Month: March 2017

Brooke vs Mouse II

Brooke, , 1 Comment

My real goal is for this just to become a blog about mouse updates so here’s another one.

It seemed like the mouse living in our apartment was pretty much gone. We hadn’t seen or heard any signs of her in weeks, and we’re really good about cleaning up food.

But if you believe for a second that the mouse was gone, you’re really not reading into the sense of foreboding I’m trying to convey right now. It seemed like the mouse was gone. We had all but forgotten she had ever even been there. Do you see what I mean?

If you have a mouse, night is mouse time. That’s when they have free reign of your living space. I woke up during mouse time last night because I remembered I left something on the porch, and I walked through the kitchen. I know you’re not supposed to look at your phone when you wake up at night but that’s what I did next, standing at the kitchen counter.

If this were a movie now we’d cut to the mouse who has been interrupted and is standing frozen just a few feet behind me. She’s trying to hide behind a chair leg. Keeping her breath shallow.

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We cut back to me. In this movie I’m pretty  much a pile of flesh as tall as a mountain and I move in big clumsy steps, so loud that everyone in the theater covers their ears. It seems like I’m going to go upstairs now, and we can almost relax. Wait. Nevermind now I’m looking at Twitter.

The camera cuts back to the mouse, her tail in plain sight if I turn around. Tiny  beads of sweat are rolling down her face. It’s now or never.

The mouse gathers all the courage she can and runs straight through the middle of the room, to her little mouse hole I told you about. Everyone watching in the theater holds their hands up over their eyes, peeking at the screen through their fingers. She’s going as fast as she can, which is frankly not that fast.

I turn slowly, squinting at what at first just looks like a small brown ball. The mouse they’ve cast in this action movie about a mouse who lives with two American expats is grayish-brown, medium sized, and less shiny than I expected. It’s always weird to see celebrities in person. I blink a few times.

Then she’s off to hair and makeup to get ready for whatever our next interaction is. I’m going to start wearing socks inside, just in case we have a scene where we touch more.

The first of probably many posts about bikes

Brooke, Leave a comment

Growing up in Minnesota there were two family sizes: regular car or minivan.

I was only eight when we became a minivan family so I don’t remember it clearly, but for other families, switching from regular car to minivan was a rite of passage. Whether you like minivans or not: four kids is too many to have in a regular car backseat. Unless one of them is only two inches tall and can sit comfortably and safely in a teacup or an Altoids tin. (Having a kid who’s only two inches tall seems really stressful. I’d much rather have two-inch-tall dad.)

I haven’t seen too many minivans in Amsterdam, but parents are definitely bringing their kids places, it’s hard to miss. And it seems like there is absolutely no limit to how many kids you can have on a bike. No matter how big your family is, it is a bike family.

The popular thing in our neighborhood is dads biking around with a small child in a little seat on the handlebars, and a larger child standing on the bar behind the dad’s back. It’s strange to see three faces stacked like that, all facing in one direction, all sort of grimacing because of the wind.

People also set two larger kids over the back wheel, sitting with their legs dangling on one side, like little ladies.

And then there are the bakfiets, where kids sit in little chairs squinting if it’s nice out, or covered in plastic like enormous leftovers if it’s rainy.

I haven’t taken any photos of people, so enjoy this family of models in a bakfiets:

bakfiets

Do you like that photo pretty much exactly as it is, but wish the kids were wearing helmets? No problem:

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Other popular ways to cycle include holding an umbrella with one hand, reading something on your phone, or listening to music. This morning I saw a woman biking without using the handlebars, because in each hand she was clutching a tote-bag sized bundle of lettuce.

Then there are the people who look just like everyone else, but I bet if you look closely you can see a little bit of hair peeking out of the pocket of their backpack, and tiny little fingers, it’s their two-inch-tall dad, on his way to work.

Ghost apartment

Brooke, , , Leave a comment

Our new apartment is great, I’m not complaining about it. It’s so great that it has a fancy thermostat, the kind you control not only by adjusting the display on the wall, but also via an app you can download.

The apartment’s former tenants used the app to set the thermostat on some sort of schedule, but we don’t have the app yet. It’s only available in the Dutch iTunes store, which we need a Dutch credit card to access, and the bank won’t give us credit cards until we’ve been receiving paychecks for 90 days. So for the next 40 days our thermostat adjusts itself as it pleases. It’s like living in a great apartment with some very finicky ghosts.

Our invisible roommates will get very warm, maybe they’re doing ghost workout videos or baking ghost bread, and they’ll turn the thermostat down to 16 degrees.

We put on sweaters and go to sleep but the ghosts wake up in the night, peckish and FREEZING, and they the thermostat up to 22 degrees to make themselves comfortable.

For those of you who haven’t been thinking about Celsius thermostats as much as I have lately, which is hopefully everyone, 22 degrees is very warm. I’ve been thinking about thermostats a lot. The goal of a fancy thermostat might be to think about the thermostat less, but ours makes me think about it almost constantly. I don’t mind. I like our ghost roommates, they’re helping me get the hang of Celsius way faster than I anticipated.

Our apartment has floorboards that used to match up, but right now there are quarter-inch gaps in between some of them because the apartment is a little bigger this year than usual. The apartment’s size fluctuates a bit, because of wind or because the entire city is built on sand.

Sometimes we’ll be sitting at the table and everything will adjust slightly, and sometimes I’ll wake up in the night because the ghosts have turned up the heat, and I’ll hear all kinds of shifting sounds.

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Hoe spel je dat

Brooke, , Leave a comment

Forget periods, bar mitzvahs, or the legal voting age, I think I became an adult when I started dreading getting mail.

There is nothing worse than a bunch of sealed envelopes filled with notes form people I might have to pay or may have already paid, mixed in with sealed envelopes filled with advertisements and sealed envelopes filled with scams, mixed in with the occasional sealed envelope with a letter from my grandmother in it. I have a vague memory of mail being all about getting birthday cards full of money, but now I mostly get birthday cards from former dentists and they never have money in them, just notes about how a birthday is a good time to schedule an annual cleaning.

In Portland I would wait so long to check the mail that the mailman (he was a man, I met him) would sort through it and throw away my junk mail, to make more space in the mailbox. I thought this was a service USPS provided that everyone made use of, but a few people have told me I was wrong about that.

I also thought moving would be a way to escape mail, but apparently I was wrong about that too. There is just as much mail. The only difference is now all of it is in a language we can’t read.

When a piece of mail arrives here I can tell it’s going to be about one of the following things:

Just kidding I don’t have a clue what it’s about!

It could be a bill, it could be an insurance form, a ransom note, a contest entry, a poem, a bank statement, or an invitation to a birthday party.

I don’t even know which part of the letter is the salutation: I just realized this week that the word I thought was the name of our insurance company is actually just the word for “city.” Or it can also mean township or village, or just an area people live in.

This week I needed to mail a form to a museum and I didn’t really understand any of the form, but it seemed to say I could put it in an envelope, write the address on the envelope, and then put the envelope in a mailbox with no stamp. That seemed ridiculous, so I wrote the address and then went to buy a stamp. As I was about to put the stamp on, the woman I’d bought the stamp from glanced over at my envelope and said that address didn’t need a stamp.

Weird, I told her, that’s the same thing the form inside this envelope said.

“This word is how you know” she said, pointing to a ten-syllable word that looked like all the other words on the envelope.

So there you go. Now I have a stamp in my pocket that I’m saving for later.

I’m not sure how to end this except to say that if someone gives you three wishes today and you have one to spare, and you use one to wish that we get less mail, I will be forever indebted to you. I will not miss those birthday cards from any of my former dentists, I will not miss the sealed envelopes full of advertisements, and I will not miss the mail we’re getting now, whatever it is.

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Sometimes it’s nice out lately, here’s a photo.