In the last two weeks, we've become fans of Oranje, the Dutch football team. The Dutch have been playing exceptional soccer, to the point that even though I haven't watched a lot before now, it was quite clear that this has been high quality play. The team wasn't expected to win any games, but they won three in a row against top-notch opponents. My Dutch colleagues commented on how well they've been playing as a team, which isn't typical, either for the team, or for the Dutch in general.

Unfortunately, the team lost to Russia this evening. Even though both teams played quite well, the Russians seemed just a bit faster and just a bit more coordinated on their attacks. Even so, the game went into the second extra period before it was settled.

This was a messy week at work. I had a deadline dropped on me early in the week and it took two late nights to get it done. Next week is the last week of work before our trip to the US. It looks to be a busy five days trying to wrap up some loose ends before two weeks off. I'm starting to learn to leave the less important tasks to themselves, but it's a hard lesson to learn. It is not easy to just ignore the pressure to pick up everything that falls on my desk, but I'm realizing that I need to be better at saying no, or at least not agreeing to every last minute deadline that falls from the sky. A good life lesson, really.

Today we took a brief trip to Nike with one of the moms at school to get the kids some new shoes at employee prices. Afterward, we played Wii until after dinner. Then we took the Younger to a nearby parking lot where he could practice riding his brother's bike without training wheels. He did really well for his first time out. He has the balance down pretty well, and he can stop without falling over most of the time, but he can't start out on his own yet. He was pretty proud of himself, and rightly so. We'll go back again tomorrow to work on starting. I suspect he'll have the whole process down with a few more practice sessions. We still won't trust him to ride to school on his own bike for a little while yet, and we need to get another bike his size, but it's good progress.

Not much more to say say this week. We're all looking forward to our trip, and we have a few details to work out before next weekend, including trying to exchange my US driver's license for a Dutch license. I have all the documentation I need, but I have to find some time to visit the Geemente. I doubt the Dutch license will be back before we leave. This will involve an interesting little dance as we'll need to rent a car in the US on M's license, get my license renewed over there as soon as possible, and then pick up my Dutch license on the day I get back here (jet lagged, most likely) and then pick up the pets from the kennel before they overstay their welcome. It's a fun little logic problem that will probably cause too much stress when it happens, but it's more than three weeks away, so I won't worry too much about it until I'm in the midst of it.

Well, that's the theory anyway. Let's see how it goes.

A fairly mild week this week. The weather was good, the job got much more clear. Now I need to work on balance a little bit, since I still feel like I haven't been home enough lately.

A friend of mine challenged me to a sleeping competition of sorts. We're going to compare notes on when we go to bed and get up for the next few months and see who can get the most sleep. It should be interesting if for no other reason than we'll be keeping track of our habits. There will probably be something useful to learn from that for me.

This should be an important week for me at work. I need to get my planning for next year done, and that will mean locking myself into my office with no distractions for at least half a day. If that goes well, then I'll have gotten over a big hump. I don't expect to have a lot less to do suddenly, but what there is to do should be substantially easier than it has been. In any case, I need to have this planning done before we go on vacation the first two weeks of July. Wish me luck.

This week was a big mess, which may be a good thing in the end, but for the moment, I'm still trying to recover.

Actually, the problem has been that the previous 2-3 weeks have been lots of work, little sleep weeks. I think it all came to a head this week. I won't go into specifics, but let me just say that for the first time since we've been here, I really considered quitting and going home. I had a few successes early in the week and was feeling pretty good about my contribution to the business, but by Thursday, I was sure I should just pack it in. I'm still questioning if I can do everything that seems to be required of me for this position. Maybe I've really bitten off more than I can chew, or maybe I'm going about it the wrong way. I don't think my job should be as hard or take as much time as it seems to be.

One thing that has become clear is that I need to stop sweating the small stuff, since I'll stress out for a day or so over this or that only to find out that no body cares and it doesn't matter. I have a tendency to want to do what's asked of me, and I really need to learn when to say no. I think I got a better idea of how to do that this week, and I hope things will go more smoothly from her on out, but I also know that's probably being overly optimistic.

In any case, I managed to avoid working this weekend by accidentally leaving my laptop at work. Unfortunately, we spent the weekend playing on the Wii instead of preparing for our first game night next weekend, so we'll have plenty of running around next Friday night and Saturday morning.

In other news, we now have the main paperwork we need to exchange our US driver's licenses for Dutch ones. Unfortunately, this is just in time to be horribly inconvenient. I'll need/want my US license in the States when we're back there at the beginning of July, but I'll want a valid Dutch license to pick up M and the kids when they come back a week after me. I can drive here on my US license until the beginning of July, but if I exchange my license now, they'll take away my US license, and maybe(?) I can get it back from the US embassy? No one seems sure. So, we'll have to sort something out. First we have to figure out which forms we'll need and if an appointment with the Geemente is necessary, or if we can just walk in. I did mention that everything seems hard over here, right?

I've decided that sleep is a key ingredient in my getting over the hump at work and being more outgoing in the community here, so I'll cut this short and go off to sleep now. I suspect this week will be quite a bit better than last, just because I refuse to let things continue to slide. I'm not about to be beaten by this job or this country. Not in only six months, so it's time to dig in and fight.

Lots of random tidbits from this week.

This week we got our Wii. It came on Friday, but we were off to a wedding (see below) and we got home late, so I waited until the boys were in bed before plugging it in. At 2am, I went to bed with three minor injuries, but I have to say, it is a heck of a lot of fun.

I didn't show the game to the boys until after the International Fair at school (see below) but they've spent almost all of their waking time playing since then. We have Wii Sports, Raving Rabbids and Super Paper Mario. We've only played the first two so far, but I would highly recommend Rabbids to anyone with a Wii. It's a set of very silly mini-games that are all designed to take advantage of the Wii controllers and it has a slightly twisted sense of humor, which appeals to me a lot. After the boys went to bed last night, M and I played cooperatively into the evening. I suspect the novelty will wear off in a while, but until then, we're having a great time.

Friday morning was our last Dutch class and in the afternoon we attended a wedding in the South, so I took the day off to get all of that done. I still don't feel like I know that much Dutch, but I'm definitely better than I was seven months ago when I got here. M has learned a different set of things (more around food and shopping) and I think her vocabulary is larger than mine, but then she's learned a language before and I haven't. I'm going to start asking my colleagues to chat with me in Dutch over lunch and hopefully that will help.

The wedding was nice, but we missed most of the wedding itself. Apparently, there was a big pop concert in the South this weekend. We left ourselves two and a half hours to get down there (when it should only take one and a half) and it ended up taking three, so the ceremony was almost over by the time we got there. Nevertheless, we enjoyed seeing our friends and I met a guy with his own business here in the Netherlands who is considering expanding into the US and had a ton of questions. It was nice to be able to help him out.

On Saturday, we attended the International Fair at the boy's school. It was a nice little event with a food booth for each country/region represented in the school. I found myself feeling very anti-social, so I kept to myself, despite the opportunity to meet with fellow ex-pats. Sometimes I wish I was more outgoing than I am, and I wonder how we got ourselves to a foreign country in the first place. I had a vision of the boys running around to each booth looking for their favorite food from that country. I want them to have that kind of knowledge and experience of the world, but I find myself avoiding the opportunity to have those experiences myself. I guess it's something for me to work on.

Work has been interesting lately. We've basically pressed reset on our project plans for the moment, so there's a lot of re-planning to do. I really enjoy the re-planning part, but it needs to get done quickly so we can get ourselves back on track. People are all but sitting around waiting for directions at the moment, so there's some urgency and stress around this.

I also spent the last few weeks figuring out what the important things I should be doing at work and realizing that 3/4 of my to-do list has nothing to do with those things. I'm in the process of re-prioritizing, but with all the work to do urgently, it's hard to take the time to sort through my lists. I need to bite the bullet and set aside a half a day to sort through things, but that probably can't happen until next week at the earliest. Still, that means another week of sort of working on the right things, and I'd rather have more definite plans than that.

In addition to the Wii, I also ordered Welcome to Your Brain by Sandra Aamdot and Sam Wang. It's a very interesting book about how the chemistry in your head translates into your actions and behaviors. It talks about such diverse issues as mental health, weight control, and the effects of jet lag. So far, it's been an interesting read and it's encouraged me to get back into running. I ran 5k at lunch time today and I did the same last Saturday. One day a week probably won't change my life, but it's a start.

Not much else to say at the moment. This week looks like it will be much like the last with too much to do and not enough time to do it, but what else is new, right?