There is a downside to how they keep making iPods smaller and lighter, and I think I just found it. I had unplugged the headphones from my iPod after erging, planning to go plug it into a dock to charge. Then apparently I forgot about it when I added my shorts to the laundry I was about to wash. Oops. I’ve put it in a sunny spot to dry out but I don’t have much hope it will ever work again. I will probably replace it next weekend, but I do have another option for the rest of the week: I can load my audiobooks onto my iPod Touch, which is too heavy to clip on while working out but which I can set next to me and use with Bluetooth headphones.

I’m off work today: company policy gives us a day off after an international flight and for once I’ve taken it. Lots to do today: laundry, sewing a fleece lining inside the band of the hat I made for Ted, and embroidering the signatures where we had out Thanksgiving guests sign our tablecloth. I also used the day off to fit in 15km on the erg, which brings me to 100,000 meters on the Holiday Challenge. Halfway through! I only missed one day during my trip, but I’m actually well ahead of schedule.

And here is the hat I made for Ted – click any of the images to enlarge. I particularly like the last picture which shows the inside! You can clearly see the difference between the tvaandstickning (twined knitting) technique on the brim and the stranded knitting in the rest of the hat.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

There is a downside to how they keep making iPods smaller and lighter, and I think I just found it. I had unplugged the headphones from my iPod after erging, planning to go plug it into a dock to charge. Then apparently I forgot about it when I added my shorts to the laundry I was about to wash. Oops. I’ve put it in a sunny spot to dry out but I don’t have much hope it will ever work again. I will probably replace it next weekend, but I do have another option for the rest of the week: I can load my audiobooks onto my iPod Touch, which is too heavy to clip on while working out but which I can set next to me and use with Bluetooth headphones.

I’m off work today: company policy gives us a day off after an international flight and for once I’ve taken it. Lots to do today: laundry, sewing a fleece lining inside the band of the hat I made for Ted, and embroidering the signatures where we had out Thanksgiving guests sign our tablecloth. I also used the day off to fit in 15km on the erg, which brings me to 100,000 meters on the Holiday Challenge. Halfway through! I only missed one day during my trip, but I’m actually well ahead of schedule.

And here is the hat I made for Ted – click any of the images to enlarge. I particularly like the last picture which shows the inside! You can clearly see the difference between the tvaandstickning (twined knitting) technique on the brim and the stranded knitting in the rest of the hat.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Bit of a discouraging day here. I signed the contract for my Neherlands employment today so I’m feeling a bit trapped – though technically I suppose I could get out of it any time before they pay out money and even afterward, all it says is that I have to give a month’s notice and that if I leave before a year I have to pay back the relocation allowance. (Not the moving costs, just a lump sum payment they give me for any extra expenses of moving. I feel like it’s free money, and if I leave early I have no problem returning that.)

But still, it’s official now.

It’s not helping that this evening, after signing the contract, I found that the HEMA doesn’t have the pretzels I liked (possibly their only edged out for the moment by Sinterklaas and Christmas treats) and that the organic grocery which had similar pretzels and which was the only place we found real popcorn here is gone. (Any one who’s been reading here a while will remember the Great Popcorn Search of 2006-2007.)

I did pull out my navel piercing, and now there’s a hole there – my previous referent was the much smaller pinpoint holes in my ears. I suppose it will heal up eventually, though. It’s still a bit sore, so I’ll use salt-water soaks.

On the plus side I have a small bottle of wine I bought my first day and won’t be able to take with me. It’s not great wine, but it’s as good as half of the stuff we get in Taiwan. Good cheap wine is definitely one of the benefits here, and so is being able to buy 0.25 liter bottles of it.

I sure hope this move isn’t a mistake.

ETA: One more positive thing: I have to catch a train around 9:15 to Amsterdam, and the hotel gym doesn’t open until 11 – but apparently the hotel reception can let me in there earlier.

And one more disappointment: I just went to check the exact time to catch the train and learned that I can only train to Utrecht, then have to take a bus the rest of the way – they must be working on the tracks. Crap. (Or I suppose I could drive and return the car there instead of here, but I’m not crazy about that idea either.) Crap again.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

I had dinner with a colleague tonight, no time to erg before it and too full to do it afterward. I’m still ahead of the game, having done a half-marathon Sunday before leaving, but I’m not thrilled about having missed my first day of erging since Thanksgiving. On the other hand I think I do really need a day off (and should get off the ‘puter v. shortly and get extra sleep). Erging tomorrow shouldn’t be an issue; the hotel gym hours are erratic so I’m just hoping they open early enough Saturday so I can erg before catching my train to Schiphol.

I’ve been seriously considering “retiring” my navel piercing for a while now. There’s no real reason to keep it: my abs are not in shape to show off or for me to like looking at them, the piercing’s not really enhancing anything. Ted doesn’t find it particularly enticing. And it’s a bit of a hazard – I catch it sometimes on the erg handle, and higher-waisted pants or skirts can irritate it. It’s so much drier here than in Taiwan thatall of my skin is rebelling, and probably because of that the piercing’s actually been a little tender for the past couple of days. So basically, I have some reasons to ditch it and no real reason to keep it – except that it *hurt* to get it and I hate to have wasted that pain and that it’s the only body-modification I have other than one plain-vanilla hole in each earlobe. Then again, navel piercings aren’t exactly edgy these days – so 1999.

I think what I’m looking for here is actually either a good reason to keep it (unlikely) or a push to give up on it.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

The hat, it is done. And it is beeeyoootiful. Some days I impress myself The nice part is that I finished it at the Eindhoven Stitch’n'Bitch night, so it got lots of nice comments from other people too. However, I dont have a camera so probably no pictures until I get home (unless I decide I just can’t wait and take crappy cell phone pics). It’s blocking now, with two water glasses weighing it down to try to counteract the brim’s tendency to fold up (I know I shouldn’t have included two plain rows in a row among the tvaandstickning – it folds on that line).

I keep alternating between “Why on earth did I want to move back here again?” and “Hey, this is fun!” Oddly, most of the latter has been at work. But I did have a great time at knitting tonight, and I think I’ve got a dinner with coworkers tomorrow. It has been getting colder since I’ve been here, and the short northern days mean I’m driving to and from work in the dark. (I’m not working long days either, mostly around 8:30-5:30.) On the other hand, today I pulled into work beneath the sort of beautiful sunrise that’s routine here and very rare in Taiwan.

And I’ve been enjoying the cafeteria food here, which is downright disturbing. It’s mostly about having choices, and having bread and potatoes available, drinks with the meal instead of as dessert, and tasty soups. Last night’s dinner and tonight’s gathering were nice too; the restaurants around here are gezellig (cozy, homey) in winter.

My meeting with the VP was better than expected (he didn’t tell me he hated my department’s quality setup, and what he wants from me is a bit clearer, if not in complete alignement with what the department wants. And it’s been fun seeing all my colleagues here again. However, outside of work I am missing ted, and that’s a taste of what moving here will be like.

Two surreal moments so far: on the train, the conductor who punched my ticket said “alstublieft” to everyone else, and “thank you” to me. I didn’t say a word to her or anyone, and I have no idea how she knew. The size of my suitcase? The other odd moment was this morning at breakfast. The hotel has a breakfast buffet but waiters come around with tea and coffee. This morning one walked up to me and asked “tea?” without even offering coffee. I don’t think he just happened to have the teapot, because I’m pretty sure there was another pot in his other hand. Did he recognize me and remember? I’ve certainly stayed here enough, but my last visit was at least a year ago.

Speaking of my suitcase, I appear to have packed with remarkable efficiency. The suitcase is big only because I don’t have a medium sized one, and it was far from full, but I could stay another week and wear a different outfit each day. It’s all in shades of gray and black except a rose-red double-faced wool blazer and tights of (nearly) that shade. I could have brought more jewelry – the jacket has tiny holes in the lapel and I forgot to bring a pin to cover them so bought one at Swarovski in the Hong Kong airport. A colored scarf would be nice too. I still want one that’s nice, soft, narrow, but heavy enough to hang down even when I walk. I will probably need to knit one.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

The trip here was pretty good. Cathay Pacific is definitely nicer to fly on than KLM – more legroom, much better in-flight entertainment, and I think the food looked better but I didn’t eat much of it. Only problem is that because I don’t have any spcial fequent flyer status on this airline (or its affiliates) I could only take 20 kilos. Since it’s only a one-week trip and I don’t expect to do much shopping that wasn’t an issue.

The hotel put me up in the “executive wing”, which is slightly nicer, no huge difference. Some of the other rooms in this hotel are seriously in need of redoing (I think a planned renovation got put off in the economic downturn) so it is in much better shape. There is a room mockup in the lobby, for some reason, so maybe they’re finally going to do it. (It’s a nice hotel, just not as nice as it’s intended to be, and not too fancy for a Sofitel.)

After flying out at 7:30 PM< I arrived in Amsterdam at 6:30 AM (plus an 8-hour time difference!), took the train to Eindhoven, checked into the hotel, and went to work. I made it there, too, despite some closed roads. Worked all day, found my way back to the hotel (more road closures in this direction), erged 7 km, got some takeout stirfry, and fell asleep by about 9:30. I slept soundly til 4 AM, dozed after that, and finally decided to wake up and begin writing this around 6:45.

Good thing I was briefed on the road closures by Ted; I asked at the hotel, and they checked with their local taxi dispatchers who said, “oh, no, all the roads are open going there.” Wrong. Somehow this hotel is always clueless about nearby roadwork.

Today may be rough; jet lag is often worst the second day, but this is my busiest day including a meeting with a few directors and a one-on-one with a VP right at the end of the day. He has a lot of say in my new role, too – maybe if I’m totally groggy I can use it as an excuse to end early. I’m also hoping I can sleep well tonight; that might be tricky because there’s a church that chimes the hours right across from the hotel.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Thanksgiving dinner #1 eaten last night. I took this morning off for an eyedoctor’s appointment and am working from home this afternoon. So far, at one part of the day or another I have: had my checkup. decided to have a tomato-and-bread salad instead of a tossed salad, gone shopping (having intelligently realized that there’s a supermarket right near the doctor’s office *and* it’s in an expat-heavy neighborhood so was likely to have the sour cream I wanted), made applesauce, made brownies, read email, had a telecon, discussed methods to report certain issues, made failed bread (mix and breadmaker, not by hand – apparently the mix was too old, because it didn’t rise at all), bought bread and cut it up to dry for the salad, and got kasha and bowties started.

Somewhere after I bought the tomatoes I realized that the people who are coming over tomorrow were at our party last summer, which means they’ve already had my tomato-and-bread salad as well as my kasha varnishkes. Oops. But it was months ago, and I did drag out some of my holiday standards for the party. Anyway, they haven’t had my turkey, or my mashed potatoes made with cheese and sour cream, and no one has had the asparagus tossed with orange zest I’m planning (based on a recipe I saw on line for green beans almondine which included lemon zest, and on the fact that I have oranges but not lemons and the asparagus looked more appealing than the beans at the store this morning.) These are the same people who had me over last night, so hopefully they’ll bring some of their leftover pie (pumpkin/pecan (yes, together) or cheesecake), and we’ll send them home with some turkey gravy because they couldn’t find an uncooked turkey, bought the same precooked kind we had last year (not bad, really) and didn’t like the gravy that came with it. Expats need to stick together!

Now I need to finish the kasha and bows, then it’s off to turkey dinner #2, which is at a restaurant.

(If you haven’t been keeping up, someone invited us to the restaurant dinner but Ted’s still away so we’re having our own dinner tomorrow – the only full day we’re both home between business trips. Then the other Americans we’re having over tomorrow invited me to their dinner yesterday. See: expats sticking together, above.)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

On Ravelry in the “knitting engineers” forum, there’s a thread on “Silly Things Said to Women Engineers”. One person there reported that when she was trying to climb into a very tall truck, a male coworker said to her, “Sorry about the big truck. I have a small penis.” Had it been me, I’d probably have injured myself when I fell back out of the truck laughing.

Many of the things on that thread amount to harassment in my opinion. If there’s an opposite of harrassment, this might be it. (Yeah, OK, it’s still a little tasteless and out of place in a work environment, but I’m inclined to take a lenient view on comments that don’t either impugn the other person’s professionalism or imply that she’s in any way lesser than her male colleagues or just there for their amusement.)

–

I’ve been rereading Sense and Sensibility. While Austen’s obviously making fun of 17-year-old Marianne and her conviction that Col. Brandon, at 36, is a doddering creature in a flannel waistcoat who is far too old to have any actual emotions, I still found it a bit depressing to realize that I’m now older than Mrs. Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne’s mother.

It’s not just relative to a society in which 17 is a marriageable age, either. I’m only a year or two younger than Ted’s mother was the first time he brought me home – and he and I met as adults, out of college and in our first jobs.

I don’t feel like I’ve wasted all those years, but unless you absolutely hate kids, I think there are always moments of regret now and then for not having any. (The flip side is whenever I’m ill, or one a long plane flight, thinking, “Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with kids during this!”)

That also reminds me that March 23 will be twenty years from when Ted and I met. I’ll have to try to make sure we’re in the same country for that anniversary.

–

Yesterday, CNN International had a commercial for Prague, which is a magnificent city and well worth visiting. However, the music was a bit disorienting; I suspect it was from Czech composer Bedřich Smetana’ symphonic poem, Vltava / Die Moldau. Seemed like a weird choice, given that it’s possibly better known as the tune of the Israeli national anthem.

I suppose it’s no weirder than if they’d had a commercial for visiting the US with brackground music of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (a.k.a “God Save the Queen”).

–

It turns out I will have Thanksgiving dinner tonight (at a coworker’s apartment), tomorrow night (at a restaurant, invited by a different coworker), and Saturday (at our place, with Ted and another couple). Tryptophan city, man. Oh well, I started the Holiday Challenge this morning, so maybe I need the fuel.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

I have two questions, one musical and one astronomical.

Musical: A song mention from stillnotbored and something I was singing the other day got me thinking about songs that go around the seasons. So far I’ve thought of:

Simon & Garfunkel, “April, Come She Will” (only covers April – September!)
Archie Fisher, “Ashfields & Brine”
Mike Cross, “Wake Up My Love”
Anne Hills, “Follow that Road”

and in a different vein, “If Ever I Would Leave You” from the musical Camelot. The first four are among the songs I love, so now I’m curious: what other ones are out there?

Astronomical: I just got curious and looked up sunset times for Taipei. Oddly, it looks like the earliest sunsets of the year happen before winter solstice, from December 9-16. By solstice they’re already getting later, though the total length of the day is at its shortest. I checked a bunch of other cities, and the same thing happens there, though the actual dates of earliest sunset vary. The same thing happens in the Southern Hemisphere: in Perth, the earlier sunset is from June 5-17.

Can someone explain this to me? If is just because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical rather than round?

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Since L’Empress asked, here is a picture of the chops I bought yesterday:

And, since I had the macro lens out, here are bonus photos of the hat I’m knitting:

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

One of the things I’m looking forward to in the Netherlands is the likelihood of an apartment with some soundproofing. We did sometimes have to sleep with earplugs because we lived right in the Centrum, right by the bars, and it got loud when they had things like the celebration for PSV winning the European Cup. But I never ever heard my neighbors, not once. I am getting really, really sick of hearing every scream from the kid across the hall (who seems to be permanently set on High, but that’s pretty normal for a toddler) and every flush from the people upstairs. I know their schedule better than I really want to.

Today I went to the Jianguo Flower Market, or rather the Jianguo Decorative Stuff market, because there are three very large sections. One has aisles of art and craft stuff: carvings, paintings, geodes set on stands, pottery, and so on; The next, which is probably the longest, has only a single aisle and is the actual flower market: flowers, plants, garden stuff, fountains. The last one is the Jade Market (it’s actually shown separately on my map. It has four aisles with jewelry, beads, jade carvings – it was actually the most overwhelming part because there was so much stuff. The whole thing is probably almost a kilometer long.

I didn’t go too wild: bought some presently-needed presents and some future-tense presents just in case, a strand of labradorite beads for under US$10, and a couple small jade beads. I also got a chop, something I’ve been meaning to get – two actually. There was someone there to care them too. I have my Chinese name on one (stylized so I wouldn’t have recognized the characters), and my Chinese name in a more readable script plus my English initials on the other. I’m wondering now about legalities in the US. Like, when you buy a house and you have to initial eleventy-jillion pieces of paper, could I use a chop for that? It would be easier.

Thank goodness it’s finally cooler. I wore cropped jeans, a 3/4-sleeve T, and an extremely light jacket that’s breathable but cuts the wind a but, and that was about right. I walked to the subway, took the crowded MRT train 6 stations or so, walked from the subway station to the market which was on the next major street (300m or so); wandered the whole length of the market, going back and forth and doing some parts twice, though lots of crowds and noise sights and smells and smells, was told to come back in an hour while the chop was being carved, went from the north end of the market back to the street the train runs on, bought some tights and some groceries in the fancy department store there (department stores all have food courts and supermarkets here), walked back to the jade Market carrying my bags, dived into it, picked up my chop and took a cab home. And I wasn’t totally dead when I got home – it’s amazing how much easier everything is when it’s not hot out!

(NB – if this all doesn’t sound all that tiring, then you probably haven’t walked through a Taipei market. This wasn’t horribly crowded, but there were still lots of people and as always, so much sensory stimulation that it can be exhausting. Also, I had already erged 15km – not at a hard pace, but it’s still an hour and a half workout.)

Knitting: The hat I’m knitting for Ted is going OK, except that the brim is curling a bit. It’s inspired by one we saw in a knitting / knitwear shop in Sweden. The pattern wasn’t available so I’m making it up as I go along; the brim is tvåändsstickning, aka Swedish twined knitting (more or less, I’ve included some plain rows in there too, which I’m pretty sure is not done in tradition) and the top is normal stranded colorwork, in a geometric design for which the shop did have a sweater pattern with a chart. I’m only a couple rows past the brim; it looks OK except the brim wants to fold up in the middle, no doubt due to the plain rows among the tvåändsstickning. I’m hoping blocking will fix that, or that it will be tight enough while being worn to stay in place. I’ll take pictures once there’s enough of the hat to see the pattern.

This is my first real colorwork, and it’s going OK, but slowly. For the stranded knitting, I’m holding one yarn in my left hand as I normally do and the other in my right – I haven’t done any English-style knitting since my early learning days and it’s slow and awkward for me to use that yarn. Hopefully it will be smoother after a bit. (Apparently the tvåändsstickning part is slow for everyone.) Also, the yarn the shop sold me is only a DK weight, so it doesn’t go all that fast – but with the two thicknesses of yarn in both techniques used, I think it will be plenty warm enough. It’s a very traditional yarn, meaning very scratchy, but I think it will bloom and soften when I wash it. No, I didn’t wash the swatch. I am Bad. One yarn is an undyed natural color, and I suspect the other is also undyed, just from black sheep.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

My uvula has been itching for a few days now, which is probably not good (as well as being very annoying). I hope this is not a sign of an impending cold, or if it is, that it comes and goes before Ted gets back, and before I have to travel.

The other day I wore my tall black boots for the first time this winter. I wore them over tights and they were a perfect fit to my calves. This is good and bad; it certainly looks better that way thanwhen they were a bit loose, but it means there’s no way at all I can wear them over trouser or jean legs. It also may mean my tall brown boots will be too tight. I’m not at all sure why my calves would be any bigger; I’m actually toward the lower end of the weight range I’ve been in while in Taiwan. I definitely lost some weight while running around the regatta (and rowing, and not getting to eat much) last month, but it’s probably creeping back, though the bras I bought in the US in August are still a little big, though I’d swear they fit at the time.

I have concluded that it’s all a myth that you grow up and then stop changing, except in the few specific ways that everyone knows about (getting fatter, building muscle, aging). As far as I can tell, my body is continuously changing – not as drastically as when I was 6, and not always in one direction, and not all of it at once, but changing. It’s definitely not a static system. That’s not necessarily a bad thing at all, but it is a little weird to realize, nearly 43 years into this life.

(Could be a lot worse. Ted says he went to college with a woman whose breasts changed size so drastically each month that it was noticeable to random male classmates. That has to have been annoying!)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

1. It’s harder to get to sleep without Ted here – though it’s easier to stay asleep when I have the bed to myself.

2. I checked just to make sure, and the clerk in Montgomery County, PA says there is no other way to get a marriage record there than to request it by mail, complete with SASE and check or to turn up in person. She seemed to think the fact that they’d had requests from England meant that it wasn’t a problem for anyone overseas; totally ignoring the possibility that it had in fact been a major pain the ass for said person, who had just been resourceful enough to manage it. Also, I think they still use checks (well, cheques) in England, which is emphatically NOT true in either Taiwan or the Netherlands. I suppose I could manage it if I had to, since we do still have US bank accounts, and a checkbook for at least one of them, and by dint of using a Fedex form instead of a simple stamped envelope, but my mommy is being kind enough to do it for me (since she lives in the same state and it should be both faster and safer that way).

3. It’s finally cooling off here, yay. Unfortunately one effect seems to have been to drive the mosquitoes indoors and I have a couple new bites, which are also not helping me get to sleep. (Nor is typing this, obv.)

4. Speaking of my mommy, she called tonight. What I hadn’t known was that she took over my uncle’s cell phone (hers was just a prepaid, his had an international calling plan, and possibly a commitment though I bet they’d have canceled it if she’d asked). She called me on my cell instead of the home number, probably because he had the number programmed in. It gave me a bit of a turn to see his name pop up.

I’ve heard of leaving a dead person’s number on your phone or not deleting their voice messages. But how often do they actually call?

5. Speaking of remembering people, I never actually knew willfullcait or read her blog regularly (and am not sure I spelled her handle correctly, for that matter) But it’s a funny kind of immortality, to be remembered even by strangers for “five random things make a post”. I don’t think that sort of thing originated with the Internet – how many people pick up a habit from a teacher, and pass it on to their kids decades later? And there’s the classic Suzette Haden Elgin story, with an sfnal setting though at base it’s about just folks, about the family who cut the ends off their ham for five generations. However, I suspect the Internet makes tat sort of ripple effect easier and wider-spread, if possibly shallower.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

stonetalker is doing one-card draws (I think until midnight Eastern today, if you’re interested:

I posted, “I’d just like to ask about the risk in some job decisions my husband and I have made recently”

The answer was, “The Six of Water tells a story of cooperation. It is a card of happiness that comes through sharing. The Six of Water is advising you to watch for unusual ways in which you can share your happiness with others. There is karma with this card, too; a bonding with those with whom you have shared previous lifetimes, or far-memory. Keep sharing your happiness, and happiness will keep itself sharing with you.

I feel no uneasiness regarding your job decisions; I feel these too were karmic for you. Just keep flowing with optimism and cooperation.”

No, I don’t particularly believe in the Tarot, but I do believe in “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and that the universe is stranger than I can imagine. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically magic about squares of carboard with pretty pictures on them; whether they can serve as tools for gifted people to tap into something bigger … I sayeth not. But I don’t say that they can’t and anyway it’s always nice to get affirmations, given that the alea is pretty much acta.

The risk is not so much about whether things will work out for my job, as whether Ted will get a job, and whether it’ll come with an expat contract. However, I feel strongly that they’d be idiots not to hire him, and they’re not idiots.

The above helps with the optimism bit, but I think I have the opposite of SADS, anyway. I perk up in winter. I loved last winter’s trip to the Ice Hotel and I’m lookng forward to going to the Netherlands in (under) two weeks. It’s probably largely because having spent most of the last 20 years in hot climates means that I am completely sick and tired of heat, but it’s also that the winter in those climates is so short and fleeting. I haven’t gotten tired of it at all. Then again, I didn’t mind the winter in the Netherlands. I confess I was more than ready for spring the winter I spent in Worcester, MA (see my very earliest blog entries) but that was mostly about being resentful and tired of Worcester.

I can tell my level of mood by what I’m singing, sometimes. Lately it’s all about hope. Last week it was Gordon Bok’s Turning Toward the Morning. Just now I caught myself singing his “Julian of Norwich”:

“Love, like the yellow daffodil is blooming in the snow;
Love like the yellow daffodil is Lord of all, I know.

Ring out, bells of Norwich and let the winter come and go –
All shall be well again, I know.”

In the next few weeks I know I’ll be singing Peter Yarrow’s “Light One Candle”, because I always do this time of year. I’ve come to think about that song, and Chanukah in general (and also St. Lucia’s Day and Christmas) as being about lighting a candle when darkness is looming, as an act of hope, faith, and defiance.

I see I lied above – I can tell by the non-tirra-lirra-y songs. I don’t exactly “perk up” in winter, because that implies being chipper and cheerful and carefree. You don’t need hope in that mood, just as you don’t need it in (metaphorical) summer. What winter rouses in me is more a mood of bloody-minded optimism, which makes me want to simultaneously embrace the cold and darkness (when I was in my early teens, when crowded parties got too loud and oppressive, I used to sneak outside and go walking, at night in winter without a coat), retreat from it (into the pleasures of cozy room tea or chocolate, book, fire, knitting), and defy it, by lighting lights and refusing to let darkness convince me that it’s here to stay. In winter I feel more like me.

I suppose none of the above makes much sense to anyone not living in this head. It’s a good mood to tackle paperwork hassles in, anyway.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

What a pain in the ass. There are a bunch of documents I need to provide before I can move to the Netherlands. Most of them, like my college diploma, they already have on file from last time. The problems, of course, are the same two that were problems last time: my birth and marriage certificates. It’s not like I’ve been born again (in any sense) or married again in the last three years, but the official certificate isn’t enough for them. They require an apostille to further legalize it – which is basically a stamp from the state of Pennsylvania saying yes, these are our legal documents and we vouch for them.

It sounds like it would be tedious, but not that awful: request birth certificate (from state office), request marriage certificate (from county office, send both back to state for apostille, get them back again, send on to HR person. But it’s worse than that.

The county is still living in olden days: there are two ways to request a marriage certificate, in person and online. In person is obviously out (and I won’t ask my mother to do it; it’s quite a long drive through traffic that scares her. My brother and SIL already have over an hour commute, in the other direction). But by mail is also problematic: you are supposed to send a check and SASE. I can’t find the checkbook for my US bank account, not having used it in a good three years; I have accounts in the Netherlands and Taiwan but neither place even uses checks, at all. I don’t keep US stamps around, either. I could send a FedEx airbill with my credit card number on it, but the only ones I have access to are international airbills. I guess that would be OK, even for domestic mailing.

The state at least gives you a choice: request the certificate by mail (sending a check and SASE) or online. By mail has all the problems listed above, but the online method has an issue of its own: you pay by credit card and they will only send the certificate to the billing address of the credit card. Because US credit cards require a US address, that means it gets sent to my in-laws, who kindly let us use their address for US mail. Oh, yes, and the fees are $10 for the certificate, $8 for the online service, and $17 for airmail, which is the default.

Also, I’m not really crazy about trusting international mails enough to have stuff sent here and then send it back for the apostille. Fortunately my in-laws are nice enough that they’ll help us on this. So I’ve requested the birth cert and it should be sent to their house in a few days. I’ll either find a checkbook and send mail requesting the marriage cert to be sent to them along with a preaddressed, prepaid FedEx airbill, or ask them (or my mother) to send the request, with a SASE.

Then they’ll send the birth and marriage certificates to the state capitol (which, by the way, is on the opposite coast from them) along with a prepaid airbill, to be sent either to me or to the HR person directly.

Are you tired yet? Because I am, just from writing all that, let alone doing it.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

…you lose some…

I got a rejection yesterday from Mike Allen for the issue of Goblin Fruit he’s guest-editing. It was a particularly nice rejection, though – from what he posted elsewhere I infer one of the two I submitted was on the shortlist, which probably makes it the closest I’ve come to breaking into GF.

…you win some…

and the Winter issue of Twist Collective is now up, with my poem “Clotho Visits the Local Yarn Store”! Kind of cool having a poem in a knitting magazine (I’m tempted to make bad puns about interstitchial art) and it has a two-”page” spread, with photos!!

(ETA: Edited to correct HTML. That’s what I get for posting at bedtime.)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

After learning that I will be moving back to the Netherlands in April, I did what any smart woman leaving Asia would do: I had two more dresses made for me, by the tailor who made one early this year. Now I need help figuring out how to wear them. I have ribbed turtlenecks in black, brown and ivory, tights in assorted neutrals, an espresso leather blazer, and assorted other things – cardigans, boots, high heels, belts, long and short-sleeved T-shorts, oxford shirts, a couple of scarves, and a lace shawl I knit in flame colors. Styling ideas, please?

Photos:

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Sunday, November 15:
NRoLW section 1, workout B/4:
1km warmup on erg.
DL: 85 lbs, 2 sets of 12, 60sec rest
Superset:
Dumbbell shoulder press: 12.5 lb dumbbells, 2 sets of 12, 60sec rest
Lat pulldown: 60lbs, 2 sets of 12, 60sec rest
Superset:
Lunge: 2 sets of 12: 10 lbs, 60sec rest
Swiss-ball crunch: 2 sets of 10, 60sec rest

Saturday, November 14: erged 15013 meters in 1:25:14.
Friday, November 13: Day off (planned, though I probably should have had a day on anyway due to cheating Wednesday – but it was good to have a day off before the long piece)

Thursday, November 12: erged 7013 in 38:55: 2km at marathon pace, 2 km at 5km pace (mid 2:30s), 3 km at half-marathon pace (mid 2:40s)

Wednesday, November 11: Day off (Bad Dichroic)
Tuesday, November 10: Day off (planned)

Monday, November 9: erged 5011 in 29:15 (light recovery from previous day’d weights)

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

If you’re a Pratchett fans or a fiber arts fan, and most, most especially if you’re both, you need to check this out:

Discworld. In yarn.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.

Ted and I have been horrible about skipping workouts lately. (NB: by “horrible”, I mean “averaging only four workouts per week instead of five”. It’s all relative.) The excuse is that we’re between the big Sydney race and the Holiday Challenge slog. Still, if I’m not going to crater on the latter (and doesn’t “crater on the latter” sound like something you’d holler as a warning? Or conversely, the title of an Irish reel?) I need to get some more distance in.

Last year I finished really quickly because I was in the throes of marathon training – I was cranking out 25km pieces on weekends and 12 and 15km pieces during the week, before work. This year I’ll be back to something more like my normal strategy, which is to to divide the required 200,000m by however many days there are from Thanksgiving to Xmas, then make sure I do at least that many every day. (This year, that’s 6896 meters/day.) This year, I’m going to try to do enough extra so that I can take a day or two off each week.

The near future is becoming heavily scheduled, as is normal about now, but the busy period ends oddly soon, in the first week of December. At the moment it goes: errands this weekend; Ted leaves Tuesday; I start knitting hat to give him for whichever holiday (Chanukah, Xmas, birthday right before Xmas), hopefully finish hat; start the Holiday challenge on Thanksgiving (but work that day); he returns the Friday after Thanksgiving; I have Thanksgiving dinner that night (yes, Friday) with some Dutch and American people at a restaurant, at which he may join us depending when he gets home; we have our own turkey on Saturday at which we may have guests (they haven’t answered yet); I leave for the Netherlands Sunday and stay there for a week in which I take advantage of ergs in the hotel and at our old rowing club to keep going on the Holiday Challenge, and then…. no plans for anything after about December 5. I have no vacation time left at all, we have no company coming and no plans at all for travel. That might all change, of course. Ted’s made the point that I should use up all of next year’s holiday here before I leave at the end of March. Even if they have it out of my new allotment of holidays after I switch to the Netherlands, I have 40 days there. (Days. Not hours. Forty days. As in two months out of a year off work. There are reasons for moving there!!)

I’m eating chestnuts at the moment, so am in a Christmassy mood. Apparently they’re a side business of our cleaning lady in the office. The texture makes me thing they’re steamed, not roasted. They’re cold, but they’re considerably better than the last chestnuts I had in a western country – we bought some hot chestnuts in Milan a few years ago, but they were awful and we threw them out after eating only a few.

Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.