Going quiet

I'm off to Minnesota tomorrow, so I won't have much to write either about Stace or about Switzerland.

Staceworld

One more post on this frivolous topic before I move back to the usual frivolous topics.

On Sunday, as we had people over for Easter dinner, we joked about the possibility of a "Staceworld" blog, which I envisioned as a blog describing the world from Stace's point of view but actually written by me. You know, sort of like our Christmas letter. Anyway, I didn't give it much thought until we had another Stace episode last night. I'm now seriously considering starting a seprate blog. This incident took place sometime during the Blog Wars that you've already read about in the last post. Here goes.

I'd been home for quite a while already last night. Stace was in the kitchen making dinner (which consisted either of tuna casserole or tuna fish sandwiches, depending on her mental state at the moment). I walked down our hallway and came around the corner into the kitchen. She let out a started yelp. I was confused as to why my presence startled her since she knew I was home and I wasn't trying to scare her or anything like that. Her answer: "I thought you were a bear!"

Yes, you read that correctly. For that brief moment, Stace thought that a bear was coming into her kitchen. In that instant, Stace apparently thought that a bear had left its home in the Rocky Mountains, worked its way over to the East Coast (maybe Boston or New York), somehow traveled across the Atlantic, journeyed to the interior of Switzerland, opened the locked door to our apartment building, climbed three flights of stairs (no elevator), come into our apartment, and entered the kitchen.

Of all the things there are to worry about in the world, the possibility of a bear coming into the kitchen of our top-floor apartment in Switzerland hadn't been high on my list, so I asked the logical question, "Why did you think I was a bear?" I should have anticipated the flawless logic of her answer: "Well, as I saw you out of the corner of my eye, you were kind of walking like a bear."

It's like the movie Apollo 13. If it hadn't actually happened, it just wouldn't be believable.

Same as the old Stace

Those of you who thought that the post-surgery Stace was going to be much more "with it" than that pre-surgery Stace may have been mistaken. Here are three examples from the last ten minutes:

1. I needed Stace to sign and date a form. She asked me the month and date. I said "The month is zero-four, and the date is zero-seven." She promptly wrote "47" for the month.

2. Stace is making tuna casserole at this very moment. Sadly, a couple of minutes ago, she was forced to decide that everyone is having tuna fish sandwiches for lunch tomorrow when she realized that she had mixed mayonnaise with the tuna before she even thought about what she was doing. That batch went in the fridge, and a new batch of tuna is going into the casserole.

3. I had printed out a map and train schedule for an outing that Stace and the kids took today. When I saw it on the table, I wanted to throw it away and asked her if she was done with it. She immediately stated that she had completely forgotten to take it with her. Her tone suggested that it was crazy for me to have thought otherwise.

The Netherlands

The impressions I took away from the Netherlands: water everywhere, bikes everywhere, very nice people who all speak English, and dang expensive.

Really, as you travel around, you get the impression that the whole country is just one good thunderstorm away from going completely underwater. I think that's pretty much the history of Holland. The canals that run along the streets are just a few inches below the level of the street. It certainly makes parallel parking a little more interesting; one wrong move and your car is going in the water.

And these people are biking maniacs. The Swiss bike a lot compared to the Americans, but the bikes here just share the road with the cars and the cars work around the bikes. In Holland, there are dedicated bike trails everywhere, and there's plenty of space to park your bike.

To get there, we drove through France, Luxembourg, and Belgium. We stayed at a hotel about twenty miles outside of Amsterdam in a city called Leiden. It was a great place for the kids. It had a pool and a pretty good play area for the kids, so it worked out well. And, by sheer dumb coincidence, the English-speaking branch of our church for the Amsterdam area met just down the street from our hotel. That was pretty handy.

One day was devoted entirely to visiting the Keukenhof, a large flower garden with all sorts of tulips and other flowers. It was a little early in the season, so not everything was blooming yet, but it was still a pretty spectacular sight.

We only spent one day in Amsterdam. We spent three or four hours at the Van Gogh Museum (didn't take any pictures), went for a canal cruise, and visited the Anne Frank house. It was raining, so the only pictures we could get on the cruise were through the glass, but here are a couple.

Our last day there, we visited Zaanse Shans, a conservation area and museum that depicts what life was like for the Dutch living in the area. It has several functioning windmills and other cool attractions. (The picture of Lindsey in front of the canal looks photo shopped, but it's real. You can tell that it was quite windy that day. Makes sense, right? One needs wind to get much use out of windmills.)

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And, as I mentioned before, it was expensive. Our experience in Prague had gotten me used to cheap vacations, but holy cow, it's pricey in the Netherlands. For example, our family had a nice buffet at our hotel in Prague for $40. At our hotel in Leiden, a slightly nicer buffet dinner cost us $100. Ouch! I thought I was pretty much over sticker shock in Switzerland, but the Netherlands still got me.

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All in all, though, it was a good trip. The weather was mostly cooperative, the kids had fun, and we got to see some things we'd wanted to see for a long time. Next up for family vacation spots: Provo and Cedar Hills.

Hooray for urine!

The three of you who occasionally check in on the Wood family blog probably don't expect a discussion of bodily fluids, but here goes anyway. (Boy, am I ever going to catch some flak from Stace when she gets around to reading this entry four or five months from now . . . .)

Recall the good old days twenty years ago or so when I was quite a bit larger than I am now. Over the period of a few years, I managed to take off about 45 pounds. Unfortunately, as happens with most people, my advancing age has made it harder and harder to keep those pounds off, and a few of them have crept back over the years. I've decided that it's time for them to go away again. My approach is to do this very gradually. The goal I've set is to lose one pound every two weeks. So far, I'm down about seven pounds with seventeen more to go. (Of course, as many of you know from personal experience, the next seven pounds will be about ten times as tough as the first seven were, and then the last ten will be about ten times as hard again. That's just how it goes.)

Weight can vary quite a bit from day to day depending on how much water you drink, how much fluid you're retaining, how excessively you overindulged at dinner last night, and things like that. My method for tracking my weight is to set a target weight that I need to hit every second Friday, and then I try never to exceed that weight again. So, for instance, my target for two Fridays ago was one hundred something-eight pounds, which I'll write as 1x8. I made my target that day, and from that day on, I try never to exceed that weight again. I may spike above it on a day or two, but I try to keep it under that ceiling. Two Fridays later, my target is 1x7 pounds. If I hit my target on one of the given Fridays, my reward is a hot chocolate at Starbucks, which in Switzerland costs about the same that you would pay for a small car in the Czech Republic.

My target for this morning was 1x7 pounds. Vacations can make weight loss difficult, so I was a little nervous this morning as I stepped on the scale for my official biweekly weigh-in because we just got back from Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I weighed in at 1x7.7 pounds, a few ounces over my goal. Motivated by my strong desire for a hot chocolate because it's unseasonably cold here right now, I decided to call upon my bladder to help me reach my goal. I drained every last drop of fluid I could manage (Stace will really be flipping out at this point when she reads this), weighed myself again, and presto! I weighed in at 1x6.7, a few ounces underneath today's ceiling. My hot chocolate was really good.

Does it still count as a visit?

I have this rule that flying over a state isn't enough to say that you've visited the state. (This matters to me because I'm going to visit every state before I die.) I now wonder if I need to add a corollary to this rule: if I spend 45 minutes driving through Luxembourg without ever getting out of the car, can I really say that I've visited Luxembourg? I think we'll say that yes, we visited Luxembourg.

Anyway, we had a great vacation in Amsterdam. Report and pictures coming later . . . .

On the road again

We're off to Amsterdam tomorrow. It's about an eight-hour drive. We'll see some tulips, the Anne Frank Museum, and things like that. We'll avoid the red light district and the coffee shops (where no one really goes for the coffee). Our plan right now actually is to spend just one day in Amsterdam and the rest of the time in other parts of the Netherlands. Going there and back, we'll be driving through Germany, France, Belgium, and, most exciting of all, Luxembourg. (I hope the kids aren't asleep for that part of the drive.)

On a completely unrelated note, I have to throw in this funny quote that I read about how hard the Disney animators were working during the animation revival that started with The Little Mermaid: "If you don't come in on Saturday, don't even bother to come in on Sunday." Grim yet funny, don't you think?