Legs a bit wobbly.

I have to confess that I haven’t actually been on any form of two wheeled device in a couple years,  a fact of which I was reminded this morning after heading off to the store for a container of milk. 

I’m sure the sight of a Dutch bike parked in front of the store must seem a little strange.  First of all,  since it was the *only* bike,  and then of course,  it has fenders and stuff.

“New and Shiny” is pretty much still well,  new and shiny.  It’s easier to keep a well made bike clean I find,  even though all the bikes got a little filthy in the basement of the apartment in Vienna.

It was a rather harsh environment.

Didn’t matter.  These bikes are made for harsh environments.  If you ever happen to venture over to the Netherlands,  you’ll see Gazelle and Batavus bikes, (among a host of others) some of which have been in continuous use for twenty,  thirty years or longer. 

You won’t find much going back before the second world war though,  as the word is that the German soldiers stole all the bikes they could find to ride back home when they were being forced to retreat.  It’s a story.  Not sure if it’s entirely accurate.

Of course,  I could have walked to the store,  but the interesting thing is,  since I chose to take just a slight detour on the way home (just one street over,  no big deal) it so happened that I was able to exchange a “good morning”  with a neighbour I never knew we had.  I mean,  just some person coming out of their house,  possibly recognised me.  Don’t know.  My point is, being on two wheels,  one does tend to interact with others more readily.  Just one of those things.

Maybe that’s why most Dutch folks whom I know like to yak?  They’re good at it.  Trust me.

 

Anyhoodle,  you’ll notice the containers there,  one of which has “yard waste” plastered on the side?

Well,  this is one of the slight annoyances of suburban life, especially when one no longer has access to a honkin’ big dumpster at work. *ahem*

We have to put out our clippings to be picked up.  I think I read somewhere that it’s supposed to start as of the First of April.   This is good.  The roses out front have gotten out of hand,  and I’ve having to be a bit ruthless when it comes to getting them back down to size.

There hasn’t been anyone with the fortitude to do this nasty business over the last four years,  so it’s up to me.

 

And that is most of what is on the agenda for today.

Fun stuff.

I’m sure I could blather on here,  but I’d best get out there.

 

Hope the Easter Bunny is good to you.  Just remember, if what’s left behind looks like raisins,  they’re probably not.

 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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Brave new world.

This sight may be somewhat familiar to some of you. 

For my non-Canadian readers,  it’s the log-out page to something called “Service Canada”.   This is different from “Service Ontario” by the way,  and it seems I may very well be dealing with them both off and on for the rest of my days.  *sigh*

I’m beginning to see the merits of being a hermit.  Life is all about the bureaucracy. Gah!

See,  Travelling Companion (and you know,  I really need to come up with a new pseudonym for her,  as she has more or less sworn off travelling) has been nagging me to get my “Record of Employment”.  I was snatched from the jaws of employment as a result of leaving the country,  so there’s this idea that maybe now I should be out there looking for a job? 

Again, *sigh*.  Or maybe more accurately, *Gah*

I do realise that I have dutifully paid into what I still call “Unemployment Insurance”  for some 40 odd years,  and maybe just maybe I might like to get a couple bucks of it back, but I’m not so sure it’s really worth all the hassle.

Just in order to *see* my Record of Employment,   I have to sign in to Service Canada and create a profile.  Well,  I supposed I’d have to do that eventually to get things like CPP or such (Canada Pension Plan,  another one of those schemes where, “I wants my money”) .  I’m just a wee bit young for that one though. 

No really.  Just a young’un in the pension scheme of things.

Back in the dark ages,  when I had employees that I had to hire and (sometimes) fire,  the whole affair was a paper trail.  You filled out a “record of employment” and either handed it to the person when they came in for their last pay,  or mailed it to their last known address.   You know, you’d put in a code for just how they left your employ?  I remember nobody liked to see a “K” on their form.  Somehow I seem to recall that one meant they were fired.

There was none of this “on the line” business.   Maybe I’ll need a bar code on my forehead eventually?

 

On a slightly different employment front,  I could very well just take on a few jobs now and again to butter my bread.

Case in point:

So you’re looking at that and thinking, “What the hell is he talking about?”   Well no, I’m not talking about getting a job as a “Mouse Guard”,  and I don’t even know what that is.  All I know is,  I was approached by a collector to build a frame for this little gem.  Again, I have no clue what it’s worth.   What I do have though,  is some woodworking equipment and a half decent idea when it came to how he wanted it displayed.   I think I prefer that kind of a “job”,  truth be told.  No bureaucracy, no filling in blanks on line.  Just cash.  Thanks.

 

Still waiting to hear back from the dealership on the Merc.  We’re not in that big of a rush,  and since we’re doing the whole financing thing, I suppose they need to sniff us out.  Maybe there will be a note from them tonight?   That’s another thing.  After the initial visit and test drive,  there’s been no need to go back there.  It’s all done by email.  Print out this form, fill it out, scan it.  Scan this, scan that.  Of course,  our scanner is in a box somewhere on its way here (or to a warehouse first to then clear Customs I suppose) so it’s a bloody good thing son-in-law has a scanner,  and that there’s one available for T.C. in her office, or that whole program would come to a grinding halt.  Do people still fax things?   I *had* a fax machine once.  Not sure I ever used it.

 

Since I’m usually looking for something to go on about,  tomorrow I’ll fill in the blanks on the driver’s license end of things.  We’re “taking our time” on that too, it seems.

 

Until then,  or until I have something to say, keep those oars in the water.

 

Thanks for lookin’.

 

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Home again, home again. Jiggity jig.

I think that’s the expression. Not totally sure.

We. be. here. 

It’s all good.

I suppose I could stop right there,  but that wouldn’t be quite fair,  would it?

The flight was OK,  really.  

A little bumpy somewhere this side of Greenland.  But the pilot had warned us.  Seems to me there was some nasty shit (that’s a meteorological term,  by the way)  that had passed through these parts earlier on,  and the remnants had to be flown through at some point.  By somebody.  It had to be us,  I suppose. 

Truth be told (and when have I ever not?) we’ve flown through way worse.  So bad in fact,  that you dared not raise your glass of red wine to your lips,  for fear of wearing it.   It never got that bad this time around.

We didn’t do the upgrade ‘cause it was just a wee bit too much money.  The configuration of the plane was a 2-3-2 arrangement,  and we nabbed two of the seats on the outside in row 19.  Like I said,  it was OK.

And I have to say this,  the food on Air Austria is actually pretty good.  Surprising,  I know.   I’m not sure how they manage it,  but it does surpass that of KLM,  even though the seating and such on KLM is better.   And really?  At this point I don’t give a rat’s tiny behind.   It’ll be a little while before we see the inside of another aircraft. 

I’m pretty sure of that.

 

 

There was something about this that simply made me want to take a picture.  Don’t judge me.  I have these thoughts once in a while.

 

Without looking at the sign above that says “Toronto”,  I somehow knew by the customers that Toronto was our destination.  You can draw your own conclusions.

Getting through customs was night and day compared to the last time.  There was actually little to no standing.  There were enough agents working,  and I’d estimate it took us no longer than 10 to 15 minutes to get up to a wicket.  At that point,  since we had ticked off the little box indicating that we had goods to follow,  we went off to the area where you would pay your customs duty if there is one.  Once again,  easy peasy.   Took a photocopy of our list of goods,  and said “Welcome Home”.  It was actually….pleasant.  

I did a double check just to make sure we were in Toronto.  Seriously.  There was no grumpiness,  or dumb-assed questions. 

 

 

Our view from the HOV lane. 

 

On certain highways here,  if you have more than two heads in your vehicle,  you can scoot along in the “High Occupancy Lane”.   It does make a huge difference,  especially when the other three lanes of traffic are parked.

 

The rest is self explanatory.

 

Travelling Companion has had her hair appointment today, we’ve figured out what we’re taking to the SuperBowl party tomorrow,  and life is good.

 

I’ll bore you a little bit tomorrow with my brief Enterprise adventure.  It turned out just fine,  so it’s not like I’ll be ranting about it or anything.  Although I could probably work it up to a bit of a lather if I really thought about it.

I’ll try not to disappoint.

 

 

Keep it between the ditches.

 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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Something to think about.

Without really planning on it,  I started writing this blog on Sept 11, 2008.   It was also one day after they fired up the particle accelerator in Switzerland.   Haven’t heard too much more news about the accelerator,  and we haven’t been sucked into a black hole,  so I guess everything is going OK when it comes to that one type of scary business. 
I don’t know if you can make out the vapour trails in this picture,  but I was upstairs last night (as I am most any night when the weather is nice)  and couldn’t help but notice these planes flying overhead.

Since I’ve been having some issues with blogger if I try and upload pictures from Live Writer,  I’ll have to reload the picture anyway,  which means clicking on it would/should make it big enough.   In theory.
The planes overhead got me thinking of course, of Sept 11th ten years ago,  which was a Monday.   I was working in our kitchen.  The work was that of painting it,  not cooking in it,  when the phone rang,  and it was Travelling Companion,  who was working at the time in Horseheads,  New York.   To start with,  she would never call during the day,  so that was already enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.  She told me to put on the TV.  I don’t remember if I did any more work that day.   I especially remember being on Lake Ontario the following night and noting the absolute absence of air traffic overhead,  which brings me right back to the photo above.

Other than that,  there have been a lot of words written about 9-11.   This isn’t the place where you’ll see any more of them.


Try to enjoy your Sunday.


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Little ironies.

Not too much happening today. Managed to spruce up the interior of the car a tad, after our recent bout of visitors. Guess I just didn't have a chance or the motivation to get out there with the vacuum cleaner up to this point.
Also took a little trip to my favourite store ever since I figured I'd take off the little sticker do dad that we had to buy to drive on the roads in Slovenia. There was no way it was coming off without the help of a razor scraper, and I probably have two or three of these things, but didn't think to ship one over here.


Meanwhile, Gabe keeps sending me more places to look at compliments of the relocation people in Vienna. Talk about a contrast from when we came here! I think we're up somewhere in the range of a dozen to 15 places to look at. That is of course, if we do manage to get around to them all. There were a couple that looked like it was a bit of a hike for Gabe to get to work, so we might eliminate them from the list.
I think we saw a total of four places when we came to the Hengelo area.

Anyway.....right after I got a note from her earlier today, the phone rang. So I was a little confused when there was someone on the other end speaking Dutch, since I just figured Gabe was making a follow up call to the note. The chances of Gabe speaking fluent Dutch was pretty slim, so I told this person she must have the wrong number, but she wasn't about to give up....

See, here's the thing.

Back, oh I dunno, about six months ago, for something to do, and with the encouragement of my significant other, I put an ad in the local rag offering English lessons. Don't laugh, it is something I can certainly do, and figured it would maybe bring in a couple shekels to boot.
So I ran the ad for a couple weeks, and heard nary a peep. So I just figured fine, nobody around here thinks their English is all that bad (little do they know) and simply never gave it another thought.

Until today.

Wow. Here I thought I was a shoo-in for the Procrastinator of the Year Award, but obviously I'm only in double "A", and this lady on the phone is Major League.

So she had managed to keep my number for some six months or more, and then finally today decided to muster up her courage and give me a call.
Like I said. Wow.

Either that or one of her kids finally said, "Mom, your English sucks, why don't you just phone that guy?"

So I actually felt kind of bad when I had to explain to her that we're moving to another country.

I mean, what could I say?

Getting together once a week would be a bit of a non-started I'm afraid, since I'm pretty sure the airfare alone would make the lessons a tad pricey. Plus of course, do I rent a car? Take the train? And then of course there's the per Diem....and well, I'd have to stay over...

All kidding aside, it's too bad I suppose, since I could have been taking this person's money for the last six months.

Jammer!*


By the way, I have it on pretty good authority that the Austrians suck when it comes to English. Hmmm....




In other news, the neighbourhood has been somewhat quieter now that the house down the street has been completely leveled.
Of course, since these places don't have basements, there's not even a hole to fill in.




*for those of you who don't speak the lingo, that's pronounced "yammer", and it sort of means, "too bad", or as the Germans would say "shade".....oh...and with that one you pronounce the 'e'.
like...Porsche
And it's not like shade, as in a window shade, but pronounced with a long 'a'....
sort of like "shahdeh".


Oh forget it..

And so it begins.

Most of the time, I seem to wander around in a state of befuddlement, and that doesn't necessarily come from having too much time on my hands. Drifting from room to room (or from my shop to the shed when back home) trying to remember what I was looking for has been a recurring theme for well, a few years now.
Any of you over the half century mark have a pretty good idea what I'm talking about. For those of you not quite there yet....

..... just you wait.


But here's the thing.

I do recall working in a particular school many years ago where power failures happened on the order of two or three times a year. So rather than keep a flashlight in some obscure location, where it's retrieval in the dark was virtually impossible, (I was on afternoons, it gets dark) I made sure getting some light on the subject was as easy as getting to the nearest sink room.

And no, I wasn't about to start carrying one on my belt. That was never going to happen.

There's a segue in there somewhere since, rather than store this one little tool in a tool box, where it would definitely be a chore to find again, I figured I'd just keep it on a shelf in the bedroom where it could be retrieved without a lot of endless searching.



Even though there was a couple minutes there of befuddlement, I knew I had put it some place where it was easy peasy to find.



The time had come.




Um...a warning for anyone wanting to visit before the end of October, the beds are going fast.

I should probably just leave the pictures and let them speak for themselves.



Taking this thing apart got me thinking about just how many times I've had to do this...and why I keep the bloody little hex wrench handy.

Here we go:
Purchased November 1999 in New York State. (put together)

Moved to Puerto Rico 2002: Taken apart....put together.

Moved to Canada 2003: Taken apart....put together.

Moved to The Netherlands in 2008: Taken apart.....put together.

Moving to Vienna 2009.....Taken apart....

and if the movers don't lose it, I'll be putting it together again in a couple months.



*sigh*


We're you counting?



I didn't bother.

Big Bang Day...plus one.

Well, I thought I wanted to get started here yesterday, since it was the Big Bang Day here in Europe, and by that I mean the firing up of the particle accelerator down in Switzerland, but....being a man of leisure keeps ya busy, and I didn't quite get to it.
So here it is, Sept 11/08....which is a tough day for a lot of folks.
It was hard to watch the coverage of the events that were taking place at "ground zero". Both the BBC and CNN had coverage.
Seems everyone remembers exactly what they were doing when the towers came down. I was painting the kitchen back home, and my wife called from Horseheads, N.Y. and told me to turn on the TV.
Man, what a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that is.

So here we are....many years later, and my wife and I are in the Netherlands. More details will slip out as time passes but for now, suffice to say she'll be working here for the next three years (well, it's about 33 months by this point, but who's counting?) we secured a house to rent, which we got the keys to on August 15th, and the big news of today was that our shipment of "stuff" will be arriving next Wednesday!!

I'm giddy just typing those words!

She already has her residence permit, and I've been to Den Haag a week ago to apply for mine. Pretty sure I'll get one. Oooh, wouldn't it be a shame if the company had to send me home every 90 days? Shouldn't think like that.
Still debating about that whole dutch driving license thing. As it stands now I am going home just about every ninety days, with the upcoming wedding of our daughter, and then there's that whole Christmas thing.
Not hanging around here for Christmas.
Now, before you send off any hate mail or, hate email, I'm sure Christmas in The Netherlands is simply wonderfull, but there's no place like home. (groan)
Besides, I'd probably just get a visit from Black Pete anyway....
So...I'm quite looking forward to getting our "stuff" (in reverence of George Carlin, who did a whole bit on "stuff") since I'm getting a bit weary of wearing the same two pairs of blue jeans, and not having a host of other things that one tends to take for granted.
Had a couple emails today from the lady from the moving company who was quite concerned whether we had some means of getting things to the second floor. (??)
If you ever go to Amsterdam, you'll get it. Houses: tiny....stairs: hardly. We however, have an actual honest to goodness set of stairs. I even sent her pictures.
Here's one.....


I just realised, that was my first ever picture upload!

Maybe I should crack another cold one?




See, that was why we didn't take that 'other house'.....'cause if the bedroom furniture has to come in through the bedroom window....well that's just not a good sign! I'm not completely old and decrepid just yet, but coming down in the morning should not be life threatening.
We also looked at a host of apartments. Some of them were really quite nice, and maybe one day I would like a nice little condo looking out over a marina somewhere, but not yet, and not here. Glad we passed on them. Actually....I'm glad we stuck to our guns and held out for this place.
As some of you may recall, on the very day back in June (would have been something like the 17th) when we came to the house to have a look around, some chimp picked up a brochure at the real estate office (wasn't the same folks we were using....they didn't like each other much, which made it kinda juicy) and then of course they had to wait to see if there was an offer forthcoming.
Oy!
I completely understand since, even though I'm not too sure what the commision structure over here is, on €675,000 it can't be too shabby.
So what seemed like forever went by and I had been back home for awhile, when the call came in that we got the house.

These little moments are exciting aren't they?

Well, I may come back later this evening and add some more drivel, but I've had the car today, so I really should go out and pedal my posterior around a bit. Gabe (for those of you who may have just surfed in, that's my wife's name, btw) is on her way by now to Schipol and then on to Birmingham.

I'm just a lonely guy in a lonely town.