My Family

This page is meant to tell the history of my Cats, my family, and me. Over the years I was adopted by many cats, some of whom crossed the Rainbow Bridge, and some of whom are still with us. The page also serves to commemorate those cats that passed away. They will live forever in our memory.

Some time during my surfing the Net I encountered , and met so many REAL friends there that I make an exception to my policy -which may be changed at any time BTW, I'm a bit fickle - of only entering links on the LINKSpage or where they are relevant. Thank you all my friends from SICC for the support, emotional as well as technical (and in this respect I just have to mention Aad, Darrell, and Paula) you have given me!

	This is my wife, Gerda. We were married on August 5, 1969. She was born March 1947 in the village of Bunschoten/Spakenburg in the province of Utrecht. The village is on the shore of the Flevomeer (Lake Flevo) that used to be the IJsselmeer, and before that had an open connection to the North Sea, and was then called the Zuiderzee. Presently she works as the office manager of the company "Marketline" in Leiderdorp. We both live there since October 1971. We have two children:
	Jeroen - here shown with his Lilacpoint 'meezer, Megumi when collecting her from her breeder's house. He was born in January 1973 in Leiden. He is studying at the Technical University of Delft, something to do with the management of buildings on a scientific basis. He is the 'puter wizard of the family, and also runs his own company MediaPlanet Webdesign. This company designs Websites for small and medium size businesses. By the way Jeroen graduated on July 2, 1999, and is now a qualified engineer.
	My daughter, Mei-lan, who was born in September 1975, also in Leiden. She is studying the science of arts and culture at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where she is also living. She was the first one in our family to be adopted -again- by a Siamese kitten in 1995. The presence of Brandal in the family caused Jeroen to long so much for the company of 'his own' meezer, that he went looking for Megumi. Mei-lan is a good photographer -we think- and it was she who took the majority of the photographs in these pages.
	And this is Kuniyoshi (Kuni for short) and I, Hans, born 1938 and retired civil servant since March 1, 1998. I was born in Indonesia and spent three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp for civilians during World War II. I have been a sergeant in the field artillery for seven years, a buyer for a chain of delicatessen stores for nearly five before I became a civil servant. My hobbies are: Cats, cats and cats, reading (science and fantasy fiction: what do you think of Tolkien, Robert Jordan, and Greg Bear), growing bonsai, and cooking. Nowadays I occupy myself -aside from caring for the cats- with house keeping as Gerda still works at Marketline.

I was born in 1938 in the capital, Batavia, of the former Netherlands East Indies, the city that is now called Jakarta. My father was a bank employee, and we never stayed at one place for more than two years. Even during World War II we didn’t stay in the same Japanese concentration camp for the duration. After the war and a recuperation leave in Holland, we returned to what was to become the Republic of Indonesia, and I attended primary school in Semarang and Palembang. The first year of secondary school (HBS in Holland) we stayed in Bussum in Holland, and after that I had another two years –2nd and 3rd grade of HBS-B- in Jakarta. The last two years of secondary school I spent at a boarding school in Hilversum in Holland and at The Nieuwe Lyceum there, from which I graduated in 1955.

Because of my interest and high grades in Biology I enlisted in the University of Utrecht as a student of medicine, but because of an abundant wealth of extracurricular activities I didn’t even register for the final exam of the first year; I would have failed it miserably. My father gave me the choice of the agricultural university at Wageningen, the economic university of Rotterdam, or the international business school of Nijenrode in Breukelen. Yes that’s where the name of Brooklyn In New York comes from. This I finished in 1958 with good grades, especially for English, of which I was very proud because my grades were even better than those of the American students at Nijenrode.

In August 1958 I was called up for military service in the Field Artillery. After a ‘quarrel’ with one of the guns, some six months of recuperation and revalidation –two of my fingers of the left hand had been broken- I finished my training an an NCO, forward observer to be exact. I then went to the Army base Oirschot, where I served in the 12th Field Artillery in a variety of functions: communications, logistics, and even the field kitchen where I taught myself to cook for over 500 personnel. After half a year in a civilian institution where we cooked warm dinners, which we delivered to about 200 elderly people, I entered a chain of delicatessen stores as manager of the Indonesian shop, and as a buyer for the whole chain for about five years. This was also where I met my wife to be, Gerda, who married me in August 1969. This period of time ended in 1971.

When I started as a civil servant with the Ministry of the Interior in October 1971, we moved to Leiderdorp, a small village (ca. 24.000inhabitants) near the University town of Leiden in the province of South Holland in the Netherlands. We started by renting an apartment, and when the opening and closing of doors for the children, when they wanted to play outside then inside, and outside again, became to cumbersome for Gerda we moved to a house with a garden (in a row). It still isn't our own, we rent it from the same owner as the apartment building. The back garden is about 6 by 7 mtrs. And the front garden we share with our nextdoor neighbours; it is a piece of ground of about 5 by 5 mtrs., between our respective sheds. I love gardening and especially trees, so our front garden is rather overpopulated by a Prunus serrata "Kanzan" (Japanese Cherry Tree), a Juniperus media "Blauw", a yellow and a red climbing rose, an Avellana contorta (contorted hazelnut tree), a Wistaria, and a variety of bonsai 'starters', not to mention our Rhododendron.

The back garden consists of a sunk terrace of ca. 3 by 3 mtrs., a three-tiered rack for more bonsai, and an attempt at a Japanese garden. There is also a Rhus typhina, a Cedrus atlantica glauca, Wistaria again, some Rhododendrons of the azalea variety, a bamboo thicket, some Acers of Japanese descent (although grown in Holland), and some conifers like Taxus and Chamaecyparis. So it's rather crowded: to Gerda's chagrin. She is always pointing out to me that 'Japanese' in gardening means lots of empty spaces to lend meaning to the few plants there are. The cats love the back garden, however, lots of trees to climb and lots of places from which to yammer and YOWL at passing OTHER cats. Since Doorak, Laylah, and Pippi joined us I have continually been busy in adapting the "Cat-proofing" of the garden, as this Somali and the two Abyssinians are constantly pitting their intelligence against mine by attempting to escape. Needless to say they always find a hole I've forgotten, or a way to get over the chickenwire, which now extends about a meter and a half above the 1.8 mtr. high pergola. They find this game a lot of fun, and who am I to deny them this 'innocent' pastime?

GO ON TO History of "my" past Cats (Rikki, Bumipol, Manja)