As requested by many friends from the Netherlands before we left, I finally got a Hummer. Okay, so I just sat in one at the Philly Autoshow but that's as close as I'm gonna get to one of these monstrosities. Actually, I have to explain something here to both the Dutch and the American readers. The Dutch (and the rest of the world for that matter) think people in the US have invented several things, most notably the hamburger and cola and more recently, the Hummer. For non-Americans these things symbolize the US of A. For Americans however, they do not. For them these things are just products that happen to be made there. About a year and a half ago Maria and I went to a wine tasting club in Delft. It was Maria's birthday and our friends there surprised us by getting her a cake. The cake was in the shape of a hamburger which all of us thought was hilarious of course. It was a very good cake by the way :-) Anyway, I only found out later that Maria had no clue why the cake was hamburger shaped.Okay, so much for the lecture. Some more stuff happened since the last post. I went on a fieldtrip to Chicago to finally meet my co-workers face to face. Actually we both went because we like Chicago. It's the city where we met. Yes, I know, very romantic ;-) It's also the place where Tracy lives who recently had a baby which we had to go and inspect. I declare it a baby indeed and give it my seal of approval. I also had to sing a little Dutch lullaby to her of course.
In the meantime the house is coming along nicely. Last weekend was divided between going down to Delaware to look at a very interesting Porsche and staining two floors upstairs. Now all we need to do is put a protective coating on it and let it sit for several weeks. Time enough to go skiing, do our Dutch taxes, prepare the US taxes, plan a worktrip to San Francisco and do some more stuff that I'm thankfully forgetting about now.
