Seen in a Dutch news newsletter I receive:

The police were in 21 shooting
incidents last year, compared
with 14 in 2006, according to
the state police force’s annual
report ...

Dorothy, I don't think we're in Kansas -- or anywhere else in the US -- anymore!

taken from tgrfan23
~ Look at the list and bold those you have read.
~ Italicize those you intend to read.
~ Underline the books you LOVE.
~ Strikethrough the books you were forced to read at any point in your education, and subsequently cannot re-read because you hate them so much.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Seven years of fairly fundamental Baptist school will do that to you. I've thought about rereading it, but get twitchy when I try.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read a chunk of his stuff, but hardly the complete works.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger -- started it, couldn't stand it, didn't bother finishing
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh -- always meant to read it; not sure why I haven't
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck  I like other Steinbeck novels, but this one drove me nuts
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving -- I can't remember if I read this one or not; I read a fair bit of his stuff when I was 15; it's been a while
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom;
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Museum by dumpr.net

Just getting a feel for what our living room may look like when I get the photos printed. We're planning on using large prints of Luna, Lola and Pippo as the art for the wall over the sofa. This picture of Pippo is the one we're planning on using for him.

The cats are really enjoying all the boxes still waiting to be unpacked. Luna, in particular, treats them as her own King/Queen of the Hill game, launching herself from the table onto the tallest of the wardrobe boxes in order to survey her domain. The shorter boxes aren't so bad, either, especially since they've been opened, so they provide a constant source of entertainment and curiosity.

Lola isn't quite as curious, but she has her moments ...

A massive heard of senior citizens with fanny packs, cameras and video cameras just passed by our front window. I think that's the largest crowd I've seen here in one place other than the bar on the nights Holland played in the EK.

I wonder where they've been and where they're going. I hope they watch out for the bikes when they hit Nobelstraat!

I've become convinced that the word smaak is Dutch for crack. These lightly bacon-flavored crackers are addictive. If anything, the paprika-flavored ones are even more addictive.

G and I came home from the bar one night -- a lot a bit tipsy -- and proceeded to eat almost a whole packet of these things. I'm trying to restrain myself at the moment. I'm not sure how much longer I can last.

We finally got our digital tv box today. As we were scrolling through the channels, imagine our amusement when we realized that Al-Jazeera was followed immediately by three porn channels (Playboy, Hustler and some Spice channel -- and they're not subscription channels here). That's some crazy channel placement! We went from seeing an older gentleman sitting behind a desk discussing something or other to seeing a woman giving a blow job and getting titty fucked while jerking another guy off.

Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!

I went to the Netherlands and I got asthma!

Well, I already had it, basically, I just had it properly diagnosed once I got here. I've had mild asthma attacks in the past due to allergens, such as dust and heavy-duty amounts of cat fur/dander, but yesterday was a whole new ballgame. I came down with a could a couple of days ago and have been pretty miserable, but yesterday got much worse. I woke up and couldn't really breathe that well. I got up, since I know that lying down doesn't help any, but the difficulty never went away. In fact, it eventually seemed to get worse, or maybe I was just exhausted from it all. Finally, I broke down and said I wanted to see a doctor. It's got to be bad if I am willing to see a doctor. I never get that sick.

Since we didn't know of any doctors, we went to the pharmacy. It turns out there's a doctor's office above the pharmacy. One of the doctors was able to see me almost immediately, and diagnosed me as having asthma. It was such a relief to get that inhaler. Of course, once I stopped worrying about my breathing, suddenly all the other aches and pains associated with the cold came rushing to the forground.

I'm feeling better today and am breathing much easier -- outside of the annoying cough and slightly stuffed-up nose. I've got to take the steroid stuff for the next month, twice a day, to help control the inflammation so that hopefully I won't need the regular inhaler. I'm hoping I'll revert back to my normal self that only has to worry about asthma once or twice a year.

I've been Stumbling a lot recently and thought I'd share/bookmark some of the random bits I've been enjoying.

First up, Jon Dyer's quest for every beard type. Makes me wish I had facial hair!

Next, bomomo, a time waster that actually allows you to have something to show for all your time. Plus, this lets you actually save your paintings as jpg files, unlike some other similar programs.

Finally, for reference, an article listing 22 websites connecting you to free music. The comments section includes further suggestions.

We're never getting our sofa or our stuff from the US.

At least, that's how it feels right now. We actually finally have a date for our sofa to be delivered, but it's not until next Wednesday. It would have been Monday, but that's when we have an appointment with the immigration office, which ultimately is a bit more important.

As for the rest of our stuff, it's been stuck in customs for the past week, because they think we have too much stuff for it to be a personal move. I'd like to see how they move! We didn't even take any furniture! Today we filled out some form (in Dutch) and faxed it back to our shipper so hopefully we can get our stuff eventually. I'm not missing most of it, but there are a few things that would be handy and nice to have.

Look what I bought today! It's all in Dutch, but fortunately, I know how to use this stuff! Grandpaw would be proud!

Escape (The Piña Colada Song) was playing at the grocery store this morning. It's been stuck in my head ever since. Even in the Netherlands.

In a similar vein, I was surprised and amused to see that the Time Life music collections are here, too. I tried to convince G that we needed to order the romantic Dutch classics compilation.

TECHNOLOGY

Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer?
A: It's the Green Leaf offered in the generic settings on my new Sony Vaio with Vista. It's fairly abstract and simple, so I haven't been frantic to change it yet. Probably once I get a really awesome Utrecht shot, I'll change it.


Q. How many televisions do you have in your house?
A: Now, we only have one, but it's nice!

I'm pooped.

After slogging through the rain carrying various paints and paint supplies (of the household type, not the artistic type) this morning, I've spent the afternoon painting the bedroom. Three walls are done, but the fourth wall will have to wait. Plus, I need another paint roller before I can do it, or I'll never get finished with just the regular brush. I'm covered in tiny paint spatters and my hair is still wet from this morning, along with the sweat from this afternoon.

Lovely picture, huh.

The cupboards are empty, and a trip to the grocery store is in order. G's going to have to go on his own, or pick up takeout. I'm not going out in public looking like this!

We're gradually settling in to our new home, although we're missing most furniture. That just means we have to go to our local more often. Not exactly a hardship.

I'm sporadically taking photos of somewhat random things and adding them to Utrecht-related sets I've created at Flickr. I'm (lazily) setting up another blog to be dedicated solely to my experiences and photos of Utrecht, to be used for updating friends and family. That one can be found here.

Just a quick post to say that we all arrived safely in Utrecht on Wednesday morning. We've already become regulars at our local and have hung out with friends. Now I'm off to apply for my residency permit. Wish me luck!

We ended up with 29 boxes of varying sizes. They're all packed and waiting for the shipper who should be arriving in the next half hour. The boxes themselves should arrive in Utrecht on 1 June, I believe. Technically, that was the day I was going to go register for my residence permit. Maybe I'll just go on 30 May instead and get it over with, so I don't have that hanging over my head all weekend. I'll still have the work stuff to sort out, though.

Once the truck arrives today and we get it loaded up (not looking forward to that bit), it's time for a quick shower and clean up and then we're off to my parents for a lovely haggis dinner. I don't know if my dad will pipe it in or not. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he did. We should probably take the rest of our bottle of Laphroaig over with us tonight. There's probably just enough left to end the evening properly.

I think the hardest thing to give up are my books. Don't get me wrong; I'm taking a lot of them -- more than I probably should. But it kills me to leave behind so many old friends. I buy books, because I often reread them and return to old favorites at least once a year. Even seeing their colorful spines on the bookshelves gives me a sense of comfort and familiarity as each one reminds me of some specific time, a location, a relationship, an adventure, a hobby ...

I'm taking the majority of my art history books, of course. For one thing, they're not cheap. For another, they're a symbol of my four years at university. Plus, I do refer back to many of them regularly enough to justify them. Perhaps if my access to English-language books is limited, I might also reread more of them completely: The German Essayists on Renaissance Art, the building of the Florentine economy, and there's always Pater and Burkhardt and Steinberg.

I've been trying to reread books that I haven't read in a while and know I won't be taking with me. Sadly, I haven't gotten to everything and feel like I'm ending relationships that haven't quite come to their natural end. Maybe I can stick at least one into my carry-on for that long journey.

It seems that the previous owners of our house are incredibly nice and friendly. Besides leaving us a bottle of Moet & Chandon to celebrate with, G's been having drinks/dinner with them a few nights since he's been there and they've been incredibly kind. I gather he's already invited them to dinner. (No stress for me, as I suspect he'll be making a lot of lasagna for all these people he's inviting over). It seems they've also provided him with some other store names and such for finding decent/inexpensive furniture. Maybe we won't have to buy only IKEA! (Although I do really quite like IKEA.)

In other words, this move is going well and I haven't even been there yet! We leave two weeks from today. Eeek! and Yay!!!

While I was in the coffee shop this morning, there was a kid in line behind me with his Caballero skateboard. I used to skate a bit back in junior high/high school and remembered Caballero being big even then. Of course, Tony Hawk was also a fresh-faced teen at the time. I'm guessing this kid wasn't even born when I started skating and reading about Caballero in Thrasher and other skate mags. That's just kind of weird.