Moving on

January 12, 2007 (3:35pm)
23º F, Changing, NNE wind 2 mph.

Good afternoon,

Well .... it has been some interesting around here the past couple of days. Yesterday, Margriet received a receipt for the money sent in to the immigration folks some time ago for a permanent residency card. The receipt was dated December 27, 2006, the post mark on the envelop was January 07, 2007, and we received it yesterday, January 12, 2007! I think the check was written and the forms sent in the first week of December, but am not all that sure. It is nice to see the speed and accuracy of our government in action! Or is it. In the mailbox today was a notice to appear in Milwaukee on the 22nd at 8:00 A.M. This notice was dated the 8th, mailed the 9th, and we have it today. Service is improving it appears. So now we get ready for another early morning drive to Suds City. Not my favorite pastime.

Overnight, 3:00+ A.M. according to the time stamp, Margriet got an email for a Notary Public in Enschede with some of the papers for the sale of the house there. It is the first things for us to actually do in the deal - other than worry. The email contained two attachments which total 8-9 pages of stuff written in Dutch! The hardest part of this is to translate into American, try to understand it, then progress onto the task at hand. What has to happen, when it is all said and done, is to have Margriet sign some of the papers, get them notarized and returned to Enschede my snail mail.

Brenda said several months ago that there were some papers coming our way to be signed, but we never saw them. We assumed they would be coming by snail mail. Never came. Actually they sent them by email instead. Never came. Apparently the email bounced and no one thought to do anything more. Nothing has been happening all this time. I had emailed Brenda and Arnoud the other day to find out if any progress is being made. Guess he called to find out and a second email was sent. It bounced too, but this time called Arnoud back again and we told him to send it to our other email account. It came this time.

It took me most of the morning to run 3 pages through the translation program. It is some comical to see some of the translations for various words. The street address of the house is Wulpstraat 3 which is translated as "Voluptuous tear 3"! Of course that caused me to chuckle a lot and finally Margriet did too. There are others that are humorous too. The structure of sentences is also different, so the combination of words end up with whole new meanings. At least to me. I like to play with words a lot and often do. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" dialect we have in this country matches pretty close to the word order and sentence construction.

The really hard part is trying to translate the words which do not translate. Margriet knows what the words are - in Dutch, but trying to make me understand and then find a substitute word to use is not easy. That too leads to some chuckles for me. The end result is that I hope by tomorrow I will have it translated and understand what the documents say. Of course the fact that there is much Dutch legal-eze being changed into American legal-eze doesn’t help much either. Would like to get them notarized on Monday, but it is a legal holiday and I don’t think the banks will be open until Tuesday. Am shooting for a goal of getting in the mail on Tuesday too. This is not at all what the plan was for today’s task’s to accomplish.

Time to get some chicken frying and supper going. We did have the pasties last night and Margriet made some mushroom gravy to go with. Boy they were good, but I could not eat all that was prepared for me. I did start the pork neck bones a-cooking a bit ago and hope to get the beans into it to night so they have a chance to cook for a long time. Bean soup for lunch tomorrow!

Time to get a-going.

In Christ My Saviour,

Chris <><