Ellen In Amerika!"MY EMIGRATION TO AMERICA AND MY ADJUSTMENT TO LIFE IN CALIFORNIA SINCE SEPTEMBER 2008"

Times flies. It is amazing. Yesterday, 2 1/2 years ago, it was our wedding day. In some ways it feels like yesterday, and in other ways it feels so much longer we’re married.  And, already I have lived in this country for more than 1 1/2 years. So much has happened to me these last 2 1/2 years. And the most amazing part is that I feel at home here. That was my biggest fear. I knew some things would be very difficult, like leaving my home country and my roots. Leaving my children, family and friends behind. I knew that would give me heartache and sorrow. I also knew I would be with the most wonderful man, so that was only positive and exciting. So these parts I was not afraid of, because it was what I knew and expected. But finding my way in this country, this city, that was scary. What if  I did not like it here. What if the culture difference would be too big? In the plane to the USA, I thought that over a lot. And I just thought, do your best Ellen,  fit in, stay positive, even when it will be hard sometimes. And you know what; it wasn’t hard. After a few weeks of excitement of finally being here and feeling like every newlywed would feel, I was seeing everything through rose-colored glasses, and I started to feel bit by bit at home. Making our home a home. Working hard on that. And now, 1 1/2 years later,  it feels as if I belong here. It is different here than living in the Netherlands, that is absolutely true, but it is as nice as it is different. I love Holland to pieces, but this country, with the people who live here, the beautiful nature, the nice weather, and above all, being with Dan, makes it great to be here.

Yesterday wasn’t much to tell. I worked in the house, and my headache was still pretty severe, so I did not spend that much time at the PC. In the morning, I opened my emails, and there were some emails from my friend Jeanette, who I am reconnected with again after many years. She had sent me some pictures of her family in France. It was great to see she hasn’t changed that much after all these years.

Today, I worked at the hospital, and it was pretty intense. It was very busy, and they needed me to work on the phone, and I was a bit flustered. I know so little about the hospital, but it did feel good to be more involved with it. You learn so much more by doing it than just sitting next to a colleague and being told how things work.

After work, I biked home, and around 7.00 pm Dan came home. After dinner we went to the gym. I had a great workout again on the crosstrainer, watching a part of American Idol. Before I knew, I had trained 500 calories! After that, we did some stomach exercises and some weights. It is now already 11.00 PM, so we are going to bed pretty soon. I am tried!

Have a great day you all!

This weekend was really relaxing. We haven’t been away that much other than going to do some groceries. Saturday I went to our local shopping mall and bought more plants. We now will have more bell peppers and egg plants in about 2 1/2 months, and I bought cilantro (Mexican parsley). Today I planted it and also finished the rest of the other garden section. The garden looks more maintained now. And what is nice too, Spring officially started today!
This whole weekend I have that bad headache again. The air is so dry again, my sinus is blocking up on me, and no painkiller really helps. We already turned the humidifier on, and that most times helps, but not today. It can easily go into a migraine now, so I told the other volunteer at the hospital that I will not come in tomorrow. Now they still have time to find another volunteer to do my shift. Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll have to work and be trained again.

Yesterday evening, I tried to find my old friend Jeanette from France, on Facebook. She wasn’t there, but I found her daughter Annabelle. I left her a message and asked her to let her mom know that I am looking for her. This morning there was already a message from Jeanette with her phone number! I called her up, and we talked for a long time. It was great to hear her voice again. We haven’t talked for so many years. Jeanette, my sister Lotty and I were always together. We went out dancing, shopping, and the three of us even went to Nice on a vacation. We had a great time there. We met a lot of French guys, and one of them became Jeanette’s husband. So she lives already for 30 years in France. She has 2 beautiful children and is totally integrated in the French way of life. We hope one day we will be at the same time in the Netherlands, so we can meet again! Joy, you see, you are so right!

After this wonderful talk, we all went out to do some shopping and turned in books at the Library. Back home again, I called Thomas at his work phone, and we had a great talk. It is so nice to hear him talking and share this part of my life with him as he shares his life with me.

Lotty had sent me an email this morning my time and said that she and her husband Hans, and a friend have gone to a 40ties party in the Melkweg, in Amsterdam. There was soul/dance music from the eighties, and they danced until 3.00 AM! They had a marvelous time and they felt broken when they came home! I wished so much I could have been there too. I love dancing and soul/dance music is my kind of music!

Later today, I went to work into the backyard and after that, I made Kay’s fish pie for dinner. It is really nice, but it is a lot of work. Dan had made us a chocolate mouse dessert, which tasted so good. After dinner Dan called his dad and we talked for a while.

This evening I found out that this weekend, Sven Kramer, our Dutch ice speed skater, won the World Championship All round Ice Skating for the 4th time in a row. This is the first time ever, A speed skater accomplished this. That is nice for him, because he was disqualified on the 10 kilometer at the Olympics this year.

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As I said, we had a nice, relaxing weekend. I hope this week will be great for everybody!

Today Wessel is having his birthday! 30 years. Happy Birthday, Wes! He has been my colleague, and for a period of time, my team leader at ABN AMRO/Facility department back in the Netherlands.  He has the same looks and now and then also the same behavior as my youngest son Thomas. That was so funny sometimes, because I sometimes treated him as if he was my son. He is a huge Ajax fan, (the soccer team of Amsterdam), and we often had good talks. Also, he had done something very courageous; he had saved a lot of money and he quit his job to go to Southeast Asia and travel for 8 months! It was in the same period I left the Netherlands. We just got in contact this week again through Facebook.

This morning, I slept in! That was so good. Last night I ate some pistachio pudding, and I think I had a slight allergic reaction to the nut flavor, because my throat was swollen, and I coughed the whole night. So this morning, I was so glad I did not have to go to work.

In the late morning, I started to replant lots of plants from the garden section into pots, and then I planted vegetable seeds in the garden section. It was of course much more work than I anticipated. I had to plow up the soil first and mix it with some fertilizer. Then I had to to replant the herbs so that they have more space to grow. I then made seed paths and planted green beans, carrots, broccoli and lettuce. I marked the spots, so I know I cannot walk there. I also planted a new yellow bell pepper plant. I just found out that the bell pepper plant and the chili pepper plant are one year plants. I still have two  bell pepper plants and one chili pepper plant in the garden section. I suppose I have to throw them away. They have given me lots of vegetables. Around 3.00 PM,  I stopped. I cleared all garden tools away and took a shower. My back is aching, but it does not feel bad, it actually feels as if I’ve done something physical :-) But I just discovered I do have a bad sunburn on my lower back. I never learn! I did put sunblock on my exposed skin, but because I have been bending to plant, my t-shirt went up a bit, and now there is a big red stripe on the small of my back. It doesn’t hurt that much, it is only very warm and red This will blister and peel big time!

As I mentioned yesterday, we watched Flash Forward. Half way through I fell asleep. It was extremely thrilling, but I was so tired. So tonight, when Dan picked up Ryan, I watched the part I missed, and I am now updated again. It is a real good series. Not sure if it is on the Dutch TV also. This is about the series is about:

FlashForward is an American science-fiction television series. A mysterious event causes nearly everyone on the planet to simultaneously lose consciousness for 137 seconds, during which people see what appear to be visions of their lives approximately six months in the future—a global “flashforward”. A team of Los Angeles FBI agents, led by Stanford Wedeck (Vance) and spearheaded by Mark Benford (Fiennes) and his partner Demetri Noh (Cho), begin the process of determining what happened, why, and whether it will happen again. Benford contributes a unique perspective on the investigation; in his flashforward, he saw the results of six months of investigation that he had done on the flashforward event, and he and his team use those clues to recreate the investigation.

The team investigates a number of events related to the flashforward, including “Suspect Zero”, who did not lose consciousness during the event, the sinister “D. Gibbons”, and a similar mass loss of consciousness in Somalia in 1991. Meanwhile, personal revelations contained within the flashforwards occupy the personal lives of the principal characters. Mark Benford sees his alcoholism relapsing, his wife sees herself with another man, Demetri Noh sees nothing which could mean he will not live to see the day of events everyone else has witnessed. Other characters grapple with similarly unexpected or surprising revelations in their flashforwards.

Oh, I almost forgot. Today, I got my first paycheck since I am in the USA! It feels special, I can tell you that!

My question of the day is: What is your favorite show/series these days?

First of all, the weather here is amazing. Yesterday it was 87F, 30,5C !! It was a bit warm inside the house, that made doing chores a bit hard, but I can take that, Today it was 78F, 25,5C. So, that’s it for now, to make my family and friends in Holland and in the colder parts of the USA jealous Sorry!!!

Yesterday evening I had a shift of 4 hours training at the job. It went pretty well. I think it is good to do, though I still need to learn so much about everything that goes on in the hospital. Dan picked me up after work, and when we came home, we watched a recorded episode of Lost.

This morning, I worked at the infodesk with Esther again. I am not sure what was going on. I mean, maybe there is something in the air, but the people were so unnecessarily rude. If visitors want to visit a patient, we need to know the room number and give them a paper bracelet with that room number on it, and we register that in our files. When visitors leave, we get the bracelets back, and we erase the room numbers from the files. This system is developed for the flu season. We now keep track of how many visitors per patient are in the hospital. Only 2/patient are permitted. Without a bracelet, it is not permitted to be in the area where the patients’ rooms are. It is not a perfect system, but it pretty much works. I haven’t met many visitors who have had trouble with this system, until today. So many men and women were acting silly, another word  cannot describe this behavior. One example: A woman passes our info desk, and I kindly asked her to check in at the front of our round reception desk. She looked at me as if I had asked her for money. Then she refused. I tried overly kind to persuade her to do so, and she did but with such an arrogant attitude, you would not believe. I asked her the room number she wanted to visit. She asked: Why? I thought, I did not understand her, and asked her what she meant by “why”? She literally rolled her eyes, and told finally me the number. She was just acting as a terrible 2 year old. What also happened was that people just walked by even though there is a sign with “STOP” / “PARA” and an explanation why they have to stop. Normally, you just say “Hello, how can I help you”. But when it is very busy, some people just pass by, thinking the stop sign is not meant for them. And again, most visitors, do not mind to go back in line, but some…… grrrrrrrrrrr Anyway, I still had a good time there. One of the volunteers of the next shift was sick, so I helped out by staying 3 hours longer. It did not feel that long, because time went so fast. I did not have had my lunch at work, so when I went on my bike home, I ate my sandwich with cheese (very Dutch to bring your sandwiches to work)

Ryan came home after school, and we talked for a while about his English class. It is a miracle when a child has an excellent teacher. Ryan was never interested in reading books, but now this teacher knows how to make the students interested and even enthusiastic about reading good books.

For dinner we had fettuccine Alfredo with tuna and broccoli for dinner. After dinner we went to Ace to get some soil and seeds for the back yard. I still had a reward card with 5 Dollars rebate from this store, so the receipt was low.

Tonight the series Flash Forward continues. It has been months since it was on TV, and Dan and I are big fans of this series.