May I present to you......

The Cherry Hillton is now open

We're pleased to announce that after months of intensive renovations and watching lots of HGTV the guestroom is now officially done. Tada!


Just in time considering the first guests will be arriving tonight. A lovely young couple with 2 kids from Maryland have picked our guest house for their weekend getaway. We also received our first new reservation yesterday. The first week of May is now booked too (hi mom).

Now, as for the rest of the house......

Well, actually, there is the garden. Since our guests have been complaining about the trees or, to be more precise, about dead squirrels thunking out of those trees, we decided to do something about that. I dare those damnably cute squirrels to thunk out of this tree!

A well-done steakhouse

People who have gone out to dinner with me know I like good meat and I like it rare. In our search here for a good steakhouse we decided to go to a fancy place called Porterhouse. At least, it looked fancy and the prices were fancy. I got their signature steak for $36 and ordered it bleu as usual. That usually means slap it on the grill till the outside looks a bit brown and then serve it. The test is to see if they know the term bleu. If they don't, ask for medium. Anyway, 3 steaks were ordered, 2 bleu and one medium. All came out well-done. We complained and sent them back. Now I know the story so far does not seem that interesting but when we drove by the place last weekend and saw the following I just burst out laughing.


I call this a shining example of the dangers of overcooking steaks. Let this be a warning to other steakhouses out there. No wait, that sounds wrong. It wasn't me! I've got an alibi. Maria? Maria?........

It's Hummertime

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.

The Sandman (and his wife)

I know some of you have been waiting patiently for christmas stories. Family feuds, duels to the death and chases involving angry turkeys. Well, I'm afraid you're going to have to do without those. Let me tell you how it really went. In preparation for this dreaded feast I took a short trip to the Netherlands to say hi to some family and take care of some unfinished business. Walnut IT is now officially no more.... My arrival back in the States was carefully timed and I was taken from the airport straight to a family dinner. I have to say that some people do drink a bit more then they should and those same people do not necessarily become better narrators when they do.... I know, I'm being pretty vague about this but I honestly have no clue who reads this stuff and since I'm still on probation here I have to be careful ;-) Anyway, I was saved by my jetlag which provided a good reason not to make it a long evening.

Okay, Christmas day itself then. We went over to Lisa, one of Maria's older sisters where the whole family gathered. The number of presents for the kids was enormous. The amount of food for everyone was enormous too. After a couple of hours most of the people gathered in front of the tv to watch the football game. Luckily the Eagles finally managed to win a game and stay in the running so the atmosphere was good. There was also a nice little incident when Nicky (another one of Maria's sisters) was about to leave with her family. Her husband managed to lock himself out of the car with the engine running. Of course it was raining by that time as we used a wooden spoon to open the door a bit and a metal coat hanger to get to the unlock button. As easy as that sounds, I assure you, it was not. I managed to get whacked in the nose several times by one of the wipers.
All things considered, not a bad Christmas party. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. The big drama came later, because the day after almost everybody got sick. The opinions about the how and why are divided, even now, but I think somebody there was giving off the flue virus in generous amounts. The other school of thought points towards the food. Who knows.... fact is that as usual I got sick a day after Maria did and again as usual got better a lot quicker too.

Finally, to make good on the title of this little festive rant, we got around to sanding the floors in two rooms upstairs. It's amazing how much of a difference renting the right equipment can make. Even so, after two weekends of sanding we're both racked by muscle pains. The good news is that we're done with the sanding so all we have to do now is paint the walls, paint the ceilings, stain the floors and put a finishing on the floors (probably three layers). Pfff, one more weekend and we're done, right?

First Thanksgiving

This was my first Thanksgiving here in the US and we had the appropriate dinner here at our place. I wish I could tell you some interesting stories about it but there really aren't. The dinnertable we ordered arrived the day before the dinner as scheduled. Familymembers came over and the turkey refused to get up to temperature. Seems like a pretty regular Thanksgiving to me, but hey, what do I know about it? My only experience with this festivity is what I see on television and in tv-land Thanksgiving mostly consists of familymembers getting together over great distances to pick up old fights. The most humorous note here was somebody asking why we didn't have Thanksgiving in the Netherlands. Luckily, another familymember came up with the snappy reply that we were celebrating getting rid of those pesky, colonizing Europeans in the first place :-)

Pim

The Secret Language of Americans

Strange discoveries all around. Recently, a friend of ours, Tracy, became a mom. Nothing strange about that but then her baby made it on Oprah so we all had to watch. The item was called "The secret language of Babies" (http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200611/20061113/slide_20061113_350_102.jhtml). The researcher involved claimed that all babies make the same basic sounds to indicate the same basic feelings. It kinda makes sense based on her explanations for these sounds. The explanations are all based on body reflexes which are in all probability indeed the same for babies the world over. Then yesterday we went to a Burger King drive-through to get some food. I pulled up to the speaker and heard a sound which I can only classify as "eeeow". I thought the employee was clearing her throat but Maria said that she just said "Can I help you?". I now realize that Americans have a secret language of their own which I have to learn. It's not because they can't speak yet like babies, Although a lot of them are not really able to articulate that well ;-) It's because soundquality of the phones is so bad. There's so much static that if you don't know in advance what somebody is going to say you end up asking them to repeat it 3 times. Not that anybody adjusts their articulation for that. If somebody asks me to repeat something I do it slower and better articulated. Not here. And obviously that gap is now filled with secret sounds. Look at the clip on Oprah's website and you'll know what I mean. And to link it back to the drive-through, if you think the quality of the phones is bad go check out a drive-through. It's a miracle you actually get what you want.
By the way, Maria says Tracy's baby is the 4th one.

Pim

Pim & Maria do America - The Season Premier

Pim & Maria do America - The Season Premier

Okay, I guess we have to start somewhere. After opening lots and lots of boxes we finally recovered the info to login to this blog. Lots of stuff happened since we last saw you guys. I won't bore you with telling you about all the paperwork but suffice it to say that they will let me drive now, they'll believe that I am who I say I am and I can pay for stuff ;-)
Let me pick out something to make you guys laugh. We bought a car for me on Saturday and it's everything I vowed never to touch: it's white, it's an automatic and, get this, it's a station. Sure, take your time. I'll wait while you finish laughing...... Anyway, as if that weren't bad enough, a warning light came on the day after we bought it. Did I mention we bought it as-is which means no garantuee? Not even to the door. To my surprise however the cardealer was prepared to fix it without charging us anything. So yesterday I got the car back again which was just in time to pick up our new almost-giant-size-which-could-never-fit-into-the-mazda-anyway tv. And here's the good part, the trunk wouldn't open so I spend a good 20 minutes in the pouring rain trying to get it open. That was fun ;-)

Welcome on your blog

Dear Pim & Maria,

We have created this blog for you to keep us up to date on your life from now on.
Please post all your ups and downs on this blog so that we all have something to talk about while you two are doing your "thing" in the States. We wish you the very best and will miss you VERY MUCH!!!!

Daphne, Juliette & Michiel