I was pleased to see on the news tonight that my former abode continues to make headlines. From Atlanta we learn today that elephants are self aware.
Although I think they are sort of overstating. It could as easily be the case that he elephant was not self-aware until that moment, which then triggered an existential crisis of, well, elephantine proporations. I mean, there was that poor elephant, munching on some hay, looking at that New Elephant while peacefully contemplating the Reimann Hypothesis (or possibly remembering dreamily the time she stomped that hapless keeper to death) and idly wondering what that thing was on its forehead, when the reality slowly dawned...why, that was, not another elephant. That was, hmmm, poke about with trunk a bit, Zeta(z) = SUMk, look, that other elephant is poking about also...=1 to infinity, hey, that itches, (1/kz) ohmygoodness, that's me! Trivially zero at the negative even integers, but where are all the other zeroes? And oh, dear, the other two elephants here are wearing the exact same thing as I am, The only other zeroes known all lie on the line in the complex plane with real part equal to 1/2. I could just sink into the floor. Maybe if I take it off nobody will notice....
I mean I suppose this is one up on "damn, it's cold out here" which was I think the conscious thought most of us had first, but still.
Or maybe this is simply the only self aware elephant in the world and they just lucked up on the first go. Right out of the box they got the Da Vinci of elephants. Wel, it could happen and it isn't reported whether this elephant had any unusual habits, like taking notes or bemoaning the absence of opposable thumbs.
Of course half the chimpanzees fail the self awareness test; I wonder how many people do?
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Travel Plans
Okay, the tickets are bought, we are coming for Christmas. The bad news is, we are indeed going to be flying on Christmas Day itself and flying back the Friday before Daan's birthday. * Hopefully next year the holiday schedule works out better, what can I tell you.
This should be interesting.
Eh. what's so horrible about flying on Christmas Day?** Over the ocean and through passport control, to grandmother's house we go....
*Mom for god's sake don't fight with me, I promise you if there had been any other realistic option I would have taken it. Quickly.
** Don't answer that.
This should be interesting.
Eh. what's so horrible about flying on Christmas Day?** Over the ocean and through passport control, to grandmother's house we go....
*Mom for god's sake don't fight with me, I promise you if there had been any other realistic option I would have taken it. Quickly.
** Don't answer that.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Party season has begun
As most of you know, party season starts around here in October with The First Birthday and ends in January with The Last Birthday. With St. Nicholas, Christmas, and one more birthday squeezed in between. This year we started one day early because the bowling alley doesn't do parties on Thursdays so it was either Wednesday or Friday.
So today was the Kid Party with the pals from school and tomorrow is the real birthday.
It was fun. When you sign up for a bowling party you think that an hour of bowling* is not very long. But in fact when it is Disco Magic Bowling, wherein the room is darkish and strobe lights and flicker lights and mirrored balls in the ceiling and black lights and glowing flourescent colored bowling pins and bowling balls give the only illumination; when some kind of smoke pours down from the ceiling every now and again (in time to the music no less) and there are animated dancing things on the screens which in the olden days only showed the actual game score, well, then an hour is about as much as they can handle.+
It's more than the fours can handle actually, we had our two four year olds and one of the young fives in tears at least once each for no reason other than the top blowing off their personal central nervous systems. Though each of them went right back to bowling after being gently removed to a quieter venue and petted for a few minutes.
Douwe demanded a "Mars Cake" for his birthday. A "Mars Cake" has nothing to do with the planet. A Mars Cake it turns out is a cake which is just like a Mars Bar. An American Mars cake no less. Well, he did not demand it; he requested it. Firmly. So I said that there was no such thing. He said there certainly was: you make a chocolate cake, then you put the white fluffy stuff on the bottom, caramel on top of that, then you put chocolate all over it and that's a Mars Cake. He then cut a Mars Bar in half with a knife to demonstrate the layers. (Like I have never seen a Mars Bar). Oh, and it has to be a rectangle.
Let no one say I do not play requests. One package of Duncan Hines Chocolate cake mix, one jar of Marshmallow Fluff**, one bag of caramels later, here is a Mars Cake:
Okay, and some whipped cream. It isn't a cake in Holland without whipped cream. It's a dairy country, they don't do frosting.
I was assured that no self respecting Dutch child would ever eat such a thing, which was greeted with horrible shudders all round by the rest of my family. So I also made the same cake I have made for Douwe every year since we got here, which is really a cheesecake but they call it something else:
We invited eight kids and six came, which is pretty good for us. Since The First Birthday falls in a vacation period, we always lose a couple to travel and other vacation plans.
We had only one girl, who was in fact the first child I met at the Montessori School. She walked up to me and announced that she was going to marry my son. Quite seriously. So I congratulated her on her taste and said I was pleased to meet her. (Well, what was I supposed to say?) She went on to say that I should keep this nugget to myself as she had not told the groom yet. Oh, I said, well, you should probably mention it at some point. She said, "Oh, yes, but he can be so difficult, so I will tell him at the very last moment. Then he'll just go along".
Since I regularly use the same technique on him, I could find nothing to quarrel with about this and promised to say nothing and asked her what color dress I should wear. "oh, what you like" she said. "They will all be looking at me anyway".
Gotta like that kid. The boys were mostly the usual suspects, with a few new additions since the start of the new school year.
And after much bowling we moved on to the rest of the bacchanalia:
No of course that beer is not his. It wasn't that kind of party.
And may I just add that the horrible American Cake was entirely demolished, destroyed, right down to its last Fluffer Nutter soaked crumb. So There.
Well, okay, there are a couple pieces left, otherwise I would be baking another one right now. For the Second Installment tomorrow.
Stay tuned.
*followed by food, some kind of horrible punch thingie which the kids suck down as though they had recently been crawling on all fours across a desert, cake, ice cream, and then candy on top of that -- ooh, my kids' friends' parents are lovin' me right about now, as their offspring race around making crop circles in the carpet, screaming incoherently from the sugar rush. Like, say, this
Or maybe an impromptu conga line in the living room:
+ I know, in the real Olden Days they kept score on paper. With a pencil. Probably a grease pencil, the kind you pulled the string and unravelled it in strips. But I am not old enough to remember those.
** Real American! it says on the label. I never saw a jar of marshmallow fluff in my life before moving here but there you are.
So today was the Kid Party with the pals from school and tomorrow is the real birthday.
It was fun. When you sign up for a bowling party you think that an hour of bowling* is not very long. But in fact when it is Disco Magic Bowling, wherein the room is darkish and strobe lights and flicker lights and mirrored balls in the ceiling and black lights and glowing flourescent colored bowling pins and bowling balls give the only illumination; when some kind of smoke pours down from the ceiling every now and again (in time to the music no less) and there are animated dancing things on the screens which in the olden days only showed the actual game score, well, then an hour is about as much as they can handle.+
It's more than the fours can handle actually, we had our two four year olds and one of the young fives in tears at least once each for no reason other than the top blowing off their personal central nervous systems. Though each of them went right back to bowling after being gently removed to a quieter venue and petted for a few minutes.
Douwe demanded a "Mars Cake" for his birthday. A "Mars Cake" has nothing to do with the planet. A Mars Cake it turns out is a cake which is just like a Mars Bar. An American Mars cake no less. Well, he did not demand it; he requested it. Firmly. So I said that there was no such thing. He said there certainly was: you make a chocolate cake, then you put the white fluffy stuff on the bottom, caramel on top of that, then you put chocolate all over it and that's a Mars Cake. He then cut a Mars Bar in half with a knife to demonstrate the layers. (Like I have never seen a Mars Bar). Oh, and it has to be a rectangle.
Let no one say I do not play requests. One package of Duncan Hines Chocolate cake mix, one jar of Marshmallow Fluff**, one bag of caramels later, here is a Mars Cake:
Okay, and some whipped cream. It isn't a cake in Holland without whipped cream. It's a dairy country, they don't do frosting.
I was assured that no self respecting Dutch child would ever eat such a thing, which was greeted with horrible shudders all round by the rest of my family. So I also made the same cake I have made for Douwe every year since we got here, which is really a cheesecake but they call it something else:
We invited eight kids and six came, which is pretty good for us. Since The First Birthday falls in a vacation period, we always lose a couple to travel and other vacation plans.
We had only one girl, who was in fact the first child I met at the Montessori School. She walked up to me and announced that she was going to marry my son. Quite seriously. So I congratulated her on her taste and said I was pleased to meet her. (Well, what was I supposed to say?) She went on to say that I should keep this nugget to myself as she had not told the groom yet. Oh, I said, well, you should probably mention it at some point. She said, "Oh, yes, but he can be so difficult, so I will tell him at the very last moment. Then he'll just go along".
Since I regularly use the same technique on him, I could find nothing to quarrel with about this and promised to say nothing and asked her what color dress I should wear. "oh, what you like" she said. "They will all be looking at me anyway".
Gotta like that kid. The boys were mostly the usual suspects, with a few new additions since the start of the new school year.
And after much bowling we moved on to the rest of the bacchanalia:
No of course that beer is not his. It wasn't that kind of party.
And may I just add that the horrible American Cake was entirely demolished, destroyed, right down to its last Fluffer Nutter soaked crumb. So There.
Well, okay, there are a couple pieces left, otherwise I would be baking another one right now. For the Second Installment tomorrow.
Stay tuned.
*followed by food, some kind of horrible punch thingie which the kids suck down as though they had recently been crawling on all fours across a desert, cake, ice cream, and then candy on top of that -- ooh, my kids' friends' parents are lovin' me right about now, as their offspring race around making crop circles in the carpet, screaming incoherently from the sugar rush. Like, say, this
Or maybe an impromptu conga line in the living room:
+ I know, in the real Olden Days they kept score on paper. With a pencil. Probably a grease pencil, the kind you pulled the string and unravelled it in strips. But I am not old enough to remember those.
** Real American! it says on the label. I never saw a jar of marshmallow fluff in my life before moving here but there you are.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Toys
I realize that I have far too much time to think about mundane things. Mostly on the bicycle, I think about mundane things. So now I am thinking about this: Why are boy toys so ugly? I mean seriously, at a certain age, the toys available just really do begin to lean strongly towards the grotesque. Why is that?
And at about the same age, it seems to me, girl toys become just nauseatingly pretty. I mean, it becomes all about pretty there for a while. And why is that, too?
I am thinking about this because Douwe's birthday is coming up, as you know. And everybody wants to know what he wants. In general: anything to do with dragons, anything to do with dinosaurs. Space. He has recently discovered Narnia. Anything to do with fast cars of course. He likes board games and card games. Model building kits. He has asked for a camera but I can't find a digital one (so he can see the picture of course) for anything like a reasonable price.
Due to some external pressure I made him a wish list at amazon.uk. Please understand, these are mere suggestions. Mostly you guys come up with really great stuff I never thought of.
I will see what I can do with dutch online stores but have had no luck so far in finding one that has a wish list feature.
And at about the same age, it seems to me, girl toys become just nauseatingly pretty. I mean, it becomes all about pretty there for a while. And why is that, too?
I am thinking about this because Douwe's birthday is coming up, as you know. And everybody wants to know what he wants. In general: anything to do with dragons, anything to do with dinosaurs. Space. He has recently discovered Narnia. Anything to do with fast cars of course. He likes board games and card games. Model building kits. He has asked for a camera but I can't find a digital one (so he can see the picture of course) for anything like a reasonable price.
Due to some external pressure I made him a wish list at amazon.uk. Please understand, these are mere suggestions. Mostly you guys come up with really great stuff I never thought of.
I will see what I can do with dutch online stores but have had no luck so far in finding one that has a wish list feature.
Since I have all this free time
I have taken on two new things.
Seriously, I am beginning to get tired, y'all. I begin to think I will never get my driver's license because every time I pick up the book to figure out the difference between a bike path and a bike-and-moped path something happens.
But I also have to get out of the house, and I really think I am in danger of becoming a recluse if I don't do something. So I figured I would do whatever presented itself. Really, I just decided that I would look around and if anything came up I would just say yes and see what happened.
I expect that since Fall has appeared in earnest I will become more motivated on the driver's license front soon. Nel is very upset about my bicycling in the rain. I don't mind it very much but I think I shall mind bicycling in the cold rain (or the sleet and hail and snow) quite a lot. Fall really is here in earnest. I know this because the heaters came on at night. And this time it only took me two days of wheezing and coughing to remember that it isn't a cold or a return of the evil walking pneumonia, it's that I have an annual reaction to the heat coming on at night and to put out the humidifiers.
This is an improvement over the, what was it, two weeks? That it took me last year.
Anyway, I am now singing with a gospel choir. It's real gospel, not blues gospel, which I would prefer. But hey, they tour and compete and everything. Gospel is all the rage over here. I would link the website for the choir except it's all in Dutch. (Ever see an all white gospel choir? It seems very odd to me but there you are).
The director is eyeing me oddly as I sang the first time with the sopranos and the next time with the altos, but they have too many altos so I shifted over to the tenors. Nice to find out I still have my vocal range, anyway. Though my soprano voice is not what it once was, too much fast living I imagine. I am informed she is planning to give me a vocal test to figure out where I really ought to be, as the answer I wrote down (where do you need a voice?) was probably not what they had in mind.
I am also going tomorrow to give my first lesson in conversational english. I didn't mean to do this, which means (if my life thus far is any evidence) that I will soon be doing it a lot. Here's how it went: Douwe has started swimming lessons. Daan is on a wait list, for a new class of Absolute Beginners.
During swimming lessons the parents all go and sit in this glass front viewing area above the pool. (Of course it's an indoor pool, they don't have outdoor pools around here as far as I can make out). So there I was sitting like that and I struck up a conversation with one of the other moms. She is muslim (I had assumed as she was wearing a head scarf) and we got into cultural differences regarding religion with your spouse. Like me, she and her spouse are of the same faith but from different countries. She was born here in Holland I gather and her husband elsewhere.
You know me, always keeping the conversation on a safe subject, strictly small talk, you know.
Somewhere in there we got into the Immigrant Experience and the learning of languages. She is now studying English I gather but having trouble with the conversational part. Then she just up and asked me if I would teach her. So I told her I did not have the first teaching credential (credentials being a very big thing around here) but that I knew several people in the english club who did. Nope, she said, she already had teachers with credentials; she wanted somebody she was not afraid to talk to.
Well, I said, I promise to tell you a hum'rous anecdote about my own verbal screw ups in Dutch for every one you make in English and then we'll be even. I'll have some left over, never fear.
Hell, I had one this week. The kids' school had a "studiedag" listed on the calendar. This means "Study day" and I thought no more than "oh, good, about time they got some studying done". Really, if I thought about it at all, (which I did not) I would have thought that they were getting ready for the various regular tests the different classes do. Douwe's class has one coming up in the next couple of months.
I should have thought of it when I woke them up and Daan said "We don't have school today, I want to sleep". But Daan has some variant of that every single day. His nose itches, he's sick, his shoes are wet (liked that one), whatever, he never wants to get up. Gets it from his dad no doubt. Slugabed.
So off we went to school and as it happens it was pouring buckets that morning. Um, "studiedag" translates as "teacher workday". So off we went back home. Duh.
In any event. Tomorrow I will be across town setting up a course of lessons in English conversation. And if I can figure out what to charge her, that would be good too. She certainly is planning to pay me but she probably has a better idea than I have what it costs. Oh, well, I guess I'll call the english club ladies and ask them.
Seriously, I am beginning to get tired, y'all. I begin to think I will never get my driver's license because every time I pick up the book to figure out the difference between a bike path and a bike-and-moped path something happens.
But I also have to get out of the house, and I really think I am in danger of becoming a recluse if I don't do something. So I figured I would do whatever presented itself. Really, I just decided that I would look around and if anything came up I would just say yes and see what happened.
I expect that since Fall has appeared in earnest I will become more motivated on the driver's license front soon. Nel is very upset about my bicycling in the rain. I don't mind it very much but I think I shall mind bicycling in the cold rain (or the sleet and hail and snow) quite a lot. Fall really is here in earnest. I know this because the heaters came on at night. And this time it only took me two days of wheezing and coughing to remember that it isn't a cold or a return of the evil walking pneumonia, it's that I have an annual reaction to the heat coming on at night and to put out the humidifiers.
This is an improvement over the, what was it, two weeks? That it took me last year.
Anyway, I am now singing with a gospel choir. It's real gospel, not blues gospel, which I would prefer. But hey, they tour and compete and everything. Gospel is all the rage over here. I would link the website for the choir except it's all in Dutch. (Ever see an all white gospel choir? It seems very odd to me but there you are).
The director is eyeing me oddly as I sang the first time with the sopranos and the next time with the altos, but they have too many altos so I shifted over to the tenors. Nice to find out I still have my vocal range, anyway. Though my soprano voice is not what it once was, too much fast living I imagine. I am informed she is planning to give me a vocal test to figure out where I really ought to be, as the answer I wrote down (where do you need a voice?) was probably not what they had in mind.
I am also going tomorrow to give my first lesson in conversational english. I didn't mean to do this, which means (if my life thus far is any evidence) that I will soon be doing it a lot. Here's how it went: Douwe has started swimming lessons. Daan is on a wait list, for a new class of Absolute Beginners.
During swimming lessons the parents all go and sit in this glass front viewing area above the pool. (Of course it's an indoor pool, they don't have outdoor pools around here as far as I can make out). So there I was sitting like that and I struck up a conversation with one of the other moms. She is muslim (I had assumed as she was wearing a head scarf) and we got into cultural differences regarding religion with your spouse. Like me, she and her spouse are of the same faith but from different countries. She was born here in Holland I gather and her husband elsewhere.
You know me, always keeping the conversation on a safe subject, strictly small talk, you know.
Somewhere in there we got into the Immigrant Experience and the learning of languages. She is now studying English I gather but having trouble with the conversational part. Then she just up and asked me if I would teach her. So I told her I did not have the first teaching credential (credentials being a very big thing around here) but that I knew several people in the english club who did. Nope, she said, she already had teachers with credentials; she wanted somebody she was not afraid to talk to.
Well, I said, I promise to tell you a hum'rous anecdote about my own verbal screw ups in Dutch for every one you make in English and then we'll be even. I'll have some left over, never fear.
Hell, I had one this week. The kids' school had a "studiedag" listed on the calendar. This means "Study day" and I thought no more than "oh, good, about time they got some studying done". Really, if I thought about it at all, (which I did not) I would have thought that they were getting ready for the various regular tests the different classes do. Douwe's class has one coming up in the next couple of months.
I should have thought of it when I woke them up and Daan said "We don't have school today, I want to sleep". But Daan has some variant of that every single day. His nose itches, he's sick, his shoes are wet (liked that one), whatever, he never wants to get up. Gets it from his dad no doubt. Slugabed.
So off we went to school and as it happens it was pouring buckets that morning. Um, "studiedag" translates as "teacher workday". So off we went back home. Duh.
In any event. Tomorrow I will be across town setting up a course of lessons in English conversation. And if I can figure out what to charge her, that would be good too. She certainly is planning to pay me but she probably has a better idea than I have what it costs. Oh, well, I guess I'll call the english club ladies and ask them.
What Daan did today
Today, Daan broke his bicycle. Well, he went over a bump and the chain slipped its gears. So I wound up flipping it upside down and strapping it to the baby seat on my bike (Have I recently mentioned how much I really love bungee cords?) to get it home. I had planned to walk the bike home with Daan on my seat, but then Douwe decided he would just go home. On his bike. He knows the way after all. So he was off.
(Oh, for an extra bungee cord to tie the self-willed little monster up. But I digress).
So Daan sat on my seat and clung to me like a little monkey and I stood on the pedals and we raced after Douwe. Daan thought this great fun. So did Douwe, actually, though he was really scared when we got home, he knows better than to take off like that.
So. As Douwe and I were haveing a Serious Talk in the one room, Papa was fixing the bike in the other room. It appears a new bike needs to have its chain tightened from time to time, who knew? And when he fixed it, he took the training wheels off.
I pointed out that the child has just figured out how to cross the street with training wheels. Papa said, "Oh, ten minutes and he'll be fine".
So off they went. And here's how they came back:
And here is Daan's story about how it all happened.
(Oh, for an extra bungee cord to tie the self-willed little monster up. But I digress).
So Daan sat on my seat and clung to me like a little monkey and I stood on the pedals and we raced after Douwe. Daan thought this great fun. So did Douwe, actually, though he was really scared when we got home, he knows better than to take off like that.
So. As Douwe and I were haveing a Serious Talk in the one room, Papa was fixing the bike in the other room. It appears a new bike needs to have its chain tightened from time to time, who knew? And when he fixed it, he took the training wheels off.
I pointed out that the child has just figured out how to cross the street with training wheels. Papa said, "Oh, ten minutes and he'll be fine".
So off they went. And here's how they came back:
And here is Daan's story about how it all happened.
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