The Netherlands 2026, Part One: IAmsterdam

Saturday, July 25 The Club SEA Shobhit actually signed up for a US Bank Altitude Connect credit card (they should really give me a kickback for linking to that) just for this purpose: to gain access to the lounges at SeaTac Airport. The first leg of our flight, which was to Reykjavic, left out of Concourse S, so we went into "The Club SEA" there—both our first time. Was it really all that special? Honestly, not really—but, still worth going to. It had its positives and negatives. Let's go through them! Negatives: Presumably the bathrooms in there are meant to be nicer than regular airport bathrooms (??), but the men's room here had only two toilet stalls, one of which was out of order; and two sinks, one of which was also out of order. I know this was just temporary, but it was still kind of a disappointingly janky setup in there. Also, the food in this lounge is unlimited and free, but still had limited options for us as vegetarians. We had a tofu salad and some mini caprese sandwiches, along with a bit of crackers and cheese. And finally, my second lemongrass margarita was honestly kind of gross, thanks to different bartenders mixing the few cocktails on the menu in very different ways. Positives: What food we were able to eat was actually very good—the desserts in particular were delicious. And, to give the first bartender we used some credit, my first lemongrass margarita was shockingly delicious. (We each had three cocktails, of which there was no limit, unless we were visibly drunk, they said—which of course we never were; these were not stiff drinks.) And finally, of course, being a lounge, there was much more comfortable seating than your average seat in the airport, although I can't say it felt particularly less crowded. It was definitely worth it for me, of course, since I gained access as a plus-one on Shobhit's credit card and I didn't have to get a new credit card of my own!
Sunday, July 26 Icelandair This was our first time flying Icelandair, and honestly, I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. The complete lack of amenities made it feel like an international version of Frontier Airlines—nearly everything had an extra fee, though at least I was able to get tea on the flight without paying extra. But snacks? Nope—not so much as peanuts; any food cost money. Shobhit is used to international flights providing free booze, and we didn't have that either (though he did quite easily manage to get a shot of rum from the lounge into a coffee cub to take onto the flight, along with like six of the mini caprese sandwiches inside a food container). On the other hand, the scheduling went like clockwork. I was slightly worried about how tightly we were cutting it with just an 85-minute layover in Reykjavik, but with the first flight leaving right on time, we had just enough time to get through with perfect timing—including Passport Control, as entering Iceland qualified as the point at which we entered the "European Economic Area" (not the European Union, a fascinating distinction). This also meant that our flight from Reykjavik to Amsterdam functioned as a domestic flight, which was wonderfully convenient. The above shot is from the boarding ramp onto our second flight, out of Reykjavik. (Okay, technically it was Keflavik, which is about 31 miles or 50 km outside of Reykjavik.) I quite liked that their ramps had windows, which in the U.S. they never do. It's the little things! Anyway, the flight to Reykjavik was about seven hours; the layover was 85 minutes; and the flight from Reykjavik to Amsterdam was about two and a half hours, making the entire journey about 11 hours. Jet lag was a bit of a thing for several days in Amsterdam, as you can imagine, having day and night basically flipped. I still didn't feel like my sleep schedule fully acclimated to the new time zone even a full week into the trip.
Wittenberg by Cove The canal seen here—there are 165 canals in Amsterdam, totaling 62 miles (100km) in cumulative length; there are more here than in Venice—is called Nieuwe Keizersgracht, and it runs alongside our first Amsterdam hotel, Wittenberg by Cove. These are basically rentable apartments, as we always look for places with kitchens so we can save on food spending, especially on trips of this magnitude. You can barely see the word WITTENBERG in gold lettering in the above shot, just to the right of the tree on the far left and just above a lamppost. Wittenberg consists of several buildings with courtyards between them, and it was a bit of a maze getting to our third-floor unit three buildings in—it took about two and a half minutes to get up there from the street. Side note: when I say "third floor," if you're American then I mean the fourth floor. Oddly, other countries don't start counting floors until you go one floor up. This hotel's elevators literally mark the ground floor as "0." That makes no sense to me as it would suggest there is no floor there but whatever!
Albert Heijn grocery store We found a grocery store about three and a half blocks from our hotel, and guess what? This is for the PCC people: electronic shelf labels (ESLs) on every product! Also, of course: Dutch writing. It was immediately a bit of a fascinating experience navigating the Netherlands, which was the first place I have ever visited where the native language was not English. People tend to speak to each other in Dutch by default, naturally, but virtually everyone also speaks English, and everyone we encountered was totally used to speaking in English. If Shobhit accidentally bumped into someone at the grocery store and said, "Sorry," they would say "It's okay," without thinking about it. The actual product labels were a bit of a challenge, though; both those and the shelf tags were in Dutch. I found myself looking up certain words in Google Translate, like "Whole Wheat." (A young woman at the bakery didn't know how to translate the word, and actually asked us, "Do you speak Dutch?" I had to say, "I'm sorry, we don't." But, eventually it occurred to me I could just get assistance with my phone, thanks to so many businesses offering free wifi, including this grocery store.) Side note: I was a little overly delighted by their shopping carts, on which all four wheels were on swivels. You could push them both forward and sideways!
Monday, July 27 Van Gogh Museum We had a nearby person take this shot of us on our way out of the Van Gogh Museum, in front of a giant print of his Almond Blossom painting as the backdrop. I just really love this photo, which turned out even better than I anticipated. Shortly before this, I went looking for one of the few souvenirs I actually wanted for this entire trip: I decided while I was there that I wanted a 1000-piece Van Gogh painting puzzle.
Stedeleijk Museum The Stedelijk Museum, which features modern and contemporary art, is right next to the Van Gogh Museum, on the Museumplein along with several notable museums; this one was founded in 1874, and has been on the Museumplein since 1895, the current, very modern building (apparently nicknamed "The Bathtub") constructed in 2012. For the brief time we were there, we saw a lot of furniture on display—such as the chairs in and atop glas cubic compartments seen through the doorway in the above shot, like a bunch of gogo chairs at a chair dance club. This was the first place we used our "IAmsterdam City Card" (the Van Gogh Museum does not participate), which can be purchased to cover from one to five days, and we bought a three-day pass. I looked around online to see how worth it this card is, and multiple people said it's only a good value if you cram in a bunch of stuff each day—well, that's what we specialize in! We bought a three-day pass, and used it four times the first day; twice the second day; and twice the third day. We very much got our money's worth, especially since the card can also be used for any of the city transit (but not any regional or national transit, even within the city, but public transit here is quite extensively accessible so it still worked out great). The card activates as soon as you use it the first time and then sets a clock based on hours, so it actually worked 72 hours from the moment we used it at the Stedelijk Museum, at about 12:30 on Monday.
Moco Museum (Modern Contemporary Museum) The Moco Museum was not even on my list, but we happened to see it also on the Museumplein, and they said they accepted the IAmsterdam Card, so we went in. On display was a bunch of famous art from the past several decades, including art by Bansky, Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and more. A lot of it was very cool, but my favorite photo taken there was this one, in which I had no idea it hilariously featured Shobhit's face only from the nose up, looking up at the banana on the ceiling.  
Rijksmuseum / Cuypers Library We all know that Matthew loves a beautiful library! I went seeking the Cuypers Library, located inside the Rijksmuseum, which is both the national museum of the Netherlands and the most frequently visited museum in the country. Cuypers Library itself, while not appearing especially huge in person, is the oldest and largest art historical library in the Netherlands. We did not dwell there long, but we did roam around the broader Rijksmuseum a bit, since our City Card also granted access there. We were there for a little over an hour. Some of the paintings depict some pretty fucked up shit.
Royal Palace of Amsterdam The Royal Palace of Amsterdam was also something we had to pay for separately, which Shobhit did not find to be a good value but I was really glad we got to tour it. The above shot was taken in the Tribunal. Why does this guy need to be nude in order to conduct a beheading? I'm not complaining. I just want to know! Maybe it's a laundry thing. Nobody wants neck blood all over their good toga. I guess that makes sense.
Amsterdam Centraal Station All of the city Central Stations in the Netherlands are spelled with an extra A in "Centraal," evidently because that is how the Dutch do. In the case of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Centraal has a quite beautiful building that was constructed in 1889. It's also quite large, today accommodating 11 platforms and 15 tracks, along with basically a shopping mall inside, much like Penn Station in New York. And although Amsterdam is the largest city in the Netherlands (population 946,447; though its metropolitan population of about 2.5 million is second to the combined Rotterdam-Hague metro population of 2.7 million; either of these are roughly equivalent to the metropolitan areas of Portland, Oregon or Austin, Texas), Amsterdam Centraal is actually the second-busiest train station behind that of Utrecht, the Netherlands' fourth-largest city, because of Utrecht's more centralized location in the country. But what fascinates me most about the train station is the bicycle garage—Utrecht's train station actually features the largest bike garage in the world, opened in 2019 with space for 12,500 bicycles in three subterranean levels. The bicycle claim to fame here in Amsterdam, though, is the opening of the "Stationseiland" bike garage in 2023, this one being the largest in Amsterdam and accommodating 7,000 bicycles—and constructed under the water of the Open Havenfront, the body of water in front of the station which is connected to Amsterdam's extensive network of canals. It has a very cool design, and as you can see, contains thousands of bicycles as far as the eye can see. In the above shot, the bikes in the foreground are rentals, and in the background you can see multi-level bicycle parking for commuters. Being such a bike-crazy city, of course I have worn my bicycle earrings more than once, and they always elicit compliments from people.
A'dam Lookout Welcome to Amsterdam's answer to the Space Needle! Or maybe more specifically Amsterdam's answer to Vancouver, B.C.'s Harbour Centre, which also features a revolving restaurant and observation deck atop an office building. Vancouver's building was constructed in 1977 and has always had the restaurant perched atop—it's a 28-story building below the restaurant and observatory that takes its total height to 482 ft (147 m). In the case of Amsterdam's A'dam Lookout—the structure atop the building to the far left in the above shot—the original building was a 22-story tower opened as Overhoeks Tower in 1971, but rebranded as the 94-meter (308 ft) A'dam Tower in 2014 and with the new observation deck opening in 2017. I had a lot of fun visiting this building, of course, but was very amused by its presentation as this impressively-tall observation deck, which is barely more than half the height of Seattle's Space Needle—and, indeed, merely the 18th-tallest building in Amsterdam itself. Amsterdam has three separate areas with clusters of tall buildings, and the five or so in this cluster includes at least two that are taller than A'dam Tower ("Amsterdam Dance and Music") alone. That said, A'dam Tower is across the IJ River from the city center of Amsterdam, the old area with all of the canals and no particularly tall buildings, so there was nothing to obscure views from this vantage point. We even timed our visit to coincide with the sunset, which worked out well.
Red Light District We actually first went from A'dam Lookout to check out the LuminAir rooftop bar on the 11th floor of the Doubletree Hotel, which had some nice views but they saved us the cost of ordering anything by having terrible service (acknowledging that the Dutch clearly have a different sense of "customer service" than Americans do) and so we left. From there we walked over to our first time checking out the nearby Red Light District, at around 10:30 in the evening. This area, particularly at night with sex workers standing in red-lit windows at regular intervals along narrow alleyways, is of course difficult to get much in the way of pictures—I had already been warned by a friend who had been here before that very aggressive people will come out of the woodwork to demand you delete any photos taken of the women, for their quite understandable protection. Instead, I took just a few carefully framed wide shots with no red-lit windows visible. My guess is 10:30 p.m. was actually kind of early; the area was teeming with people, clearly mostly tourists just like us. I saw a YouTube video recently by a local guy who called the city center "basically Disneyland," and while I don't think that's quite fair as a broad generalization, it is a fair description of several specific areas—which would include, somewhat amusingly, the Red Light District (the fact that there is no "Disney Red Light Land" notwithstanding). I wondered if there's a certain time later at night when the crowd has more serious potential customers. Because we were clearly not that. (Also, many of the women in windows were so seriously made up they kind of looked to me like human Barbie dolls. But hey, maybe you're into that. No judgement!)
Tuesday, July 28 National Holocaust Names Monument The National Holocaust Names Monument is located all of about two blocks from our first hotel; I only knew about it because I noticed it marked on maps when first researching the area. It features walls bearing the names of 102,000 Holocaust victims not given a proper burial. Viewed from above, the walls spell out four Hebrew letters that together translate as "In Memory of." These walls also all have geometrically designed reflective shapes placed on top of them, giving the entire monument a beautiful design suggestive of quite literal reflection.
Hortus Botanicus The Hortus Botanicus was not on my original list of things to do, but it was covered by the IAmsterdam City Card, and I do enjoy a good botanical garden. Plus, it also turned out to be all of two blocks from our first hotel—actually it was one block away, but a two-block walk due to it being on the other side of a canal. This botanical garden was established in 1638, making it one of the world's oldest. Speaking of which, I realized shortly after arriving that Amsterdam, a city itself founded in the late 13th century, is by a huge margin now the oldest city I have ever been to. This, of course, was to be expected with my first-ever visit to Europe, having previously only been to the U.S., Canada, and Australia—all countries established by colonizers from Europe.
NEMO Science Museum Rooftop Square The IAmsterdam City card also covers tickets to the NEMO Science Museum, which is in a structure that looks at first like a giant sinking ship, but is actually designed to mimic the adjacent IJ Tunnel.   We didn't bother with the museum, though. It should come as no surprise to you that my interest lay in the NEMO Rooftop Square, access to which is actually free during museum hours. There's also a cafeteria up near the top. It is the highest city square and rooftop square in the Netherlands, and rises to a height of up to 92 feet (28 meters) above the water level.
OBA Oosterdok - Public Library We walked from NEMO Science Nuseum to Hotel Jakarta to check out their tropical lobby design I heard about ages ago; and from there we walked to Amsterdam's Central Library. Because I love a library! A lot of major cities have very cool Central Libraries, and Amsterdam's is nice—and pretty reflective of the city's density—but not quite as special as those in some other cities I've been to. As you can see, it does have a fairly distinctive exterior architectural design, though. The same could be said of its interior, mind you; it's actually very nice and I'm glad I visited it. I just wasn't quite as wowed by it as I have been by some other central public libraries. (I should probably note, though, that this is apparently the second-largest public library in Europe, in terms of total square footage, behind only the Library of Birmingham.)
Mokumboot Canal Tour Okay well, I did get a recommendation for a more expensive canal boat tour, which I genuinely trust was well worthwhile, but—we're still cheap, and we wanted to milk those IAmstardam City Cards for all they were worth! There's a ton of canal boat tour companies, as you can imagine, most of which launch from the body of water just south of Centraal Station (the same water the bike garage is built under; it's apparently neither a river nor a canal, but formed via late 19th-century land reclamation in the IJ River, which itself used to be a sea arm). So, while Shobhit and I were stopped in the Doubletree Hotel lobby restaurant for some Friets, I used the wifi (tons of places here have wifi; we have not needed to activate our phones for international service) to look up the TripAdvisor rating among the several boat tours that are covered by the City Card. The winner was called Mokumboot, and at first there was some real confusion as to where we were supposed to go to board, because the dock our directions took us to had no boats by that name, only several others. We learned later that they have just the one boat, and launch every 90 minutes or so. We even went all the way inside Centraal Station to ask at the AMsterdam store in there before we figured this out. Once there were just a half hour or so until the next scheduled tour, at 6:30, we rushed back to the same dock. There we found that if you don't have a booked ticket already, they only accept IAmsterdam City Card users if there are spaces available. The guy taking tickets and who also drove the boat, who was 6'4" and could barely avoid having to duck under some of the bridges, told us the capacity was 35 at the most, and Shobhit and I were among the only three City Card riders who fit on in the end. So the boat was quite crowded, but still workable, and we did learn a lot of stuff about the city from the tour guides (the boat driver, and also a young woman who was also blonde—I've never been anywhere there were so many blonde people). Anyway! The above shot is of the so-called "Dancing Houses," apparently one of the more popular postcard picture opportunities in Amsterdam, because they are all crooked, due not only to slightly sinking into the ground, but apparently several other reasons as well, including deliberate architectural design. Once the canal tour was done, we walked briefly to W Lounge—yet another rooftop bar, this one on the 6th floor—before heading back to our hotel, after another long day of sightseeing.
Wednesday, July 29 Rembrandt House Museum On the third and final day of our IAmsterdam City Card use, we did far less, but still managed two museums that accepted the card. The first was the Rembrandt House Museum, which was about six blocks from our first hotel, and was far more fascinating than I anticipated—and I still expected to be very interested. The house is full of nearly all paintings only by his many pupils and contemporaries, but includes two of his own originals, including this kind of wild example above, which is only the small surviving portion of a much larger original painting that was damaged in a fire in 1723, sixty-seven years after it was painted. The original painting was a recreation of an anatomy lesson Rembrandt sat in on with people surrounding a corpse, with its scalp split open to reveal what the brain looks like inside. Now there is some artistic dedication I would never have.
Museum of the Canals Last stop on the IAmsterdam City Card tour! And the eighth such stop overall—not even including in-city public transport (Metro/subway, trams, and buses we never took because trains and trams were more than sufficient) that we had unlimited access to for the three days (more specifically, 72 hours) we could use the City Cards. The Museum of the Canals was arguably the most touristy thing we did, with multimedia presentations in several rooms we moved through with timed presentations in each. We still learned interesting things about the canals that we wouldn not have learned otherwise, such as the fact that all the houses along the canals stand atop millions of wood pilings, due to the land having been waterlogged, swampy wetland. In the above shot, you see Shobhit standing in a scale replica of one of the canals, which average a depth of about 2.6 meters (about 8.5 feet).
De Oeverlanden Check it out—in De Oeverlanden Park, an officially designated public outdoor gay cruising area, complete with municipal signage. The only one in the world! I have to admire the straightforward simplicity: just a rainbow flag, and the Dutch word for cruising area. These signs are posted in basically every trail entrance to the designated area of the park, which is near the south end of Amsterdam's city limits, only about four miles (6.7 km) from Amsterdam Schipol Airport. Mind you, this has not been historically without controversy, even in Amsterdam. De Oeverlanden is also a nature reserve, and in 2004 the city introduced a herd of Scottish Highland cows in a "thinly veiled" effort to discourage cruising. Maybe they thought the gays would be too self-conscious with cows watching them? Whatever, it didn't work, and the posted signage was installed in 2009, apparently with some updates in 2022. The cows are still there though; we actually saw one just outside the designated cruising area, before we knew anything about the cows' backstory, or that there were cows there at all, so it was a bit startling to run into. (Kind of hilariously, Shobhit totally thought it was a buffalo, and I actually wasn't sure what it was. A nearby local clarified for us.) Apparently, there is a new development plan, with an aim for completion by 2040, which will lessen the area and slightly shift its location. Fascinatingly, queer activists are unhappy about this—it seems some people regard this as "historically significant" (something the plan itself apparently acknowledges) and—I'm paraphrasing here—they don't want that history erased. It's perhaps worth noting, though, that the city's official web page for De Oeverlanden does not mention the cruising area among the park's many amenities—although a separate page about its development does.
Homomomument Well hey, as long as we're talking about queer history! We did go out of our way to find Amsterdam's Homomonument, a city monument opened in 1987 as the world's first memorial to people who have been persecuted for their sexual orientation. Back when Elin still worked at PCC, she took her own trip to Amsterdam roughly a decade ago, and sent me a photo of this at the time—it also clearly showed the sign that reads HOMOMONUMENT, which you can see in the photo above if you look closely to the right. I naively thought it was some kind of joke at the time, but it is very much not, and I think it's great that it exists. [posted 12:07am]

DLUntil next time

— छह हज़ार अड़सठ — So yes, only three Daily Lunch Updates (DLUs) this week: I skipped posting a DLU altogether on Tuesday, and then I did so again yesterday. I don't know how many people have actually noticed this; maybe the presumably 2.5 people who return daily? In any case, nothing to fret about: the DLU getting skipped yesterday was for a far more innocuous reason: available time at work. We had our quarterly in-person POS meeting yesterday, which was held for the first time here at the Central Office, making it the first time most of the POS people from the stores had even been to this location, which we officially moved into at the beginning of last September. Gabby really goes out of her way to rotate having these in-person meetings at different stores each time, but the store PCC Cooks classes are all booked up for the summer, leaving the office as the only option. This was a slight challenge in terms of space, as our largest conference room here is designed for fitting 12 people comfortably, especially with a central table in there. Gabby waffled a bit on whether to take all the tables out and arrange only chairs to allow for a little more space, but after consulting with Cathryn and me we all agreed we should use tables in there because otherwise some people may not have a place to eat the lunch she was having brought in. In the end, she arranged the tables in a U shape in the room, four on each of the three sides so there were 12 seats actually at a table. She arranged another 6 chairs, I think, along the back wall, which would have taken us to 18. There may habe been another one or two chairs crammed in there somehow. In any case, a bunch of them had already arrived and gone into the conference room when I finally made my way over around the scheduled start time of the meeting, at 10 a.m. Most of them sat at tables, and realizing it best to let as many POS people as possible sit at tables, I sat in one of the back-wall chairs. Amy, does not always attend POS meetings as they often cover subjects not directly relevant to her, did come in this time and join us for the whole meeting, came and sat in the chair right next to me. Cathryn only came for the first section on the agenda, and she also sat in the back row, but on the other end by the easternmost of the two doors to this room. We currently have 16 operating stores but due to the small size of Downtown "Corner Market," there is no dedicated POS person there and thus no representative from that store in attendance; that would leave 15. I think only Hyong from Edmonds and Tina from Kirkland were sitting in that back row aside from Cathryn and Amy and me, which would mean 13 were squeezed around the tables—and that's not even including Gabby, who was using one of the table chairs at the far northwest end. There must have been 14 total around the tables. Anyway! Gabby had Taco Time brought in to cater for lunch, for which we broke at 11 a.m. (It's worth noting that POS work very early shifts and typically are done by 2:00; 11 a.m. lunch was actually kind of late for many of them.) She had also learned of an "Ice Cream Social" being hosted by Rainier Square up on the terrace, specifically for tenants of the block, and she managed to snag 18 tickets to it! Kind of stunningly, only one POS person—the aforementioned Tina—took her up on the offer. I think Gabby was disappointed that so few accepted this offer after she's secured so many tickets, and I don't really blame her. Amy and I both happily took a ticket, though (Amy had even worried that there was one more person in the room than there were available tickets for—no need to worry about that). Gabby left the rest of the tickets for office staff, but during the lunch break Amy and I went with a few POS people to eat our Taco Time lunch up on the terrace, and the three of us with tickets got ice cream. It was from a place called Street Treats and was pretty good. Two other POS people, Mere from Fremont and Dylan from Central District, came with us, just to join us for lunch on the terrace. I offered to guide everyone up there, and led us all to the cushioned chairs by the elevator. We took the back way around out the office back exit and took stairs the whole way, but on the way back down I took everyone down that elevator to show them the other way, which is through the back entrance to the store and then to the office front entrance which is right next to the front entrance to the store. There are two key things that Mere and Dylan have in common. First, they both use "they/them" pronouns, and have that listed in their default email signatures. (Side note: lots of people put their pronouns in their signatures, and I have never bothered. My decades of pointed androgyny notwithstanding, I figure I can let the continued use of "Matthew" as my first name be a natural indicator.) And second, both of them still always wear face masks, whether at work at their respective stores (including while on our biweekly Teams virtual meetings) or when attending our in-person POS meetings. But! Since we all went up to the public terrace to eat our lunch, both of them took their masks off for extended periods of time, something I had not yet witnessed before. It turns out a face can look radically different if you just add a nose and mouth. I think I'll qualify this as a Social Review point for all four of them: Tina, Mere, Dylan, and Amy. We all went and had lunch together, after all. Amy went to get in line for the ice cream as soon as we all sat down in our chairs, saying the line got really long right behind her. I finished with my soft tacos and mini crisp bean burritos at 11:11, and when I went to get my ice cream after that, Tina came with me. The line was very long but moved quickly; the booth had like four people working it. I opted for a cookies & cream ice cream cone, which resulted in a smaller scoop than the coffee ice cream Amy had come back with in a bowl, but that was fine. — छह हज़ार अड़सठ — — छह हज़ार अड़सठ — In any event, I was otherwise detained during my normal lunch break, and the POS meeting was from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Any other week, I might still have found time to write up a draft of a DLU post, but this is not a normal week. I'm getting everything I need done with surprisingly comfortable ease, but I still need all the time I can get until my two-and-a-half-week vacation starts. We leave for Amsterdam tomorrow. I can hardly believe it! Full disclosure, I did spend a fair amount of time yesterday printing tickets and itineraries and related stuff just so we'd have printouts of critical documents for our trip. That took some time. I did finally get the early prescription refills I needed for the trip, which I actually picked up on Wednesday. That was not entirely related but still connected to some of the horrible bullshit I had to deal with earlier in the week. Thankfully it's all settled now, although in a way it feels like an overcorrection: when I get these mailed to me from CVS Specialty Pharmacy, they only send a month's worth at a time. When picking them up at the Walgreens on Broadway, they provided me with two months' worth, even though I only needed one. Whatever! That's a better problem to have; I just hope it doesn't fuck up further ordering from CVS Specialty in the future. I have to get my PrEP prescription renewed every three months from my doctor, which clearly was a source of the confusion. Some guy from Dr. Means's office clearly thought I should have plenty on hand because his information said I get three months at a time. But no, it gets renewed every three months while CVS Specialty only sends me 30 pills at a time. It kind of sounds like if I actually always picked it up at Walgreens, they'd be giving me three bottles at a time. Whatever. I have what I need right now and that's what matters. In any case, I had really hoped to see The Odyssey a second time this week, and I had also hoped to get Shobhit to come with me. That was only going to happen if we went on Tuesday or Wednesday because only then could I use my $10 in AMC Rewards points to cover the half-off tickets on those days of the week. But, multiple scenarios and circumstances conspired against that being possible. I am not likely to go to a movie again until Friday, August 14, at which time it will have been only one day shy of four weeks since the last time I went. A two-and-a-half-week trip to Europe is a good enough distraction from movie-going for a while, though. So, my evening last night, just as it was the evening prior aside from picking up my prescription, was just spent at home. Last night I did have Shobhit go through the pages of printouts I brought home, which he clearly liked being able to do. And then we finished season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which had to be the funniest season yet. — छह हज़ार अड़सठ — I spent like two or three minutes longer than normal to do it, but I finished my library copy of Stand on Zanzibar right at the end of my lunch break. Perfect timing! Now I'm just hoping to find time this afternoon to go return the book at the library three blocks away. It's all coming together. I'm feeling pretty good. And I'm very excited! Amsterdam, here we come. — छह हज़ार अड़सठ — [posted 12:41pm]