An aside for any West Wing afficionados

This video from Slate about parallels between the plotline of (I think) the final season of The West Wing and the current presidential race provokes some thought about how life imitates art imitating life when you have experienced executive branch politicos jumping into tv writing. There are worse ways to spend 3 minutes of your time. (Ehm, than watching the video, I mean. Although if you can dash off a compelling hour-long drama in three minutes, by all means, please send it along.)

In case you wondered what an eight-year-old ponders...

We've just gotten back from another grueling schoolday commute and I set the kids down in front of their bowls of yogurt and granola and set off for the computer to check on Super Tuesday results. After about five minutes of dead silence but for the slurping of snack, the following:

Aislin: (yelling from the kitchen) Mom?

Me: Yes?

Aislin: Have you ever thought about just how often you use adverbs?

Me: (short pause) Er, no, I guess I haven't.

Aislin: Well I just have.

I pause, waiting for the follow-up. There is none. She is satisfied. Exeunt.

Living the fairytale life

So we broke our weekend hibernation long enough today to explore our environs a bit. We emerged from our cave, rubbed our eyes for a while in the forgotten spectacle of real sunlight, then pedaled off into the incessant winds. We had a map that seemed to evince that a few real castles might be within shouting distance, a possibility that actually appealed to both kids, so we knew we had to jump on it.

You have to understand that we don't undertake recreational bike rides lightly these days. One among us has to commute to work daily on his bike, spending a full hour in whatever capricious and brutal weather gets thrown at him; on Saturday morning at 3 a.m., for example, he had the distinct pleasure of riding through the first real snowstorm of the season with 50 mph wind gusts over a breathtakingly narrow bike path with a barge-bearing canal on one side and goose-bearing canal on the other. A Dutch Scylla and Charybdis, if you will. He arrived home covered in an inch of snow -- pardon me, 2.54 centimeters -- and semi-hysterical with laughter at how utterly unthinkable being outside in such conditions would have been to our softer selves even a few months ago.

So we were marveling at the lovely bike path to the Casteel de Haar and what a comparatively short ride it was, etc. Then we took a ninety-degree turn and were nearly bowled over by the wind broadsiding us, which brings to mind another Dutch proverb: If you can't feel the wind, it's at your back. (Okay, so Jeff made that one up today. More accurate than the other Dutch proverbs, e.g. the following: "Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven." Translation: "He who has butter on his head should stay out of the sun." Deep words, indeed.) So we blew into the castle and took a quick look around, but we decided to wait until we have some visitors before paying the actual admission fees. We're cheap. Aislin was psyched to see the stables and the cool door-within-a-door (free), and Dylan was enthralled with the drawbridge (also free), so we did just fine.

Then we started back. That'd be directly into the 25 mph winds. The whole way. With 40-pound Dylan on the back of my bike. Slumped over asleep such that I'd have to shift his body back into his seat every few seconds to keep him from asphyxiating on his seatbelt. Suffice it to say that it took us twice as long to get home as to get there, but I'll be durned if we didn't get the kids to bed early tonight so I'd call that breaking even.

Happy holiday

I am shocked -- shocked! -- that the Netherlands does not recognize the annual efforts of Punxsutawney Phil in ensuring that the globe remains on its axis. The sacrilege. Evidently, at least in the States they can expect another six weeks of winter.

Here, we figure we can expect another six weeks of rain. To be followed by another six weeks of rain. Perhaps followed by some especially sunshiny weeks of rain in May and June. We're all a-quiver with antici....

To be filed under "intriguing ambivalences" (or perhaps a side effect of failure to observe critical holidays -- I'm stretching for a segue here), there's news this week that the first "coffeeshop" in Amsterdam has gone smoke-free before the new smoking ban (applicable to all types of public smoking) goes into effect on July 1 of this year. I first read about this in the Dutch language newspapers and had to search all over before finding the above link to make sure that I'd actually understood what I was reading since my Dutch is not exactly what you'd call fluent. Lo, it's true, and further support for our observation that we're living in the Netherlands just in time to witness the (re?)conservatization of the Dutch.

Of course, they are still planning on showing that old classic, Deep Throat, on public television next week "for its cultural and historical value." And no, it's not a documentary on Woodward and Bernstein. Wonder if they'll have subtitles or if they'll trust it to, er, speak for itself.

Walking the tightrope

Although I was pleasantly surprised that Utrecht isn't nearly as seedy as I remembered Amsterdam being, I was still prepared when we moved for the occasional need to distract Aislin's attention away from a newsstand here or there. You know, to preserve those conservative family values we hold so dear. Evidently, however, I need to expand the parameters of my vigilance...

I've been trying to pick up as much Dutch as I can, and the quickest way to do that, I've found, is to read as many of the free newspapers as possible that clutter the morning trains. There are at least four different papers to be had each day, so I usually try to scan each to see if I can pick up on what's going on in the world. Of course, my Dutch isn't great, so I usually have to check the English language websites when I get back home. There was the day that I thought Hillary had declared former General Wesley Clark as her running mate, only to discover upon fact checking in my native tongue that I had merely misunderstood the Dutch reporter's cleverly ironic headline in an article saying the 2004 candidate and Hillary supporter had just visited the polderlands to take a gander at some alternative energy options, viz. windmills.

So this morning I was sitting there trying to decide if I was really understanding the article to say that Dutch men spend more time in front of the mirror than Dutch women (which I was, as it turns out). Then my darling 8-year-old, who was sitting across from me finishing her homework, cleared her throat, "Ahem, Mom?"

"Yes, dear?" I responded absentmindedly, nose still buried in paper.

She continued, delicately, "Um, that picture might not be too appropriate for me."

This is roughly the top half of the picture I was holding in front of my daughter's nose, minus the thigh-highs and stilettos:



So much for vigilance, but at least she self-censors. My daughter, that is.

Saturday morning blues

Here's the polymusical Dylan at work on his newest composition with his muse and assistant, Dad.

O What a Beautiful Moooorrrning

This, folks -- this excerpt from the weather report for tomorrow pretty much sums up what it's like to live in the Netherlands in January.

Hours of Precipitation:	7 Hrs
Hours of Daylight:	7.3 Hrs

Yes, I can attest that the two do, in fact, correlate almost perfectly. It rains only when I need to be shuttling the kids several kilometers to and fro by bike, and then it rains copiously. Comically. In all fairness, the word "Daylight" really should be in quotes given the cloud permacover. Oh, and don't forget the other key statistics:

High	44°F
RealFeel®:	28°F
Winds:	S at 26mph
Wind Gusts:	52 mph

Is that really a 16-degree difference between actual temperature and wind chill? And gusts of fifty-two miles per hour? Surely they jest. There have been several occasions on which Aislin and I have been sure we were literally being blown backwards as we pedaled, and those winds were estimated around 40 mph. Maybe if the wind's blowing the right way we can just open our umbrellas and float into the station like Mary Poppins. Hopefully when there aren't any actual trains approaching.

Nothing in the world like a Dutch commute, I tell you.

He told me so

We bought a car. After much debate (and a bike ride on which Jeff rode my bike with the boy on the back -- but without the added 20 kilos of groceries we always do), we decided (he was convinced) that there are certain things that you just have to have a car to do. It didn't hurt that our neighbor was selling a beater for a song. I decided to test drive it.

Ah, the test drive.

How did I get elected for this? I know nothing of Dutch road rules. Literally nothing. I had noticed there were no stop signs, like EVER, but I had no idea what the round blue signs with the slashes and "X"es were all about. It's a good thing the neighbor let me in on this little rule of yielding to traffic on the right. Talk about a sea change in the way you process what's going on on the road -- argh! It doesn't matter how fast you're going or how large the road you're on; if someone is approaching on a blind street from the right, you'd better believe they're just going to roar the heck out there in front of you without so much as a glance to their left, that is, in your direction.

So there I was driving my neighbor's car with my neighbor in the front seat as nervous as my mother when I got my learner's permit. Truly, he was so apprehensive I tried to call the whole thing off, but he insisted... and then went on to use the nonexistent brake pedal as we went through our neighborhood, then the nonexistent accelerator as we merged onto the A2. "You have to go faster, FASTER!" he exhorted me while pushing down on my right knee (!) although the pedal in his ancient Golf was already pressed entirely to the floor. I could tell the poor man would have smoked an entire pack simultaneously, Guinness World Record-style, in the ten minutes we were in the car if I hadn't mentioned being asthmatic. Me, I haven't been that nervous driving since I was nine months pregnant the first time.

Sigh.

But we bought the beater. So we are now the proud(ish) owners of a completely impractical, rust-spotted, two-door Golf that is the same model year as my very first car sixteen years ago. Hey, at least there are four wheels and an engine.

Postscript The very, very first time we tried to start the car after we bought it from him, the battery was utterly dead. Even after replacing the battery we were forced to spend the rest of the life of the car carrying around a portable battery/jumpstarter so that when we inevitably stalled out in the middle of the road we could get ourselves started again... since no one would stop and help the first time it happened, but rather preferred to drive around me honking one long, constant honk as if I'd just stopped in the middle of the road to have a picnic on the hood, specifically to inconvenience them. When we attempted to trade it in the following August, a mere ten months after buying it, it was junked. Our neighbor was clearly offended, obviously believing that we were somehow responsible for the Golf's demise and reviling to our faces the new beater of a van we were forced to purchase after its untimely death. "Do you even like that color?" he sneered, "And look at those spots on the bumper where the paint is peeling off; that is just unacceptable," opined the man who had sold us the rust-covered car less than a year before. Indeed.

Getting themselves some edumication

So we're no longer on the lam from the long arm of the law. No more sitting up night after night waiting for that knock from the truancy SWAT team (do SWAT teams knock? but i digress...). The kids are officially back in school.

As with everything our family attempts, we decided to make it as challenging as humanly possible. Go to one of the five adorable local schools to which we could walk or, if we're running late, bike? Nah, that's for pansies who take the obvious route. We're interesting; we're thoughtfully inefficient. So it's off to the international school in Hilversum each morning for us.

It's been about an hour's commute in the morning, but only because I'm a complete maniac about missing the first train and make us bike to the station so early that we end up sitting on the platform for almost 30 minutes before dawn breaks (keep in mind that dawn cracks at about 8:15 these days). I'm rethinking that strategy after this morning's 25kph winds. So we bike to the station, take a train downtown, switch to a second train, and then walk about 15 minutes (at 4-year-old legs' pace) to the two schools. In terms of satisfying our complication quotient, we were pleased to discover that the kids would be in two different buildings a few blocks apart and that the closer building doesn't open until well after the one further away, ensuring that aforementioned 4-year-old legs are dragged an extra six blocks or so before they can fold into semi-exhaustion on his little carpet square in his classroom. I have a feeling that his teacher will be wondering what we're doing to this kid to make him pass out over his apricots at snack time.

Despite the vicissitudes of the commute, the kids are both ecstatic to be in classrooms again. Although she put on a show of complaining about having homework, Ais buckled down and completed almost two days' worth of it last night. Dylan was uncharacteristically stream-of-consciousness chatty after being back in a classroom, being particularly impressed with the dinosaurs and the kitchen area with faux dishwasher. This school is so well organized and geared toward expat families' needs that the crazy mornings are a very small price to pay to meet kids and parents who are in a similar situation.

The weirdest part was taking the train back home this morning after dropping them off. I had a strong pang of, "Holy moly, my children are in one city in a foreign country, and I'm going to another... what am I thinking?" But then there was that guilty sense of relief that I now have a few daylight, weekday hours in which to get stuff done for the first time in months. Of course, rather than grocery shopping or revising my CV, here I am...

Houston, we have progress!

We can do Mississippi Stop-Stop -- or a reasonable approximation thereof -- on all four strings now. We've got a passable bowhold, and the bow even stays between bridge and fingerboard. We're practically professional. To anyone who hasn't lived in a household with a nascent violinist, the following will probably be excruciating; to be honest, I can't believe my own parents lived through this stage three times, but I'll tell you, this is music to this novice violin teacher's ears.




Dr. Suzuki's rolling over in his grave, but we'll be on to Vivaldi soon enough.

Note, too, the tragic overzealousness [or undertrainedness] of the hair-shredder, er, stylist to whom I entrusted Dylan's innocent little head when we were stateside. For the record, I most emphatically did NOT ask for a buzz cut, and further, they need to train people that the one-inch guard on the electric clippers does NOT leave an inch of hair. At least my looks-like-she-used-the-lawnmower haircuts are free. Sheesh.