Home is where the Woofer is

Its been quite a few years since my Shadow crossed the rainbow bridge and for a long time, I didn't really want another dog. There are some dogs that are just that special that you are not likely to meet another one quite like it - and Shadow hit that perfect spot.

It's also hard to travel when you own animals, unless you take them with you or have a great relationship with a local kennel. As Shadow had a lot of health issues, kenneling generally wasn't an option, so it was travel with dog or find a friend! I also feel that its unfair on a dog to be alone during the day, and with the move to a new country that was pretty much on the cards all the time  - so another woofer just wasn't an option. 

Life changes though & with W's new job, the 'alone time' dropped dramatically and it became possible to think about having a dog in our lives. I made the mistake of looking around to see what woofers I could find and met this adorable chap. He really looked more like a guinea pig, than a puppy - and sounded remarkably like one too. 

As the largest puppy in the litter, he clearly shared some dietary traits of a porcine nature. Here he is with his sister, the day before he left for his new home. 


The first few days of settling in were quite challenging as the renovations were still in full flow, so the house was full of people wielding sharp implements and pots of paints. Luca quickly demonstrated his ability to get underfoot, find and remove the tool you have just put down, or simply cause chaos.  We have started puppy training, which is all done in Dutch and is a huge encouragement to accelerate my language skills. Thankfully, some of the basic commands sound almost the same in English and Dutch so I can claim to have a bi-lingual puppy. Or as close as you can come, when he wilfully and cheerfully ignores you because he's found something far more interesting than listening to his master's voice!

Despite the puppy training being second time around, I am struggling to find some comparative  commands to those we are learning here : 'high' and 'low' for 'stand on box' 'get off box to the ground' just don't quite sound right and Luca can definitely  hear the lack of confidence in my voice. If anyone knows what the commands should be, please let me know!

It's quite an exhausting experience for a young puppy to spend an hour concentrating hard, in a group of distracting and interesting other pups. So Friday nights usual end up rather like this - with Luca inelegantly sprawled on his own personal sofa .

First things first : planning the project & creepie crawlies

As I've been in the new place a while, I am going to play catchup for a bit in my posts - we've done a lot since we moved in and I would love to share the full journey!

With roots in project management, the first step in kicking off a renovation project had to be planning ahead  - working out what we want to do, choosing a style and color palette, setting a budget & booking the workforce. I started with good intent, but reality and time caught up remarkably fast - and many decisions needed to be made on the fly. 

To ensure that I didn't forget or lose information as the project happened, I ensured that the project team leaders (W, Ian) were all signed up to Evernote - it helped to structure lots of pieces of information into useful findable buckets. I loved the  mobile capabilities of the Premium subscription, as well as the ability to capture documents & business cards with just one click .

Pinterest  was valuable in finding inspirational pictures . With friends and family in different countries and timezone, it was a wonderful way of being creative together and stretching boundaries. A goodly number of pins from friends made their way into the project and I'm super happy with the end results.

Choosing colors ahead of time was critical : I  had a very short window to do a lot of  'base level' renovation & redecoration work in before the movers arrived with all the furniture & belongings. There's nothing to stop me doing more, but it gets ever so much harder when you are moving things around as you paint! Each room had it's own paint chip, and I tried to blend the color change through the house, with relaxing and soft greens in the main living areas, cool active blues in thinking rooms, warm pinks in cozy sleeping rooms. I spent hours on Design Seeds browsing through the color chips finding just the right blend of shades for each room. It even encouraged me to be far more adventurous in my color selections than normal as it was so easy to find a set of beautifully matched colors to work with. 

Finally the most challenging part of the preparation was expanding my slim dutch vocabulary exponentatially with many complex building/diy/technical words as I struggled with contractors with quotations for work that I didn't feel up to doing myself. Whilst W was happy to help in the majority, he has a strong belief that he shouldn't have to make all the calls  - and anyway, all Dutchies speak English, honest! I believe I've disproved that many times now, but the rule still stands - I have to at least try. 

With the house frame and structure being entirely wooden, a must have was a survey for insects and rot. The first company to come in was quite terrifying, leaving behind the impression that the entire building was about to collapse entirely with the next breeze unless they were paid lots of money immediately as the house was thoroughly infested with 'houtworm' (woodworm) and 'boktor' (deathwatch beetle). Thankfully, a web search rapidly identified them as being at the  more 'cowboy' end of the building world, and with a little help from colleagues, I got into touch with Van Lierop - a far more reputable company who confirmed the presence of both denizens, but that it was a new and very mild infestation, easily treatable with a very good spraying! So, all booked, all planned ready for key day!

Mosaic Experimentation

Random factoid 1 : I've always had a passion for mosaics - I love the complexity of creating a realistic image combined with a color by numbers approach to building up the image. Never actually tried making one before though....

Random factoid 2 : any self respecting archaeological unit or museum will tell you that they have hundreds of pieces of 'pot' - shards of broken pottery - which take up precious storage space and few are of sufficiently high quality to display publicly in large display cases,  yet must be kept since they may be of importance to research.

Not so long ago, I  saw a museum that has made great steps in cracking the 'shard display' issue : they turned an entire wall of a hall into a journey through time displayed through pottery shards. It was a graphic and impressive journey through human crafting over time - and started me thinking about a possible craft project.

The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, and this has left it's footprint in the soil : in many places, you can't dig your garden without finding hundreds of pottery shards, often in 'delft blue' or the trademark medieval greens and browns - as well as the remains of many clay pipes. This little treasure trove is just perfect for the piqué-assiette style of mosaicing and that's exactly what I decided to do.

I used the back plate of an old broken pendulum clock bought from the Kringloopwinkel (recycling store) for pennies as my base plate. Since I had substantially more blue'n'white than green'n'brown shards, I painted the plate brilliant white with some left over household wall paints. I laid out a couple of trial layouts , allowing me to experiment with the balance of the shapes, and to decide on the individual display direction. Some epoxy based glue and some sticky fingers later, the final layout was secured into place. Then the fun part - filling the gaps with grouting. I used a pure white grouting - I know many professional mosaicists mutter about it looking like kiddie craft projects, but guess what - I'm a big kid having fun, and the contrast was much better given the large amounts of delftware.

A night spent setting, and voila : a slice of Dutch life in a wall display.

New start, new home

It's been an unconscionably long time since I blogged but despite best intentions, my focus has been anywhere but online . A lot of life changes some tough, some just hard work but at the end of it all, I'm settled in a new home in the North of Holland. And that's the reason for restarting to blog : I've developed a passion for renovating my lovely old house and want to share some of the trials, tribulations & victories along the way.

So : let's start with a major catch up on the world!

In July, I bought a house. Or rather, I saddled myself with a large amount of debt owed to a large Dutch financial institution in exchange for the right to spend even more money whilst living in an old Dutch farm house.


The brochure picture from the real estate agent above makes it look just idyllic - and it very nearly is! It's called a 'stolpboederij' in Dutch and has a special construction that uses 4 major beams in a pyramidal shape to support all the roof weight. As a result the majority of the interior is not loadbearing - until you decide to build upwards.  This construction of beams is a 'vierkant'. Historically, a portion of the building was the farmer's home and the rest was a combination of hay barn and cow shed - just like this.We know that the house dates back to at least the 19th century : the surveyor stated that the building style inside looks more like 18th century. As a result it has many years of living, repair and DIY from different eras all over it.

The inside is no different to the exterior - the ground floor looked in reasonably good condition in the main, with modern plumbing, 2.5 kitchens (it was divided into two flats at one point, the .5 seems to have been an easy storage route) and a beautiful spacious living room - but some very dodgy pipes, wiring and gas flows. Upstairs is much less appealing, with stained ancient wallpaper, falling out walls and damaged floors.

The garden is a disaster zone - the previous owners were very very horsy : the horse environment is spotlessly maintained and beautiful, but the garden was mowed occasionally and left to run riot for nearly 10 years.

Over the next two-five years, W & I are setting out to transform this from an already beautiful house to our dream home.

An extended break.

Another extended break taken, I am afraid. Sometimes, life jumps in the way of blogging. But I'm planning on picking it up again.

Cognitive or cultural ? Behaviour in business & science

There are a myriad of scientific (pyschological, sociological or anthropological) works published over the years which seek to define the differences between 'base' human behavioural responses (cognitive) to stimuli from 'culturally' behavioural generated responses (cultural) to the same responses.

One of the most (in)famous experiments is the Milgram study  'Behavioural study of obedience' the findings of which Milgram summarises as follows :

 Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.

There have been other studies on the same line - all of which come up with essentially the same overall conclusion about humanity's willingness to follow orders over personal morality. But every study was executed in the Western world.

Within psychology, anthropology and sociology, there has been historically been an acceptance that there are base cognitive reactions that are common globally. This is being challenged by a growing wave of studies which highlight the flawed thinking behind this. A new paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” by Henrich, Heine, & Noranzayan and covered in this article really got me thinking about the impact of cognitive vs cultural behaviours.  The paper talks about how new studies are showing increasingly that what has historically been considered as 'base' behaviour is being challenged in the light of new experiments demonstrating cultural impact. It highlights the large proportion of studies being executed in the Western world - from which global assumptions are being extracted

A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

It goes on to show that America & Americas - the largest source of such assumptions are not even viable as  the 'Western' norm :

As the three continued their work, they noticed something else that was remarkable: again and again one group of people appeared to be particularly unusual when compared to other populations—with perceptions, behaviors, and motivations that were almost always sliding down one end of the human bell curve

Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
Given the data, they concluded that social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins while believing that they were learning insights applicable to all birds.

I have to admit the visual image of Americans as penguins and the streets of New York populated by armies of penguins amuses me- and it requires little stretch of the imagination when you think of the typical daytime population of Wall Street. And mentally migrating on from Wall Street, I started thinking about all the challenges I find in my daily working life in the IT Industry . IT has been shaped and changed dramatically in the last few decades by the rapid growth of outsourcing - leveraging the global economic differences in relative costs - to reduce expenditure whilst attempting to retain flexibility and capability. Outsourcing itself has a reputation for being challenging in the extreme to do successfully and conversations with Westerners who have been involved in outsourcing to Asia or beyond all seem to be peppered with nods of agreement as a familiar litany of woes gets recited and blithly blamed on 'culture'. That said, it has been lauded and dissected by many economic studies and business strategy documents from such leading academic bodies as Harvard, MIT, and the LSE, or commercial organisations such as Gartners or Forresters - so much so that for mid to large companies it is almost automatically accepted as the 'way to go'.

Culture has a major part to play in business life and the challenges of operating on a global basis : one of my recommended bible books to any new starter in multinational working is Fons Trompenaars' 'Riding the waves of culture'. That said, there seems to have always been an underlying assumption that the bone deep drivers of business are the same around the world. Now I question that : have business gurus and economists made the same mistake? Are the challenges faced in outsourcing, in running multinational companies more fundamentally complex than previously portrayed? Is the fact that we assumed we could 'outsource' American or Western norms and  'process' to those same norms inevitably impossible on the basis of the gap between base behaviours?

Does the impact of this mistaken enforcement of the 'American norm' go even deeper? Can it challenge the very beliefs behind our economic systems? Bhutan appears to believe so and chooses to measure itself in 'Gross National Happiness' rather than the more traditional 'GDP' : frequently joked about on the internet and media in general, but becoming of interest to the UN and other multinational bodies. I for one, hope it is adopted more widely.

I would love to see some studies sponsored by the top business schools that take the hypotheses behind the “The Weirdest People in the World?” study and revisits some of the seminal concepts behind business economics and activity in the light of it.

I wonder if the Milgram experiment would have had a different result if it had been done in a 'primitive' culture - and if so, what it says about Westerners as human beings.

The queen is going, long live the King

Last year was a pretty momentous 'Royal' year in the UK with Queen Elizabeth II's jubilee  with frenetic activity and press coverage. This year looks to be equally busy with another heir approaching  and I thought I'd escaped some of the Royal brouhaha by moving to Holland.

Turns out that I was wrong, as Queen Beatrix chose to abdicate in favour of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander.  Each year, the Dutch celebrate 'Queen's Day' on the 30th of April - marked by a Royal visit to two locations - but predominantly by the lifting of the need to have a permit to sell on the streets, or pay tax on the earnings. As a result, Queen's Day turns the entire country into a giant fleamarket, with a sea of shoppers in orange. This year however, Queen's Day marks the passing of the throne with all due pomp and cermony and will become King's Day (on a new birthday date) hence forth.

It does beg the question - if one looks around near a Royal residence will you find a collection of 'carefully maintained, no longer required due to retirement' bric-a-brac for sale? The odd 'worn once, dress coronet, does not fit new owner'? I, for one, plan to go shopping for bargains!