Following the leader

Conventional wisdom goes that Americans are more likely to binge drink because Americans don't have a culture of drink, so when they get to college and alcohol is suddenly everywhere, they have no idea how to handle it. Like so many other pieces of conventional wisdom, it's wrong, maybe: the question is how frequently the subject drinks more than 5 drinks in a row. I'm not entirely sure if a few glasses of wine with dinner, followed by a couple beers with friends as you gripe over the local soccer team, necessarily counts as downing five in a row in the same way that American students tend to think about it. Healthy? Unquestionably not. But it's definitely not the same as doing vodka shots on an empty stomach.

The report has its shares of flaws (bonus points to people who pick them out) but it does make you wonder how important behavioral modeling is, in terms of adopting bad (or good) habits. I mean, Karel's parents are both heavy smokers--graciously abstaining or going to another room when young kids are around--but you'd never see him within ten feet of a cigarette. My mom always had a healthy (and ample) dinner on the table at 6 pm, but I really can't be arsed to cook when we've got a freezer full of leftovers. Okay, I do make a fresh hot dinner for Karel when he's home, but that's only about half the time, and half of that time, he's not hungry.

The question is increasingly relevant when it comes to the issue of childhood obesity. As of two years ago, although obesity issues had stabilized in adults, it continued to increase amongst kids, the latest numbers showing that a (relatively modest) 15% of boys and 18% of girls are too big for their britches. Dieting shows in the Netherlands are therefore a bit less ego-centric than their counterparts in the US--the emphasis is on the whole family and being healthy, rather than straight-up losing weight. The most outrageously-titled show "Help, Ons Kind is te Dik" (Help, Our Kid is too Fat--Dutch openness at its best, eh?) has dieticians, doctors, and cooks prescribing their cures for an unpleasantly-plump child, and counselors to formulate productive reactions to temper tantrums and incorporate physical activities into their daily routine, and on top of all that, support groups for the parents.

The show itself is quite dull, and the most interesting aspect of it is that the parents are often not the paragon of active, healthy adults themselves. Moms have a hard time incorporating vegetables into the dinner, and parents also have to fight the malaise of biking to work in the rain. While some parents are indeed the fit-and-healthy kind, most of them look fit to burst an aneurysm. And yet the kids do well by the program, losing anywhere from 3 to 12 kg (modest first steps).

It works, I think, because the show leaves no stone unturned when it comes to tackling childhood obesity. All the angles are attacked, and the result is that kids are the better for it. Could such things work in the US? Possibly, though I'm doubtful of it. There's no question that everything we know about what makes children fat can be addressed. It's a big, and open question, as to whether we have the drive to fix it.

The Hell of Small Cats

Our cats, despite being spoiled rotten, are actually not terribly-behaved. They shred the couch and our bedframe, but have left the antique-y furnishings alone. They will not go up on the dining room table, save to explore new things left there. And they will eat just about everything, from raw meat to the most exquisite canned food. Their favorite is raw beef--God help us if Shadow ever tastes lobster.

There is, in fact, only one thing they do that we absolutely cannot abide: skittering through the apartment at 5 in the morning. Every. Morning.

We theorize that Noodle, who sleeps in the living room, gets hungry at around 5 (which is expected), and thus goes to the bedroom to whinge at his humans to feed him. Alas for him, the bedroom is deep girl-country, the domain of Shadow (under the bed, windowsill) and the Tweeb (top of the bed), so she chases him out, to the living room, which is his part of the apartment (having staked out some kind of presence on all of the sleeping surfaces there). Then he chases her back, and we have kitty-ping-pong, at five in the morning. Usually this is resolved when I close the living room door.

For the most part, the Tweeb is left out of this civil strife. She has staked her own claim on her humans, and barks commands for food, attention, and turning on the heater independently of the other two. However, this morning, she decided to be somewhat more imperious than usual, and took to jumping on the bed and yelling at us.

So I banished her from the bedroom.

Banished from the bedroom, barred from the other kitties, locked in purgatory between an empty kitchen and the empty bedroom--the cat who can make stones weep blood when she cries for me when I leave to get groceries. Hell can be many things, but for the Tweeb, I would imagine that this might just come close to hers.

Never fear, though: the Tweeb exacts her vengeance in many ways--some of them stinky. At the bottom of our pantry this morning, next to the potato sack, a tidy lump of Tweeb-turd.

Poof!

Poof: March is almost over, and so is my month of not taking myself or anything else too seriously. I'm pretty happy with what I've managed to get done--renewing my baking skills, some financial planning-ahead, flexing the writing muscles, rediscovering how to draw. Time certainly flew by, and now it's time once again to buckle down and get sh*t done.

Poof: 'Tis the season, sadly, for posters of missing cats. I love cats (obviously) and while I completely sympathize with someone who's lost theirs, I also tend to think that they got what's coming. For Chrissakes, you let a small, furry, oft-dark-colored animal run around next to a busy street; it gets into other people's gardens--people who have no compunction about using pesticides and herbicides and God-only-knows what to get beautiful plants; where people regularly walk their dogs without a leash...seriously, it'd be more of a miracle if they didn't disappear.

Poof: An hour of my day has vanished. Usually I'm pretty aware of the start of Daylight Savings, but this year it caught me by surprise. Fortunately my boyfriend had the wherewithal to adjust our alarm clock, but it's been a little discombobulating all day.

Poof: Changes to the area around Millingerward mean that there were no signs of the released beavers this time around. Was I just not looking hard enough? Or have they gone, migrating to less industrialized places along the Waal? Hard to say; I'm planning to do another epic ride (+20 km) in a couple weeks to find out for sure, and maybe shoot some snails in the bargain. I am definitely looking forward to the start of baby season, when the konikpaarden start foaling. It's amazing to watch a baby basically fall out of its mother and then get up 15 minutes later--from a safe distance, of course. The wild horses of the Ooijpolder aren't really all that wild--you can walk through a herd and they can get quite close while snuffling for foliage (unlike most horses, they eat leaves as well as grass)--but going near a momma and her baby is just asking for trouble.

Poof: While I've always liked tea, these past few weeks I've become convinced that nothing magicks away problems like a nice hot mug of good, loose-leaf tea. We have two tins of it from a gift basket that I'd constructed by never managed to give, and recently I've started making some every day. I may not believe in God, but heaven is a cup of good tea.

Going greener

We're not really "green" so much as we're broke. We don't recycle because we're good people--we recycle because the statiegeld saves us a euro here and there on our groceries. So eating organic regularly is out of the question. About the only thing I do get with any degree of regularity is organic herbs, and that's because they are, surprisingly enough, cheaper than the supermarkets' pathetic excuse for plant matter.

Right before I left Philadelphia, I had toyed with the idea of joining a CSA group. Community supported agriculture was big a couple years ago--basically you pay a few hundred dollars in May and get a big box o' food every week for the next six months. Subscription plans vary in the details, but the basic gist of CSA is that you get organic produce fresh from the farmer, and cheaper than from Whole Paycheck Foods.

I'd wondered if such things existed in the Netherlands. I mean, I assumed there was such a thing, given how ecologically sensitive the country is (individuals, not so much). But if it did, I certainly wasn't hearing about it. Thus, dinner with the Bekkers was enlightening, not only because we learned how to make a quick 'n dirty Hollandaise sauce, but also because P. Jonas told us about his groete abonnement: every week he gets a bag of organic greens and fruit (his apparently included fruit; some of the ones that I've seen also offer organic meat) that included such things as salsify and winter purslane, which were both incorporated into the delectable meal.

So of course, one of the first things I did upon getting back was google "groente abonnement". It took a little searching, since the first thing that pops up is the website of the Netherlands' Green Party, but eventually I turned up the website for sustainable living and with it, the link to how to get what is essentially a CSA subscription. Except they're broken, so what you really do is do a search for the pickup points and go from there. For the life of me, though, I'm not entirely sure what to make of a website that thinks I'll go to Amsterdam to pick up a bag of vegetables.

It's not a CSA the way most of the Americans I know would think of it, not exactly. Rather than paying for six months' worth of food at once, you pay for a weeks' worth--okay, three meals' worth--of fruits and greens at a time. And while the cost is actually pretty low, it does concern me a bit, because Karel sucks at being Dutch, and no Dutch bag of veggies would be complete without a pillar of leek, which is the one thing we do not eat on a regular basis.

All the same, the idea of just dropping by Brakkenstein on a Saturday morning, rather than pedaling all the way to the market, is very appealing. And fresh purslane--well, that's worth whatever it costs.

Techieness

I must apologize for the nearly-week-long absence. I had a post all ready to go on Wednesday but just as I was putting up the final touches, it was time to leave for Groningen. Just last week Karel had decided to visit his sister and a few friends who live up in that direction, and so for most of Wednesday and all of Thursday we were inundated with one very cute baby, lots of good food, and promises for pizza (Karel had promised Mini-Bekker a homemade pizza several years ago, and true to his form, MB has not forgotten). It was a good trip, but then again I suspect I would say that about any trip where I get to hold a 6-day-old baby.


I finally had an excuse to try out my Lensbaby this weekend, as of course any new baby warrants a ton of pictures. My brother bought it for me for Christmas, and my initial test with it was quite rushed, as I had neither the time nor the inclination to experiment much when it arrived (some time after Christmas, when I was in the middle of a major Angst moment). I actually used my macro to shoot the baby--why fix what ain't broke, stick with what you know, and all them clichés--but I was able to put the Lensbaby through its paces later that day and figure out exactly what it could and couldn't do.

I take a not-insubstantial amount of pride in knowing what all of the buttons on my camera do but it was still a lot of fun to actually make those adjustments, as for the most part the D90 is smarter than I am when it comes to shooting awesome. However, with a Lensbaby, because you're on full-manual, it becomes a matter of trial and error as you point, adjust, click, look, and adjust any one of the gazillion settings available to turn your picture into something not-eyeball-gouging-ugly.


My conclusion about the Lensbaby is that it's a fun piece of kit to have, but probably not something that I'd use on a regular basis. My 50 mm macro can get those awesome narrow-range-of-focus pics with much less trouble, but it doesn't do that awesome blur. But then again, I don't necessarily want a lot of blur. Furthermore, because it's not an actual lens, you need to adjust your focal length by actually moving the camera. It is unquestionably a ton of fun to play with, though, and you do make awesome pictures.

Virtue, explained

The quick 'n dirty translation of the Dutch word zuinig is "frugal". As with many Dutch words, though, the quick 'n dirty version is incomplete. There is, in addition to the "maximizing value" component of zuinigheid, an element of virtuousness that the word "frugality" doesn't quite cover. In the US, you can still get slammed for being frugal, as it has the connotation of being cheap. In the Netherlands, you will only get nods of approval for being zuinig.

This extra dimension explains, I think, the popularity of the Saturday markt (in all cities except, I am told, Maastricht). There are market days throughout the week--in Nijmegen, for instance, you have the fabric and produce markt on Mondays, and the secondhand markt on Wednesdays. But the Saturday markt is where all of the action is--it's when all of the vendors and their kramen line the main shopping streets, when the booksellers set up shop outside the library, when anybody with any bit of Dutch in their blood crowds onto the 10 a.m. bus or busts out their fietskar in the hopes of landing good deals.

Anybody can be thrifty by reading the flyers at the supermarket and shopping accordingly, but it takes serious dedication and price-matching to find the best deals at the Saturday markt. Not to mention that many places are cash-only, so you can't say, "What the hell," and let yourself overdraw. There are some things you can help yourself with, and others that you can't--generally speaking the rule is "arm's length", but the Dutch have very long arms. During the busiest times, you might have to wait up to 15-20 minutes before you can pay, and then only after you've shoved a little old lady out of the way. You don't have carts you can load up, unless you have a shopper (which nobody under the age of 85 uses, lest they seem old), so you have to carry an increasingly heavy bag with you. Price-wise, it helps to know what other sales are going on, because while there are a few great items, others only seem that way until you do the math.

There is, as far as I can tell, only one major benefit for going produce-hunting at the markt, and that is the eco-stands. Fresh herbs that are genuinely fresh, and amazing mushrooms and cheeses--will still cost you an arm and a leg, but the scent of fresh basil following you around for the rest of the day is obnoxiously decadent, screaming, "Hey, I'm food snob!"

By the time you make it home from the markt, in other words, you'll feel like you've done something--that goes double if you've managed to hold a few brief conversations in Dutch with the vendors. Yeah, the euro you might have saved probably doesn't cover the cost of parking. But it's the thought that counts.

Culture Shock redux

I'd hazard a guess that most people get over their culture shock within, well, a time period shorter than four years. You either do, or you don't, and if you don't, then you don't stay here for very long. But every now and then, something comes along that shocks you back into your "I just got off the plane" state.

We're in the market for a fietskar, the better to haul Noodle to the vet with. The Kitty Tower of Terror was patently unsafe and precarious--not to mention that it meant walking to the vet's, and while it's not a too-bad walk, it gets a lot worse when you're hauling three yowling kitties along for the ride. Especially when a bus comes careening down the road.

It's not just cats, though. We're stuck, for instance, paying for kitty litter six liters (one box) at a time, in a large part because the sacks of litter are simply too precarious to move by bike. We'd also like to start up again with the plants in the apartment--mostly garden herbs, because they're not only delicious and smell good, but also because the cats can eat them with impunity. And that takes potting soil, and lots of it.

There were two aspects of the hunt for a fietskar that made me feel like a newbie. The first is that they are surprisingly difficult to find. I visited three bike shops in town before I was able to extract directions to a little store called "Hans Janssens" which carried them. The second is, when I got there and saw the prices, HO-LY F*CK but the buggers are expensive. I'm used to seeing four-digit bike prices, but €300 for a box with wheels? Makes me think I might just make my own. Or, at the very least, demand installation.