Spoke too soon?
Me a week ago:
We packed away the fan last weekend and I’d be surprised (and worried) if it needs to be assembled again before May.
The Netherlands this week:
The temperature at De Bilt was measured at 21.5C at 12.40pm, beating the old record of 21.2C. Forecasters say the south of the country could exceed the 25-degree mark, which has only happened twice before in the second half of October.
While not quite need-to-assemble-a-fan-hot, this is very warm for this time of the year.
Summer is over
Summer is over. Second week of October is pretty late in the year to be saying this, but I wanted to be sure. We packed away the fan last weekend and I’d be surprised (and worried) if it needs to be assembled again before May. Overall, we got a cool and wet summer this year. The sort of summer even I can get behind, look back fondly on etc:
Goodbye Summer
Goodbye Summer
Zippers
Despite years of wearing jackets with full-length zippers, the wife and I found ourselves struggling with zipping and unzipping while trying on new jackets at shops in the US. The wife pointed out that the Pull Tab and Slider were mounted on the right Chain while the jackets we’ve been wearing for the past few years in Amsterdam, have had them on the left.
Zippers
While both countries drive on the right side of the road, the Americans went with the side of the road they drive on, whereas the Europeans chose the side where the steering wheel is. Why the two are different never made sense to me.
I still can’t believe that this simple change caused us to struggle with something we do hundreds of times a year.
The list of parts of a zipper on Wikipedia is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipper#Components
My top three favourite movies
Some movies manage to become the staple of in-flight entertainment. I discovered Edge of Tomorrow on a flight and it became an instant favourite of mine. I watched it a second time a year later on another flight (quite fitting for a movie with a time-loop narrative). A transatlantic flight last week - in a plane whose idea of in-flight entertainment system was tiny screens per 10 or so rows suspended from the roof of the plane - managed to slot it in between two runs of the latest Pirates of The Caribbean sequel. Perhaps because the movie came on when I was in that twilight between wakefulness and fitful airline sleep, it got me thinking about my other favourite movies and if they shared something in common with Edge of Tomorrow. The top three came down to:
- Arrival
- Edge of Tomorrow
- The Matrix
Turns out they do have something in common - the protagonist(s) in all of them are up against highly intelligent alien or artificial life forms. They also play with time as a plot device (ok The Matrix not so much unless you count Bullet Time).
Movie Montage
Summer 2017 in Amsterdam…
…as panels of an imaginary comic:
In June, days in Amsterdam stretch on for 16+ hours. The afternoon sun, even on partly-cloudy days when it’s a pleasant 23ºC outside, is blindingly bright. It takes my mind back to much hotter (40ºC+) and considerably lazier afternoons of school summer vacation spent binge-reading comics.
Appreciating Trees
I came across an article in The New Yorker that prognosticates how Greenland would change as the global warming progresses and causes the years old ice sheets to melt. While it touches on many serious topics such as the race for mining for minerals and tensions with Denmark, this passage caught my attention:
Today, Greenland has fifty-six thousand residents, twelve thousand Internet connections, fifty farms, and, by American standards, no trees. (The native dwarf willows top out at about a foot.) One Greenlander I met, who’d recently left the island for the first time to attend a meeting in upstate New York, told me that his favorite part of the trip had been the noise of the wind sighing through the leaves.
“I love that sound,” he said. “Shoosh, shoosh.”
I realised the other day that since reading this article, I’ve been growing more appreciative of the sound trees make when their branches sway in the wind. With summer in Amsterdam at its peak, and the trees in the park covered in fresh leaves, they also make for a subject I find very calming to shoot - especially when it rains:
