News roundup

Trojan - The news from over the weekend of the demolition of the Trojan nuclear power plant's cooling tower not only showed up on the main page of CNN's website as the most watched video for today, but it was a short news item on the NOS Journaal tonight. Must have been a slow news day. At least the presenter pronounced Oregon correctly, which is more than you can say of presenters from the Eastern US.

More Oregon - I've been meaning to rant about this for awhile: bloody Nike and their shirts that have "OREGON" splashed across the front with a pine tree or something. Because I've seen a lot of people in these shirts here and it's so disconcerting to see all these Dutch people wearing my state's name on their chest when they likely have no clue what it's referring to. There was even some former French footballer wearing one on a BBC show the other night. Ok, maybe it's a bit overboard to be peeved about it, but it is at least really weird.

Where are the coconuts? - Continuing with weird things: for weeks now, both grocery stores we shop at have not had any Conimex coconut milk. Is there a shortage of coconuts? A break in the line of supply to Conimex? It means that we haven't been able to make this Thai chicken that has become a usual for us and I'm starting to miss it.

Ant update - Sadly, the first ant of this bunch of ants has died (not counting the one that didn't survive the transfer to the Antworks box). It's way down in the lowest tunnel though, so we have no way of getting it out of there and these ants don't seem to be bothered about carrying it up to the surface like they're supposed to. So it's just trapped in there. At first a couple of the other ants did pass by the dead (actually, at the time, dying) ant and quickly moved on and now they just seem to avoid that bit of tunnel completely. Not that they don't have enough tunnels... They're still digging and have a whole complicated mess of tunnels and chambers now near the top.

Holidays - Just like that, *boom, boom,* we have booked flights for two different holidays. First up, we're going in July to see a cousin of mine who has recently moved to a place near San Sebastian in Spain. He lived in Spain for ages and he has a Spanish wife, but then they were in the US for awhile and he was teaching Spanish at a college near where I went to college. I haven't seen them since their daughter was a baby, and now she's 6. We were just going to go for about 5 days, but for a couple of reasons we extended the trip to a week and we will see Madrid for a couple of days because we've never been there. One reason for the change was that we have to go through Madrid anyway since there are no direct flights to San Sebastian, so we may as well stop and see the city. The other reason is that we're going the first week of July, at the end of which is the World Cup final, and at first we planned to come back the same day as the final, but the flight didn't get in til 9:30 at night, so we would have missed it. We then moved the dates back one day and due to this and that thought we may as well go for a week.

The other trip is going to the US this fall, the dates of which revolve around a very good college friend of mine (and O's) getting married in early October. We fly first to Portland and are there for about a week and then we'll be road tripping down to San Francisco, taking about 3 days to see the sights, and then spend a week in SF. I'm really looking forward to that, I mean, we had this idea pretty much as soon as we got home from our trip to the US last year. I've been to SF once, 10 years ago (!!!) during my first college spring break and we drove down from Salem, but we didn't take time to see any sights on the way really, plus what was probably one of the prettiest parts of the trip, driving through forest in Northern California, we did at night. So I want to see the forests and the coast and maybe one of those drive-through trees from the 50s and the Oregon Vortex and enjoy the freedom of a car and stay in whatever cheap motel we can find in whatever town we decide to stop in for the night.