Life in technicolor...or at least pink

The most important update:

The pink is back!!!

[Emily's note: He came home from his first day at the new job and immediately told me he had permission to dye his hair pink again. Only THEN did he add "oh, also they're sending me to Italy and England within the next three months".

Heatwave

As many have heard and are likely tired of hearing, there has been a heatwave sweeping across Europe and it is hot...very hot. It's not necessarily that it's impossibly hot, but it's incredibly hot for June, for Europe, for the humidity, and most of all, for the lack of AC.

Before we moved here, we researched how common AC is in the Netherlands, and everything we read showed that it was fairly common. What we're discovering is that it's common in commercial and modern homes, not in old apartments...

We have a balcony on either side of our apartment, which is lovely, but also means that we have windows facing both the East and the West, so the sun is always beating on them.
So far, we have a big 15k BTU portable AC hooked up to the bedroom window and keeping the bedroom door closed to trap the cool air, which manages to keep it between 75-80° in here during the 95-102° days. As a result, most of our time is spent in the bedroom playing board/card games to stay cool. That's not to say that it's kept us from wandering out, however, to find some local pizza. Priorities!

Storm

You generally sleep with windows wide open so that you can keep cool at night, but a few nights, we were woken up by some incredible storms. I cannot speak justice to them, so enjoy this video. It went on like this for half an hour before it finally slowed down to taking a few seconds between each strike.

New job is fake

I mean...the job is real, but it sounds fake. I have 3 work laptops, didn't like one, traded it for another, and the CEO's office was repurposed for free office massages for a day.
Dutch lunch is strongly observed, meaning EVERYONE takes their lunch right at noon (they're a very timely folk) and goes to lunch together to sit and chat. If one person is still eating after everyone else finishes, a couple people will usually stick around to keep them company while they finish. After eating, everyone goes and gets a coffee and goes for a walk around the beautiful campus with nature paths, a canal, ducks, barbecue, and people out paddle boating on the water.

I started my job too late in the year to benefit from it this year around, but I've learned that many of your taxes come back to your at the start of summer as "Holiday Pay" where they encourage taking vacation during the summer and provide you 8% of your year's wages to spend on holiday.

A week ago here, we just celebrated the 5-year anniversary of the company and I got to meet ALL the people, do a sort of video call gameshow, and have all kinds of foods and drinks followed up with more food and drink.

It's been incredible seeing what my company's technology gets used for, I was initially apprehensive of working for an AI company, but this is specifically for far-edge use cases, meaning low-power, not reliant on a server or the internet, so that it can be used for things such as a robot dog (akin to Boston Dynamics'), where the chip we create ensures that it does not run into objects or people, or multi-threaded evaluations of product to individually pick out good and bad fruit from a harvest. Our CEO, who Emily and I have had the opportunity to meet and chat with for a while, has a love of the idea of incorporating it into agriculture and healthcare, focused on helping people, not on profit.

Plus, this office is so fun:

Having our first guest!

We're having our first visitor from the US and we can't wait to show them around and spend time with them! This particular person is my best friend since high school, best man at my wedding, and casually an international competitive vocalist!!!

Emily's Birthday

Emily celebrated another decade this year! Not having many friends here yet to celebrate with, we instead took the day off and went to Rotterdam for her favorite ramen shop (seriously the best ramen we've had) and a tattoo to mark this huge point in our lives!

Random things we've noticed

The Dutch like Orange, right? IS THAT WHY THEIR MOLD IS ORANGE?!

Real Italian pizza really is that much better. It also requires a fork and knife to eat it as it does not come sliced. My Italian coworker has also made it clear that pineapple on pizza is unacceptable.

The Dutch like cake. Birthday? Tompouce. Someone leaving the company? 4 cakes. Company's anniversary? Cake. Someone graduated in the workplace? Cake. Our office has plates, cake forks, and a dishwasher just for this.

Schnitzel comes in 2 sizes: burger and slab-large-enough-to-feed-your-family.