Oh, Monday

It's a blustery Monday afternoon here, the wind making the trees really hang on to the last of their leaves. It rained most of the morning and at noon, I even had to turn on the living room light because it was feeling more like twilight than lunchtime. Now the rain has stopped and the clouds are a bit higher, but the wind is still hammering away outside. Mike just called as he was walking out of school for the day and said it may take him an hour to bike home against the wind (FYI, we live a 6 minute bike ride from ASH, so he might have been exaggerating a bit). The plan was then to go for a run together, but we have scaled it down to a walk, figuring that we'll get a decent workout walking into the wind. At least it's not too cold, only about 11-12 degrees Celsius (50-50 degrees Farenheit).

We had a nice weekend, mostly sunny and the opportunity to spend time with good friends. On Saturday, Mike biked up to Leiden to watch football (aka soccer) with Mike and Karen, I chose to stay home since A) I don't like watching football, and B) we were going out to The Hague in the evening and I had some stuff I wanted to get done at home, including making a yummy garlic and fennel bisque we would have for dinner. Our outing in the evening was a mellow and nicely conversational time with Bill and Hans and we vowed to try and make it more of a regular occurrence. It probably helped that we were in a cozy little bar, known as a Brown Bar here because it serves only beer and wine and has a natural wood decor. There was music piped in, but not so loud that we couldn't hear each other speak, and it wasn't packed full of people, so we had space to sit down and relax.

On Sunday, we had a nice sleep-in and then a leisurely morning. Mike needed to pick up some papers from school, so I proposed we take a longer walk and stop by there on our way home. It was a nice day, we went by the farm I like so much because of its goat population (they even charmed me on demand by making goat sounds...it's not baa like a sheep, what is the English equivalent?). We came to school and the gate was closed, at which time Mike said, "I guess it opens at 1:00 on Sundays, not 12:00. So, we kept on going and ended up back home. A relaxed afternoon, reading and watching some TV and then I made a white bean and chicken chili for dinner - also yummy.