news from the earplug zone

It’s been a very loud sort of weekend. We never did see any of the yard sales that are the traditional hallmark of Queen’s Day here, but the city celebrated it jointly with PSV (the local football/soccer team) winning the Dutch championship with a giant party. Beer stands everywhere in the Centrum, music blasting, lights, and a DJ on a platform suspended from a crane overhead. (Cool idea, but I kept wondering what happened if he had to go to the bathroom.)

Early Sunday night was fun, with everyone very happy and mildly drunk, but by the time we walked around later on (8 or 9) the crowds had grown enough to be a little scary. It was difficult to move, and of course that much worse with everyone being so tall. Also, by then there were some people throwing beer over the crowd – I’m not really fond of having it in my hair or on my glasses.

Monday the party began again, and by dinner time the area was so crowded we decided to eat at home instead of going out. Fortunately our apartment is well soundproofed; the music wasn’t too annoying when we were indoors, though we did end up sleeping with earplugs both nights. It was loud out there.

Roeiste and I took out the double on Saturday morning. That was my first row in a week or more, but I’d been putting serious mileage on the shoe leather and bike tires, so I wasn’t too worried about it. We’ll be racing in a quad with two other women in June, though, so yesterday afternoon we spent the day off in our first row together. It was … extremely splashy, though a lot of that was because it was windy enough to kick up some waves. According to our cox, we were rowing more like two doubles than one quad, but I think we’ll have it ironed out by race day. I think we should probably alter our lineup a bit for best results, but I doubt I’ll say anything. I don’t want to come in sounding all know-it-all. (Stop laughing, you.)

The sock I’m knitting is still going blazingly fast, by my standards. I cast on Friday (a week and a half ago) and I’m halfway up the leg. I’ll probably have it done this weekend, which is good because I need to finish the second sock and a baby blanket by the end of June when we go back to the US for a visit. I was thinking of doing a log-cabin knitted blanket in Mondrian-ish colors – black and white with spots of red, blue and yellow to liven it up. I thought that would be good because new babies don’t see colors well anyway, but I couldn’t find yarn I liked in those colors in the extremely limited local selection. Amazingly I ended up with yarn that is not the acrylic I intended, but rather mercerized cotton. I think it will still be fairly easy to clean. It’s a light worsted weight so should knit up fairly quickly and I bought 4 skeins each of hot pink, medium blue, yellow and tangerine, where each color has bits of the others in it. I’m going to do mitered squares instead of the log cabin pattern – haven’t decided it they should be arranged in diagonal stripes or what.