Fast Writing and an Almost Sock

It's probably because I'm now writing for several hours a day for newser, or maybe my two-year hiatus from school just refreshed my burned-out scholarly abilities; for whatever reason, I barreled through my 10-turned-20–page paper this week. Between the paper writing and the exam studying I still didn't have too much time left over, but it was enough to make serious progress on a striped sock, for which the required yarn and needles were purchased at a heavy discount during last week's huge yarn store sale.

I would like to blame Kasia for most of my yarn splurge. And I would do so, if the precedent for my buying of large quantities of craft supplies weren't so damning.

I need knitted items, though, because it's suddenly turned decidedly chilly. This week has been full of heavy, slatey skies and the kind of cold air that, even after my sixth year in Boston, I continue to associate with Germany in the fall. Thankfully, the skies have contented to merely be atmospheric, and left us free of rain.

We've also been free of something else whose absence bothered me for a while before I could pin it down. Despite having more than its fair share of oaks and chestnut trees, Amsterdam has no squirrels. This wouldn't have seemed strange to me had I come here straight from Orange County; my part of California has basically zero wildlife.* But I came from Cambridge, which is so overrun by these furry little demons that I eventually stopped thinking they were cute.**

One thing they do have here that decidedly does not exist in Boston (except in Super Bowl commercials) is huge horses pulling wooden carts with kegs of beer. This probably sounds like one of the things I might make up to get Jesse to leave his Boston-based band and move here, but it's true. I turned a corner on my way to hit up the map library at school, and found myself face to nose with these two Clydesdales:

It's unclear to me whether this is just something done to delight tourists, or whether it's actually a viable way of transporting beer from one canal to another. It's really too cool to question.

Now that first period is over, I'll be starting a more traditional schedule of classes that will involve me going to school three days a week. I have clearly become much too accustomed now to my one-class-per-week situation: when I got my new course schedule I nearly snorted in outrage that one of them meets three times a week. I've since come to terms with this.

One of my classes is Archaeometry II Practicum; the other is Biological Archaeometry. What is archaeometry, you ask? I don't know.



*Every once in a while my mom finds a small lizard in the house, and this is always big enough news for me to hear about it, which I think only supports my point.

**Although in fairness, the incident of the fearless vampire squirrel probably had a lot to do with that.