As of 1:11 PM (13:11), my e-mail inbox has been completely emptied!  It's not likely to last for long (it's been several months since the last time)... but it's a nice feeling while I've got it.

I'm all about the little triumphs in life. :-) 

We got a new-old CD in the mail this weekend: Ken Medema: "Just Us Kids." It was a gift from my sister for my and Elliot's birthdays -- and man, has it been a good one!

When I was growing up, our family had the album on vinyl (yes, boys and girls -- I am old enough to personally remember records, eight-tracks, cassette-tapes, CDs, and MP3s as the dominant listening formats!). And listening to the songs and stories of Ken Medema (now digitally remastered) again this weekend was returning to a very happy place in my life: remembering our family's plaid couch, the orange-velvety upholstered chair, our dog Muffy, my blue Darth Vader T-shirt... Ah those were the days...

And although the nostalgic effect of the Ken Medema album was immensely enjoyable, in and of itself, I have to say that even if I hadn't grown up listening to that record, it's just a great album! You couldn't exactly say that it's timeless (the mid-70s brass section coming in at parts, like Chicago's "Saturday in the Park," definitely anchors it in a certain era) -- but it's absolutely classic. The music is really cool -- not just some crap for the kids (a presumably undiscerning audience). It's kind of Billy Joel meets Chicago -- but not merely pop-rock; kind of jazzy and bluesy, too. And then beyond the music, Ken Medema's storytelling is absolutely brilliant. He uses the piano as a beautiful complement to the stories (kind of background music, kind of sound effects), and the stories themselves are both entertaining and insightful. I'm not a professional album critic, so I find my descriptions here falling
miserably short -- but all I know is that it's very enjoyable
listening.

My kids, too, have really enjoyed listening to the new album. Already, after just a few listenings, Elliot and Olivia are singing along with the music and listening in gape-mouthed silence to the stories. I love it.

Thanks, Anna for a great birthday present!

"So what'd you do today?"

"Oh, some grocery shopping. A few telephone calls. Nothing too unusual. What about you?"

"Me? Hmmm. Well, um... I, uh -- I bought a house this morning."

* * *

It's true. Surreal. Anti-climactic. Understated. But true.

Today, Marci and I signed the papers for the purchase of our first home in the Netherlands. The process here works a bit differently than it does in America -- so we still have to wait three days (a mandatory "thinking period") and then secure the final financing from the bank before we can officially call ourselves homeowners -- but basically, it's a done deal. We bought a house today.

Lest the story sound any more dramatic than what has really taken place, the house that we bought is the house that we've lived in for the last five years (which is actually just an apartment, in American terminology). The opportunity to buy the place kind of just fell in our laps. Because of our renters' rights (which make it nearly impossible for a landlord to have us removed, against our will) and because of tax incentives for the owner to sell within a six-month period of time since his own acquisition of the space, we were given an offer that we felt we couldn't refuse. So we bought a house today.

It still sounds crazy to say it out right like that -- but it's true. We got the place for about 75% of its market value (which is to say, 75% of the cost that the other apartments directly above our apartment went for -- in exactly the same neighborhood, exactly the same square meterage, and exactly the same time of the year), and believe it or not, our monthly mortgage payments will actually be less than what we've been paying in rent each month (when some tax breaks are factored in). Thus, the decision to go forward with purchasing the house seemed like a no-brainer for us.

Still, it's crazy to realize that we bought a house today.

Sorry for the silence. I haven't been able to do much blogging this week.

It's just been one of those weeks. A preaching week (whenever I preach on Sunday, my work week is inevitably more stressful). The week before an out-of-town trip (which is also an automatic stressor). And, on top of it all, this is the week that we're celebrating the fifth anniversary of our church community here in Amsterdam.

The fifth anniversary thing would normally be prime fodder for blogging -- all kinds of opportunities for sappy sentimentalism and introspective nostalgia -- but instead, I'm being kept busy with practicalities, more than anything. In just about every free moment throughout the last week, I've been exercising some old, atrophied video-production muscle: putting together a slideshow representing the photographic history of Zolder50 (which, by the way, I hope to be able to post here on-line before the end of the weekend). I've also been helping to plan and organize some of the activities for the weekend, as well as taking special time to hang out with some of the out-of-town "alumni" who have come to celebrate with us. It's all good stuff, of course, but it is extra stuff. And added with all of the other stuff from a preaching week and a preparation-for-an-out-of-town-trip week... well, it's just made it one of those weeks.

As icing on the cake, we found out late this afternoon that our application for Elliot's leave-of-absence from school at the end of the year has been denied. Rejected. We jumped through all the hoops they asked us to jump through (flaming hoops, suspended 3.5 meters up in the air). But in the end, we were still rejected. It stings. But we're going to enter the appeal process and maybe seek some legal consultation on how to deal with the fact that the six weeks of the appeal process (following the six weeks of the application process) will push us right into our travel dates.

< sigh >

It's just been one of those weeks.

I'm intrigued by the process of blogging just as much as the actual writing of the blog posts themselves: how people come into contact with a blog, how they interact with the blog, how a blog becomes established and recognized by the internet community -- that kind of stuff. It's really interesting stuff, once you start looking into the statistics and noticing what kind of internet traffic comes your direction.

For whatever reason, the volume of visitors to this blog has tailed off in recent weeks. For a while, basically between the American holiday of Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day, I was getting hundreds of random hits per day: just some scattered search engine query bringing someone in for a quick bounce in-and-out (curiously often related to "appeltaart," "Fonz" or "dating in Amsterdam," and more through image searching than through text searching). But recently, the flood of random hits has slowed significantly (again, don't ask me why)... And now, I find myself getting more e-mail reaction to particular posts -- sometimes from quite a long time ago.

For instance, a number of international expatriates from Richland County, Ohio found my blog through my post on absentee voting, which included an incidental mention of the race for Member of State Central Committee, Mansfield (19th District). And while these visitors didn't typically leave comments on the blog for everyone to see, I got to have some interesting e-mail interaction with a unique sub-culture of people scattered throughout the world.

And then there've been the requests for advertising space. Like the following e-mail received last week:

Hello,

dead monkeys in a party dress? now i've seen it all.

Say, I was wondering if I can place an ad on this page http://www.ericasp.com/blog.php/2008/01/22/dead_monkey_in_a_party_dress
for someone who sells pet insurance?

I don't have much, but I can pay $25 for an ad there. If this works for you let me know and I'll send you over the ad and the payment.

Thanks,

A.K.

I honestly don't know how much of this is spam, and how much is legitimate business entrepreneurialship. I'm not naive -- still, I can imagine that some small business would do a search on Google, see what it came up with, and then try to place ads on those sites that already have some exposure (as opposed to making their own site and then waiting for it to rise the ranks of the search engine robots).

I'd be curious to hear if anyone has any experience (positive or negative) with advertising opportunities in the context of blogging. Up to this point, I've been fairly averse to the idea... But then again, maybe I'm just scared of the unfamiliar... Who knows?