It's working

So here is my trying hard to keep to a more or less weekly post on this blog.  Today's topic is the first question many people ask us: How is work?

Lea has starting teaching in earnest 2 weeks ago.  It is going very well and she is really enjoying it.  The challenges of an American college do indeed exist (a few difficult students, doing lots of class-related administration) but it far outweighs all the nice things, mainly the mostly really motivated students who are eager to have a discussion in class (about almost everything, of course).  Her colleagues have been nothing but wonderful and SMC (Santa Monica College) is by and large a place that is full of friendly people who keep it running smoothly.  Lea even got a first week recovery present from one of her colleagues and several cards as well to welcome her.

It has been very hot here, and especially not just one occasional day but almost 10 days of afternoon temperatures in the 90 F (32 C).  Because the rooms in her ecological and green building do not have air conditioning, Lea moved a few classes to grassy area outside, where the students continued to work in groups and be quite productive.  That is dedication!

Meanwhile, Dirk has been going to the beach every day.  Yes, it does have palm trees but you can only see them through the window:  The beach is the area dedicated to employees who are new or are between projects, and his assignment has been to get to know people and read up on stuff.  So his head is more or less exploding with new knowledge (Ruby, Java Spring, Vim, ..) but luckily the real beach is only a block away and a refreshing walk during lunch time is helping a lot.  Not too many problems with the heat there, although the bike ride to work (about 3 miles, 15 minutes) is long enough to require a change of shirt on arrival.

The colleagues here are also very nice, mostly very young but super friendly.  Dirk's work is basically a big room full of geeks who, thanks to pair programming, have social skills. Hooray for that!

We are close enough to the beach that to have a house without air conditioning and for most of the year, that will be fine given the evening sea breeze.  However, during the heatwave the evening just brought in more moisture and hardly any cold.  The girls didn't sleep so well and this was wearing on them (and us) quite a bit.  Luckily things have cooled down now and everybody is catching up on sleep.

Meanwhile, the girls got a hair cut:

Delphine's birthday is in a few days!  This is of course fantastic, but it also makes her miss her Dutch friends very much.  We will have no fewer than two parties for her here:  One in San Diego with her old friends; and one here in Santa Monica with her almost-there new friends.  We have been so busy we haven't even had time to buy her any real presents yet, but we have some good ideas:  I am sure that this too will be fixed last minute .  :-)
 

Two minute summary of two months in Santa Monica

Hi and welcome to our new blog.  A Dutch translation is forthcoming.

Let's start to say that we are sorry that we haven't kept you up to date more.  Things have been superbusy and then we had some confusion last week whether or not Lea had posted something like this on Facebook or not.  Those of you who are following Dirk on Google (google.com/+dirkjanssen-dpj) may have seen of this info already.

We will from now on post longer things and lots of pictures here, or at least, we will try :-)  If something substantial has been posted, we will make announcements with links to our Facebook and Google+ sites, so you don't have to check on this blog.

Today is the block party in Oak St, where we live (an email update with our full address and phone number is being written as we speak).   It is Labor Day in the US, so everybody has Monday off and the street is blocked off so we can all meet and mingle.  The girls are really looking forward to making new friends and we are looking forward to getting to know our neighbors a little better.

We live in a nice, cozy 1920's style wooden bungalow house.  It is the back unit of what they call a 'duplex' here.  Nice wooden floors, lots of windows and bay windows, pretty front yard with grass and a patio outside where we eat every night.  It is very cute and we like it very much.  It is a fair bit smaller than our house in Breda, so we have tons of boxes in storage for now.  Luckily there are all these built-in cabinets and with Lea's skills at packing stuff in small spaces, we are slowly taking in more and more boxes.

Here is a picture from just before our container arrived, so no furniture yet but beautiful light:

The girls are going to school now:  Delphine has started in 3rd Grade of the Will Rogers Elementary (you can google who Will Rogers was, quite interesting) with Mr Witt as her teacher.  She is working hard on learning how to write in English, luckily she is having zero problems speaking it!  She is starting to make new friends but of course they never come as fast as you want them to.

Jenna is going to a day care/ preschool which is called Mount Olive Preschool, it is part of a small church very close to our house.  We wish we had more pictures from the inside, it is like a beehive with kids and rooms everywhere, very cute and wonderful.  Jenna likes it very much and she keeps calling it "my new Altijd Lente" (the name of her day care in Holland).  For some reason, Jenna has completely given up on speaking Dutch which is worrying us a fair bit, but we are hoping to coax her back into using it in the house.  She can still speak it fluently, she just avoids it.

We planned to speak only Dutch at home, but this is not working out so well because Lea's mother is staying with us for a good week right now.  Of course she doesn't speak Dutch, so the kids naturally switch to English.  It is great to have Betty here and it is fantastic for the kids.  The occasion, however,  is a sad one:  Lea's father passed away on Aug 18th.  He was 88 and doing relatively well until the last 2 weeks, when things went downhill very fast.  We are all still a little in shock; the funeral was only a good week ago and it still hasn't fully sank in with Betty, or with us.  The funeral and the reception were really nice, thanks a lot to all of you who were there or sent flowers, gifts, etc.

Lea is really enjoying her new job, she just finished the first week of teaching at Santa Monica College.  Due to all the family circumstances, the move and the relatively short notice at which Santa Monica hired her, she is a little behind, but catching up.  Lea really loves her work, the campus is beautiful and a 10 minute walk away, and the colleagues are outstanding.  She just has to get used to being called "professor Hald" :-)

Dirk will start working tomorrow as a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, a company that makes website and web services for businesses.  What is exciting about it is the way they work (they do pair programming) and the pace of things in general.  Their hiring process was also quite different:  After a one-hour first assessment, Dirk was simply asked to come work there for a day.  So at the end of that day, he had a very good idea what the new job is going to be like.  Unlike most other programming jobs, you end up talking all day as you work with another person on one computer (two keyboards and screens, so you don't have to push each other aside when you have a good idea).  This older and as always a bit over the top post by Tim Ferriss summarizes it nicely.

We just had a block party (straatfeest) today and it was really good, we met lots of friendly faces and the girls made new friends.  It made us think of the wonderful Postlaan in Breda, of course, and a party that was hard to match.  Jenna often asks about Britt and Sarah and the children from Altijd Lente that she wished were here.  It is great to be here, but sometimes sad that we had to leave so many people and things behind.  When that happens, we sit on the patio at night, look at the palm trees and decide to go to the beach again this weekend :-)

That's it for now, back to unpacking boxes!
Lea and Dirk