Wheels

I am still suprised by how much I missed biking while I was in the States. It's so much more fun than driving places, and today was perfect weather for it. Granted, that time I got caught in a sudden, very cold, downpour, I did wish for a car, but overall I really like the bike better. There's something very satisfying to me about moving under my own power, and it's a really relaxing way to get around, while still being a decent light cardio activity. If I get lost, it's much easier to turn around and try again than in a car, parking is certainly easier, and it's a nice way to exercise without exercising. I've never enjoyed walking on a treadmill or using a stationary bike, because it seems so pointless. I mean, it's kind of silly to walk 4 miles to nowhere, when you could walk 2 miles to somewhere and back again. I really like how biking everywhere incorporates bits of exercise into my day without making it about exercise. It can be hard to stay motivated to go to the gym; it's easy to bike to work and shops and back, because how else will I get there? It's quicker to bike than take public transport from my apartment. I'm not terribly concerned about cold temperatures, because winter is pretty mild here, and I have wool socks and merino scarves and I'm planning on alpaca gloves. Next spring, I'm planning to try out some of the country bike trails, and see how I do on longer rides. This place is covered in bike paths, and taking my bike up to the tulip fields to ride through them sounds particularly appealing.

Note: Photos taken by W when he and MM came to visit. Top photo is MM and I biking, bottom photo is my bike, which is awesome.

Taking the bus

I went to work in Utrecht today, since I have a meeting on Thursday, my usual day out of town. It takes me two trains and a bus ride each way to get there. The trains are always pleasant, and great knitting time, but I could live without the bus ride. Not that it's horrible or anything, but you have to pay better attention to which stop you're at and it can get pretty crowded.

Today, however, the bus was fantastic. The chipkart reading thingy was broken on both buses I took, so I got to ride free each way, for starters. On the bus home, I put my card up to the reader machine, and nothing happened. The bus driver said "Beep beep!" and smiled. It took me a minute to figure out, but he was making the card read noise and communicating I could get on the bus, in like the silliest way possible. I laughed.

I had to stand on the bus, because the between 17:00 and 18:00 buses are always crowded. At the next stop, an elderly woman who totally reminded me of my Grandma got on. You could only tell she was older by her hair and her skin; her stance and body language were very young.

Now, the bus driver's sense of whimsy seemed to extend to his driving as well. Or maybe he was trying to find out just how little space the bus needed to stop, or something. After the first stop where everyone who was standing nearly fell over, the guy sitting next to me tapped the older woman and asked if she wanted his seat. She refused, and really looked like she was having a great time with the balancing on the ride of insanity, but it made me happy that this random guy thought to ask. Warm fuzzies on a bus ride, who knew?

Things that are happening

I've been getting together all the papers so we can get R's visa. Since I'm a "highly skilled worker" he automatically gets a work permit, which is making this process a little easier. Since he was born on a military base in Europe, the paperwork has been a giant pain. I registered our marriage at Gemeente Delft, which is like a city hall. That part was easy, since I just had to take the marriage certificate, its apostille, and my residence card (which I'm legally required to carry all the time anyway) to the building and hand them to the people there. However, I recieved a new form to fill out, which had some awkward spots. Since R is still in the states, he doesn't have a visa number yet; what goes there? Do I have to mail it to him to sign, or can we fax it? Naturally, I didn't read the form thoroughly until I got home, so I couldn't ask about it. I have it (I think) all ready to go, though, so it gets mailed to R tomorrow. Just as soon as I find out where to buy stamps.

The world cup is over, and I haven't heard a vuvuzela since. Pure awesome.

I tried fixing my bike tire, but I think the hole was too big. O very thoughtfully loaned me a tire repair kit, and explained how to use it. The whole process was pretty simple, I'm just not sure it worked. I suspect I'll need to buy a new inner tire (this is like, 5 Euros or so) and learn how to replace that. Fun times! I like fixing things. I had planned to take pictures of the tire patching process, but my hands had too much adhesive on them to be touching my lovely camera.

Now that I've been paid again, I'm planning an exciting trip to IKEA. I really need a new mattress, so I don't have to sleep on the perpetually falling apart bed, and I could use a couple picture frames. Plus, IKEA is fun to wander, and Delft has a ginormous* one.

R and I have had some more activity with showing the house since we lowered the price again. We're giving it a couple more weeks, and then are probably going to take it to auction. We've reached a point where as long as we have to keep paying the mortgage, we're losing money, so it's better just to cut it loose now. Besides, we're young, and can earn more money later.

I need to find a tailor, or borrow someone's sewing machine, to fix a tiny fit problem on the dress I bought for MM's wedding. The top needs to come in by about half an inch, and the hemline could definitely be raised an inch or so. I could do it myself with a machine, but I'm not hand stitching it, because I really really don't enjoy hand sewing at all. This is very apparent in my choice of knitting patterns, which rarely require any seaming. Granted, that's also partly because it's cheaper to buy a sock's worth of yarn than a sweater's, but still. That's not my point, which is that hand sewing is tedious and sharp. I am a huge fan of nice blunt plastic yarn needles, I must admit.

I'm impatient to finish the second red sock in the pair, because I really want to use the leftover red yarn with leftover brown from the previous socks and make a nice pretty scarf or something.

July has just flown by here, partly due to the week I had a migraine, I'm sure. I'm way behind on pictures, so I've added a handful of old ones. The only unusual thing I've done was have a BBQ (by this, people here mean grilling out as a social group, not actual BBQ-ing) with all the roommates. However, as it started raining right as we sat down to eat the first course, I didn't get many pictures after we finished prepping all the food, because we were busy running inside with all the stuff, and then finishing the cooking under an awning as the rain poured down. It was fun though!

*Is ginormous really a word? The spell check doesn't underline it, but does underline IKEA. Which is even stranger, since spell checkers usually assume all caps words are acronyms, and therefore not subject to normal spellings.

Misc

It's summer here. Gloriously, summertime means upper 70's F, not sauna weather. I did get sunburned during our coffee break today, since we've been taking the coffee outside. Most of my group went sailing this afternoon, but when asked if I wanted to come I told them next time they go on a cloudy day, thanks. I know very well how burned I'd be in this sun plus water reflections. I did leave work a little early, though.

Went to the bike shop to replace my recently stolen bike. I'm already tired of walking when I could ride! Mostly because my shoes keep getting sand in them when I walk through construction areas, of which there are 3 on my trip to campus. Sadly, the bike shop no longer has the purple bike I was planning to get. I liked the purple one. I did look at a couple other ones instead, and I'm leaning towards a cheaper black one. They also can't take my credit cards (EU cards have a different scanning system, or something like that) so I couldn't get a bike today. I'll be getting some cash tomorrow and buying one then, on my way home from the market.

On Monday (if I have a bike, it's too far to walk in the hour they're open after work) I can pick up my new debit card! And finally use plastic here! I'm pretty happy about that.

I had a good day at work yesterday. I finally got my broken output problem all squared away, which was a relief. I spent most of today running experiments and trying to read a dissertation. I made it all the way through Chpt 1, which would be a lot more impressive if it were more than 5 pages long.

I've been here for 2.5 months already! It's craziness. I feel like I'm getting to actually know my coworkers a bit, which is pretty awesome. On Monday we made up a ridiculous new sporting event during coffee; underwater upside down hockey. Lots of silliness, which was pretty fun. Today I introduced them to the world's awesomest religion; the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Good times.

I really like having work to do. I finally feel like myself again, after 6 months of horrible stress and nearly of year of boredom. This is much better.

Fietsen

Fietsen = to bike

I have a bike! And I can ride it, although the first tries were a little wobbly, and I had to lower the seat all the way. The first time riding on the street was scary, but I feel okay now, as long as I already know the route, and don't have to go through construction.

Some observations about biking.

1. Intersections are terrifying.
2. After not touching a bike for 10 years, it is inadvisable to do 3 miles a day for a week. It makes one's derriere hurt.
3. This town is really flat. The only hill I've been on is a man-made tunnel, and goes under the train tracks.
4. Ask the guy how the bike lock works, so you don't spend 15 minutes feeling stupid next to your bike the first time you park it.
5. Telling a Dutch bike salesman that you haven't ridden a bike for 10 years renders him speechless. Even when you've clarified you aren't from around here.
6. The Dutch are the tallest people in the world. This means there are very few bikes of an appropriate size for a shorter than average American woman.
7. As a glasses-wearer, riding in the rain is scary. The droplets get on the glasses and visibility is severely compromised.
8. I don't like hearing the motorized bikes coming up behind me.
9. I can't yet signal my turns, because I get all wobbly if I take one hand off the handlebars. I suspect this is not the reason for the other 70% of people who don't signal their turns.
10. Riding a bike has shortened my commute by 20 minutes each way. This is awesome.

Code is awesome when it works

4:45 PM
I am running code. In fact, I'm waiting for it to finish. I'm also trying to figure out what time would be normal to leave, since I'm now at KNMI instead of on campus. Also, this code is hella sexy. Seriously, it's amazing. This is FORTRAN with a GUI, running on a ton of processors. Sometimes. I got an error today because the code (doing some sort of finite element analysis over a fair chunk of the coastline over a 6 hour period) was running on too many processors. I hadn't made the simulation complicated enough for it to use all the processing power available. Which means the code is efficient too. Awesome.

Anyway, I hope the Aeroboys read this, because no one else will relate to the geekiness in that first paragraph.

It's been an exciting day here in science research land! Having gotten used to the routine of going to campus every day, today I switched it up and took two trains to Utrecht. I usually like having routines, especially considering how crazy everything else is currently, so the morning was a little stressful. I made the train connection and got to Utrecht with plenty of time, and then I got help from CS finding bus tickets. I met an entirely new batch of people, even though I'm still working on names from my uni dept, and around 2pm I finally had a computer set up.

The downside of meeting new people today is that they're all significantly taller than me. Like, way way taller. Three of the people in this group have hit the 2m (that's about 6' 7") mark. It's ridiculous.

Getting on the train at all was pretty exciting, since it's nearly impossible to buy train tickets for the nearby station without a Dutch bank account. The smaller station only has machines, and they only take debit cards and coins. I certainly didn't have €21 in coins! My debit card doesn't work because US cards use a different format than EU ones. Most ATMs can handle both, but not a lot of other machines. I cannot wait to get a bank account! E bought the train tickets online for me, which was super nice of her.

I can knit about 2 inches of sock on the train ride from Rotterdam to Utrecht, so the new coffee break socks are growing pretty fast. I might need to rename them train socks, since I've been doing most of the knitting on the trains instead of during the coffee breaks.

The bus ticket thing is an elegant bit of technology, I think. I got a plastic card, and loaded it with a chosen amount of money, and then I just hold it up to a scanner (this takes like 2 seconds) when I get on the bus, hold it up again when I get off, and it deducts the fare for however far I went. You don't even have to slide the card, just hold it by the machine. It's quick and easy, both good when dealing with public transportation. I *think* I can put more money on it online, although I bet I need a bank account for that.

Code's still running. Yay for running code!

I've applied for a bank account at a local bank. It was pretty hard comparing banks online, because they don't have much in the way of English pages. They all seem pretty similar. I picked based on ease of understanding the Dutch, bank locations, and the fact that I could start the process online, which is helpful when banks aren't open on the weekends, when I could actually go to one. According to F, I picked the one most like a credit union, which I'm somewhat amused by.

I think the code finished! Why, in fact it did! And it worked! You wouldn't BELIEVE how much data this puts out. This is a huge improvement from last week. As it's now 6PM and I have an hour train ride to go, I think I shall be heading home.

Happy birthday to J!

Some random observations

1. It's much more pleasant walking through parking lots when all the cars are small.
2. Grocery shopping in a language you don't speak is challenging, especially at the open-air market.
3. A "short walk" here is much longer than a "short walk" in the states. The expectation that you would walk or bike to the market that's 2 km away is pretty motivating though, and it was a really nice walk.
4. Sidewalk construction projects get done really fast. Particularly strange is that I've never seen anyone actually working on the sidewalk, but each day the project has progressed about 20m farther.
5. Coffee breaks are sacred. That's awesome.
6. They sometimes serve free alcohol at university-sponsored events. A lot of it.
7. I should have brought my farmer's market bag with me, since the ubiquitous plastic grocery bag is pretty absent here. Luckily, my purses are big.
8. Having a roommate (F) who has lived in town for 11 years is very helpful. She gives excellent directions.
9. Stores are closed on Sundays, so I have nothing to do today but relax. Also awesome.
10. The cure for boredom with two blue knitting projects is apparently varigated taupe-to-orange socks.
11. The members of my department are very excited to finally have a native English speaker on the team.
12. I get irrationally frustrated when I can't understand Dutch, and apparently think I should have learned it in about 2 days here. I realize this is silly.
13. My Pakistani roommate (S) makes really really delicious food.
14. E's cat, Pasha, is the only animal I've ever met that is as obsessed with people food as Parents 1.0's dog.
15. I am apparently very approachable (or look like I know where I'm going) because people keep stopping me to ask for directions. I have yet to be able to help anyone.
16. I really like the lack of pickups and SUVs. It makes walking along streets seem much safer. Also, it's easier to see street signs.
17. The auto train ticket stands don't work with American cards. They require the fancy new kind with a microchip.
18. Pasha very much likes merino/silk yarn, and spent an hour sleeping on it.
19. I need better shoes. Or to get used to walking so much.
20. There's a website that plans routes for you based on public transportation. It's the best thing ever. Except for having access to public transportation in the first place, which is even better.
21. Kids play outside by themselves here, with no adults in sight. I like that, but it's disorienting.
22. It's hard to think in math after a year of unemployment. Satisfying though.
23. There's an IKEA here. S and I are going, because we both need furniture. I'm excited, and already know what I want to get.
24. Skype cannot register a clear image of Quasar. All the fuzziness screws up the webcam.
25. Everyone I've met so far has been really nice. The first question I get is "How did you get here?!?!" followed by "Where are you from?" and then "Corn, right? and Wizard of Oz?" At least they haven't asked if I grow potatoes, which makes them more conversant with US geography than several coastal Americans I've met.
26. Happy birthday to the lovely AH!