Normal

A common saying here is "doe normaal" (pronounced 'do normal').
The Dutch celebrate normalcy and not trying to stand out - which initially rubbed me the wrong way due to liking to stand out, celebrating people's uniqueness, and by golly, I had pink hair.

That pink hair will be back some day, but for the moment, I doe normaal.
It's growing on me, though, because a part of doing normal is being community, it has to do with not making others feel insufficient, and being reliable.

What I'm learning is that self-expression is not the sin of doe normal, being a braggart or agitator is. Boasting, being pretentious, showing off wealth, disrespecting rules, or having too strong of a burst of emotion towards someone are the things that will get someone to call you out for being 'niet normaal!'

All of this is to say that one of the trickiest things so far, is learning what social norms are, how do people communicate, where do you walk, where do you bike, how do you stop making the Mondial Relay guy mad?
Linguistically, as well - cashiers, instead of saying something like 'thank you' or 'have a good day' after you finish your transaction, say 'alsjeblieft' (Al - sheh - blee - ft) which means 'please'. Am I supposed to respond to this with something?

Ultimately, our current status is trying to learn what normal looks like, both for life in this area, and our personal lives here, and it's been a fascinating journey, challenging what we knew to be norms and learning a different perception on life.

Speaking of our personal lives, with the holidays over, it feels like things are finally leveling out.
UPS has paid me back for the damages done to our computers and I've been able to build a replacement and am now back online.
Construction, while still underway outside, is wrapping up many of their projects, and now we actually have a house number on the outside door.
The replacement part for the washer/dryer should be here tomorrow (the laundromat is very expensive here, and we have been grateful for a neighbor allowing us to use their washer/dryer).
We found that one box of our belongings hadn't shipped yet due to having batteries, and the moving company is now working on getting that our way.
On Tuesday, we have our appointment to go get registered at our address and to obtain our ID's, which will allow us to finish our visa paperwork.

We are figuring out what meals we can easily make out here, what stores to visit for what (this week's discovery was Pipoos), and learning schedules, such as trash days and the fact that no one's open on Sundays hardly.

We are also addressing the partying neighbors with our landlord, so hopefully our Friday nights can start being more restful.

Someone notified me this website wasn't working for some time, so I spent some time fixing it and have some additional changes I want to make to it.
Eventually, I'd also like to upgrade this server sometime. I'm using a free one with only 1-core & 1gb memory, so it can really wrestle with some of these images and gifs.

We pulled out "Sabrina the Server" which I will be using to practice common infrastructure tech used in the EU.

We are working on learning Dutch, which is going to be a long-standing project, but would like to be mostly functional by the time of getting a job. (So much Miffy...)

We have LOTS of cardboard from getting our belongings and ordering all kinds of goods that we need to break down and cart over to the recycling bins.

Since we're going to be in The Hague (Den Haag) this week for municipality, we're hoping to visit the Westfield Mall of The Netherlands.

Weekends are packed with spending time with friends and family on calls, games, and the like, which is the absolute highlight of our week.

Fighting with drains. Seriously, we've already had to clean out the shower and sink drains twice each, with the shower needing it a third time.

Christopher picked up an office chair.

Christopher is locked into perpetual mortal combat with Liara.

Eating good foods:

Case: NZXT H7 Flow
Motherboard: MSI B850 GAMING PLUS WIFI6E
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9700X - 8 core/16 thread @ 5.5GHz
CPU Fan: Noctua NH-D15 - Still don't trust liquid
Memory: Lexar ARES - 32GB 7200MHz DDR5 (HUGE thanks to my dad)
GPU: ASUS Radeon RX 9070 XT
Case Fans: Noctua NF-P14s & Noctua NF-P12

Peripherals
Speakers: Logitech Z625 2.1 THX
DAC: Audient EVO4
Microphone: Audio Technica AT2020 - Previously Used Rhode NT1A
Keyboard: Glorious GMMK
Keyboard Switches: Glorious Lynx MX (lubed)
Mouse: Glorious D
Mousepad: ENDGAME GEAR MPC450 - Cordura w/ Jade Skates is pretty nice
UPS: APC BX2200MI-GR