Happy New Year

I wish you all a good 2005. Let's hope it will be better than the previous year.

Here a picture from last year. This year I will try again. Let us see if it will be abetter one. :-). Living on the 11th floor at the border of the town, has its advantages..

Merry Christmas

I want to wish all my readers a merry Christmas. I hope you you get a lot of nice gifts. I never had any Christmas gifts... except for this year. I received the following by airmail:

My turn to thank JERIC for giving me many hours of pleasure to my ears with your site. I have a new mug for in the office.

Merry Christmas to all of you and your families and friends.

Cal

Dutch Xmas tradition..

Dutch traditions are awesome

In the beginning of the last century dutch farmers gave some of their supplies to the employees to share with their families during the Christmas holidays. This has gone through quite an evolution here in the Netherlands. Nowadays every employee gets a 'Christmas Package' from his boss. It is a box with all kinds of food, drinks and small items. My previous employer was very bad in coming up with good ideas, and there were always complains about each years box. One year I got 6 free tickets for a botanic garden I never visited (owned by the employee of course). The other was a calender, which is lying somewhere in a cabinet here.

Now that I have a new job, I was quite curious about their Christmas gifts. Well they did not let me down:

I love me new job :D

What a lovely sight...

After three years my collection has been complete. Many hours of pure entertainment for eyes and ears.

I can not believe that we Europeans have it sooner than the Americans :-)

More X-mas stuff

Time for some more X-mas rants... It was about 8 years ago that some dude decided to put a low budget christmas item on the market. It is what you can see in the picture. It is a plastic thing with 7 lights you can put in front of your window. As a result it became quite a hype here in the Netherlands, resulting in that almost every house had one. Preferably one for every window. So everywhere you look (yes also before dec 6th). You saw those bloody things.

When I was learning to drive. My instructor complained about his wife wanted those damn things too for every window. He complained about it twice. Yes I was such a bad student that it took me two christmas seasons to get my drivers licence. Nowadays, people are finally realizing how bad those things are. You rarely see them any more. Last year friends and I were shopping in a hardware store. We saw those stupid things lying in a rack over there after all those years. Well december 5 is behind us.. So here it for the second christmas and many christmas seasons to come:

Good thing it stands behind my TV so that I do not have to look at it. :-)