Beware the Ides of March

No, that really has nothing to do with the content of today's post, other than the fact that today is indeed the Ides of March.  Poor Caesar.

So, what have we been up to?  Well, it's finally spring here.  These tulips are from the market, but the crocuses have been blooming for a couple weeks, and I expect daffodils and tulips any day now.  It was a bit rainy last week, but as I type this, the temperature is 18 C, clear and sunny.  And I feel obligated to point out that, when I went out this afternoon, about a quarter of the people I passed were still wearing parkas.  Down-filled, furry-hooded parkas.  I think they may actually be from a completely different planet than me.

We're finally back on the bikes, too.  (As a side note: I hadn't realized just how tiny my bike looks next to Stefan's normal adult-sized bike.)  Stefan blew a tire way back in January, in the middle of a rainstorm and a good four kilometres from home, and promptly decided that he was going to fix it himself.  I should note that, when we moved here, he claimed he wasn't going to learn to fix bikes.  He was going to take them to the shop for tune-ups, tire blow-outs, and such.  That lasted nearly a year, and I have to admit, I didn't think it would last that long.  Then he decided it was cheaper to do it himself.  Unfortunately, during the process of fixing the tire, he somehow messed up the gears and the brakes, which are in the wheel hub rather than separate, as in most bikes.  So he ordered parts and waited.  And waited some more, despite the website's claims that the parts would arrive in three days.  And got half the parts, and continued to wait.  After four weeks, and zero responses to his e-mails, he ordered a duplicate from another website, which finally arrived.  So, five weeks after his tire blew, he finally got it all put back together and working well.  He knows how the bike works now, too, which will make it easier to fix next time it breaks.

While he was at it, he bought a few replacement parts for my bike, which, to be fair, wasn't the most high-quality purchase we could have made.  Part of that was because we bought it a few weeks after I got here, when we had just shelled out all kinds of money on birth certificates, visas, and plane tickets, and when we were looking for a new apartment and anticipating security deposits and furniture in the next few weeks.  The other part was the size.  Look, we all know I'm short.  I'm particularly short here, of course, because the Dutch are, on average, the tallest country in the world.  I pass people all the time who are at least a foot taller than me, and I routinely see men whose waists are at about the same height as my shoulders.  We knew finding a bike was going to be a problem.  They don't stock a lot of adolescent sizes, though, not in the cheaper bikes.  We looked everywhere, and the only thing we found was one bike for 700 euros, which was so far out of our price range that I had to laugh.  Finally, I found this one, which had hand-brakes (which was vital, because I hadn't been on a bike in probably ten years and didn't want to re-learn backpedaling) and on which I could still touch the ground when stopped (also vital, despite the fact that I can now hop on and off like the Dutch, because I certainly couldn't 18 months ago).  But some of the parts left something to be desired.  The front light wouldn\t always stay upright, so that it often illuminated your knees rather than the road.  The back light was a pain to switch on and off.  The kickstand was terrible, and the bike fell over all the time if the bags were imbalanced or if you nudged it slightly.  The brake handles that had been used were an adult size, not the right type of brakes for the handlebars, and way too big for my tiny hands.  I could barely curl the first joint of my fnigers around them, which meant that I couldn't put much pressure on them and the tension had to be way too high.  So Stefan started replacing things.  My Frankenbike has, in the eighteen months I've owned it, had the following parts replaced: the chain (once), the brake handles (once, both of them, and yes, the new ones are a children's size), the brake pads (once, just the back ones), the back light (twice), the front light (once), and the kickstand (once).

Oh, and Stefan's missing parts?  They showed up about a week after he'd finally fixed his bike, along with an extremely funny note saying that the company preferred to spend its money on good customer service rather than advertising.

My little sweatshop is still producing things.  I've been particularly productive in the last two weeks, mostly because I wanted a few small projects that I could finish in a couple of days after having spent six months on the Egypt piece.  I swear, I'm going to run out of wall space at this rate.  So, two for Stefan, and one for me.

We're also doing taxes at the moment, which is impressively complicated, considering that I have zero taxable income and yet need accountants in two different countries.  The Canadian taxes are just difficult because there are a few complicated forms to fill out when you lose your residency.  So, although I'm still a Canadian citizen and still get paid through the university in Canadian dollars, I'm no longer a resident.

That's nothing, though, compared to the Dutch taxes.  We have an accountant here too, for two reasons.  First, when you move to a new country, there are all sorts of specific immigration exemptions you might not know about, and our accountant specializes in expat taxes.

  Second, under Dutch law, the tax office can only communicate with you in Dutch.  So, if we had any questions at all and called them, they would tell us (in English) that they weren't allowed to talk to us.  Hence, a Dutch accountant.  All the forms and paperwork on our end are finally done, I think, although I did get to fill out an entertaining web form that did the usual captcha verification (the kind where you type in the words you see in the picture), with the instructions: "Please verify that you are human."  Yep, still human.

Finally, when I was uploading photos for this post, I found this on my camera, which I'd completely forgotten:

Stefan took it one night, after he'd prepared a late-night snack for us, because he was very impressed at how much healthier our snacks here tend to be than in Canada.  Apples, grapes, two different kinds of cheese, sausage.  Seriously, I didn't think I was much of a cheese person before, but apparently I was wrong.  The white cheese is a goat cheese (which I thought I didn't like, but it turns out I just don't like crumbly goat cheese) with nettles in it (which sounds weird, but is really, really good).  The yellow cheese is "harvest cheese": something in the Gouda direction (nothing here is actually marketed as Gouda, because so much of it is Gouda), with ginger, garlic, peppercorns, and a few other spices mixed in.  The sausages come from the market and are imported from France (which, as I understand it, involves the stall owner driving to France once a week and filling a van), and we've run through most of his very wide selection, which includes various spices (garlic, rosemary, etc), various meats (duck, pheasant, wild boar, and kangaroo, which I'm NOT trying), and various other things (walnuts, hazelnuts, berries, cheese).  Every last one has been wonderful.  I think that particular one may have been the blue cheese sausage, which is especially good.

Wow, that was far, far longer than I'd expected.  And now I want cheese...

Two more things done

After six months and somewhere around 450 hours of work, I sewed the final stitch last night:

It's about 11 by 14, and by far the most ambitious piece of cross-stitch I've ever attempted.  The fabric has smaller holes than I usually use (which makes it harder to stitch).  Most of the stitches use threads of two different colours, which makes it hard to keep track of single threads that are just slightly different in colour.  There are tiny little beads all over it, which were a bit tricky to put on at first, but they make it look so much more finished.

And I spent so much time on it that I'm posting close-ups of it, too ;)

A close-up of one of the corners on the border.  You can see the beading between the flowers and in the corner, and all the work that went into the darker brown outline of the border.  That part alone took me a week.  It's hard to tell in this part, but pretty much every stitch you can see here has two different colours of thread in it.

And below, the king and queen part.  Their faces look so much more detailed because the stitches are much smaller.  Most of the stitches are blocks of two by two, but the stitches in the faces are one by one, so I can fit four of them in one of the normal stitches.

If you look closely at the bird's wings, you can see how the stitches have multiple colours in them: that dark brown shading on the inside of the wing actually comes from a light purple thread mixed with gold.

And last, the three figures in the centre and the bird at the bottom, with the borders about and below it.  I particularly like the top border, the one that looks sort of braided.  It looks super fancy, but it's just made up of straight lines.

Sadly, I've already got a new pile of projects waiting for me, but I'm going to start with a few smaller ones that I can get done in a couple of days before I dive into another giant project.

Finally, as I slowly work my way through Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Stefan would like to point out that he's finished it.  Every level, every side mission, everything, 100% completed (literally, if you know the game: he's got 100% sync).  So now he's taking a short break from the Xbox while we wait for the next game to arrive, which is really for the best.  And it gives me the chance to catch up ;)