SO, WHAT'S BEEN GOING ON with me? Lots and nothing, I'm sure. Did some traveling. Went to Amsterdam to attend the wedding of a friend (who had an account here but hasn't been seen for a long time) in early May. Ceremony was lovely (it was here) and we stayed a few days afterwards because, well, we'd come all the way (and only a few days because I was laboring under impending work deadline). Was a nice break nonetheless, and it was beautiful weather the whole time we were there. The Rijksmuseum thoughtfully concentrated all their highlights into a manageable area that we could see in one day (the rest was under construction.) We also took in the Museum of Bags and Purses, on the recommendation of one of the expat couples we were seated next to at the wedding reception. Unable to find it in any guidebook, we thought they might have been pulling our leg, but the canal tour passed it, giving us the challenge to find our way back to it that afternoon. We had tea in their cafe, overlooking the courtyard out back, just as they were closing.

One of the evenings, D and I had what we both thought could have been the best meal of our lives.

Also, money is expensive in Europe. What gives?

THE WEEK BEFORE WE LEFT, we had some visitors from Bermuda who, despite their shoebox of a hotel room, were greatly pleased to learn the true meaning of "broadband" and the joys of hulu.com. We introduced them to tapas and fondue in a single day (but not the same meal). I figure you're always on the greener side of someone's fence.

D HAS BECOME A BIT of a coffee snob. His company has this habit of acquiring smaller companies, incorporating all their resources (such as employees and coffee-making equipment), then laying off the people and keeping the coffee machines, some of which are quite sophisticated. He developed a taste for unfiltered coffee with crema, and after a few days in Amsterdam drinking coffee in the same style, we invested in one of these fancy automatic espresso machines.

It's helped us work through a considerable backlog of our monthly pound of coffee from Grounds for Change -- we don't have to both agree that we want coffee before we make a pot. Besides, I'm having far too much fun steaming milk. Next, we'll have to get cute little demitasse cups and some of those big latte mugs.

Meanwhile, I discovered the best tea ever found in a tea bag, at my local supermarket. It's been a good time for hot drinks in our house.

We are however, as we used to say in high school, so fucking bourgeois.

NEPHEWS HAD BIRTHDAYS. They're now 5 and 3, and damn cute. The elder had been inviting people to his party for months. When the event finally came around, when we asked whether he wanted a lot of toys for his birthday, he said, "No, I already have a lot of toys. Yeah. So I would say, 'No to toys.'"

Actually, while I'm on the subject of cute kid stories, I have one leftover from my sister's birthday back in February. We had piled into the van to do go to a restaurant, Older Nephew on the left and Younger on the right. As we passed a KFC or some clone on the right, Younger Nephew announced, "I see chickens!" Older asserted that he could see them too, but Younger insisted that since it was on his side of the van, they were his chickens.

I prodded Older Nephew from my seat behind them and said, "But that's OK, you'll see the chickens on the way back, right?"

Older got the idea and said "Yeah -- I'll see the chickens and then you'll see ..." He cast about out his window for something, finally spotting a worndown streetlight, "... this old lamp."

I HAVE ALSO BEEN TRYING to read more on paper and less from computer screens lately (sorry, Husi, I still love you). I went through a couple of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books, which had me thinking about trying to rescue some of my scribbles from the Well of Lost Plots. My friend who just got married was the one who originally pointed me to Fforde, so it seemed like fitting airplane reading for the trip.

After that I read The Brief History of the Dead, which I'd bought ages ago on toxicfur's recommendation and only just got to rescuing from the To-Be-Read pile. Brockmeier is the kind of writer who almost makes me want to give up on the whole fiction thing with nearly every other sentence he writes. But, I think I'm too much in love with the potential to work magic with words, even if I never quite arrive there.

SPEAKING OF WORDS, and arranging them in a certain order for a particular purpose, the work deadline whose gravitational pull bent my world for a few months has finally passed. Quoth the dev manager on the project mid-death march, "I've been promised that this kind of thing will never happen again ... at least, not with any team I am on." So say we all.

So, now I get to think about all the other projects I've been putting off (both work-related and otherwise). I have a feeling there are quite a few of them ...