In honor of Earth Day and Arbor Day...

I have cut down the 9 pine trees in my yard. Now I have only 2 dogwood trees and lots of overgrown holly and azalea shrubs.

We took them down because they sway alarmingly during storms. Every year some tree comes down and takes out power lines. Thankfully, they haven't taken out any houses or cars, but I'm not waiting for that to happen.

The pine needles that fall from them also suppress grass growth and now half our lawn is just dirt. Attractive. Husband wants to tear everything up and put down sod and maybe a sprinkler system.

This Saturday morning, a landscape designer will come out to give us a plan. If we're going to redo the front yard, we're going to redo it right.

I'm on Lime and Violet!

Just heard Lime and Violet's podcast#34: A Brief Interlude of NotYarn. They mentioned a link that I e-mailed them and I squee-ed out loud. Good thing I was alone in the car.

Purlescence, a yarn shop, had a contest asking what storybook characters would have knit. I sent them the link to a pattern to some lacy thigh-high stockings Cinderella would have knit.
http://www.purlescence.co.uk/storytellers/cinderella/cind_secret_stock.pdf

Lime and Violet are my favorite podcasters, and they're in my links list to the right. Their show is ostensibly about knitting, and they love, love, love socks. So I thought they'd get a kick out of the Cinderella stockings.

Lime and Violet are two women who some how ended up in Omaha, Nebraska, became friends, and got into knitting. They're former Goths and Ms. Violet is married to Side Show Husband, who does things like eat fire, light his head on fire, and I think piercings of some sort. Ms. Lime is dating Kilt Boy, a sound engineer for rock shows. They go to clubs and side shows and knit and people think they're the strange ones. Half their show is not about knitting or yarn, but other funny and bizarre things going on in their lives, sometimes involving Side Show Husband and Kilt Boy, and it often involves drinking and cursing. Much of their show makes me laugh out loud.

So I was very, very excited that they mentioned my e-mail and my name, even if it was mispronounced.

New HP trailer

A trailer for "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" is available here. http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/harrypotterandtheorderofthephoenix.html

It looks good. I always had difficulty trying to picture the action scenes in the Ministry of Magic and am really looking forward to seeing how they depict it in the movie.

On the other hand, who dressed these people? Some of those outfits the kids wear are awful.

Not surprisingly, I have preordered my copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." Just letting you know now, I will be unavailable for any social events on July 21.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam was the last stop on my European trip, and this time it was all for pleasure, no business. In Amsterdam, I met up with my husband.

Some of the other fellows from the fellowship extended their trip to Amsterdam as well. Here I am with one of the other fellows on the fellowship. The other two guys are my husband and the husband of another fellow (and here is an example of the need to find a gender-neutral term, other than fellow and fellowship) who took the picture, so she's not in it.

We are at a great Indonesian restaurant called Kantil and the Tijger, having ristaffel. Essentially, you get lots of little dishes of differnt kinds of foods, to go with your white rice. Shyam was thrilled to have ethnic food. It wasn't Indian, but it was close enough for him. He kept saying how happy he was about the food. We all were.

Here we are touring the Heineken brewery. I have to say, after drinking the Belgian beer, I found Heineken to be watery and flavorless. Not that it stopped me from finishing the beer that came with the tour.










Now for the postcard pictures.
Look -- pretty row houses















The Dutch have much classier double-wides than we have here in Georgia.

This picture cracked us up. It's the Dutch National Monument, and it's a huge phallic symbol. Check out the guy with his arms up on the right.

Here's a close up of the guy on the left side of the monument. Be sure to walk with your pelvis out front!

Statues at the Rembrandtsplein park.

Someone decided to improve on it.

Full moon over a canal. Very romantic. Trust me on this.

That would be 1 Euro, 30 cents. 1 Euro = 1.33 US dollars. Don't know how big the beer was.

Here is a snack platter we ordered in Amsterdam. Starting on the left side of the plate and going clockwise, we have cheese cubes, 2 dipping sauces, batter fried chicken nuggets (real pieces of chicken, not reconstituted chicken paste), meatballs, and the red stuff on the right side of the plate are pieces of sausage. However, I don't think it was cooked meat. Very tasty none the less and no one got sick. In the little tray are quarters of pickled onion, little pickles and spicy mustard. And beer, of course.

At Vondelpark, this was a tree that fell over at some point, but it's still alive. There were leaves budding on the tips. But I like to joke that I was so strong, or so heavy, that I pushed it over.

Yet another blogger

I'm back from my trip and my head is still spinning. It may be jet lag, it may be my cold, it may be the outrageous levels of pollen in Atlanta that's messing with everyone's sinuses and turning all surfaces yellow.

Anyway, here's a link to Sam's blog: http://html.wral.com/news/local/blog/1212251/ He and I were only in the first and last cities, that is Paris and Brussels. But you can get a feel for the trip over all, and he's got lots of pictures.

Other bloggers

I'm not the only one behind in my blogging. If you want to get a flavor of how the other travellers are doing, go to www.natashaj.com to read her blog. She and I have been together in all my cities, except she went to Lisbon and I went to Rome. As you can see, she's pretty behind in her blogging too.

Riot police and the American Embassy

Today we started earlier, like at 8:30am. I got 6 hours of sleep and that was fine.

Okay, before I go any further, I just have to say that I'm sitting in the lobby of the Admiral Hotel in Copenhagen, and there's a private party playing right next to me playing 'Play that funky music white boy' and earlier played 'Dani California' by Red Hot Chili Peppers. There's a group of 20 something people in ties and shirtes talking loudly behind me in something other than English. I'm quite tempted to joing the funky white boys.

Anyway. Today we met the minister of culture who read from prepared notes and gave us copies of KulturCanon, which apparently discussed what was core to Danish culture, then went to the Museum of Art and Design. We had some other meetings, but what stood out was the 3hour meeting with the national police of Denmark and the Copenhagen police. We learned about Danish national policing, how they deal with rioters, met a riot policy commander, saw their body armor and armored police vehicle.'

I interrupt this post to say that the party just finished 'Walking on Sunshine' by Katrina and the Waves and is now playing 'Love in an Elevator' by Aerosmith.

Okay, after the riot police, we went to the home of the deputy US ambassador. Nice, but very much party line. Then dinner and drinks at the bar, and now bed.