I would want to explain to my dog that, the more she barks and goes berserk at the squirrel on the tree trunk four feet from our window, the harder that squirrel laughs.

Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom. The most recent photo anyone had seen of Mandela before he was released from jail in his seventies, was a photo of him when he was around forty. So, on the news, when I watched him walk out of prison an old man, I bawled my eyes out, acutely feeling such a wasted time for the man. But reading Long Walk to Freedom later, I realized it hadn't been wasted time for him. At least not nearly as much as I had assumed. He was always working to end apartheid, even if the media didn't allow any mention of it. He is a remarkable man!

The very first time I saw one of the Degas ballet girls (there are about five, I believe), in London, I seriously wondered if I could ever own it. No, of course.

Why do I love it so much?

First of all there's the combination of bronze and tulle. Hers was clearly very old, and it went extremely well with the bronze. (I saw another one somewhere else, later, I don't remember where, and the tulle had been replaced, and right away it wasn't the same.)

Then there's the pose. You can just imagine the next movement being bringing her arms up and moving her balance onto her forward foot and then onto her toes.

But the really fascinating thing about it is the girl's age. She's at the beginning of puberty. She's about to move from girl to woman, and she has that innocence of a young girl who knows she looks pretty in her ballet costume, but has no real idea of her beauty. And her face is looking up and forward in yes, a ballet pose, but she's also looking to her future, with no idea of what it will bring, yet completely open to it, with that fearless optimism of youth.

All the time. The dial on my car radio is glued to NPR. The only station worth listening to. Not that there aren't some good stations as far as music are concerned, but they all have commercials. And life is too short to listen to those every other song.

Monty Python.

The best prank I can come up with is one my brother once pulled. He worked at a company for years, and he often worked well into the evening. That was appreciated.

Then one night, on his way out the door, he was stopped by a new, very gung-ho security guard who thought he was trespassing. My brother was a bit insulted, and when he told his boss about it the next day, his boss said that it was the new policy to have a security guard. Board decision. Live with it.

That evening, as my brother was leaving his office, he saw the entire board of directors stream into a meeting room. When he got to the elevators he saw the security guard. My brother told him he just saw a whole bunch of shady-looking characters sneaking into the meeting room, and that he had better go check it out.

The guard made a beeline to the meeting room and the last thing my brother heard before the elevator doors closed was the security guard barging into to the room, bellowing, "What's the meaning of this?!"

Time for a blast from the past.

One of the Plinky prompts was to name my favorite TV shows as a kid. Well, I watched shows from three continents, so lots of you out there should recognize these.

We lived in the Netherlands until I was almost five, and we didn’t have TV. But I remember watching Klaas en Pimpernel (had to search to find the title; I only remembered Klaas) at my grandparents’ house occasionally.

In Australia, the first TV show I ever watched was Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. That was the bee’s knees! Because of watching Skippy, the first thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was a helicopter pilot.

I also watched lots of cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, the Flintstones, etc. and a children’s show called The Magic Circle with a woman called Mrs. Flowerpot. And apart from Skippy, I also watched Flipper, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. But they couldn’t light a candle to Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo. Skippy, Skippy, Skippy a friend ever true! Okay, I’m getting carried away.

My parents and I also watched the Carol Burnett Show, the Dick Van Dyke Show, I love Lucy and Mc Hale’s Navy. Those are the ones that stand out in my memory. Occasionally I got to watch a Tarzan movie with Johnny Weismuller. Exciting stuff!

Later on I watched Robin Hood with Richard Greene with my parents, and I have to say that, of all the shows I ever watched as a child, that one was and still is my all-time favorite. I found the complete episodes on DVD a year or two back, and I was in heaven watching them all again, and lots I hadn’t seen.

Back in the Netherlands we again didn’t have TV most of the time, but every now and then I got to see De Fabletjeskrant and Pipo de Clown, and later Q en Q. My brother watched Ti Ta Tovenaar, Beertje Colargol en Calimero. As a teenager I watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus and All in the Family with my parents.

But the memories of TV shows in the Netherlands after coming back are a lot less vivid than those of shows watched in Australia before the age of ten. I think everything is more magical when you’re younger.

Michelle Bachman

I miss lots of Dutch foods, but here are the top five American foods that make up for them.

Pumpkin seeds

Hmmm! And the good thing is that I'm the only one in our family who's interested in them, so they're all for me! Better than peanuts, even better than cashews! Better than pistachios? That's a close call. But definitely cheaper.

French Silk ice cream

Vanilla and chocolate ice cream swirled together with bits of chocolate mixed in. There are thousands of ice cream flavors here, but this one has been my favorite since I discovered it seventeen years ago.

Phȏ

Okay, it's Vietnamese, but I discovered it here. Wonderful comfort food. Huge bowls of broth with meat of choice and lots of vermicelli, bean sprouts and Asian cilantro, which tastes even better than regular cilantro.

Collard greens and mustard greens

My substitutes for boerenkool and endive in stamppotten, but also great just as greens in any dish or as a side dish sautéed in olive oil and a bit of garlic.

Bagels and lox

A toasted bagel, cut open of course, so you have it all twice. Spread on cream cheese, sprinkle capers on the cheese, and then put on the slices of smoked salmon. I could have this every day!

Yes, we call them cockroaches here.

I don't have a role model. That's a very American thing. We Dutchies don't tend to idolize individuals as much.

The first time I was ever confronted with that question was when I applied for a job with an American software company in Holland. It took me completely aback and I was scrambling. I ended up saying a friend of mine at the police training school where I worked--one of the two Dutch teachers--was my role model because she seemed so wise and even-keeled.

But to say that she was a role model in the sense that I actively tried to emanate her good qualities...no. I would forget. I admired her, though.

I still greatly admire women who have that perfect poise, who are perfectly at ease in their own skin, who are always super-polite yet warm, considerate, never flustered, and who never stick their foot in their mouth. I know a few women like that and next to them I feel like a bull in a china shop--bumbling, stumbling, grumbling through life.

Immediately after seeing them I tell myself that I will try and be more like them, but somehow that thought is as hard to keep hold of as fog. Maybe having written it down will help.

In early summer of my senior year of high school in Bilthoven, the Netherlands, I cycled from Eemnes to my school (about a 45-minute bike ride) when the weather was nice. Otherwise I would take the bus and the train.

I had an old bike with no speeds, but what was great about it was that it handled really well with no hands. On the way back from school I often battled a head wind so I didn’t cycle without hands much. But on the way to school I cycled without hands a lot.

So at one point I decided to see if I could make it all the way from home to school without using my hands except to get on at home and to get off at school. It required a lot of luck with traffic lights and there was one particularly sharp little bend in the bike path about halfway that I hardly ever managed completely without hands.

Then one day I had good luck at traffic lights—either because they were green when I approached or because no cars were coming and I could run them—and I got the sharp bend right. I felt that this was my lucky day. It was now or never. It was still going to be tricky, because traffic in Bilthoven would be heavy, but I had a good feeling about it.

I probably ran another light or two because no cars were coming, but then came the crossing at school. It was super-busy of course, with cyclists and cars driving every which way, and I had to make it across that street for it to really count. I approached, having had luck all the way, but a car was coming. To hell with it, I thought. I’m never going to get this close again. So I kept going, gambling that the driver would choose slam on the breaks rather than have a mess on the front bumper.

It did. So no mess. And I made it from Eemnes to Bilthoven with no hands. I was euphoric! I even wrote about it as my final Dutch exam essay a few weeks later. The assignment was to write about a challenge. I got a good grade. I still grin inwardly when I think about it, more than thirty years later. But don’t ever do this.

I've sky-dived. A tandem jump with Holland's champion skydiver at the time. I would never bungee-jump. Too scary!

Living in America, the music I used to listen to in Holland as a teenager and college student now has a whole new dimension. Take ZZ Top. I was in the second year of library school in Deventer, my boyfriend and I had broken up but we still lived in the same student house and he would play his music really loud when he got back from the bar at 1 a.m. He drove me nuts, pretty much literally. And definitely consciously. A friend of mine who was in a biker phase at the time introduced me to ZZ Top and it was the perfect music for being mad.

One day I was so angry at my jerk of an ex-boyfriend that I put my ZZ Top record on really loud, with the speakers face down on the floor (he lived downstairs from me) and left. Not much of a payback, since it was a record, and after 20 minutes it would just stop, but it was the best I could do at the time.

Of course the lyrics were about Texas, South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley even, about Brownsville and South Padre island and the Driskill Hotel in Austin. I had only a vague idea where Texas was within the USA and didn't know anything about particular places. So it's funny that I married a guy from the Rio Grande Valley, lived an hour from Brownsville, went to South Padre Island regularly, and drive by the Driskill hotel almost daily. Go suck on that, Leo!