Posted by Ellen | Posted in My life in the USA | Posted on 15-03-2010
Tags: Dutch language, High Altitude, hiking, Loft, Nice weekend, plants, poking plants, Wii bowling
It is Sunday evening, feeling a bit sad. We had such a nice weekend. The only trouble about nice weekends is that it goes way too quickly! Saturday was a relaxing day. We both worked a lot on the computer. Dan had to review some taxes of previous years, and I was replying on so many nice messages on Facebook. It is great to see your current and old friends there! Cara, I really liked it! 
Joy asked, in referring to the picture of the loft area, what we have there. It is our office. It is a nice open space where we have ours desks, and sit side by side, doing our “thing” on the computer. Because it is open, we still feel connected with the downstairs area.
In the afternoon, I inventoried our plants and what we need to buy. We need a lot of soil, and I want to expand the garden section. I still am not sure if I want tomatoes again. They are so difficult to maintain. I need new bell pepper plants, and I want to grow other vegetables. The herbs are in that section also, but I need to plant them in pots, so I heard. Our orange tree has little blossoms. That means we will have oranges by the end of this year again! The flower plants that we have need to be trimmed, but they look so beautiful. Here are some pictures of what is blooming.
In the evening, Dan and I bowled on the Wii. Ryan was supposed to play with us, but he was online playing his games, and said he could not leave his mission in the game. That resulted in Dan and I playing Ryan’s turns. And, it ended that Ryan won! Dan and I played two more games, which Dan won both. I still have the Pro status, but I cannot go much lower now. After this, we finally watched the movie “The boys from Brasil”. The movie was great. Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier performed so well, and a very young Steve Guttenberg was in it too. It was fun to see that there was a Dutch actor in it, and the movie was also set in Vienna. I have been there a long time ago with my sister Lotty. I still recognized a lot. After the movie, we all went to bed, it was late, and the clock would go an hour forward, so 1 hour less sleep.
This morning, we did not feel at all we could sleep an hour less. We just slept an hour longer!! That was nice! We were planning to go hiking today, but it looked, we were not able to go, because it was very windy outside, and we had a lot to do for Ruysdeal Design. But, around 2.30 PM, we decided to go. We went to the Santa Monica Mountains at Point Mugu. The moment we set one foot on the trail, I had a bad feeling about this hike. The scenery and the weather was great, but the hike was so steep. The altitude was 720 feet! And on top of that, the paths were so narrow and full of rocks, that made it climb even more difficult. There were a lot of cactus plants, and some do not look like they are very sharp, like this one on the left. This plant was all over the place, and it was very, very sharp! We were
also Geo-caching, and when we went to look under plants for the cache, we were constantly poked by these plants. The leaves are like needles. All three of us got stung several times badly. We had 3 caches to find, but we only find one, by me At one point, we decided to go back. Down hill was even more difficult than up hill. My toes were pushing against the front of my boots, that wasn’t very nice to walk. I do not think I will like to walk this trail again.
Back at home, I made dinner and dessert (tapioca pudding, so lekker ).
At Face book today, I discovered at the Dutch page,http://www.facebook.com/learn.dutch?ref=mf, the following info, bold, I never knew. I think, that a lot of Dutch people did not know this either. So, here it is:
“The Dutch language (sometimes called Netherlandic) is the official language of the Netherlands. The name Dutch comes from the word Dietsc, or Duutsc, meaning “language of the people,” which is what it was called in the Middle Ages. In the Netherlands the language is also called Hollands, a reminder that the language evolved from the dialect of the old province of Holland. Dutch is spoken by the 15 million people living in the Netherlands and was made the official language of the northern part of Belgium in the late 1930s. Dutch is related to Afrikaans.”
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