The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

In October of 1996, I painted this ceramic bowl for Sam to use as his water bowl. Since then, I think Ripley, Milo, Busby, and Piper have all used it too. I recall eating pasta out of it while living on houseboat #5, since I didn’t have a dog then.

It has had a hairline fracture for years, but still held water. Last night there may have been too much water in the bowl that froze, because this morning these two pieces of the side broke off. The bowl is still holding water though, so I’ll glue the pieces back on and see how many more years it lasts.

A few sights walking around Amsterdam. Notice the canal has paper cranes that someone has hung over the canal.

I was mostly in the office so didn’t have much time for photos, but here are a few street scenes of Madrid in January 2025.

We have explored markets, navigeted the labyrinth that is each major train/metro station, enjoyed a variety of foods (much of it from convenient stores and sushi belts) and even enjoyed seeing trees with their Autumn colors.

Nara is known for deer that are very used to people; so much so that they approach so you can give them a treat. To get there, we took a sightseeing train from Kyoto and then sat at the front of a train when leaving Nara for Osaka.

We visited an antique toy museum and learned how about 16 different toys worked. Two included figuring out how to remove a string from a piece of wood, which Lorie and a Japanese guy worked on together, with no shared language.

We spent our first few jet lagged days in Osaka, mostly just walking around.

Have you ever wondered if automated car washes exist in the Netherlands?

They do and they work!

For about 100 years, there was a little train running under London to help deliver the mail, called the Mail Rail. It stopped running in 2003 and they’ve now created a small, people-friendly version that we rode on Friday.

It makes for a fun way to learn a bit of history.

Not counting the 4+ hour train rides to/from Amsterdam, which should only be 3 hours, but there is track construction slowing things down.

It was all work so the sight seeing was between the train and the office.