SSH

Oh, what a day. It is early yet, but already much excitement has happened. So one of the windows in our flat is broken. Not the glass, but the frame of the window, broken in the sense that it does not lock. Apparently, this happened last night (I vaguely remember hearing something in the night, but I had taken Nyquil because of this stupid cold that I am fighting and I wasn't sure if the noises that I was hearing were real or not...). Two of my flatmates had jerry-rigged the locking mechanism in the night to the point that the window was closed, but lo and behold, this morning, a gust of wind knocked the lock out again. So we spent nearly an hour trying to fix it. I called the emergency number for our rental agency, hoping that they could dispatch an emergency maintenance person to fix it because, seriously, it is dangerous the way that it is (big window right in line with the stairs, so if you are walking up or down the stairs and the window suddenly opens, you get smacked in the face, fall down the stairs and break something serious).

I waited. And waited. And waited some more. The hold voice was monotonous and annoying. I waited and when someone finally picked up, I said good morning and then the line disconnected. I had thought that I had run out of credit on my phone, so I went into my flatmates room to use her phone. The same thing happened! So, essentially, the window is haphazardly fixed but gets knocked out whenever a particularly strong wind hits (winds right now are between 30 and 60 miles an hour - 60 and 100 kilometers an hour). All I know is that SSH has already received a strongly worded email from me and will have to deal with me in person when I come to their offices on Monday.

In other news, I took Rachel to Amsterdam yesterday, which was fun. We went to the Van Gogh museum, saw the Millais traveling exhibit, which was just stunning. I had been to the museum before, but it was cool to see the traveling exhibit and to see Van Gogh again. We had plans to go to the Anne Frank house, too, but then it started raining and I still wasn't feeling well, so we came back to Utrecht and ate dinner with my flatmates and I introduced Rachel to the hilarity that is 30 Rock.

Now if I could just get up the initiative to write this paper that I have due, life would be great...

-B