You may have noticed a tone to the past few posts, and if you've been reading M's blog, you'll see similar sentiments there as well. We've been struggling lately. We all want to go home (at some level). We're homesick and lonely and we really don't feel like we fit at the moment. For me, it's simply exhausting even to hear the Dutch speak. I feel like I want to lock the four of us in the house and just not go out.

Objectively, things aren't going badly. There have been bumps, of course. M managed to lock my PIN card by entering the wrong PIN, so I'm without money until Monday when I can get to the bank. Not a big problem, since nothing is open on Sunday anyway. M's card won't let her online because we changed my account to a joint account, but that can be fixed with one phone call Monday morning, so again, not a big deal. Our oven is still broken (since it takes at least a week to get the part), but we seem to have figured out how to deal with that, so it's not such a big deal anyway, but it's one more thing to deal with.

Work has been a struggle and I feel like I've been paying attention to the wrong things there. Again, objectively, things are fine, but I have this sense that I'm out of control and not watching the right things. I have a plan to get it under control, but I never seem to find the time to actually make it happen.

The older is spending a lot of his time fighting with the rest of us, but that's starting to get a lot better. We're making more time for him and making sure he's getting to choose when he can. Both boys now love their new beds, and I'm encouraged by the fact that they've both decided to go to bed on their own a couple of times already. We still need to brush their teeth and M and I want to institute reading to them while they're in bed before they go to sleep, but things are moving in the right direction there (at least in my opinion.)

We had guests over on Saturday again (third week in a row!) It was a nice visit, and we walked to the nearby woods. There are a bunch of walking and biking trails there and we all enjoyed being away from town and out in the wilderness. The dog managed to get very muddy in the one or two puddles we saw, but it was a great time, and we need to go back.

Next weekend, M's niece will be in Paris and we've reserved a car and a hotel there so we can see here. It's a five hour drive, and we'll head out there next Saturday and return Monday evening. I'm looking forward to being away from our house, but we still need to finalize a solution for watching over the dog and the cat.

Making the reservations was surprisingly hard for us. Neither of us likes to spend money, and there are too many unknowns (quality of hotel, location in city, etc.) for me to be completely comfortable with the situation. Eventually I just got tired enough that we picked something. The weekend will cost us about €500, not including food, but I know it will be worth it. When we get back (after having the good time I know we'll have) we need to book our trip to the UK for the end of April.

I've all but decided to go without a car for our time here. Work has to (for liability reasons) rent me a car for any trips over 100 km. I looked into Green Wheels, and for €5 a month, we can rent a car at the spur of the moment and only pay €0.14 per kilometer, so that will cover running errands. I think it's a little more complicated than that, since there seems to be some fee to cover insurance, but I can't tell if that's a one time payment, or a regular cost. The only question at the moment is the insurance question, since I don't want to go back to the US in three years and have to start my good driver status all over. I'll call the insurance company tomorrow to figure out how to deal with that.

I keep wanting to write more on my observations of the Netherlands and the people, but to be honest, I'm tired of the whole thing right now, so it's hard to work up the energy to do it. I know this will pass, and it's important that I keep flinging myself out there or it won't get any better. Our trip to Paris should help quite a bit. I think I'll be looking forward to getting back to the Netherlands where they speak English. It might help me appreciate where we are a bit more.

Lots on my mind today. Not too surprising, since it's been just over a week since I posted last. I have been putting off writing here, partly because I have a lot to say and it's all been trying to get out at once (and so nothing gets out) and partly because I've been sick and unhappy lately, so I haven't felt like writing at all. Today is Easter Monday (2e Paasdag) so I'm home for the day, but it's been a day of laying around and doing nothing much.

I was told before I moved here that the six month mark was the hardest when moving to a new country. Well, the end of March will be five months for me, and I can say that these last few weeks have been pretty hard. The "honey moon period" has definitely worn off, and every little thing (including the Dutch accented English) is really grating. I feel exhausted a lot of the time (and my sleep habits aren't helping) and there are days and times when I really just want to go home, and lately, M has been feeling the same way.

Now before anyone writes or calls to try to help us out, please realize that I know this will pass. Just as the moments I've written about before have passed. It's just a stage of the process, and we knew what we were getting into. That doesn't make it easier, but it does make it temporary, and it means that we won't be contacting any moving agencies any time soon.

Of course, a number of things have not helped (and a few others have.) For one thing, the weather has been a mix of sunny, warm spring days, and driving rain, wind, sleet, snow and hail. That's a bit of a roller coaster all by itself. This morning, we woke up to a beautiful snow-scape, but by now, it's almost all melted (despite the heavy snow we had just an hour ago.) The sun is out for the moment, but a quick look at the sky shows it will be raining again in a few minutes. Normally, I like days like this, but since we had almost two weeks of warm spring weather at the beginning of the month, I've been longing for some summer.

We've also had mice in the house lately. I think the warm weather woke them up, and then the cold has driven them back inside. We had an incident with a mouse a month or so ago, but we hadn't seen or heard anything until this past week. The boys' beds had been delivered from Ikea, and a mouse had gotten between the boxes and was scared out when I started moving things around. The cat was very interested, but she seems to think they're toys, and if she catches them, she puts them back down to try to play with them some more. She's far more useful as an alarm than as a trap. So, on my Saturday shopping trip, I bought some mousetraps. We caught one the next day, and I hoped (with some amount of doubt) that that would be it, but the cat showed up with a live one today, and I had to catch it and take it outside and break its neck. I hate doing that, but releasing it just guarantees it will be back in sooner or later, so better to be done with it. We still have one trap set, and I expect we'll see more before it's over.

Last Monday and Friday, we had Dutch class again, and I think we need to change something, because I'm feeling really stalled. We're oscillating between studying grammar and vocabulary, and I don't feel like I'm making progress in either. I'm tempted to buy something like Rosetta Stone, but at $300+, it's a big investment for something that we aren't sure will work. I'd put the money down for the boys' sake alone, but, well, we're a bit cheap this way. If I could find a source for it here in the Netherlands, I'd probably just buy it, but strangely enough, the versions to teach you Dutch don't seem to be available in the Dutch online stores.

Also not helping things is the fact that I made a minor, but annoying, mistake at work. I put off getting a bill paid because I had other things that seemed more urgent, and now the vendor is threatening to shut their part of the project down. I suspect it's just a threat, and I've got the process started to pay, but now I'm waiting for one last approval, and he's been out for the last half a week. I'll be in his office Tuesday morning to make sure this gets done, but if I'd dealt with it when I first got it, it would have been paid two weeks ago. I especially hate it when I'm at the mercy of someone else's decisions, since if this were a paper that needed to get written, I could just get it done, but now I need to wait, which I also hate.

This mess up happened before I started using GTD. In fact, pulling my to do lists all together is what made me realize that I needed to get the process of paying this bill started. Too bad I didn't start sooner. So far, GTD has been helping, but I'm not as religious about it as I should be. I've got to get better at writing down actionable items on the list. For example, I have things that look actionable, like "buy a car" or "deal with insurance," but when I go to do these things, I realize there are a bunch of smaller tasks like "research car reliability" or "collect insurance contact information" that needs to be done as a first step, and I'm often not in the right place to do those things when I read my list. It helps a lot to have the bigger projects broken down into very specific next steps, since when I read something simple and easy, I'm much more likely to do it. When I read "buy car" I roll my eyes and realize 1000 reasons that it isn't that simple and I end up putting it off (again). So, I'm getting the idea, but it will take some practice to make it work properly. We just bought the book today (by mail order) so hopefully I'll have a better idea of the ins and outs soon enough.

I spent two days this week home from work with a cold. Everyone else in the family has had, or does have it. The younger is a little snot machine. Every evening his sleeves (and sometimes his pant legs) are covered with the stuff. It's pretty gross, and no surprise that the rest of us have gotten it too. I was back at work on Thursday, but now I feel it back a bit stronger. Maybe that's in anticipation of work tomorrow...

I wrote previously about how the Older has been having problems adjusting and getting angry a lot and I think I had a big breakthrough with him this past week. It came along with the new kids beds. As you might remember, we'd had the kids sleeping on opposite ends of a queen-sized bed but the box springs wouldn't make it into our upstairs here, so they've been sleeping on the mattress on the floor. We bought them bunk beds that could also be identical single beds when we were at Ikea, and they got delivered on Thursday. I started to put them together that evening, and the Older had a breakdown on us. I took him aside and we had a long talk and I realized just how unfair things have been from his perspective lately, and I can't say I blame him. He's lost his home, his school, his friends, his bike (we moved him up a size and gave his to the Younger) and now his bed. It was too much, and I completely understand, so we've taken some steps to reel things back in a bit. I promised to get his brother another bike the same size so he could have his bike back. We put off putting up the bunk beds for a couple of nights and just slept on the single mattresses on the floor to ease the adjustment. I've been a lot more patient since that talk, and I feel like his angry times are fewer and less severe when they happen. It's also what has made me look into getting Rosetta Stone. I think if he and his brother had a way to learn Dutch at their own pace, it would help them both a lot. I'll probably order it this week, but I want to check a few more reviews first to make sure I think it will actually help and not hurt.

We had our second set of guests on Saturday night and it was quite pleasant. This was the friend of my cousin (who I mentioned before) and his wife. They stayed until midnight and we talked and really enjoyed ourselves. They've just bought a house just outside of Amsterdam and invited us over sometime once they've gotten their table and are ready for guests. That makes for three dinner invites that we need to decide when to accept. Looks like we'll have a full social calender before we know it.

Speaking of full calenders, we have another set of friends coming over next weekend for dinner followed by a trip to Paris to visit M's niece the weekend after that. We really need to get that trip planned, since train (and plane) tickets really want to be bought in advance, and we'll have to figure out where we'll stay (and who will check on the pets...) Of course, this just adds to the feeling that there's too much to do, but if we don't get ourselves capable of traveling around, we could quickly spend three years here and never see any European countries (including this one!)

Yesterday morning, I was rousted out of bed to the sound of a crack and a loud (but minor) expletive from M. It turns out that we've broken the oven again. M was trying to melt butter (again) and the door shattered, just like last time. Apparently the butter doesn't stop enough of the microwaves, so they bounce around until they hit a bit of grease that's on the edge of the door frame. That spot gets really hot and the glass can't take it. I re-read the instructions (again!) and there's no warning about any such thing in there, so I think there's some problem with the design, but once we get this fixed (another week with no oven! Oh, woe!) we'll put a glass of water in there with the butter and I think that will prevent this from happening again, but for now, this is a royal pain in the butt.

Well, I'm sure there's more to say (like that I finished HL2, but now have Episode 1 and 2 to work on...) but I'd better get something done today (like make dinner.) Just writing this makes me feel better about things already, since there's a lot of good mixed in with the tiring and annoying. I'll keep you posted on how things progress, but we will survive, and this will be a good experience. We just can't give up on it yet.

It seems like things have gotten rolling, and now everything is busy all the time. I'm hoping we can create a small lull for ourselves in about a month, but I'm not counting on it. I'm going to sign up for my summer vacation this week, and that will probably include a trip back to the US, so I'll let you all know when and where we'll be as soon as we know.

I also need to start planning the European trips we want to take. At this point, I think we just need to start going on every long weekend, but without a car, it's intimidating. In reality, it's intimidating in any case, since every new country is a new set of things to learn and do, but we have to make it happen. M's niece will be in Paris early in April, so we really need to make that trip happen. I suppose we'd better start planning now.

Last Monday, my bike helmet got stolen. I had been leaving it with my bike at the station. There were two reasons for this. First, the helmet was 15 years old and the plastic shell was starting to come off. I'm not at all sure it would have protected me in a crash. Second, none of the Dutch wear helmets, so I figured it would be safe. Not so. Monday was a very rainy day, so it's possible someone took it as a rain hat. The holes in it make it less than ideal for that. In any case, I'm not exactly upset, since it was time to get a new one anyway. So I rode around for almost a whole week without a helmet. In the US, this would have just been stupid recklessness, but here, Saturday was the first chance I had to buy a new one, since all of the bike shops are only open until 6. Anyway, I have a new one now, and it needs slight resizing, but it should do the trick.

Last Tuesday, both our IKEA and our electronics orders arrived and the house was once again full of boxes. We've been setting things up since, and it seems that I have some bad karma with IKEA things, since I hurt myself on at least three separate occasions in the process of setting up everything. We also almost managed to drop a wardrobe on me while we were putting it into the attic, but we've all survived with only slight injuries. M finished putting together the wardrobe in our bedroom this afternoon, so now the only things left are the kids' desks and their beds, which have yet to arrive.

I spent a large part of the day today trying to sort out the electronics. The TV we got is HUGE! It dominates the room and the change from the last seven years of having no TV is quite stark. So far we're happy with it, but I've been fighting a losing battle between the DVR and the cable television box. Apparently, the DVR we got is not set up to talk with set top boxes. That means it can't control which channel the cable is set to, which means it can't schedule when to record. We can set up the schedule on the cable box and have it send a signal to the DVR to start recording, but getting the cable box to schedule anything is a pain in the butt. I've pretty much decided to send the DVR back and get the DVR from the cable company that will replace the cable box. It's €5 a month more, and their DVR doesn't have a DVD player in it, but it's probably the better deal anyway.

On Saturday, we had friends over for dinner, and in preparation, I took my bike and ran some errands, including grocery shopping. First, I stopped and got saddle bags for my bike. They can hold 48 liters. That seems like an odd measure, since I imagine putting in 24 - 2 liter bottles (12 in each side). So, they're a bit big. It took a bit to get them on the bike, but they were crucial for the trip, since I ended up with 3 big, heavy bags of groceries, and I wouldn't have been able to get home otherwise.

My second stop was at a stationary store to get a notebook. As I mentioned in the last post, I'm toying with GTD, and so far it seems pretty good, but I wanted to take it one step further, so I set up a notebook like the one described here. I have to recommend the Moleskine notebooks. They're very nicely put together, and they just feel really good. I have a tendency to get attached to things like pens and notebooks (I used the same mechanical pencil and eraser all through my time at university, and it was difficult to start working when I couldn't find them.) So far, I've only set this up as described in the link, and I expect I'll have to tune my use of it to my own habits, but so far, I'm happy with it. I'll know better in a couple of weeks if I'm still using it.

Dinner was lovely, with our guests staying until midnight. This was a co-worker and his wife, and I hadn't met her before, but she's very nice. We had a good time, as did the boys. They played a couple of games with us and we talked and talked. It's too bad they live so far away (about a two hour drive) or we'd look forward to seeing them more often. Our next two Saturdays will involve hosting guests as well, and it's nice to finally have our house in order enough to feel comfortable inviting our friends over. Even so, I'm already looking forward to the free Saturday three weeks from now.

One last note, I've been having a lot of trouble with the Older lately. He's angry much of the time, threatening to bite us if he doesn't get his way. He hurts his brother whenever he's tired or hungry or has to go to the bathroom, and he'll often start screaming when you ask him what he said. Sometimes it feels like a war zone. On the other hand, I know he doesn't want to get like this, and he's always very sorry when it's over (often, M and I are as well.) He manages to push a lot of my buttons, and I know I don't respond in the best ways to diffuse the situation, so things escalate quickly. I think a lot of it is that he misses his friends in the US and he blames me (at some level) for bringing him to this new place. At the same time, he likes it here and he's meeting new friends at school and in the neighborhood, but I think that's hard as well, since having two such different feelings at the same time can be really confusing. I know we'll survive this, and that things will turn out fine, but it's not easy right now, especially if I happen to come home late from work, or if I'm feeling overwhelmed with all the things to do (or tired, or hungry...) I think he and I need an active hobby that we can do together and work out some of these things in a more directed and playful way.

Well, off to bed. Dutch classes in the morning.

It's been a busy week since I posted last. I'll only cover the highlights, since I need to get back to work (as you'll understand in a minute.)

On Monday, M and I started our Dutch lessons. We decided we should do them together, and that means when the kids aren't home, so now Monday and Friday mornings we have two hours of Dutch lessons at home. That means I don't get into work until noon. That's ok with everyone (since as long as I deliver on my commitments, my time is my own.) The instructor was 30 minutes late because she stopped to ask directions and got sent to the other end of town.

Class itself was nice. She's been teaching for five years and seems to take the approach of teaching us what we need to learn instead of following some fixed syllabus. She spoke to us half in Dutch and half in English. We met with her again on Friday morning, and much more of the discussion was in Dutch. I think just having someone to listen and talk to us and correct us when we try to talk is extremely helpful. She claims that we'll be doing well after our 15 sessions, but I think that will depend a lot on how much practice we get outside of class.

Tuesday, I met my new boss. She's just a bit older than me, and has a lot to learn about our company, but I think she'll work out well. She talked about her experience, her family and how work/life balance is important to her. I think I'll enjoy working with her, but I'll have to adjust to her style a bit (once I figure out what style that is.)

Wednesday, I headed off to Germany for another consumer research study. I was there for most of Wednesday and Thursday. I find that I enjoy business trips (there's something nice about not having to worry about household issues or getting the kids to bed) but I really miss home as well. M and the kids seem to get along ok without me, but it's always good to be back home, even if I'm only gone one night.

Friday was a second Dutch class (as mentioned above) and Saturday, we returned to Ikea to actually buy the things we didn't buy the first time. It was a zoo. Apparently it was the last day of a sale. We were confused about how to manage buying things. Everyone we asked had a different story. We ended up taking the difficult path of wandering through the showroom, picking out what we wanted, going down to the warehouse and picking it all up, and then standing in line to have it shipped to our house. I think (and someone said) that we could have everything ordered and sent directly, but when M tried to order a coffee table that was out of stock, she was told it was against Ikea policy to do that. Nevermind that we'd ordered a set of bunk beds for the kids that was out of stock. The woman behind the counter couldn't explain to M why the two orders were different. I find this very typical here. People have a process to follow, and unless they are exceptional at their jobs, they don't think much about it. If they're confronted with a conflict, they fall back to the I don't know, I can't help mode. "Kan niet" (I can't) is apparently a very common Dutch phrase and it can mean I'm not capable, I don't want to, or I'm not allowed.

I spent today getting organized. Someone (you know who you are) pointed me at "Getting Things Done" (GTD) a method for getting and keeping yourself organized. I spent quite a bit of time reading about it (thus avoiding getting anything done) and decided to give parts of it a try. I haven't officially read the book, but you can piece the core of the concept together from what's online. The idea is that we have trouble getting things done because our brains are working too hard at remembering what we need to do. GTD advocates putting everything where you will naturally find it again when you need it. It's an interesting idea, and I use some of these techniques already, but I haven't been regular enough about it. I plan to actually get and read the book, but I'll let you know how the struggle goes over the next few weeks.

Anyway, to get organized, I piled all the collected crap into one place, and sorted through it from the top to the bottom without letting any bit of it go back into the pile. Now I have a single to-do list. I still need to work on making everything on the list "actionable" (meaning that I can do exactly that in one step) but it's a start. In the process, I got a bunch of small things done, but there were so many small things, that I didn't manage to finish my one big work task for the weekend, so I need to start it now. Unfortunately, my computer seems to have eaten the file I was working on, but fortunately, it wasn't that hard to create it, and I'd already decided to throw most of it out anyway. But, I'd better get to it before it gets any later. Wish me luck.

A mixed day today. First I stayed up WAY too late playing Half Life 2. When I came to bed, I asked M to get me up to make breakfast. She kindly obliged, but it hurt a bit.

Breakfast was the (now) usual French toast, and quite tasty, if I do say so myself. I'm also trying to cut back on the coffee drinking, so I only had a cappuccino. Coffee is stronger here, but I've been drinking it in American quantities, so I think it's been part of the reason that I haven't been sleeping as much as I should be. I've gone cold turkey before, so I know I can do it, but this time I really just want to cut back to reasonable amounts instead of cutting it out completely. We'll see how that goes.

The next thing we did was place a big order at a local electronics shop. I get a reasonable employee discount there and there was an additional 10% off for the first order, so we bought all of the appliances we had been doing without. We got a TV, DVR, Audio system, iron and a wake-up light/alarm clock. Everything should be here in 6-8 working days.

I need to say a bit about the TV here. We did away with TV in our house seven years ago, just after the older was born. We made the decision when we realized that we were spending too much time in the evenings watching this or that and no time interacting with this new baby of ours, so out it went. At the time, we didn't have either cable or a DVR, and this time we'll have both, so there will be no shortage of things to watch. My hope is that we can use the system wisely and watch only what we want to watch. The DVR will help a lot, since it will let us record just the shows we want to see instead of leaving us at the mercy of the live schedule. We'll see how it goes.

After that, I went out and fixed bikes. My bike had seemingly lost one of it's gears, but the plastic housing for the gear shift mechanism on the back axle had been bumped out of place. Popping it back into place made everything work again. I also moved some training wheels around on the boys' bikes. The Younger is now riding the Older's old bike with the training wheels put back on, and the Older has moved up a bike size. We took a test ride around the block. The Younger definitely has gotten the better of the swap, as this bike fits him much better and he can go much faster now. The Older's new bike is a little bit bigger than he's ready for, and he had a small accident later in the day when riding with his mom. A couple more practice runs, and I'm sure he'll have it figured out, but today he announced that he was going back to the old bike.

Speaking of the kids, the Older has been having a lot of trouble lately. He's been getting really upset with everyone and has taken to hurting (including trying to bite) all of us. We spent some time talking about it today, and I think he's really missing his friends back home. He doesn't know how to deal with being so sad, and he's mad at me for making us move here (and away from his friends) so he lashes out at me in particular. He's old enough now that, when he's not in fully angry mode, we can talk about it all, but that doesn't help in the heat of the moment, and my reactions to it don't always help either. Today he spent some time watching the DVD of videos and pictures that his class put together at the end of school last year, and that seemed to help a lot. He's only been here two months now, and I know he's still adjusting, so I'm not really worried. It's just really hard for him right now.

Tomorrow M and I start our Dutch classes. It should be interesting, but I'm also worried about taking time out from work to do this. I plan to put in the hours to get my work done (like that's any different) but being AWOL every Monday morning (and likely Friday mornings as well) makes me a bit nervous. It's only for a few weeks (we get 30 hours of class, hardly enough to learn anything) and people are more understanding of these sorts of things here, but I haven't broken out of the US live to work mindset yet, so it's a struggle.

Well, it's time to start the kids to bed. I'm too tired to stay up tonight, and tomorrow comes early, so it's off to bed for me as well.

We haven't really fallen into a routine yet. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it keeps us on our toes.

This past week was especially strange, since Monday was spent late at a going away party for a co-worker, Tuesday I was home late after missing the early train from the R&D site, , Wednesday I was watching consumer groups in Russia via internet until 8pm, Thursday was a fairly normal night back from R&D, and Friday I was off, just because I needed it.

So Friday, our oven broke. M was melting butter and the glass in the door shattered. We called the rental agency, and they happily told us they'd take care of it, but we haven't heard anything since, so I guess we'll be making do with the stove top. If we don't hear anything by Monday at noon, I'll call again. In the meantime, we've acquired a deep fat fryer, so fries and other breaded yummy things may be in our future.

Friday, we intended to go out and do a bunch of things, but we accomplished exactly nothing. We couldn't even convince the kids to go play across the street at the park. Today we did a little better, as I took the older to Gamma to shop for some home improvement items, while M took the younger to the grocery store to get our weekly bread. Later, both boys played in the park. It's nice to be able to send them over there by themselves, since we can watch them from the kitchen window. There was a bit of trouble today, as the younger seemed to be taking their bat to an older boy, but it wasn't clear if it was play or something else. We yelled out the door at him, and things settled down after that.

I also managed to make a list of the things we need to get at Ikea and the electronics store, and M and I ordered a number of things we had delivered to some good friends in the States with the hope of an eventual care package. I just hope that the shipping isn't prohibitive. There's a chance of bringing things in when we travel, but it gets complicated, since the Dutch love their tax money, and with the exchange rate so high, there are a lot of people bringing in goods from the US and not bothering to declare them.

Still no progress on the car front. I've started paying attention to the cars I see around me, but I haven't worked up the nerve to call a garage yet. I also need to check with work, since I've heard there is some liability issue if I drive my car more than 100km for work, and the new R&D location (that we will move to in the summer) is about 140km, and there's no train. If that's the case, they may need to provide me with some kind of transportation once we move, making me think we may not need to get a car at all. There is a short term rental program called Green Wheels, which is similar to the Flex Car concept that those of you living in California and Washington may know about. I think we can get by with renting for tourist travel if it means never owning a car over here, but I need to check out the rules at work first.

Otherwise, not much to add this week. Work is busy, home life is busy, lots to do, not much getting done. Dutch lessons start Monday morning, and hopefully, M and the kids can be registered in a week or two at the most. M needs to go into the Geemente next week to get some documentation, but then it should be easy. Of course, we've thought that before, so I'm not holding my breath.

Well, off to take part in the post dinner chores. More updated later.