Index

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For a few family pictures, you can open our photoalbum.

We like to travel for our vacations. Once we were able to make a long trip discovering new parts of the world as in our 2001 trip. But typically, we are just looking for a relaxing vacation on a beach or visiting our relatives. If you like to see descriptions and pictures of where we go, look here for our separate trips reports.

There have been a couple of people approaching us to find out whether they are related or not. Genealogy is very popular nowadays. My father has spend a considerable amount of time looking for our ancestors and relatives. I can impossibly show them all on this website. However, on the genealogy page I show 14 generations of Hemmeses, of which we form the last three.

Although it has been many years since we made our 2001 trip to Bali and Australia, I still get comments from people that read about it. So here is a series of links to the pages about our vacation. There are pictures of the outbound flight and Singapore, of Club Med Bali, our Bali tour, Australia's Northern Territories, Cairns, Dunk Island and finally of Melbourne and the return flight.

Here is a very short biography of us.

Diederik was born in 1954 in the Netherlands. Just before his 7th birthday his family moved to Curaçao, an island in the southern Caribbean that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. His father had an assignment that ended up being 8 years long. When he was 15, the family moved back to the Netherlands, where he then finished high school, went to college and did his mandatory military service. In 1982 He got a job with a Dutch company (ASM International, a company that makes manufacturing equipment for the semiconductor a.k.a. chips industry.) and was transferred to their facility in Arizona. There he met Stephanie in 1987.

Stephanie was born in 1957 in Wisconsin and spend the 28 years there working and going to school. In 1986 she moved with her daughter Nicole to Arizona where she met Diederik in 1987.

In 1988 Stephanie and Diederik got married in Arizona. Nicole was 7 at that time.

In the meantime, Diederik had found a new job in 1991 with Novellus Systems. A relatively newcomer at that time that also made manufacturing equipment for the semiconductor industry. At that time his main customer was Motorola mainly in Arizona and Austin. But he travelled quite a bit to other regional customers but also to Taiwan which at that time was a small newcomer in the chips industry (imagine that now!).

In 1997 we relocated to New York. IBM had a chip manufacturing site in Fishkill for research and pilot production. Novellus was working on a special program with IBM to introduce a process that would replace the aluminum wiring inside chips with copper. Diederik was put in charge of the group that supported IBM with the introduction of the first-of-their-kind Novellus plating tools. (This project was so successful that even today 25+ years later Novellus (even after the merger with Lam Research) is still by far the dominant supplier of copper plating tools for chip manufacturing.)

Our Eagle Scouts.

Early on in our marriage we had concluded that we wanted a vacation/winter home in the Caribbean. While we went to the Bahamas many times for vacation, it was not the right area for us for our own place. One of the main reasons is that the Bahamas routinely get impacted by hurricanes. We also looked at Central America (in 2012 we visited e.g. Panama), we ended up selecting Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean, a small hop away from Curaçao where Diederik spend many years in his youth. It is outside the hurricane zone, and has a stable political and judicial government being basically a small village in the Netherlands.

Because all the changes at IBM, Diederik’s job for Lam Research (which had merged with Novellus), very drastically changed. So he decided to retire a few years earlier than originally planned in 2015. In 2016 we moved into our vacation home in Bonaire, so we could get our house in New York get fixed up and then sold. That took a while and we then bought a new house in Wisconsin to be close to Stephanie’s Dad who was getting old and needed more support than Stephanie’s sister could give him.

But Wisconsin is very cold in the winters, so after Stephanie’s father passed away, we moved again now to Longwood (just outside Orlando) in Florida. Nathan was already living there with Caitlyn. Stephen and his family (Kayla and Liliana) were planning to move there. And we helped Jordan move there too. We had all boys now within 30 minutes of our home. By American standards that is quite unusual (and unfortunately didn’t last). By now, Nathan and his family have moved to upstate New York and Stephen and his family have moved to Arizona.