Walking with Annelie is coffee indoors today. We’ve told each other we need to go on more walks. She asks if we should dress warmly for the cold, wet park, or if we should just grab a table inside. Normally at this hour, Coffee Company is packed to the brim with digital nomads, so “dress for cold, hope for warmth” I say. Miraculously, there are two tables from which we can choose.

• I forgot how the COVID booster can make you feel as though, temporarily, the world may well be ending. I got it earlier this week, and it left me with a sore arm and that dreadful, ridiculous sensation that accompanies a flu that lasts a week too long. I mimic my late stepfather, who used to wimper like a puppy whenever he got a cold.
• I still do well to limit my hours of screen time. Before I know it, I’m stuck with a headache and dizzy spell.
• Spotify’s Discover Weekly was on point this week. Aside from lovely “beards and log cabin” tunes, as I call 70s soft rock, I’ve fallen hard for the hyper pop track “Notice” by Moe Shop and Toriena.
• We raced through another season of The Crown, this time with the excellent Elizabeth Debicki as Diana. I love how she manages to capture Diana so well despite and because of her camp-adjacent interpretation of her. I wonder if she ever got a sore neck during taping.
• After protesting for weeks, I’ve finally let Anja turn on the heating. So far, I haven’t had much up-close experience with the energy crisis the world is currently facing, and I don’t want that to change. It’s great to feel my toes, though.

It has been snowing in Amsterdam. As the years go by, I’m having trouble understanding whether I’m experiencing the effects of global warming, or whether I’ve never paid attention to what was always in front of me until now. It is likely a combination of the two. Either way, it is sad to see Amsterdammers retreat into their homes after two weeks of shorts and drinks in the sun.

At work

Leeruniek’s Product team is hiring, and I’ve been the one taking care of the recruitment process for two engineering and one design role. So far, I’ve found a new front-end engineer as well as a designer within two months, so I suppose you could say I’ve been busy. If this process has been teaching me anything new, it’s that 1) I very much enjoy meeting people and learning about their (work) life stories, 2) there is such value in building strong relationships with recruiters who make you smile, and 3) it takes two weeks of introdutory chats before I begin to regret having to listen to my own voice give the same pitch over and over again.

“Do you want this problem to get smaller or bigger?”

“I still love you, but I’ll be doing it from behind this line.”

“Blaue Augen sind besser als braune Augen” (“Blue eyes are better than brown eyes”, 10-year-old brown-eyed German boy to his blue-eyes brother at the Okura Hotel breakfast bar)

The weather is great, infection rates are down, and the Dutch government loosened Covid restrictions. Masks are no longer required in public indoor spaces. I’m at Basquiat waiting to catch up with a friend, and an Irish woman strikes up a conversation.

“I like to sit here late in the afternoon to watch the sun set between the buildings. I can’t take much sun, I have Irish skin, you know.”

When I was a child, no physical activity brought me more delight than inline skating. I had a wonderful pair of skates; silver, neon pink, and teal, snuggly fitting my feet. I felt limitless on those wheels, cruising all around the neighborhood, learning tricks in the grocery store parking lot, and distance skating past farms and fields.

For the past five years, I’ve been telling myself that I should get a new pair of skates. There’s a skate store around the block from my house, and whenever I’d pass it, I’d find myself right back in the best part of my childhood. For five years, though, I never got around to actually buying them.

I’m terrible at keeping it a secret: my favorite time in the week is when A works from home. We spent the past month building a home office in a one-bedroom apartment, and I’m happy about the result. Monday is Uni day for her. I find it endearing that her Statistics course is throwing her for a loop a little bit.

“Work is so great!” I think to myself on Tuesday. My onboarding period is somewhat odd because of two separate parental leaves in my team. Now that my fellow designer is back again, I have to conclude that she is an utter blast. A attempts to use her iPad as a sidecar but doesn’t get the audio right. This makes it so that I can hear all of her pupils wrestle through 1984. When she discusses a particular rainy scene, a girl says “like, I don’t know, it’s, like, just typically English”, and we both smile.