Meanwhile, the preparations continue. I now have added to the growing pile of stuff in the living room a new (to me) brand of chocolate called Plantations. It's from Ecuador and is made from a varietal called "Arriba" that is supposedly "the only cocoa varietal with a perfumed floral scent before roasting the cocoa bean", etc, etc. In addition to select stores catering to flush gourmets such as San Francisco's 24th Street Cheese Store, it can be found at eChocolates, which also carries El Rey and and other fine brands.

I've also stacked up a selection of dried fruit: two varieties of pluots, Bing and Rainier cherries, Moyer plums, slab apricots, and "regular" apricots, all from Bella Viva except the last, which I got from Johann Smit since I thought it would be fun to take fruit grown by a Hollander to Rina.

Note: I don't want to tell CUESA their business, but that pic they are displaying is not of Johann and his parents as the text suggests but rather of Johann and his children.

Speaking of Rina, she called this morning, and it's settled. I leave here on the 25th, arrive the 26th, have the 27th to recover a bit and do some shopping, and on the 28th, we do our first dinner. It'll be for Otto and Rafaël and hopefully Amanda, and I'll use the fresh tomatillos and pasilla chiles I'll be taking to pureé with local garlic, fresh coriander, and fresh green onion for Chile Verde.

Queen's Day is on the 29th this year since the 30th falls on a Sunday. Whew. Am I cutting this close or what? And oh, my friends Andrew and Frank arrive on the 29th for a week. Their hotel is just 50 meters or so from the Centraal Station, which is a good thing since on Queen's Day all the streets are blocked and there's no taxi service from the airport. And speaking of aha! moments, I gave Rina one when she extracted from me that my friends were staying at The Black Tulip.

Other preparations involve frantically trying to get my luscious new HP ready to take to Amsterdam, stuff like loading it with various utilities, including Skype and Picasa and my HTML editor as well as the OED and all the NoeHill files and such. All has gone swimmingly except for the Dutch dictionaries, which are playing hard-to-load. Next, I need to make sure I can connect to dial-up and DSL when I'm away from home. Here, I just use the wireless network Al set up for me several years ago.

I'm also frantically trying to get read all the Dutch literature I bought last year and mostly let sit on the shelf. Last night I finished reading Peter Verhelst's Tonguecat (Tongkat). In general, I found it a bit tedious even though parts of it were marvellous. Cyrus Frisch had told me that he thinks Verhelst is the finest current novelist in the Dutch language, but I have to admit that I like Cees Nooteboom and Marcel Möring and even, gasp, Harry Mulisch better. I'm now reading Nooteboom's All Soul's Eve (Allerzielen) and just loving it because it's set in Berlin and is just full of comparisons of the Dutch and the Germans as well as acute observations on Dutch and German social conventions.

Speaking of which, it's interesting to me that I have in some cases come to deeper understandings of Dutch culture without being consciously aware of how I reached the understandings. For example, in my first Dutch travelog (Dutch in Three Weeks) I speculated as to why it was that the Dutch seemed to so routinely leave their curtains open, even at night when it was as if they were sitting there on a brightly lit stage. Well, I don't know when, but at some point since then I have learned that all my speculations were wrong and that the reason the Dutch traditionally left their curtains open was to show the world (or actually, the neighbors) that they had nothing to hide and were living lives of utmost propriety...especially when they actually weren't.

Kinda reminds me of those Americans who loudly proclaim that they want Bush to eavesdrop on their phone conversations and read their email. If I were running the IRS, those would be the first people I'd want to audit. However, under the current administration, alas, the IRS has shifted the focus of its investigations to the poor since it would not do to risk annoying contributors to the Party. OK, I'm just speculating about the reason, but the shift of focus is a fact.

And finally, for a pic, how about one from my notorious Wires of San Francisco series. I mean, taking pics with all those wires in 'em is a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it since normal people devote a lot of energy into finding angles without wires for their pics, and I have friends on two continents who remove with cunning software wires they can't avoid.

Hmmmmm. That gives me an idea. If I learned how to use that software, I betcha I could add wires.