We’d gotten them catnip toys in Holland but they were totally not interested – for them it was the American stuff or nothing.

Last week we spent an afternoon at Downtown Disney. We looked for the Good Kitty / Bad Kitty nip toys but could only find these new ones.

We’re still unpacking from the trip and these were sitting in a bag downstairs. I noticed Arby rooting around in the bag – when I checked, I found the toys. We’d forgotten about them so Arby found them himself!

It’s still good stuff. Disney catnip is the best!

We got up early for another bird walk with one of the birding clubs in the area. We’ve been doing this every weekend the last few weeks. This time we met with Lake Cook Audubon at McHenry Dam in Moraine Hills State Park at 7:30. We walked the loop trail for about 4 hours and saw 37 different bird species including 6 new lifers (Orchard Oriole and several warblers)! We had a great time.

Another cool animal we saw was this large Bullfrog. There were actually several of them and they made an extremely loud call, which is reminiscent of the roar of a bull, hence its name (you can see/hear it here).

In the afternoon we went over to Home Depot to get supplies for a new bird feeder. For a while we’ve wanted to get a better setup with stronger poles than we’ve been using. They sell expensive pole systems at wild bird stores but we thought we could do it better and cheaper by making it ourselves. So we bought some plumbing pipes and made the following with help from Amy’s dad:

See Amy’s post about the new bird feeder for more information on how its made.

Now we can finally hang our Wingscapes Birdcam at a good place and hopefully get some more interesting shots than those from ground level. Here’s one of the first birds, a House Finch, using the new feeder and photographed by the Birdcam:

1. Hidden Security Tags in Old Navy Jeans
2. The Rat Temple of Rajasthan
3. Pirates of the Carribean 2: a rip-off of Monkey Island?
4. Top 10 Things to do in Tunisia
5. Quechuas Toss and Go Seconds Tents
6. Pop Tarts with Beef Gelatin
7. Top 10 Budget Things to do in Chicago
8. Scuba in Europe’s Largest Swimming Pool
9. Top 10 Things to do in South Florida and the Keys
10. Driverless Robot Buses Crash

The first post in the list, about Old Navy, has received lots of comments, which are quite amusing to read if you have some hours to kill. The comments are both from angry customers who found a tag in their pants that kept setting off alarms in other stores, as well as from disgruntled Old Navy employees who are fed up with their customers.

I gave UK2 a call and spoke with one of their representatives. The guy insisted that I owned the domain and that if I no longer wanted it anymore that I should cancel it. I said that I never saw the website before, that it was owned by someone else and that they must have mixed up my details with another customer. He said that that was impossible and that the only explanation was that someone must have stolen my name and credit card details! Riiiiight … why would someone steal my credit card and then use it to register a website in their name? That doesn’t make any sense. Still, the UK2 representative insisted that that is what happened. There was nothing that he could do for me but advise me to cancel the website so that I would not invoice me again. He would not be able to give me my money back.

This was unbelievable. There was no way that I believed that someone got a hold of my credit card number and used it to register and host a website in their name. That would be the dumbest crime ever. Nonetheless I decided to contact my credit card company and informed them about it. I also visited the real estate website, which I supposedly owned, and used their contact form to inform the owner of the mix up. I informed him that UK2 had made me owner of his account, invoiced me for his costs and that UK2 had accused him of stealing my credit card details. I instantly got a reply from the owner (let’s call him Bob) who was most helpful and copied the UK2 helpdesk explaining that he was in fact the owner of the website and not me. Several days passed without a reply from the helpdesk. In the meantime I was invoiced another £54, also for the real estate website that wasn’t mine. They had now charged me over one hundred pounds or $150 by mistake. This was really getting annoying.

Bob and I emailed and called UK2 several times over the course of two weeks and finally got them to change the account into Bob’s name. Unfortunately they wouldn’t be able to refund me the money. Now they claimed that I had been invoiced for my original website from last year and I had supposedly not canceled my subscription properly. What kind of lame excuse was that? The invoices I received clearly stated Bob’s website. Now UK2 suddenly claimed that it was for my website anyway, which I canceled a year ago, and the whole mix up with Bob’s account was just a coincidence? This was preposterous! I obviously didn’t let them steal my money like this and sent them a nasty email.

Eventually UK2 decided to refund my money. So what did they do? They sent Bob an email in reply to my ticket informing him that I would get my money back. Bob forwarded me the email.

I never received an apology from UK2. They mixed up two accounts, accused their loyal customer of stealing credit card details from me, lied about me not canceling my account properly and sent a reply to a support ticket to the wrong person. These guys are really incompetent!

If you are thinking of signing up for UK2 web hosting then my advice is: don’t and find someone else. You have been warned.

Arby and Alex both always seemed to be afraid of paper or plastic bags and they acted like they hated the crinkly sound they make. I know a lot of cats are attracted to these noises as so many popular cat toys feature a crinkly sound or crunchy texture.

It was a Whole Foods bag. Our cute little Organic Arby.

We were proud to join the shopkeeper team, Butterscotch Brigade.

▲ This is at Disney Wilderness Preserve on January 3rd. We started off the year at First Night in Leesburg, Florida. New Year’s Day had record low temperatures in Florida.

▲ In February we had a new visitor to our backyard in Leiden, the European Goldfinch. It isn’t a rare bird, but we never saw one before in our own backyard. It brought the total of different birds we had in our small backyard to a respectable twelve.

▲ In March we spent a weekend with my family in a holiday bungalow at Port Zélande resort in Zeeland. Here we are in Hellevoetsluis.

▲ From January through March we went to Amsterdam several times for my US permanent resident visa. My final interview at the US Consulate was on 20 March and I received my visa in the mail on 27 March.

▲ On April 19th we went to Madurodam, the smallest town in the Netherlands. Madurodam is a tourist attraction near the Hague where typical Dutch buildings and landmarks are displayed at a 1:25 scale.

▲ On April 25th we visited the Kaasmarkt in Alkmaar. This largest cheese market in the world was started in 1365 and since 1939 Alkmaar has been the only place in the Netherlands to maintain the cheese market in this traditional form. It is mainly done for tourists now and held from mid-April to mid-September on every Friday morning.

▲ On April 30th we left on a short road trip to France. On our first day we stopped at the Caves of Han in Belgium. The large rooms were very impressive and the underground whitewater river was very cool to see. There was even a short sound-and-light show in one of the big chambers with benches for everyone to sit down. It was very entertaining.

▲ The next days we drove throught the Alsace region of eastern France. Here’s me at an alpine slide at the highest pass of the Vosges Mountains at 1139 meters (3737 feet), just west of Munster.

▲ On May 9th we visited Biesbosch National Park south of Rotterdam and rented a canoe for a few hours of canoeing.

▲ On May 17th we went to Baarle Nassau to see my cousin Agnes at a pottery demonstration. Baarle is a town in the south of the Netherlands with complicated borders that zig-zag through town. The border situation is the result of a number of complex medieval treaties, agreements, land-swaps and land sales. In this photo Amy has one foot in Belgium and the other in the Netherlands.

▲ On May 23rd we saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at Pathé Arena in Amsterdam. We thought it was great and saw it two more times on the big screen, in the Hague and Rotterdam.

▲ On June 14th we drove to Katwijk for a walk with my parents and had some drinks at a beach cafe.

Photo by caribb

▲ On June 27th we finally bought our tickets for our move to the United States. The date of our big move was set to 21 September and packing began.

▲ On July 2nd we went to the island of Texel. We took the train from Leiden to Den Helder and then the Teso ferry to Het Horntje on Texel. It was a beautiful day for bicycling around Texel: 30^oC and sunny.

Photo by Rob Van Hilten

▲ On July 19th we visited the new Corpus Museum in Oegstgeest, which opened on 14 March 2008. The museum is housed in an impressive 7-storey building with a statue of a large man sitting on it. Corpus features a 1-hour multimedia tour through a giant body, traveling from the stomach, through the intestines, into the heart, lungs, mouth, eyes and eventually the brain.

▲ On July 25th we took a long bike ride around Roosendaal with my parents and visited this Corn Maze in Belgium at De Bosrust in Essen-Horendonk.

▲ On August 2nd we went to Noordwijk and visited the Space Expo exhibition and visitor center of the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC). This largest site of ESA was just a half hour from our house in Leiden.

▲ From 17 to 24 August we stayed at a chateau in the small town of Bourgueil in the Loire Valley in France. We saw lots of castles, beautiful gardens and nature parks. Here’s Amy at the huge Château d’Angers.

▲ Through the summer we spent many hours emptying our house and packing up all the stuff we wanted to move. On 9 September our boxes were picked up by Worldwide Baggage Services (highly recommended) and shipped to Chicago.

▲ On September 10th we went to Amsterdam for the last time (for a while at least) and visited the Rijksmuseum. Holland’s National Art and History Museum is housed in a very large building that is currently being renovated and work is expected to last until 2013! Until that time a small collection of masterpieces can be visited in the Philips Wing. It was a small exhibit but very much worth the visit.

▲ On September 12th we rented a small truck and moved our couch and several other big things to our family in Roosendaal. By this time our house was getting pretty empty, with only some essential furniture left.

▲ On September 13th we had a small goodbye party with my family in Roosendaal and that evening we had a very nice dinner with my parents and Patrick at Het Hooihuis.

▲ On September 21st we flew from Amsterdam to Chicago with our two cats Arby and Alex. Here’s Amy with the cats at Schiphol just 15 minutes before we said goodbye to my family and went through passport control.

▲ On October 10th our beloved cat Alex died at the age of 14 from kidney failure. She had been very sick since the flight and after almost 3 weeks of giving her medicine and daily fluids we had to put her to sleep at Greentree Animal Hospital in Libertyville.

▲ On October 11th we drove up to Horicon National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. The weather was beautiful this day, around 77^oF / 25^oC. Horicon Marsh is the site of both a national and state wildlife refuge.

▲ On October 19th we drove up to Eagle, southwest of Milwaukee, and visited Old World Wisconsin, an open air museum with more than 60 historic structures from the 1800s.

Photo by Neal1960

▲ On November 4th we celebrated that Barack Obama was elected the next President of the United States. If McCain had won me might have had to move back to Holland.

▲ On December 16th we bought this 2002 Toyota Sienna. Three days later, on December 19th, I got my Illinois driver’s license at the DMV facility in Deerfield.

▲ On December 21st Arby discovered some starlings perched on a wire close to the house.