In Canada, the Monday following the first weekend in September is Labour Day, a nationally recognized holiday where we honour all those who would like another day off work.

Here in the Netherlands, there are no long weekends. There are holidays and vacations, but no long weekends. This would go against the Dutch Calvinist view of life.

So I have been working on the web site. There is a separate BLOG page now with 3+ entries, the default being the Lord Hairball page.

I'm also happy to report that if you search for sontag on google.ca, a link to this page appears near the top.

OK - maybe that's not exactly FaceBook or anything but we did replace one Susan Sontag link (no relation, unfortunately).

We have also bumped off the notorious Sontag brothers (again, no relation, at least none that my relatives will own up to).

I have been stampeded by a herd of YAPUs recently. A YAPU is my acronymn for Yet Another Program Update.

YAPUs are the speed bumps of the internet highway. They slow you down, sometimes even demanding that you restart your engine. But we reluctantly accept them because they are there for our safety.

A YAPU might show up on the doorstep of your computer when you turn it on; as you check your email; or open a web page; click on something in a web page; or even when you plug in an iPod.

The Relunctant Traveller found himself in Norway for reasons that were, like the weather, never very clear. We saw about six hours of sunshine in the six days we were there.

We stayed in Stavanger, a pretty little town on the west coast that is a service port for North Sea oil production.

The regular readers of this page, if there are any, have known for some time that we were off to Norway for a few days. One might ask why.

Some serious work needed to be done there, not by me, but by MLW. The company had an apartment in Stavanger, so I tagged along.

According to the Economist magazines highly acclaimed Big Mac Index, Norway one of the most expensive places in the world. They put the price of the venerable Big Mac at C$7.21 (using the prevailing Bank of Canada currency exchange).

I set out to test the theory you get what you pay for. Set the bar low enough, and you can prove (or disprove) anything.

The first picture is of the landmark Kurhaus hotel, built in 1886 and the focal point of Scheveningen.

We went on a day trip to Delft, a town about 10kms south of Den Haag. You can get there by tram, train or bike.

Delft is the quintessential Dutch village, so to speak, home of Johannes Vermeer, one of the most famous of the Dutch masters. It has two remarkable churches, creativily called the Old Church and the New Church.

We have reached our one month anniversary here in Den Haag. So far I really like it. It's very quiet, since so many people use bikes to get about. And everything is close. The shopping, if you like that sort of thing, is amazing.

We have an apartment rented starting June. It's big and sunny, with windows on both ends, 9 foot ceilings, (standard here), 2 balconies, and a bathtub, which seems to be a bit of a luxury here.