One other advantage to picking up my car at the hotel instead of the rental agency desk at the airport: they gave me one with a manual transmission. I think if they realize you’re American, they try to give you an automatic (we’ve had them do that even when we specifically said a stick shift would be fine.) Of course, this could have been a disaster but I do really prefer a stick; I suppose if I didn’t I could have asked my work travel office to make a point of getting an automatic.

Just to make this trip even more complicated, half of the training I came here for has been postponed a few weeks. This means I will either return home after two weeks, when the rest of the training is done (and hae one week at home with Rudder before it’s his turn to come here) or stay here even longer. We’ll decide at the end of this week, based on whether we think the training is likely to happen at the new date or be postponed farther

I can definitely tell I’m back in the Netherlands. I can recognize everything in the cafeteria at lunch, the stair rails at work are nearly at my shoulder, and when I sit on the toilet in the hotel bathroom, my feet don’t touch the ground.

I’ve finished the sock I began in the Taipei airport (all except for weaving in ends). This picture may give a hint of why the yarn was cryin out to become socks for a little girl going through a princessy phase. The two socks in this picture aren’t meant to be a pair; they are, in the phrasing of the two-year-old whose home I started the first one in, a mommy sock (lace pattern from Knitty’s Broadripple, short-row heel) and a baby sock (plain sock with 1×1 rib on the leg, ruffly picot bind-off, peasant heel). The peasant heel was the easiest way I’ve come across so far to make a heel, but I’m not sure I like the shape of it when it’s done. Nice and neat, though.