The big 2016 update

Hello everybody!

I hope you are friends with Lea on Facebook because our last update here was more than half a year ago.  Dirk's google+ channel has been very quiet too.

Here is why.

- On the good side, Lea's teaching last Fall went very well.  Her evaluation committee was super enthusiastic and one person even said Lea is one of the best teachers at the whole campus.  yippee!!  Lea has really found a job that fits her like a glove and that makes her happy every day.
- I am still having a great time in my new career. A large project was finished successfully and I am now busy trying to set up all kinds of training for the office.  Once a teacher....
- Jenna is doing great, she is turning to be quite the opposite of Delphine in some aspects:  She is very strong willed, sometimes a tad loud and wild, and always outgoing and full of energy.  She can write most letters and loves putting together large Lego projects.
- Meanwhile Delphine has made great academic progress, she read a big illustrated Star Wars book from cover to cover the other weekend -- this is up from our hard working first-words-in-English reader less than a year and a half ago. Reading proficiency has helped her in other subjects and it has also given her a lot more confidence.    Delphine is has learned to play the clarinet and she builds wonderful things in mindcraft.

- On the not so great side, we are slowly growing out of our lovely rental home but Santa Monica houses are so expensive we are waiting a little.
- But a much larger problem was that Lea's mother Betty was diagnosed with lung cancer in October. It did not affect her daily life but we visited a number of doctors and agreed on immunotherapy, which she would receive in Los Angeles.  We helped her a lot keeping up with her walking and her breathing exercises.
- Betty stayed with us a lot through Fall and this was great: We hung out, talked about a 1000 things, and went to the movies with her.  Playing with the kids gave Betty extra energy and put a big smile on her face.
- Late November Betty received her first therapy.  It went well but the therapy, combined with a cold that was going around, made her very tired.  For the first time in years, she did not have any Christmas present ready early and she really hated this.
- In the end, we had a great Christmas: Lea's brother was here and Betty bought fantastic presents (with some help).  Betty's birthday and New Year's Eve were all great, and we squeezed another big party in that last week of December.
- On December 29th, Betty was diagnosed with pneumonia.  This explained her tiredness and she was sent home with a ton of antibiotics.  But on January 1st, we took her to the hospital because the pneumonia was not getting better.  Her oxygen level was low and the doctors were extremely worried about her survival.
- However, on January 3rd, Betty made a miraculous recovery.  She was sitting upright in bed, she was breathing better and she was fully with it.  We spent as much time with her as we could and we started making plans to move her  to Santa Monica.  Eddie was still in the US and he visited her every day.
- On January 19th, we drove to San Diego to bring Betty to a great care home Lea had found in Santa Monica.  While we drove there, the doctors called to say that her health had taken a bad turn.  When we arrived, she could clearly hear us but she could not respond any more.  She passed away a few hours later, while Lea was holding her hand.

The funeral and reception were held last week Saturday.  It was sad and happy, full of great memories.   There was a reception afterwards at Betty's favorite restaurant, overlooking the San Diego Bay.
Thank you to everybody who was there, sent us cards or flowers, or just thought of us.

Things are going well.  We are very happy and busy, there is lots of work to do around improving Lea's mother house.  It has also been great to unearth the treasures in her garage, her wardrobes and many other places :-)

School started for the girls, they are both very happy with their new teacher and class mates.  There was some nervous tension last Monday when the first day of school came around, but things have calmed down now.   Lea has some pictures, I'll see if I can get her to post them.

I am trying to move over to a shorter blog format in the hope I'll make more posting instead.  Not sure if it is going to work, but it is worth a try.

Short entry #1:

We have often walked past this seemingly unassuming eatery three blocks from our house:

We went there last Thursday and it was spectacular!  Behind a facade and name ("Local") that reveals nothing , hides a beautiful and delicious kitchen and serious wine bar.  We are so happy to have found the equivalent to La Cucina in Ginneken, also around the corner.  Obviously, Local is a bit pricier than La Cucina, as is everything, but we are not complaining...

Six months later

So people complained I do not blog enough and they are right.  What can I say, life is interesting, lots of fun and quite full.   Here are some snapshots:

Santa Monica on a Sunday night:  Fancy car, funny top hat, and the living is easy.

I was in San Francisco for work, where these bananas had just participated in a race (the annual Bay to Breakers race -- 12km are run by about 50,000 people, many in costume).

We went to an amazing Frank Gehry exhibit at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

Amazing sunset over the sports fields next to our house (it was even prettier 2 seconds ago, but then they switched on the lights)

And you know these two, growing like weeds.

We will be in Europe in the second half of June, so we may see some of our readers then :-)

Walk around the block

This post was created in January 2016 but somehow did not get published until now.  I blame Blogger, not your late night part-time blog operator.  

Hey all and happy new year if I haven't seen you in 2016 yet.  As usual we are running pretty late with our cards, I even considered stamping "Hope this gets there before the Chinese New Year" on the back of the envelopes..

Either way, we are doing well and have recovered from what must have been the busiest half year ever.  If you ask me, I'd say we have been in Santa Monica for two years already; it seems like I left Breda ages ago.  I do miss it sometimes and Delphine had a tearful moment when a Dutch  "Kinderen voor Kinderen" song came by that she danced to with her class back in Holland.  We found some pictures of our wonderful house there and that was bittersweet too.

I have been to Southern California many times but actually living here in the winter is still a little bit of a new experience.  I had a panic the other day when I realized that I had not seen any of my jackets since June and I really did not know where they were.

I have since found my light rain jacket and I carried it with me to work a few times, but I have stopped doing that as I never need it.  On the three days that we got massive amounts of rain, which we did, I took the bus or Lea drove me to work as she had an errand to run anyway.  I thought I would miss the cold, but I am actually fine without it so far.

Please find some pictures below from a little walk around the block I did in my lunch break the other day.  I take a walk many days, but that one day I felt inspired to take some pictures.  Enjoy!

Third Street Promenade

One of the pretty and older buildings

A street musician on Third Street

Fancy office building next to my work, the beach is just behind it

Movie set sale: all kinds of clothes (didn't buy any, sorry)

The "Johannes van Tilburg" building

And this is not a video I made, but I have seen Chelsea Williams perform several times on Third Street, and this video gives you a good impression of the atmosphere.

Happy Thanksgiving & Pictures from Halloween

Traffic lights in Los Angeles, as seen from a car

Green light

 Lights in Los Angeles seem to work differently from anywhere else in the world.  The green light is deceivingly simple.  Go, it says, go now.  The intersection is yours.  But maybe you want to read on before you do....

The Counter

Next to almost every light is a counter.  Rumor has it the counter was introduced for pedestrians, a probably mythical and certainly now extinct breed of humans that was vastly inferior to drivers.  Drivers have wheels where pedestrians apparently only had legs.  Go figure.

The counter, however, is great for drivers.  It counts down to the point at which the green light will disappear. This gives you, the driver, an accurate estimate of how much you should accelerate:  Numbers over ten, just speed up a bit; number 10 to 5, push down gently but firmly; numbers 4 and 0, come on now -- let the engines roar and floor it!  No speed is too fast on city streets and if you see any creatures that seem to be blocking your way, remember that those pedestrians are probably mythical anyway.   Don't let them get in the way of you making it past what is probably the slowest light in all of LA!

Yellow light

This light was especially created for people wanting to make a left turn.  In the city where traffic never stops, making a left turn is rather complicated.  Only one or two cars will get the privilege of turning left per full cycle of the lights.  The yellow light is the sign for the left turners to say their prayers, cross their fingers, call their loved ones one more time and attempt that daring maneuver of turning left while avoiding high speed drivers making it through the intersection at the last moment. To make it worse, the drivers in the cross street are revving their engines and getting their hands ready to honk hard if you dare to still be anywhere near the intersection once their lights turn green.  One - two - three, go now, or no -- stop, yes , go.  Oh I don't know.

Red light

The agreement is that this light means stop, we all know that.  But that is theory, you see, and how does it really work in practice?    What does stop really mean, and where should you stop?  Stopping is hard, especially if you were already driving fast.  Given that there is always ample time between this light turning red and the lights on the cross streets turning green, it is worth considering whether stopping at the next red light can be counted as an indirect way to obey this light, don't you think?   Furthermore, those drivers trying to make a left turn are sore losers and you have the right of way anyway, so if you drive fast enough it will be clear to them that they will have to wait until you have passed.    That makes it really quite safe and kind of legal, don't you think?

See you next time at an intersection in Los Angeles,
Dirk

More birthdays

Everything is starting to become a little more routine here, and that is very good.  For the first time in ages, we were able to get the girls in school on time, maybe even a little early today. It was very much enjoyed by all.

We spend two great weekends with activities around the area. The weekend before last, we were in San Diego, went to a birthday party, and saw tons of pumpkins in a Halloween Pumpkin patch that was lots of fun.  It was very hot for the time of the year again, the pumpkin patch was in the mountains between San Diego and Los Angeles and the highest temperature was around 37 Celcius (100 F) that day. That is very hot.  During most of last week, Santa Monica has also been unusually hot and relatively humid (for here at least).  Luckily things cooled down last weekend, when we ran lots of errands (boxes came in and out of storage, in the hope that one day we will fit it all into our house) and spend the Sunday at the Discovery Cube Orange County, a fantastic museum / activity place for kids.

It is funny how our feeling for distances has already been distorted:  The cube is about an hour's drive away, but we just got in the car and started driving on the endless LA freeways (this map gives you a great overview, scroll down slowly to enjoy to its fullest).

Oh a message from our sponsors:
Today's blog post is brought to you by the Birthday Boy.
Dirk: Did you know this is my first ever birthday in the US?  I was always in the US over the Summer or Winter holidays and when I was in the US for a full year in 2000, I happened to be in Montreal (Canada) for my birthday.  It was a rather uneventful day, "I went to work" basically summarizes it, but I had a fantastic weekend behind me so it still was a great day.

I did some more writing on Java Spring at work, learned more about data science and worked on my ping-pong skills, an essential part of working at Pivotal :-)  Oh and I got to unpack the fantastic ChromeCast (the 2014 model) at night, which really solves a bunch of the issues we had around media in the living room.

This is from the SF office, but ours looks quite similar

Size of a big USB drive

More news another day! 

Dirk & Lea