2.37 pm

My office is a cozy 26 degrees, according to the thermometer in here. What that translates into is that between the heat and the brilliant sunshiney day outside, I’m having difficulty getting off vacation mode and into work mode. Waking up this morning hurt, even though my alarm didn’t go off that much earlier that I was waking up over the long weekend. It’s something about having to get up and get ready, rather than choosing to do so.

2.42 pm

Thank god for Google. I’m currently looking through a UNC handout on the passive voice, since I’m rather certain that most of the sentences my boss has flagged in my current project as “passive” aren’t. Still, my mother always says that discretion is the better part of valor, which I will take in this case to mean that I should be sure about my grammar before I leap. Or something to that effect, anyway.

3.20 pm

Microsoft Word, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways…

The thing that really gets me is that even when I know exactly what I want to do, Word is sure it knows better. Especially when what I want to do is in any way remotely connected to pagination or section breaks. On the other hand, maybe it’s just a PIBCAK issue…

4.03 pm

Back from my whirl-wind, not quite 48 hour tour of Brussels. All in all, I'm glad that I went - but at the same time, I'm absurdly glad to be back home.

The trip got off to a rather rocky start when the conductor on the train to Brussels informed me that my ticket was no good for the train I was on and I would have to pay her 80 euros. I was furious, mostly because the website I'd bought the ticket from had been mostly in Dutch and the ticket itself said it was good for travel on any train. It didn't help the conductor didn't speak very good English and I don't speak any French. In the end, she only charged me 18 euros - and I still didn't know what was wrong with my ticket!

The train station in Brussels was ridiculously confusing. I had expected to arrive in Brussels Central and ended up in Brussels Zuid, possibly because I had, in fact, been on the wrong train. The guy at the information desk helped with the ticket situation - apparantly, even though I'd bought the ticket through what looked like a Thalys website, it was only good on intercity (IC) trains. He wasn't so good with getting me to Central. He told me to go buy a ticket at the window, so I waited in a room packed with sweaty, smelly people for about 20 minutes - only to learn that the ticket I had used to get to Brussels was good for travel between the train stations too, and I just needed to go upstairs and hop on the next train.

The best part about the whole thing is that they didn't even check my ticket on the way home!

4.25 pm

The city herself more than made up for my travel difficulties. Although I spend the better part of the two days with my head in the guidebook, trying to figure out exactly where I was, I did manage to figure out the layout of the city by the time I left. My directional sense being what it is, I didn't realize that all the mini maps in my guidebook were oriented in different directions, which made for some interesting times.

I did not try either the mussels or the fries. I did, however, have a Belgium waffle (hot off the grill, with little bits of caramel in the dough and powdered sugar on top, like a little bit of heaven on a paper plate) and lobster (with champagne and truffle sauce, although I was reminded that lobster ends up being a great deal of work for very little meat). I'm not a big beer drinker, but I did have a raspberry lambic (delicious!) and Jupiler (went well with my fried scrimps, but not my favorite).

I also have chocolates from three gourmet chocolatiers (Pierre Marcolini, Neuhaus, and Wittamer) that I intend to savor slowly over the next two weeks.

1.45 pm

I'm sitting in the square outside my apartment building, the one with all the bars and restaurants that's filled with tables in the middle, sitting at a table in this square, looking through the Brussels guidebook I just bought, eating a sandwich and drinking a glass of white wine, when it hits me: I'm in Europe. And I realize how quickly indeed places become familiar, so that this is no longer Den Haag, in The Netherlands, thousands of miles from where I live. This is home.

11.37 am

Still waiting on the wind. Windfinder says it's blowing about 5 knots right now on the beach. I am pondering whether tossing a nickel into the water would encourage the wind gods to produce a stiff breeze.

It's been a remarkably good weekend. Friday I had the day off, so I rode my bike up to the beach with my kite. There wasn't any wind when I got there, so I settled for a beer and a chicken sandwich, then sat on the sand and listened to my ipod speak French at me. Friday night I saw "The Reader" - excellent film, although rather cynical in a thought-provoking sort of way. I'm still not sure if I liked it. And last night was dormapalooza, which was simply much too much fun, especially after we started roasting marshmallows over tiki-torches.

11.49 am

My shopping list for today: strippenkarten, guidebook for Brussels, something for breakfast for the next few days, kleenex, and garbage bags. I'm at that strange not here for very much longer but still need food and other stuff in the house point. Which means, I suspect, that once I cook most of the food in my fridge I'll either be living on pasta and cheese and sandwich meat or getting lots of take-out.

11.58

Blow, wind, blow.

8.48 pm

So exhausted I can barely keep my eyes open and so wired I can barely sit still. I feel as though I haven't stopped moving since Tuesday? Wednesday? last week when I got pulled to be on the team working the Secretary of State's visit. This past week has been a frantic rush to check out the site of the Afghanistan conference, hammer out the details, and get all that info back to Washington. Not an easy task. Every step of every movement needs to be discussed, walked through, written up, in triplicate, sent to the processing department, lost in the mail, resent, and rubber stamped. The upside about 12 or 13 or 14 hour days is that if you're busy enough to be working that much, you're busy enough that it flies by.

And fly it does. Here I am on a Tuesday night, a week after we began to pull the visit together, and I can say that I witnessed diplomacy in action, took notes for the Secretary, and had a chance to shake her hand. I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that our official photographer got a wide angle shot of the meeting where I took notes, so that there's a photo with me and the Secretary at the same table. Perhaps a little silly or celebrity struck - but you already know that I'm a geek like that.

*edit* There is such a picture, although I found it on the Hillary Clinton Blog. All credit to the anonymous photographer.

2:00 pm

I have a theory that the Dutch are always cheerful and good-natured because they spend so little time in their cars. Think about it. It’s a Saturday afternoon, warm out, so you load up the car for a trip to the beach. Of course, once you get on the road you realize that everyone else had the same idea . You end up sitting in traffic for an hour, the beach a ten minute walk away, all the while getting angrier and angrier that you’re in your car instead of on the sand. The Dutch neatly avoid this problem by bicycling or using public transportation to get everywhere.

This theory occurred to me as I was bicycling home from the beach yesterday afternoon. I went down to fly my kite (because truly, nothing gives you wings like watching that frail nylon bird sailing across the sky) on a beach that wasn’t quite jam packed but was still pretty crowded. By the time I left, almost everyone else was leaving for the day. I zipped out of there in five minutes, as the line of cars waiting to exit got longer and longer. I rode home with the wind at my back, enjoying the fresh air and the feeling of being alive!, aside from one brief bit across the cobblestones that rattled all my bones against each other.

Try it, if you don’t believe me. The next time you plan on taking a little trip, see if you can ride your bike or take the BART. And tell me if you don’t have a much nicer time without the hassle of road stress and idiot drivers.

10.18 am

A hazy sky spread outside the office window, sun fighting its way through the clouds and losing. The light filters through the two small glass jars with water on my desk. One holds an avocado seed, propped up with toothpicks. There is a small protrusion in the bottom that was not there yesterday. The other holds a hyacinth, inherited from the former inhabitant of this office. The water in this jar is cloudy, almost obscuring the white roots that look like the arms of a sea anemone. The hyacinth has been taking its time in the blooming. When I came into the office yesterday, the tight green leaves had opened a little further, almost enough to reveal the tightly concealed flower.

4.32 pm

A whirlwind day of Court hearings and briefing papers, interspersed with discussions of legal nuances. I’m happiest when I’m struggling to understand what these Courts have decided and why. It’s more than simply the intellectual exercise. These courts are so new, their jurisprudence still so unsettled, that there’s much more room for legitimate disagreement than with the U.S. courts. The Supreme Court has to stick with the precedent it created 200 years ago. These courts struggle to find a balance between following good precedent and disregarding bad. It’s the struggle that makes it so interesting.

9.38 am
The rain streaking down my windows has turned the outside world into an Escher-like blur of mis-matched corners and impossible angles. I sit in front of the glowing monitor, hands cupped around a steaming mug of tea, watching the raindrops hurl themselves violently against the glass. Days like this it is almost impossible to believe in the crocuses and daffodils pushing up out of the soft spring soil.

11.12 am
My days fall into a pattern. I get into the office and spend the first hour checking websites, news articles, correspondence from Washington for anything relevant. A few hours of work and then my hour in the gym. Lunch. A few more hours of work in the afternoon, sometimes broken by a conference call or a meeting. It surprises me how tightly I cling to this pattern, how I feel as though I am unraveling when part of it falls out of place. Mornings especially – days when the computer system is down I am uncertain how to start my day without having first checked the news.

4.07 pm
Tuesdays pass so slowly, the ticking of the second hand scarcely muffled by the documents piled around my desk.

4.34 pm

I should be doing my research paper. Instead, I am blogging. This is getting to be a theme. As is not blogging during the week (perhaps it would be best if I resigned myself to the fact that this will continue to happen).

I braved the Dutch stores on a Sunday for the first time today. This probably doesn't seem like a big deal. But combine stores that close early every other day of the week with gigantic sales with people speaking a language I don't understand and you get a ton of Dutch people, pushing and shoving and crowding, and all of it incomprehensible. Thus far, I have gone into the drugstore, the grocery store, and the kind of like Ikea but not store, and that only on a need-to-go basis.

Despite everything in the above paragraph, it was pretty much like being in a crowded mall in America on a weekend. The brands were the same - Tommy Hillfiger, Ralph Lauren, that crocodile shirt brand - and the styles really weren't any different. I picked up a long sleeve T for Adam and a sweater for me. I hadn't planned on buying any clothes here, but I'm getting tired of wearing the same things to work every day. Plus, I figure that since there's an APO at work, I can ship home my sweaters and flannel sheets. Which leaves me lots of space in my bags, which means I can buy things.

5.09 pm

In taking the things I bought today out of shopping bags, I discovered that my Turkish pizza (which tastes rather like a quesadilla) had leaked all over the outside of my shopping bag and onto my blanket. Easy fix - there's laundry in the building and it's free. Except that one of the machines appears to not be working, and the other was full of clothing. Very wet clothing that apparently hadn't gone through a spin cycle. I was about to start the machine to spin, when the owner of the clothing appeared, taking it out and putting it straight into the dryer, creating large puddles of water on the floor. And I thought to myself, so this is why this floor is always soaked.

I cannot wait to get out of student housing.

1.31 pm

So much for updates every day. My only excuse is that it seems like my free time is all but non-existent.

I should be concentrating on researching for my writing requirement, especially since it's going to come due very, very quickly. Even though I tell everyone that it's on the most boring topic ever (the differences between the two major systems of investment arbitration), I actually find it pretty interesting. Even so, I've been hard at work all week, and the sun is trying to break through the clouds, and I'd much rather be walking around the city than in front of my computer. Adam sent me a kite, and I'm dying to find a field where I can fly it. It's a little stunt kite, and it says that it can handle pretty strong winds. Which is good, because it gets very windy here.

1.42 pm

The Dutch have rules about almost everything, but I constantly find myself questioning the point.

Take bicycle rules, for example. It's illegal to ride a bike with a dim headlight or no headlight at all. A policeman will stop you and give you a ticket on the spot if you don't comply. Same for riding the wrong way on a bike lane, or riding on the sidewalk. But there's no law requiring helmets. And I constantly see people sitting on the rear bike rack, precariously hanging onto the rider, while the police look on. It seems to me, ignorant American that I am, that making helmets mandatory and not allowing "passengers" would do a better job of promoting safety than headlights.

Then there's the trash. You have to separate your glass out. If you don't, the garbage collectors will open your trash, go through until they find a reciept with your name and/or address, and send you a steep fine. But there's no recycling for plastic, and paper recycling seems to be sporadic. Quite frankly, this one simply baffles me. Why not just send the fine to the house that the garbage is in front of and leave it at that? For that matter, why not provide people with recycling bins and public places to recycle to make it easier?

Then again, the American bureaucracy is just as bad.