Ack--- Catastrophic failure

My hard-drive on my mac went belly up. I am able to occassionally check e-mail from one of the two other computers, but I will be asking you -- friends who read my blog, to please send e-mails to me when we get me back up and running. I think that we will be ordering everything come Monday...and add on two more weeks, so after Yom Kippur I will be able to blog and will want everyone to send e-mails so that I can capture e-mail accounts again. I have a pretty good personal memory, so there is a chance that I will remember you even if you don't feel like writing to me...but it will be a new Jewish Year, so well worth it.

In the mean time, I will be blog-free. So, your clue that it is time to write to me will be that you see a new post!

Thanks for your kindness and patience.

Eileen this Fall

It is officially Fall -- or as they say it here: Herfst. I learned that from one of Eileen's Dutch board books - a gift from our neighbors. Eileen and I had a morning tromp through fallen leaves on a dreary, cool day. Then returned for a morning nap and a brew of caffeine free peach tea.

We had our physical yesterday -- finally. She is slightly shorter than average, but not much, and same on weight. The doctor said that she was way ahead on milestones. She is officially 7660 grams (16 pounds, 14 ounces) and 68 cm (almost 27 inches). This means that according to the charts, she should grow up to be 170 cm (I am 150 for those keeping score).

Dutch lunch and breakfast are remarkably the same, and usually are not served hot. Think a slice of lunch meat between two slices of buttered bread. But, with lots of tile floors and a chill in the air, I have been cooking an egg, or reheating dinner from the night before. Eileen hates socks at the moment. She is trying to learn to walk and socks make it slippery...however, they taste great and it is entertaining to watch Mom slow down to pick them up as they are flung, stripper style, one at a time from the stroller (she also likes tearing off her cardigans, though Mom figured out that buttoning them under the chin prevents that).

Time to admit that the Dutch love children, but that they do that by criticizing complete strangers in public places like grocery shops (how dare I let her shop without socks on, or amble with her down the dairy aisle with its refrigerated cases). I have found that the best thing I can do is smile and nod and thank them for their concern. Mostly, it just feels weird. I know that there are people who act the same way in the US, but usually you know them -- they don't just walk up to you in a museum and start touching the baby your are holding (usually).

Urban Planning?

Eileen and I have explored many ways to travel between Volkel and Uden (the big town-- order of magnitude bigger than Volkel). I was speaking with a friend from the west yesterday. She has been here for four years and finds Europe sometimes difficult to navigate. She mentioned that she was used to cities laid out in a grid pattern. I started to warm to the subject of 'urban planning' as I think of it: Chicago after the fire. Then, I started to think about these old cities and how they were planned to confuse enemies trying to overrun them. So, I guess I was being biased - chaos can be urban planning.

In other news, NEVER throw money at the street artists in front of the Rijks museum. One of them had money thrown at him by an American yesterday; the artist then started a bellicose scene accusing all Americans of being rude, obnoxious, and secretly bringing nuclear things into his pristine country. I wonder whether the American had to pay extra for that (and if he somehow made it seem like: 1) he was bringing in something nuclear or 2) knew Condoleezza Rice personally, so could change foreign policy if he wanted. Moral: If you must give the artist money, put it gently in his hat (and only use Euros). I do find it curious in a country that irradiates much of its dairy -- (they call it shelf stabilized) that the word Nuclear is dirtier than The Sex Museum.

Food Glorious Food

Today I had lunch with a girlfriend in Uden. You might be thinking, so what? You ate lunch with me all the time when you lived here. The big deal here is that I went out for lunch on the local economy (not in The Building -- or in the Dutch lunch room). I have done that a couple of other times, but thus far, never just to go into town and have lunch unless it was our weekly time out of the house for Eric and me (together). It seemed so much pricier here than in the States, plus, there is the making a fool of myself by not knowing the language factor. To be fair, I have gone for coffee with various friends and even with just Eileen....so maybe I am making a big deal of nothing. At the time, it certainly felt like an event...but then again, since I normally don't have caffeine, maybe that is just the caffeine talking (nice foreshadowing, eh?).

So, we went to the local tiny version of say Marshall Fields (am I dating myself?) or Jordan Marsh (am I dating myself?) and went to the terrace dining room and for 10 euro (which is really quite reasonable -- it's about $15 or so) we got cappucino and a bagel with lox. YUM!!! first bagel here. I guess I won't have to make them myself (which is good, the mixer is in storage). I am still patting my stomach (and Eileen's).
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In other news, I found some rhubarb at the local grocery and made the best rhubarb struesel coffee cake ever. I found it as a muffin recipe at Epicurious, but they needed 1/2 cup sized muffin cups. Mine were 1/3 cup sized, so I either needed to adjust everything down a bit (hard to do with eggs, but not impossible) or try to find an equivalent pan. For the record, 12 muffins at 1/2 cup are about a 9 inch square baking pan!

Around the Building

There is a building on the base that houses a small, but very full Shopette (I posted about these before...but quickly, a Shopette is where you can buy your gas coupons, alcohol, snacks, and convenience items; rent/buy DVDs; and ours will order larger things for us -- like fans or humidifiers); a chow hall (open to family members and guests who are accompanied); an ATM and cash cage; and our APO boxes--with small attached mail facility; the club; a small exercise room; and a nice little playground.

Needless to say, this is often the center of activities. Whether it is the Support Our Squadron club (which might, in another era, have been an Officer's Wives Club - except we don't have enough officers for that here), an ad-hoc toddler music and motion class, a jumping off point for going on a trip to some place.

With this central role, it is of course where most of base life happens. It figures loudly in people's good and bad memories of the place.

Eric works long days, so Eileen and I will often sneak over to meet him or someone else for lunch there. Right now, with Eric out of town (he'll be back on Monday), Eileen and I sneak over around lunch time and to pick up our mail in the middle of the day. It is an easy way out of the house, since everyone there speaks English. Though, like Los Alamos (only more so--since it is about an order of magnitude smaller in terms of population), there is no anonymity there.

It's Kermis -- not Kermit!

Traveling carnivals seem to abound in Holland. They go to really big towns and throw a really big party there -- like Uden or even bigger: Oss. They come to little towns, and have four or five small rides -- like Volkel. Kermis is what these things are called. And, they come in the late summer to this part of the Netherlands...and because this is a Catholic area, they come again right before Lent.

I stayed away from the ones at Uden and Oss, having been to the German version (which was part of the pig roasting festival -- go on, ask me what I was doing at a pig roasting festival...not eating pig). These are big, crowded, loud, and tend to attract non-locals, who might be interested in picking a pocket (though with my purse and my baby sling forever intertwined, mine might not be the easiest pocket to pick.

I have heard from friends here that you can take your child on whatever ride you think that s/he might enjoy. This includes babies. And, sure enough, at both the one in Germany and the mini-one in Volkel, there are no signs saying that you must be this tall. But, the mini one in Volkel really had mostly tame, kid appropriate rides (there were about 5 rides, and three of these were: the little airplane ride, where you go in a circle slowly, up and down; bumper cars; and a small carousel). There were the traditional Carney games (hoops, water guns...), and then there were the big tents and live music at the bars and restaurants in town.

Eric and I felt simultaneously too old and not old enough. We looked around, covered our ears from the noise, and came home (if we were older, we could have turned off our hearing aids -- and probably would have ponied up some dough for Eileen to ride the rides).

This is the perfect place to announce that I had never seen a port-a-urinal (this is a hexagonal, unenclosed thing) located on a village street, in the parking area for a church before. I guess, you drink enough, you feel confident about peeing in public.

Slowly finding my way

A good portion of my life here is filled with frustration that I don't speak Dutch. Imagine being in the States and wanting to get information a topic and not speaking English. So, for the most part, using the phone terrifies me. I spend a lot of time on the Internet with my friend Google Translate. Here is where I say that 1) having a baby who has only slept through the night a handful of times in the past three months has hurt my meager ability to retain new words, 2) Rosetta Stone may be a good program, but I need to actually use it, 3) I am trying to sign up for language classes -- but waiting until my friend Dana gets back from the States.

I met with a woman from our local baby wellness bureau last week. She was impressed by how many toys we have -- and more than that, that we have books out for the baby. She was also caught off guard by the fact that Eileen immediately started to pull up on her to grab her papers (which I had to rescue three times before I finally suggested that maybe we needed to move them to a higher surface). My path forward can be one of the following: get all wellness baby things done at the local bureau, or get shots done within the US military medical world and do the rest at the bureau. Eileen reacts very strongly (think high fever and then about a week of not being herself), so the drive to one of the med facilities with US shots is untenable unless I have another person with me. I'll figure that out.

I spent yesterday morning (here it is 5am on Saturday) at the local swimming pool in Uden. It is actually a three pool indoor complex. Lovely and large. They have a swim class for babies. Eileen loved it. But, it starts and ends with a song or three, and I couldn't keep up with the singing. I will learn...I keep telling myself that. The pool was heated to about 88 degrees. There is a huge recreation pool with different depths that we might check out tomorrow afternoon. In other news, I may have made a Dutch friend, yesterday at the swim class. We'll see.

Following where Montgomery would have us go

Operation Market Garden came right through this part of the Netherlands in the fall of 1944 see http://worldwar2database.com/html/arnhem.htm for further information about this unsuccessful campaign. I won't be pulled into a debate about Montgomery vs. Patton, as that is untenable. Instead, Eric, Eileen, and I went to Arnhem and its surrounds to look for a museum in Montgomery's HQ for this campaign. We were stopped everywhere we tried to go and noticed a ton of people on foot. Strange. This is a bicycle kind of country.

We got home and discovered that they were people participating in memorial walks (10, 15, 20, and 40 km options) for the same operation. It explains why we couldn't get to the museum. And it said that there are a ton of people who remember the campaign. The highlight for me will be next weekend, when they have a race of WWII vehicles to a bridge in Arnhem. How cool is that?

***to those of you wondering, yes, I know I lived very close to Gettysburg and never saw that battle reenacted, but the Karen of today would have liked that opportunity :-)

Wineries

Like almost all of the Americans here, we have a GPS navigator for our car. "Tom-Tom" -- who we call Tom, despite the fact that the computer voice on it is really a Brit named Kate, often tells us how to get where we want to go. Yesterday, we decided that Tom should send us to a winery. It has a winery button and Eric picked one. Kid in backseat, us in front, good classic rock on the radio...off we go.

Now I know you are thinking, I have heard of French wine, and German wine, and Italian wine, but never Dutch wine. Ah, I figured, maybe we are in for a hidden treat, after all, the history of each of these European wine areas seems to have come with the Romans (notice, the Brits are not known for their wine...so there was a hole in this hypothesis already). So, we follow where Tom sends us to a residential area in a little industrial town. No vines to be seen, no signs on houses, we had to assume that this was not a winery as we know it, but possibly a wine importer running the business from his home. Geez. We didn't knock, it was a drive-by winery search!

Fall?

Well leaves are starting to yellow here and there. Berries are turning red or black and attracting birds. The temperature feels a little cooler. It is gray and rainy (oh wait...it was that in high summer, too). I am beginning to see signs of Fall. Perhaps it is the planning that goes into the Jewish New Year -- different here, since the planning is less directed inwardly into how to make ammends for the wrongs that I have done in the past year and more frantically outward trying to find a community at all.

Eileen seems just happy as can be to stay in the house all day, but even though the socks are slippery on the tile floors and she has had the ability to remove them since 2 months, she has actually started bringing them back to me when she removes them at all to put back on her tiny frozen feet. This while learning to walk. I do make sure that we walk outdoors for at least 15 minutes a day -- no matter how gloomy. Eileen is still the toothless teether, we think -- though she awoke sticking out her tongue and would not even put it away for me to feed her the greek yogurt and banana mixture I made for breakfast - guess who got a wipe down over the kitchen sink? Maybe one or two of the six just below the surface have decided to emerge.

We seem to be settling into a rhythm of sorts. Market at least one day a week. Grocery on an intervening day. Laundry amounts to about a load a day, but I save it for two big laundry days. Coffee with local friends when I can. A major base related thing a week - though I actually missed the Italian lunch day yesterday which was to be my major base related activity. That said, I had two the week before, so I am still doing fine on average.

Otherwise, I am truly missing my worldwide cadre of friends. Thanks for checking the blog!

the ongoing adventures of Wilbur Cat

Most of my readers know that Wilbur cat is a long haired mostly Maine coon. He is about 12 years old and came to me a year before Eric and I settled into marital bliss. He belonged to Eric before that.

Wilbur had an exciting move over here and has had some fun and terrifying moments since then. Eileen LOVES Wilbur in a way that results in Wilburs hair being loved off...like in the Velveteen Rabbit only with claws.

Wilbur is not as fond of stairs and running as he used to be. He also needs a pretty regular reminder for the "not in front of Mommy" rule (no counter, no clawing furniture, etc.). This didn't used to be a problem. Also, mister skittish, finicky cat, suddenly cannot get enough wet food -- no matter how much and what flavor we feed him. This from a cat who on June 5th would only have licked some gravy off the wet food we put down. Other strangeness: no more hairballs and lots of matted fur.

We don't know if it was actually Wilbur's evil twin who got off the plane in Amsterdam, but he is cute and furry.

Six month wellness baby -- the saga continues

Yesterday we went to the primary care doctor again to try to get Eileen set up with wellness baby stuff. We still don't know how much she weighs or how tall she is (she did get her shots). Though she is now 7 months and no longer even close to 6 months. They couldn't do anything there -- no scale to weigh her, no growth charts to show how she was doing.

I was handed a phone number to an automated phone line (it answers in Dutch...duh...and there is no para Espanol button). Eventually, 9 phone calls later I decided to push a random button and see if a person answered who could help. She could and she did. She said that when we registered with our mayor there should have been a call from a nurse to set it up. Ah..there is the rub. We are not registered with the city of Volkel.

She said she would give my number and info to the nurse and would try to work the problem from her end.

To be clear, Eileen and I are registered aliens with rights to live in the Netherlands, but I did it through the NATO office in Brunsom as I was told to do. Ah, but I learn slowly!!!!

Eileen meanwhile, got to wear her clothes and not be prodded for yet another day :-)