Finally responding to some suggestions (part 1)

Remember last month when I bribed you with candy asked you what you'd like me to blog about? I have been working on going through them at last!

Amy has recently discovered she has Dutch ancestry and likes to read the posts about holidays and Dutch customs.

From the end of May until December there aren't really any Dutch holidays so my postings about them might be a little sparse until we're in the "thick of the season" again! In the meantime A Touch of Dutch has a great many posts about feestdagen (holidays).

Erika would like to know more about living in The Netherlands. The pluses and minuses of living in another country. She'd also like to know how the cooking is different.

I would say that the biggest minus is the distance between my family and I. Another is the language barrier (although, I'm working on that). On the other hand, I get to be with my fantastic husband and see a part of the world that I probably wouldn't otherwise have been able to explore.

As for the cooking differences, where do I start? I don't have a "real" oven for starters. We have a microwave/convection oven combo unit. It works for us, but it's not very big. No cooking big turkeys in this baby! Another thing is the availability of ingredients. You would think that baking soda would be something you could pick up just about anywhere, but it's not stocked in normal grocery stores! I go to the Asian market for that, otherwise I'd be buying it from the drugstore (it can be used as an antacid afterall) at a rather steep price. Buying in bulk is a rather foreign concept. The bags of flour I buy are 1kg (2.2 lbs), which seems rather tiny to me! Another big thing is converting between different sets of measures. I will say it does make more sense to measure ingredients by weight, but I have 3 sets of US measuring cups that I use on a pretty regular basis. I think I'll add to this in a separate post since I could go on and on!

litchicky wants me to post more of my jewelry.

I guess I better get busy making some, hadn't I?

Noodle likes to hear about our excursions, my projects, and thinks I have been neglecting to update on what mischevious things Mr Jummy has been up to.

She has a point there, doesn't she? I haven't written much about Mr Jummy since he tried replacing me as Martijn's Nintendo parter. I think next time we go somewhere, he'll be tagging along! Maybe he'll even help me stuff some sock monkeys.

ikkinlala enjoys the recipe posts and the tutorial posts.

I really need to work on these a little. It gets so dreary and grey here that it's hard to make nice picture tutorials with no light! We have been having a few days of sun here and there though, so I should make the best of them!

I have lots more suggestions to go through, so watch for a couple more posts like this in the next couple of weeks!

For no other reason besides "I can," I am going to show you this picture of my father-in-laws birthday present from a couple weeks ago.

Het Blauwe Schaap

I just have no words to describe this. Do you?