It's Queen's Day and I'm still sick. I became violently, violently ill night before last and spent yesterday in bed.

In the late afternoon, Rafaël and I totter past Edward's on the off chance we'll catch him, and to our mutual pleasure, he and I see each other through his remaining living room window as I crunch up his steps, which are covered with shards from the other window. Nothing serious, I later learn. You can't make a truly boisterous party without breaking windows.

He has just dragged himself out of bed and is fumbling cautiously through the wreckage, pawing at forlorn, half-crushed packages of cigarettes in hopes of finding a survivor. I can scarcely bear his suffering as his hope dwindles, so it is good that I cannot stay, but we agree to get together for dinner on Tuesday.

Rafaël and I continue over to the Black Tulip to see whether Frank and Andrew have braved the crowds and taken the train from Schipol. They haven't, and I return home to bed.

Just as well. It is downright cold today, and the only way I can wear a bright orange tee shirt is to wear both of mine under my little black coat, which I am able to keep open only part of the time. Luckily, one of the shirts is so big that it hangs down beneath the coat and thus displays at least some orange.

I'm not the only one to notice the weather, and I get the feeling that the number of celebrants is only about half that of last year. Still, some folks are brave enough to take to open boats on the canals, and here's a boatload on the canal through the Oudezijds Voorburgwal. Note the absence of bare flesh, normally featured in abundance on Queen's Day.

After a couple of hours in bed to recover from my stroll, I get up just in time for Rina to ask me to join her and Hans to a party a few doors down the street. Well, I have enough energy to put in a cameo appearance, I realize, and it turns out that I'm sure glad I do.

For the hostess, I take a spice bottle stuffed with the leaves of Umbellularia californica (California Bay Laurel) that I plucked with mine own fingers last summer at Saratoga Springs and dried with mine own sun at home after my return to San Francisco. Anything to indulge my passion for treating folks to foods they never heard of. At the party I re-meet Elly, a neighbor I met last year shortly after she had had a very serious bicycle accident, and I compliment her on how much her face is improved without the purple and yellow discolorations and the stitches hanging out.

I clear it with Rina and invite her to tomorrow's dinner.

I chat serially with a number of others in a mixture of English and my pidgin Dutch/German (which I would love to refer to as "Nederduits" or "Nederluits" or "Nederdeutsch" for entertainment value except that so far not one of the Dutch I've tried my clever coinage on has been amused. Nor, now that I think about it, should I really expect my German friends to find it all that funny since many of them are already aghast at my wasting my time on Dutch when I could be improving, or at least maintaining, my grasp of the language of Goethe and Schiller).

Note: Turns out that "Nederduits" is a term already in use for several centuries to describe various dialects of Dutch and German. (Not to mention a South African branch of the Dutch Reformed Church.)

Anyhow, I discover that even though I don't already know any of the neighbors but Elly, they all know me from having seen me on the street during my visits. Well, yes, especially in 2003, when a guy zipping up and down Spuistraat on a Segway did stand out a bit.

A man named Leo is particularly entertaining, as we seem to share quite a few interests, among them exotic personal vehicles, and I ask Rina if he might also be included. She observes that since he's Elly's husband, he's already been invited. Hey, how could I know? They're not wearing name tags.

Oh, and why not. I'll close with another pic, this one from my Hinges of Amsterdam series, a subset of the Doors of Amsterdam. These are on the Beurs van Berlage. I do love that building.