Avontuur

If I’ve been quiet around here lately, it’s been partly because because life has been going smoothly, and partly I was sitting on a big announcement until I was able to make it public.

The weekend before last we raced in the Covered Bridge Regatta. I came in last, not being at all ready for it, but at least I raced! Ted did well, going on to the finals for his event. He came in second in the final in raw time, but was fourth after the age handicapping. After that I stayed at the lake house for a week while he went to Phoenix on business, and got to meet up with our friend Kathy. Ted’s parents stayed on to see the race, then kept me company for a couple of days. We’d brought the cats, too, so I did have some company after they left, and I think the cats enjoyed having the big house to race around in.

But the BIG NEWS is…. My book, to be called Fundamentals of Business Process Management, has been accepted by AMACOM, publishing arm of the American Management Association) and will be published in Spring of 2014. And yes, that means you can go buy it in Amazon

I’m pretty excited about this, as you may imagine. AMACOM was the first place I sent my proposal, so it was a shock to have the editor write back expressing interest in just two weeks. I think they are a great fit for my topic. Now I need to expand it, at their request, so the next few months I’ll be doing that and hunting for my next job.

All that I know
Of a certain star
Is, it can throw
(Like the angled spar)
Now a dart of red,
Now a dart of blue
Till my friends have said
They would fain see, too,
My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:
They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it.
What matter to me if their star is a world?
Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it.
– Robert Browning

And now you know why my new Etsy shop is named Dartle. Most of the bead jewelry I make is either natural stone or very sparkly glass and crystal; it tends to be inspired by water, mountains or stars. I wanted a name that would suggest some of those things (at least to me!), and many of the sea and star-related names I thought of were already taken.

I used to do a lot of bead-and-wirework, but it got to where I had more than I could wear, didn’t have many people to give them to, and thought it would be difficult to sell them while living in the Netherlands or Taipei. I was getting Beads of the Month, too, but finally had to stop because I had more beads than I could use. For a while I made things and put them in a bowl to sell ‘someday’, but that felt so unrewarding. Someday is here now, though; I’ve started making things again, now I have a place to sell them.

You can see all pieces here at the shop, but here’s a sampling:

The difficult part seems to be marketing. Obviously I like sales, but if my stuff is not your style, or you don’t want to buy anything for whatever other good reason, I’d also appreciate mentions to friends, Facebook sharing, Etsy favoriting, Pinterest linking or whatever.

Note: A couple of these pieces have already sold, but they’re good examples of what I can do. In many cases I have similar beads and can make something similar or slightly different on request.

Note: a few of these pieces have already been sold, but they’re good examples of what I can do. In many cases I’ve got more of the same beads and can make similar (not exactly the same) pieces on request.

Oolong and Macchiato:

Macchiato is the more outgoing; we put them in our bedroom to start with, and as you can see she’s been exploring a bit. She seems to like water (she was rolling around with my water bottle earlier, too). Oolong just comes out now and then to eat or use the litterbox, though she has let me pet her and purred at me. She’d made it clear she’s not terrified or anything; she simply prefers staying under the bed for the moment.

I’ve ended up being prompted into research by both of them already, in one case into coffee and the other into cats. The names Oolong and Macchiato are because we wanted names to reference Taiwan and the Netherlands, as well as fitting the cats. The Dutch do drink a lot of coffee, but typically use the Italian names fo specific drinks. Apparently this cat is a latte macchiato (steamed milk with a shot of espresso, which is a layered drink with a dark spot on top) rather than a caffe macchiato (espresso with a shot of steamed milk, leaving a white spot on top). We were going to call her Mach for short, but that doesn’t seem to fit (too abrupt for her, and she isn’t actually all that fast) so I think it will be Macca or Maka for daily use.

Someone didn’t filter out the tea leaves for Oolong, leaving her stripy. Apparently that makes her a caliby – a calico because she’s got three colors, and a tabby because of the stripes. I’ve been seeing some dire hints about caliby cattitudes, but nothing definite. So far, they both actually seem pretty mellow compared to our previous cats, who were both male. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to eat those words in a week’s time, though.

Incidentally, on the house front, all the damage from the leak is now fixed, as of today – drywall replaced, subfloor dried, new flooring in place. Now we have a problem with a totally different toilet. It flushes fine, but ten minutes later all the water has drained out of the bowl. The plumber says the trap is cracked and he needs to replace the toilet bowl – he was supposed to do that today, but didn’t feel well, so he’s shooting for tomorrow. Thank goodness the house is under warranty! I think this toilet company had a batch issue.

OK, I’m exaggerating. A little.

We went down to Rowell (the lake house) last night with a small moving van (a benefit our realtor provides), came back with a load of boxes, opened the garage door… and saw water dripping from the ceiling. The toilet from the powder room above was leaking, and I mean LEAKING – there were drips down the garage wall on both sides and coming down from the ceiling. It turns out the toilet tank had developed a crack. I guess there must have been a manufacturing defect in it, and after a few flushes it spontaneously ruptured while we were away. Good thing we were only gone for one night this time! The house is under warranty, so we paged the emergency number.

The service guy came up (I felt a little bad – he’d been about to head to a wedding), asked if we had shut off the valve (we had) and sawed holes in the garage and powder room drywall, setting up fans to dry it out. They’ll come by Monday to assess and fix it all. This is going to be a big job – I sure am glad it’s under warranty. They’ll need to replace the toilet, the baseboard and possibly some flooring and patch the drywall upstairs and in the bathroom.

Meanwhile, we now have a another chair, our city bikes, and a lot of boxes we need to unpack. Tomorrow e’ll pick up Ted’s desk, which should at least make it easier to unpack some of it, but we’re still missing one bookshelf and two desks, to be delivered in another few weeks. I foresee boxes sticking around in our short-term future.

On Friday we had our closing, got our keys, and moved the first batch of stuff from our apartment. Here’s me unpacking the dishes we bought:

Saturday was the Great Festival of Delivery: we had five different groups of people bringing in our major appliances (fridge, washer, dryer); most of the furniture (except the sofa, which takes longer, and a few backordered items); Ted’s monster TV; the key to our mailbox; and our mattress. Luckily the mattress came after the bed.

The house is almost done now; we’ve been scurrying around picking up small things, like kitchen canisters for flour and sugar, a spice rack, sheets because the ones we brought from Taiwan are too small, towels, and so on. This weekend we’ll borrow a panel truck and bring up most of the stuff from Lowell. I have no idea what’s still left there that we could possibly need, except our bikes. I know there’s some clothing, another rowing machine, some hangers for our clothes, mixing bowls, and some books, but half of a large room there is full of boxes and I can’t imagine what’s in all of them.

Here are some photos from during the delivery process, and the kitchen as it looks now.

Some of our bedroom furniture has secret identities. The coolest piece is the vanity we bought to use as my desk: here it is looking all mild-mannered, then after a quick trip to a handy phone booth:

OK, we’re exhausted. On Wednesday night we went down to the lake house (we named it Rowell, not sure if I ever mentioned that here). Thursday morning early the moving truck showed up, with all our stuff from the Netherlands. The truck wasn’t more than half-full; we’ve been living in furnished flats for the last six years. Still, half a 40-foot moving van is a lot of stuff, especially when you’re trying to fit it all into a house that’s already furnished. The load included two rowing singles; the two sets of oars that go with them; two segments of a beautiful old wooden eight that we bought when our club in the Netherlands retired a couple of their boats, three sets of wooden oars (these boats and oars will be used for decoration, not rowing); two nightstands; a lingerie chest; a rocking chair; a matching ottoman; a storage ottoman; two patio chairs; and all of the books, clothes, pots, dishes, glasses, kitchen utensils, sheets, towels, tools, travel souvenirs and art and hobby stuff (beads and yarn) that we took with us or bought along the way.

Ted’s always said that it really bothers him when things in a house don’t have a place they go in; that’s not something that’s ever bothered me before, but now I understand what he means; I felt like I was drowning in a tidal wave of possessions. There was so … much … stuff. We worked from early every morning to late at night getting it sorted; I’m proud to say that now the entire upstairs of that house is cleared out. Books are on shelves, clothes are in closets and drawers, sheets are neatly stored in bins labeled according to which bed they’re for, kitchen stuff is put away. (The house is oddly organized; the main floor is a 3-bedroom two-bath house, with a large fitness room, craft room, garage, large laundry/workroom, and two baths downstairs.) The fitness room has the ergs and weights set up and usable on one side, with stuff meant for the new house on the other side. We brought back one load of stuff that we’ll need in the new house right away, but we kept it to a minimum since everything we brought back now had to be carried up stairs to this apartment and will then have to be brought to the new house and carried up there. (It’s three floors: garage, then living room, dining room, kitchen and den, with bedrooms on top.) The craft/storage room in Rowell is also full, but we can clear that out at our leisure. It was just such a relief to get the stuff all sorted away!

Also, it was great to have all our stuff on one continent. I made shrimp étouffée on Friday night and was able to use the new German knife we bought for that house just before leaving the Netherlands, my good cast iron Dutch oven, a pot from Taiwan (that was in a box the whole time we were in the Netherlands), and that house’s gas stove, all together for the first time. (I do not like Chef Emeril’s recipe, however. There was something wrong with his proportion of flour to butter and I had to correct them by guess.) Ted was happy to finally get to row his single on that lake, and I took my open water boat (it’s a Wintech Explorer 21 rec shell, good for training or open water) out for a shakedown cruise, though the water was like glass, and its extra stability wasn’t needed.

And we even got back in time to see the Superbowl – I’ve seen better years for commercials, but the game itself and the halftime show were some of the better ones I recall.

We bought a house! We’ll be closing on February 22, so I think it will be a long month to wait, but in the meantime, things are getting busy.

Since we’re keeping the Eugene house, but since we’ve also been a bit spoiled by the apartments we’ve lived in as expats, we wanted something small but nice in Hillsboro. We’ve settled on a townhouse. It’s only got a one car garage, unfortunately, but at least there’s a long enough driveway to park the truck (which wouldn’t fit in the garage anyway). The entry is on the ground floor with the garage; on the next level (American 2nd floor, European 1st floor) is the living room, dinging room, and kitchen, all open to each other, plus a small den off the living room. We hope to put the rowing machines there, where they’ll be able to see the TV in the living room, but the townhouse is laid out with several condos sort of interleaved in one building, so that someone else’s one-story unit is below us. We’ll have to hope that, with a pad under the erg, they won’t be able to hear us in the bedroom below, or else we’ll have to put the ergs elsewhere. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms and a loft. Each bedroom has a walk-in closet (not true, even for the MBR, in many other townhouses we looked at!) and its own small bathroom. There’s decent storage overall – lots of counters in the kitchen, a pantry, a coat closet, and another shelved closet identical to the pantry over by the entrance, next to the powder room and coat closet.

This weekend we’re at our Eugene house getting everything ready, because next week they’ll finally be delivering our shipment! We’ll have to lay out all the kitchen stuff and linens and clothing, and decide what stays here and what goes up to Hillsboro. (The closets and bedroom size there are some of the best of any townhouse we looked at, but they’re still a bit small. I miss the closet and built-in storage space we had in Taiwan! On the other hand, hopefully this place is considerably better insulated from both outside temperatures and neighbors’ noise.)

Meanwhile, we’ve been buying everything. It feels like that, anyway – all our major appliances and furniture, because just about all of our existing furniture will stay at the Eugene house. Unfortunately, though most of the new stuff will be delivered the day after closing, the sofa won’t arrive until the beginning of April. Luckily, we have two comfortable glider chairs, one already in the Eugene house and one coming with the shipment, that we’ll being up so we have something to sit on. Ted’s bedroom chest will be late too, but since I don’t nee anything but casual clothing at the moment, I can leave most of mine in the other house and let him use some of my drawer space.

I am very glad that we decided I’d take some time off to work on writing projects; not only am I loving working at home and enjoying the writing itself, but it’s been a huge boon to have the free time to deal with all of this, look at houses, go back and buy things once we’ve made decisions, and accept deliveries. Wonder if I can eventually get a telecommuting job?

I’m not sure why, entirely. They do wear light jackets; after all, you need something to keep the rain off, especially as (I’m told) Real Oregonians also don’t carry umbrellas. (And here I thought Ted was just being ornery all those years. I did see his father use an umbrella once though – in Thailand, to keep off the sun.) There is reason for it though; the reason was obvious yesterday when the temperature hovered above 50F (10C) all day, but even today, when it’s been drizzly and in the low 40s I was pretty warm after doing some errands in my own winter coat, even though I kept my coat open.

I’ve been being domestic lately; this morning I changed and washed the sheets on our bed, which I think have been slept on for a combined total less than two weeks, including both before and after the holidays. That may be a new record for me. I’ve done a bit of cleaning in the bathroom and kitchen and have compiled a list of meal ideas so I can just pick a few to get ingredients for when I go shopping. Next week, I plan to assay a chicken pot pie. Tomorrow will be chili, one of my specialties (today is mac’n'cheese, so Ted doesn’t get too accustomed to high standards).

The high point of today was my visit to the Hillsboro Main Library. Aside from one brief visit to the one in Eindhoven back in 2006 (during which I determined that their stock of books in English was fairly small, and anyway they were only open during my working hours) I haven’t been in a public library since moving out of the US. This is a good one, too; they have computers and events and all, but most of all they have books. Lots of books, and they’re renovating to make room for more. They’re part of a county-wide library system, so my card gets me into any of those libraries, and they can get books from each other without having to use ILL. It’s surprisingly well-staffed: a Welcome desk, a Library Card Services desk, a Reference desk, a Children’s Librarian and an Ask the Librarian desk in the Children’s section. Some of those desks were staffed by 2 or 3 people.

I think I got brownie points for enthusiasm; to get a library card you have to prove you’re a local resident and that’s difficult at the moment: we’re in a temporary apartment being rented by Ted’s company, and we don’t have any utility bills. Because we’ll only be here a couple of months, we had the truck and our driver’s licenses registered to our Eugene house. We ended up putting my phone account in Ted’s name, because we got a company discount that way, and those forms do have the address on them. I ended up taking one of those plus our marriage license to prove that I really am ‘associated’ with Ted. You’re really supposed to have a document with your own name and address on it, but when they checked with the supervisor, she said , “Well, she’s really gone above and beyond, so we should give her a card.” It wouldn’t have been a disaster anyway; they have stamped postcards you can send to yourself from the library, then bring it in once you’ve received it in the mail. (I think the concern may be less about the legitimacy of your residency and more about making sure they can get hold of you if you don’t return books or DVDs.)

I’ve also signed up to volunteer; I told them I can read aloud well (“well” may be an overstatement; I don’t do character voices, but at least I’m coherent and get the emphasis in the proper place) and that I’m good at research and with computers. Hopefully they’ll ask me to do something more interesting than shelving. I’m not great at that; I know how to do it perfectly but I tend to be inefficient because I keep stopping to read the books I’m supposed to be putting away.

After that I went grocery shopping, then, armed with the gas discount I get for spending money at the grocery store, went to gas up the car. This was the first time I’ve done that in this state when I was driving (well, once before but Ted was there and he dealt with it). Oregon is a bit strange: you can’t put gas in your own tank, but have to wait for an attendant to do it for you. I didn’t know what kind of fuel the car took, either, because it’s a rental and there was nothing to say, so we assumed 87 octane was OK. I also thought it was a bit strange that the attendant could use my bank card to pay without me putting in a PIN code; you don’t need one if you use it as a credit card (US bankcards mostly also serve as VISA charge cards) but it wasn’t clear to me if I’d need to sign or not afterward, so for security I did get out fo the car and enter my code. The gas station attendants here are not nearly as adorable as the teen-agers at the gas station we used to go to in Taiwan.

Otherwise, I’ve just been amassing words and meters: the former on my writing projects and the latter on the erg. I haven’t been getting huge numbers in each; having started Monday, I’m only about 4K words into my book on business processes, plus a few diagrams. (Funny how much faster blog entries are to write: this one is around a thousand words!) I’ve only been erging about 5km a day, due to some tendonitis in my right wrist. That hasn’t helped with all the typing either, though it isn’t really the limiting factor. I’ve also been spending time getting the document formatted and doing some research (hence the library visit).

I’ve also been spending time on house hunting. So far there’s one we like best, but they’re releasing townhouses in a complex a few at a time and the owners aren’t really responding to our realtor to see if we can get one with the features we want in the time we need it. There’s a second best that I’ll be taking another look at tomorrow, and a few more that might be OK. Once we get it, it will need to be furnished; we have a couple of chairs and bookcases from the other house to bring over, and after furnishing our flat in Taiwan we already have most of the kitchen gear and linens we’ll need, but we’ll have to buy beds and sofas and such. That should be fun, anyway.

Our break has been great, though we didn’t do anything dramatic. First we spent a few days at our house near Eugene, and picked up Ted’s grandfather at the airport. Then we all went down and spent Christmas at his parents’ house. We went back to our place afterward, and they all came up for a few days around New Year’s (and to get his grandfather back to the airport). It turns out that keeping house and cooking for five people is hard work when you’re not used to it! My right wrist is unhappy with me now; apparently I need to start keeping it straight when washing dishes. Still, it’s rewarding cooking for people who appreciate it, and it’s always fun, both to try new recipes and to make old favorite ones.

Today, our “first flight” stuff – two suitcases and a computer – finally arrive. That usually takes a few days or a week, but it got hung up over the holidays. It will be nice to have more than the clothing we brought with us, though. I’ve worn the jeans I brought so often that I’ve put holes in the back bottom of the legs of one pair with my heels. On Monday Ted will start back to work, and I need to get started on my projects, with some breaks to explore the local area.

We arrived in Oregon last Friday, and I’m liking Hillsboro so far; there’s a nice mall 5 minutes walk from our apartment and all the supermarkets and big-box stores anyone could want, but you can be driving beside planted fields in about ten minutes. There are just lots of things happening to us or that we’re encountering, to write about.

Things about our temporary apartment: two bedrooms, two baths Reasonably nice, great location, OK storage (except the clothing storage will be completely inadequate once our stuff gets here!). The kitchen is far better equipped than our Dutch ones, but why am I the only person who thinks that a ladle is part of basic required kitchen gear? The thermal control here is a bit weird; the living area and the two bedrooms each have their own thermostat but it always seems to be too hot for me. The location really is excellent: Ted’s office is 10 minutes away, the mall is right next to us, lots of restaurants are nearby, we can catch a train into Portland at any of several nearby stations, and the Portland airport is a half hour away.

Things we’ve eaten that we can’t get in the Netherlands: Chipotle burritos, crispy bacon, pretzels, ales from BJs in English and Scottish styles, green asparagus in winter, good tortilla chips, American steaks. We will miss the European wines but Oregon has plenty of its own.

Things we’ve bought so far: All the groceries (making this the 3.5th kitchen I’ve set up from scratch in the last few years; the half is our lake house, where we try not to keep much food between visits so we don’t stock much); assorted housewares including a broiler because for some reason we don’t have one; an iPhone; and a very large truck. Well, sort of; we go pick it up and give them large amounts of money tomorrow.

Things we’ve done: found a realtor we like and viewed about 16 houses so far; gotten a US phone number (um, let me know if you need the number); gotten Oregon drivers’ manuals so we can study for the knowledge test; checked out a local rowing club (nobody was there); started learning our way around. Also, gotten rained on a lot (It’s a peculiarly drippy rain. In Eindhoven we had mist, drizzle, and hard rain; here, there’s also a particular state in which large occasional drops fall from the sky, so you don’t get really wet but you know when one’s hit you. It feels like standing under the drippy edge of a roof.