on Friday the 5th of February 2010, our newest addition was born. Although I was pretty much convinced it would be a girl, it turned out it was another little boy. We didn't expect him until the 10th, and because we come from a long line of procrastinators, we didn't have a name yet.
... is usually my job on the weekends. I like grocery shopping. And I'm good at it, as long as I get an itemized list from home. The list has to be detailed for me to be good at grocery shopping though. A simple item like peanuts does not suffice. It has to be "Planters Cocktail Peanuts, jar, 1lbs.". Luckily, the person that writes the list knows that (she learned that the hard way), so most of the time I come home with the intended items.
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On January 21st, Toyota announced a massive recall of vehicles in the US, Europe and China, because of a sticky accelerator pedal. Although there is a very small amount of cars in which this might actually happen, Toyota has taken its responsibility, and offers to fix 2.3 million cars in the USA alone.
The American public has seen Toyota outselling the big American automakers in the last couple of years, and the media couldn't wait to jump on this news. In the past week, I have not been able to turn on the radio in my (American) car, and hear some kind of report on the dangerous faulty gas pedal in Toyotas. Toyota's stock has taken a little bit of a plunge, although probably not as big as a lot of people would have hoped. Finally, the press has found something bad to report on a Japanese auto maker.
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It is now 5 and a half years ago that I first set foot on American soil, on July 4th 2004. After that things went kind of fast, and since September of 2006 I am officially a resident of the United States. You would think that after all that time I wouldn't really feel like a stranger anymore, and most of the time I don't. But still there are certain things that I will never get used to. For somebody that grew up in The Netherlands, the US can be a strange place to live. And I'm not talking about the fact that there are 12 McDonalds restaurants within a 10 mile radius of my house, or the fact that some stores here are open 24/7, but more about the way people think.
While spending a couple of hours in the garage, trying to get it back in a condition where both cars would fit in it again, I was wondering why this was necessary.
When we first moved in this house, there was so much room we didn't really know what to do with it. I admit, we did put some stuff in the house that made it look a little less roomy, like a desk, furniture, a TV, a bed and some other stuff, but that really made the house more comfortable to live in.
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