Now with pictures!

This morning I told myself, no more granola. I’ve wreaked too much havoc on my digestive system. Too many oats have ravaged my innards. No more! At least for today.

So what shall it be? Shall I choose from our multitude of healthy, albeit bland breakfast choices? Or shall I go for something involving impressive levels of fat and sugar?

I don’t know what came over me this morning. Wait, yes I do. Scott stayed home today for a doctor’s appointment, so he drove Henry to school. It was 9 a.m., Henry was gone, and I was still in my pajamas. This confluence of events sent me straight into vacation mode.

Besides, yesterday was the most depressing day of the year. Despite that fact, I was feeling rather chipper. So I figured today I should celebrate, because it only gets better from here, and if it gets better than "rather chipper," I'm in for a good year.

Here’s one of the things I love most about our house: it’s sunny. Our apartment was so dark, we had to turn all the lights on each morning. And french toast tastes better in a sunny dining room. That’s another thing: a dining room! I have a dining room!

I was so excited about the french toast that I forgot to fully cook it. Mmm, sopping brioche. (That’s right, brioche. I could have used the hearty multigrain bread. But hearty multigrain bread is for chumps.)

I’m not giving up on you yet, french toast.

See? You turned out delicious! And then I ate you.

Charlie got to lick the plate. That’s like Christmas times ten for him.

After breakfast, I waddled up to my office. Otherwise known as a sunroom. I have given up the quad workout of the slanty room. Now whenever I’m working, I get a tan. And when I look up, I see these:

My sister-in-law made these for me. I saw her crane mobile, and asked where she bought it. She laughed at me. I made one or two of them, under her tutelage. They’re the misshapen cousins of the others. Poor, twisted little freak cranes.

Every day, I look up at the cranes and pretend to work. It’s completely quiet, except for the occasional bird twitter or the driving-school cars who circle our neighborhood, always driving more slowly than I thought possible for cars to drive. Charlie basks in the sun next to me. Later we’ll go for a long walk; Charlie will lurch ahead, failing to murder a single squirrel, while I listen to The Sound of Young America podcast and try not to laugh out loud. Inevitably one of our newfound friends will drive by and stop his or her car (okay, minivan) to ask why I’m laughing out loud.

Why did I have a problem with this place, again? I can't quite recall. Maybe it's from that stroke I had, shortly after breakfast.

Craving for a tan.

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Strangely enough, I am also craving for a tan, or better yet, a sunburn, and the rise in body temperature that would accompany it. It is cold here, nipple-invertingly cold; I'm no stranger to the cold but with the wind whipping off the canals HOLY CRAP it's cold.

My first-day impressions, clouded as they were by a thick haze of sleep deprivation, were recorded in an email to my husband:

"Getting to the train? And then the tram? From the airport? Not an easy experience for someone who probably right now can't tie her own shoes. There's no way to figure out which tram goes where and you need a special ticket to take the tram and how do you pay for the ticket? No way to know! Everything's in Dutch! We finally figured out that we had to buy the ticket at the bookstore in the train station, where we lamely were all American and like "GIVE US TICKET PLEASE" and they were all "Thank you for not learning a single word of Dutch."

I don't even know how to say thank you.

Then we got to the hotel, which is an amazing place--I may spend the rest of my time here in the bathtub, and if Melissa wants to hang out with me, well, she'll just have to climb in--but they wanted me to fill out forms, and seriously I couldn't do it. If someone had handed me an IQ test right then and there I would have pulled out a brown crayon and scrawled I LIKE NAPS across it. I thought I had lost my passport and proceeded to have a full-scale panic attack, which was nipped in the bud .5 seconds later when I found my passport. Melissa gazed down upon me in pity. "

Then before I could hit "send" I passed out on my keyboard.

If anyone in Amsterdam wants to get drinks with us, email me. Melissa needs company in her quest to drink more than a single beer, and I'm not up to the task. Yet.

Darth Vader liked Italy the best.

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There are over 1,000 photos, but I have mercifully uploaded only a few of them here. If you want more, you can come to my home and enjoy our five-hour slide show. And we'll even supply gauze and ice for when your eyes begin to bleed!