Arby is 14 years old and today, for the first time ever, he went inside a paper bag. He went in for about 30 seconds first, much too short for us to grab a photo. But a few minutes later, he went back inside and even laid down in it for a couple of minutes!
Back in December, CafePress (CP) forum moderators and CafePress Voice (CPV) members formed a giving team at Kiva.org and challenged the CP community to a fund-off. A team of shopkeepers and a team of CP employees took up the challenge. Kiva is a truly wonderful organization, helping provide loans made by anyone in the world to entrepreneurs who might otherwise not be able to get a loan. This video explains the Kiva concept by showing what happens when a team of accountants in London makes a $25 loan to someone in Cambodia.
We were proud to join the shopkeeper team, Butterscotch Brigade.
Happy new year and gelukkig nieuwjaar!! We wish everyone a prosperous, healthy, peaceful and generally awesome new year. May all your wishing come true. It is now 12:23am here in Illinois and we’re watching Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest on ABC. New Year’s Eve is not as exciting here as at our old home in the Netherlands, where everyone does fireworks outside. No fireworks here, except for on TV. That’s a lot safer, though! 😉
Just five more days and it will be 2009. We’ve had a busy year. We had a couple of short holidays, we ran around Holland to see things before we left, we spent months packing up our stuff and emptying our house, said goodbye to our Dutch family, on September 21st made the big move to Chicago, in October our cat Alex died and in December we bought a new car. Here are some pictures of our year:
â–² 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. More »
Wishing everyone a very merry Christmas! The following picture from December 2004 shows our cat Alex with a Santa hat. Alex died in October this year.
Here are my favorite 5 websites of the year 2008, in random order:
Arby discovered a small group of Common Starlings perched on a wire close to the house. The temperature outside is hovering 0 °F around so the birds are probably huddling close to the house for warmth.
When Arby gets really excited he chatters. It’s like he’s trying to talk to the birds. Here’s a short video of him chattering:
Yippee! 😀 I got my Illinois driver’s license today, and it only cost $10. We got to our nearest DMV facility in Deerfield at 8:30 this morning and were the first ones in. They checked my papers at the desk, I paid $10 at the cashier, did the written test, the driving test, took a picture, my license got printed, and we were outside at 9:15!! It only took 45 minutes! More »
We drove around with our new car today and went up to an outlet mall just over the border in Wisconsin. We each bought some nice shoes at the Columbia store there. 🙂
We had lots of little icicles on our car this morning:
We bought a car yesterday. It’s a 2002 Toyota Sienna minivan and we picked it up this afternoon. We wanted to drive around a bit today, but a snow storm forced us to come home. Here are some pictures before the snow really started coming down.
