nope. Now that is nice! I think that means that I am ready to walk on.

I feel like I have a super productive meeting, one that needed to be had and that now action can be taken. In this case, forgiveness.

It’s also fueled my usual optimism even higher, which is already pretty noisy! When I look at the list of struggle items today, I am still optimistic that they can be solved positively and that everything will work out. I am grateful that I can use my talents to try and change messed up systems.

What’s your experience with forgiveness?

You know when you have that sensation that you have forgotten something? It’s right there at the back of your mind, like a small irritating noise? That’s a feeling I have been having for the past couple of months.

For example, this week I went to London for a conference and I left all my power cords on the train. I went to find an open shop the next morning to get new power cords and didn’t buy the ones I wanted to, instead choosing against my decision and ended up with cords that didn’t work properly. Then with meals, struggling to choose. And it’s not exactly like it was fine dining with so many delicious choices to choose from…

The Dutch have a word for this “keuzestress” which translates to “choice stress”. I am a good example of this. When things get really busy and my brain is on overdrive, I spend too much time on the little choices. I go back and forth 57 times. Which is really annoying and leads to things like forgotten power chargers. With big decisions, no problem. It’s like the more important the decision, the more clearly I can see it. But ask me if I want to spend 24 pounds to buy a new charger and I will agonize over whether or not I really need it.

Aside from the irritating habit of checking every small decision multiple times, I can’t complain. The boys are healthy and have charmed a whole new group of people in our new work building. My current group of students will finish this week. I have hired two more employees. The cats are fine, coming home much more often now that the weather is crisp.

Next week is Thanksgiving, which means it’s the time of year that my former interns come for dinner and share all their stories of what they have been doing. I think tomorrow I should probably figure out what we are going to serve them and start cooking ahead since it is another one of those crazy weeks. I’ve also just realized that a conference I have tickets for this week, I really don’t have time to go to.

My goal is to close out the year with a bit of peace and quiet. Which means I am thinking of escaping the whole holiday mess by taking the boys off into the woods somewhere and recharging. When I saw how much they enjoyed themselves in the Ardennes, I feel like I need to do that again with them. Of course, I should have planned this months ago.

We are deep in the Ardennes of Belgium, at an old farm, complete with massive fireplace that George and Henry are currently curled up next to each other and snoring. It takes a lot of energy to run around like you are a young dog again.

George is 14 today. Watching him run through the grass here and start barking at a calf that was grazing on the lawn, it’s easy to forget his age. And GG has just spent the past hour trying to speak French to a local vet’s wife because we forgot George’s pills in all of the chaos of leaving. We are in a village with 10 houses and no lights. Which is the perfect place to get away unless you forgot something urgent.

So now we wait – to see if they can compound something locally. Otherwise, it’s back in the car tomorrow or via the high speed train from Brussels to go home and pick up his pills because a week is too long for him to go without.

We were hoping to have a peaceful week here with the dogs. Yet I brought my banjo so that doesn’t mean peace for the surrounding village. 😉 We’ll pick Rupert up at Brussels on Wednesday night and stay a few more days.

During this week, I hope that Henry and George get a chance to run around, smell many new things, take naps next to the fireplace and generally get a chance to relax. It would be great if the people in their lives could do this is as well but my first priority is their relaxation. As easygoing as they are, I know that I generate a lot of stress for them to absorb. They always do that willingly but I do worry about the impact.

GG just said to me “And you thought you would have to relax on this trip.” Which is her way of poking fun at my difficulty with taking time off in general. 😉

P.S. — turns out the vet left a message because he needed to check his compendium if he could make it and he heard that GG speaks Dutch. So when she called back to try and get through in English and he said that “Dutch was much easier for him.” Jesus Pete… this is after four phone calls in GG’s tortured high school French. We are laughing about that now. The good news – tomorrow at 830AM, we can pick up pills for George. Now it’s time to have a glass of wine!

It’s pretty overcast and the square outside is still wet from the rain from earlier this morning. Snoozing on the couch, under his bright red IKEA blanket and with his brother snoring away beside him, Henry seems to be taking his 14th birthday in stride.

He’s the first of the birthdays this week. Pickle and Olive will turn 1 on the 26th and George turns 14 on the 30th.

I love all my pets. Henry is my solid little rock. He tries and he tries and he keeps on going. This is one of the things I love about him. He’s shorter than George but does his best to keep up with his unusual little bunny hop. He’s also fully capable of setting his entire body weight in as resistance, which is always a surprise of how much stubborn can fit in a small dog.

Since we have been going to the new office location this summer, he’s eager to go in the mornings. He dances at the door if he sees me grab my backpack. He gets into elevators now and he is quite comfortable navigating his way around the coworking spaces.

He doesn’t see as well now so I take that into consideration. I leave more lights on for him to make it easier for him to see where the door is at night.

Next week, we are going to the Belgian countryside with my family. The boys will be coming too. I’m looking forward to seeing Henry run through the grass and lie in the sun. When I went to Italy a few years ago, Henry was very good at practicing vacation pose.

The thing I wish people would stop doing is getting that look when they ask me how old he is. They make a certain noise too like “Ohhhhermm” and then say something like “Well, that’s quite old, you know”. He’s a senior citizen, which is not necessarily the same as being one step away from the grave!

Tonight they will get something special for dinner 🙂 And we will celebrate another year!

It seems that we still have some summer weather ahead of us. The square in front of our house is full with people spending their Saturday afternoon at one of the cafes. Right now, Pickle is lying upside down with his feet in the air taking a nap. Henry and George are stretched out and possibly dreaming about dog treats. Olive is nowhere to be seen, hopefully she is in the shade somewhere.

This morning, the boys and I went on a walk with Mevrouw Van G. She’s a sprightly 80 year old who we met one day while walking. She offered to give Henry a lift on on her walker since he seemed to be lagging behind. We ended up making our whole round of the city center with her and exchanged addresses. She doesn’t have pets anymore and the local shelters think that she is too old to have another one, so I invited her over for coffee and pets. She took me up on that offer and now we have moved on to walking together on the weekends.

Due to the weather today, we picked her up at 10AM and spent a good hour and half walking through the park and back around the windmills. She is tiny and can tell lots of stories about what it was like here earlier and in Rotterdam. She’s a widow now and today I learned more about the story of where she met her husband. He was a painter and journalist and she was a dancer. They met in a cafe in Rotterdam that was full of creative types. Apparently his creative tendencies were a big disappointment to his family, who thought he should be in business. She said that the first time she met his parents, she didn’t know who his mother kept talking about. His mother kept refering to this Adri person. That was her husband’s given name but outside of his parents’ house, he went by Pieter.

I’ve learned that is common in The Netherlands. People choose their own “roepnaam” which translates to “called name”. So an Anna Cornelia Herminus becomes a Ghislaine and a Johannes Hendricus Martinus becomes a Joop. A Mariette becomes a Jette. It can get confusing.

The next few days should give us more of the same type of weather. That will mean that the long walk of the day will be in the morning instead of the afternoon. Since I broke the big ice tea container yesterday, now I have to microbrew. 😉 That’s what you get for cleaning something before you use it, you break it!

That I haven’t written anything since the end of July? It’s already the 21st of August. Either I am getting old and not paying attention to the passing of time lately or I have been busy. Or a mixture of both.

For starters, the banjo and I have braved the world of playing in public. We’ve started playing weekly at one of the jam sessions at the local dive bar. It’s quite hilarious. Me and my banjo, surrounded by a collection of characters with amplified instruments and all looking like they were extras on the set of a Quentin Tarantino film. And all of them can play. It’s a super challenge for me: to concentrate, to play faster and actually try to play along with the rest. I wonder why I waited so long? But perhaps I was just waiting for the right group of people to play with, ones who are even less concerned with fashion and good taste than I am. 😉

Tomorrow is one of my last three Groningen days. That means the 534AM train ride will come to an end for me mid-September. I am going to miss the people in my incubator, I am not going to miss the 6 hour roundtrip on the train every Thursday – if nothing is delayed!

On Monday and Tuesday, the boys come with me to the classroom, where they spend most of their time lying on their bed under my desk. Occasionally, they wake up to take a walk around the classroom and check in on all the students. Especially when lunchtime comes around. Going twice a week means that they know how to ride the tram now and Henry actually will get into an elevator now instead of pulling his whole body into resistance.

I’m having a hard time lately when people feel the need to ask me how old the dogs are, mostly Henry, and then make a comment about that’s a really old age. Kind of like I should accept the fact that there won’t be much more time. I have to keep reminding myself that the boys are healthy and well taken care of and there’s no reason for them not have time left!

Speaking of pets, Pickle has taken to waiting for us on the mornings that we leave. He’s pretty smart. He hangs out on the corner of the block where he can see the front door. He has 50/50 chance that we are going to turn in his direction. I used to avoid him by going the back way through the alley but then last week he found us from the rooftops and then started following us that way. I am trying not to help him expand his boundaries so usually what happens is we walk to the poop tree, the boys do their thing, I clean it up and we walk back to the front door and lure Pickle back inside. Which then means I need to bring him upstairs and then start the whole exit all over again. It takes an extra 20 minutes each time – which eats up the 20 minute gain we earned from feeding Henry some different food.

I’m starting to understand why I haven’t written since July. 😉

As for our girl, Olive, she’s the least troublesome of the lot. She likes to be picked up and hugged but then she has a terrible drooling problem. Tip: don’t wear clothes that are not drool proof around her!

Okay, time to get my shit in gear for tomorrow. Until next time! 🙂