Third post from the Netherlands

 
Susan and I registered this morning at the conference for which we came all this distance, after walking to the convention center with two fellow hotel guests: one a nurse (and I think nursing educator) herself, the other her husband, a clergyman. I stayed with Susan through the first two presentations; then, following the break, I returned to the hotel to do some revisions of the paper she’s to deliver Friday morning, and to prepare for setting the main points into a PowerPoint presentation.

(I should have done that work long ago, or at least begun it as soon as we arrived here. It’s a bad habit, and I’ve never broken it because I keep getting away with it. I really can put off written material until the last minute, then pull together something suitable before the deadline. The PowerPoint part, of course, is child’s play.)

At the hotel, I tried something that had occurred to me sometime yesterday: I asked if it would be possible to pay ahead on our hotel bill, using Susan’s and my bank cards. It was, and so I drew €135 from each. That will leave us, on paying the balance, a cash store of perhaps 45% of what we had on arrival, which (with decent economy) should be more than enough.

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I checked my passport just now, and yes, it has its first stamp. Susan and I proceeded so quickly through the entry desk at Schiphol Airport, I thought the man had just glanced at it, but no, an official stamp, the first I’ve ever received.

Susan’s passport has ten stamps in it.

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I returned to the conference center forty minutes before the last presentation was supposed to end (and a reception for the attendees to begin), but Susan was so slow coming out that I loaded a small plate with hors d’oeuvres and found a table. (On the way, I ran into the conference’s sole attendee from Iran, and greeted him in Farsi. He said I had a good accent.) I ate the first two items on my plate, and then saw Susan coming down the stairs; I went to meet her, showed her where I had set up, then turned my plate over to her and went to get another for myself; then, when she was finished, I returned to the buffet table to get her more shrimp salad and a diet cola.

We talked to the people at the table adjoining ours, then when we were about to leave we were accosted — in a friendly way — by a lady I’d met in the hotel lobby yesterday, and who had met and talked with Susan during my absence today. Our conversation with her stretched out so long that the three of us sat down again, and it was falling dark by the time Susan and I started back to the hotel.

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Back in place, she spent the next six hours doing homework for her online doctoral program. Classic over-achiever. Now it’s time for bed.