"If You Give a Mouse a Muffin"

You know the saying, "If You Give a Mouse a Muffin"..........then he won't eat the mouse poison in the box on the floor.

Erin made muffins yesterday, but the tupperware we usually put the leftover muffins in was being used, so she resorted to putting the muffins in a plastic ziploc bag. Unfortunately she left the bag of muffins on the counter all night instead of putting them in the refrigerator. This morning we discovered a tiny hole at the end of the bag and part of a muffin had been swiped in the night.

The ironic part of this story is that we were just discussing the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" and "If You Give a Mouse a Muffin" books just last night. (We were talking about this on a completely unrelated matter to our mouse problem - something about Erin not ever reading "good" children's books when she was little and John meeting the author of the "If You Give a Mouse..." books at his school library or something.) Anyway, the mouse must have overheard our conversation and decided muffins did sound good.

All the leftover muffins are now in the trash, and Erin has just finished thoroughly disinfecting the kitchen counters.

It Has Finally Happened

After hearing all the stories about the bad mouse problem in Amsterdam, we finally have our very own mouse problem. Although there is no evidence in the form of droppings or chewed up food containers or chair legs, Erin witnessed the presence of a mouse with her own eyes in the kitchen last night. Of course Erin had to be the one walking into the kitchen to be greeted by a scurrying mouse because John is not actually at the apartment enough to have such an encounter. It's interesting that just the knowledge that a mouse appeared does not have quite the same effect on John (who also is not in the apartment for 15 hours of the day) as the effect on Erin of actually seeing the little critter. Without actually seeing the mouse it is easy enough to forget about the whole thing. Erin still gingerly enters the kitchen, making as much noise as possible at all times. Three traps have been set, but there have been no casualties yet.

In fact, the more Erin thinks about the mouse scurrying along under the kitchen cabinets, the more she thinks the tail on that thing was really long. Maybe what we have is more like a rat than a mouse! How long does one wait to call an exterminator to come put out poison? We have it on good authority that an exterminator will come place poison boxes around the apartment for only €45. Erin has to admit she has not talked to anyone in Amsterdam who has actually caught a mouse in a mouse trap. The poison is seeming better and better, especially since most evenings, when mice are most likely to venture out, Erin is home by herself.

Erin is currently pondering which she hates more: rodents or cockroaches. That's a tough call. For those of you not from the Southern U.S., by cockroaches Erin means the huge 3-inch kind that fly. Maybe rodents win the most-hated battle since cockroaches, at least individually, can be killed more easily, are not as fast, do not consume household items, and don't leave behind evidence of their presence. Uuuggghhh.

On a different note, Erin attended another free lunchtime concert today with Annette and another wife of an Ernst & Young employee who just moved here from Istanbul, Turkey. This week the concert was a piece by Brahms (whom Erin has heard of), played by a clarinet, cello, and piano trio. This might become a weekly event, at least until June.

If anyone has sure-fire ways to get rid of rodents, please let us know.

A Week of Culture and Information

This week Erin seized a couple opportunities to make herself more culturally knowledgeable. The American Women's Club (AWC) gathered Wednesday to hear a free orchestra concert at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and met once again this morning for a free tour of Sotheby's auction house.

Now, Erin didn't actually ever meet up with the AWC on Wednesday but she did manage to hear the free concert. Erin traveled to the Concertgebouw with Annette and ended up getting there a bit earlier than the Club was going to meet. It was pretty cold and windy Wednesday, so Erin decided it would be much more comfortable to wait inside the Concertgebouw rather than stand outside for 15 or 20 minutes waiting for the AWC group to show up. Once inside the building Erin and Annette quickly found themselves trapped in a crowd of wall-to-wall people within just minutes! Since it was almost impossible to escape (and they happened to be very close to the door into the concert hall) they decided to stay put and not venture through the growing mob of people to meet the AWC. After being so cold outside it felt really nice to stand inside next to a window with the sun pouring in...for about 10 minutes. The sun, indoor heating, and probably also the hundreds of people crammed into the lobby soon made for a rather uncomfortably warm wait.

The Concertgebouw offers these free lunchtime concerts every Wednesday from September to June, and apparently the concert hall is packed each week. Erin and Annette got there about an hour prior to the concert and soon after they entered the concert hall all the seats were taken. The Symphony Orchestra played, joined by a pianist, Valentina Igoshina, for approximately 30 minutes. The piece, a piano concerto by Skrjabin, was one of the pieces the orchestra would perform in their evening concert later that day. (Erin's not all that knowledgeable about classical music, so she doesn't know who Skrjabin is, but the music was excellent and the hall is beautiful!)

This morning Erin joined a handful of women for the Sotheby's tour - with coffee and cake of course. Almost every AWC activity, or any gathering in this country for that matter, has to be accompanied by coffee, tea, and cookies or cake. When we eventually return to the U.S. we will probably have a hard time breaking the habit of offering people coffee or tea at all hours of the day and night! One of Sotheby's 40 or 50 auctioneers conducted a brief talk for us telling us all about Sotheby's history and how they do business.

Sotheby's began with its first auction in 1744 in London. For a long time the auction house only sold books, including those owned by Napoleon, Prince Talleyrand, John Wilkes, and the Duke of Buckingham. Only in the last century has the company expanded to include all areas of fine art and furnishings. Even from the beginning, much of what Sotheby's sells is not so much about the object as it is about the history that comes with the object. A Renaissance writing desk on which President Kennedy signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty sold for 10 times what a regular Renaissance writing desk would normally fetch. While Europeans clamor for belongings of royalty, Sotheby's caters to Americans by auctioning off items belonging to actors, actresses, and musicians - American "royalty."

Erin got to see the lots housed in the Sotheby's building currently, all of which will be sold in upcoming auctions. One of the auctions will be for photography, a recently identified type of art that can sell for big bucks. Erin has to say, some of those photos she would not take for free much less shell out €1500 for! The other auction will be of fine jewelry. No one famous is attached in any way to the particular pieces Erin saw today, but there were still some quite pricey items, a diamond plaque brooch, for instance, that is estimated at €20,000 - 25,000! Some of the jewelry was amazingly gorgeous, other pieces quite gaudy. Now Erin can say she's been in Sotheby's, the building she looked at out of the Novotel window for a month after we moved to Amsterdam.

Busy Season in Amsterdam

Yes, accountants have busy season everywhere in the world, in case you were wondering. And this is why our adventures in Europe will be a bit less adventurous for a while, maybe for the next month and a half. Erin might attempt a few adventures and is sure to run into the occasional ironic/funny/terrifying/embarrassing situation in the midst of her daily routines, but John may be working quite a lot, including weekends, for several weeks. So, if you'd really like to keep reading, we'll fill you in on our quite unexciting but very relaxing weekend.

Instead of traveling this past weekend, we decided to enjoy what may be our last work-free weekend together for a while. That and John needed to take some suits in to be altered so he seized the moment. John's trip to the tailor was quite successful: the tailor spoke English, and, in fact, the customers before and after John were both English-speaking; the cost turned out to be reasonable; and John found what has to be the absolute cheapest place in Amsterdam to park other than the Ernst & Young office, which is free. He paid only €0.10/hour!

The rest of our weekend was probably rather unexciting: movies, Yahtzee, a walk around town in the snow, reading, sleeping. We did run into our neighbor while we were out and found out how we might get someone to clean our windows. Since we live on the second floor, third floor for Americans, there is no way for us to clean the outside of our windows ourselves. Every once in a while someone comes by and seems to be washing everyone else's windows using an adjustable electric ladder/cart thing. (Our neighbor doesn't know the word for it either, in English or Dutch!) Our neighbor explained that some previous renters apparently never paid the window-washer, so he stopped washing the second floor's windows or ringing the bell to ask if we want our windows cleaned. She told us she would tell him we were new renters next time she sees him and ask him to clean our windows. The mystery of the window-washer who skips our apartment has been solved!

Everywhere you go in Amsterdam shops are selling flower bulbs: tulips, hyacinth, daffodils, narcissus. On our way to church Sunday we noticed little tulip and daffodil plants poking up out of the ground all over the place. Erin decided our apartment could use some hyacinth bulbs (those are the kind that smell really good) so as we wait for spring weather we're also waiting for the bulbs to start blooming.