Getting ready for Christmas

Dennis and I are going through another stretch of boringness as we prepare for the holidays. We are both spending far too much time at work. It’s easy to get caught up in work when you don’t really want to spend time outside. The weather has turned a bit colder – right around freezing – and the days are so very short. Remind me never to move any further north!

In the mornings, I find myself procrastinating about getting to work. I hate the idea of riding my bike to work in the pitch blackness. By about 8:15, it’s just light enough to go. I seem to have no trouble riding home in the dark, though. It gets really dark around 5:00. A quick check on the internet indicates that the shortest day here is one full hour shorter than in Minnesota. Of course, we get the long days in the spring and summer that help to make up for this horrible darkness.

For Christmas, I am going to Salt Lake City to visit my sister and her family. Our parents are going to be there as well. Dennis is still too new with his job to have any vacation time, so he has to stay home. Feeling bad for him, I arranged to be back in the Netherlands so we can celebrate the New Year together. A one week trip to the US is going to be tiring, but I’m still pretty excited to go.

I’m now trying to figure out what to take along and what I need to buy while I’m back. I’m planning to take the Christmas cards with me. I can address envelopes on the plane. I’m making Dennis write the Christmas letter this year too, so you’ll hear his perspective for a change. Of course, this means that all the cards will be a bit late – sorry for that! I’m also carrying the Christmas gifts that need to be shipped. Shipping from Salt Lake will be much easier than from the Netherlands. You have no idea how complicated the Homeland Security department has made it to ship things to the US. And I better not even start about import duties and taxes! As it turns out, it’s really difficult to find things here in the Netherlands that you can’t get in the US anyway. Next year, I’m going back to my usual internet shopping for Christmas!

For the return trip, I have a long and strange list of things that are difficult to get in the Netherlands. Mostly, I have a hard time finding good cold medicine here. But I also desperately want to go to Eddie Bauer.

Other things that have kept us busy are house projects and Dutch lessons. The house here was fitted with very minimal light fixtures. We installed a couple new fixtures when we moved in, but it was hard in the spring to judge how much light we would need in the winter. It also is a bit of a pain to buy light fixtures for a house you don’t own. Oh well, I’d rather have the lights! With our new lights, it’s much easier to study our Dutch lessons at the dining room table. We’ve been reading and watching Dutch TV programs. Our vocabulary is getting bigger, but we still struggle to speak. It’s going to take a while!

So that’s our boring life: work, groceries, laundry, study etc. We moved halfway around the world to get a taste of a foreign lifestyle and so much of life still boils down to work, groceries, and laundry!