Tostis, Bikes, and Homework

Lesson of the Netherlands #10:
The Dutch appreciate the awesomeness of a grilled cheese sandwich. Or as everyone here calls them, tostis. Pretty much wherever you go you can get a tosti, be it a cafe, coffee house, or restaurant. And none of that "crappy piece of unknown but slightly plastic-y cheese between two pieces of bread" stuff you get in the States. A tosti (1.50 to 2.50 euro) comes with oude kaas (aged cheese, usually gouda) and ham. Often you can add something to it, but generally it's not necessary.


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This has been a bad week for bikes. Someone kicked Ev's bike (my preferred mode of transportation, since it's a modified, super old-school race bike) hard enough to break the front derailer. This was discovered at 7:45am when I was trying to head to school. Not ok. So I went for the mountain bike. Someone had let the air out of both tires. I wish I could say that was uncommon, but apparently people like to steal bike lights off bikes (don't leave them on the bike, they will walk away) and let air out of the tires just for kicks. Luckily, we have a hand pump, so I dashed upstairs and pumped the tires up.

Monday motivated me to finally change out the tube on my road bike (another super old race bike with levers on the frame you use to shift). Unfortunately, my shiny new tube has a slow(ish) leak, as I discovered Tuesday morning. Actually, I assumed that some asshole had let the air out of my tires again (obviously this is not the first time this has happened). Another dash upstairs for the bike pump and I was underway. Imagine my joy to discover that upon trying to leave school that evening my tire was 90% void of air. Lovely. Pump it up. Bike home. It's flat again in the morning.

I took the mountain bike in the rest of the week. The mountain bike is heavy and slow and not particularly pleasant for a long commute.

Now Ev's bike is kind of up and running. He took it into a shop in the hope that they could replace the derailer, but no such luck. Something about it being really freaking old and the parts being hard to find. But they took the broken derailer off, so as long as you don't try to shift the front gears it rides just fine.

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I'm having throwbacks to my bachelors degree. I actually have homework this quarter. Lots of homework. Weekly assignments, massive programming assignments with professional quality reports (we get multiple weeks to work on assignments for a couple classes. What that actually means is they're freaking huge and take up a lot of time).

As I said, undergrad-level homework.

To cap it off, we finally got data for one of the projects I'm working as a research assistant for, which means I actually have lots of stuff to do on that front. Which is really cool, since we get to verify the model (which appears to be pretty accurate, which is kind of impressive). And kind of a pain, since wading through data and figuring out what's actually useful and what to do with the massive gaps in measurements adds some complexity to the task.

There are not enough hours in a week. This is cutting into my exercise time, which is not ok.