Saturday evening we had a fun dinner with friends at home and the dessert turned out quite well. On Sunday morning I traveled to New Jersey.

In the plane I met a researcher from Penn State, and I gave him a ride from the airport to Princeton. The car, parked near the airport, was covered under a foot of snow which was kind of cool. The roads were are all clear. Pennsylvania is obviously better prepared to deal with snow than southern states.

In the evening there was a Super Bowl party which was a lot of fun; very diverse crowd of people.

Tonight I cooked koolraap — rutabaga in English, as I recently learned. When I was a kid I didn’t like it at all, but it was delicious. Simply boiled, with boiled potatoes and a meatball.

Sunday the world was still covered in snow. We went for a walk at the Al Buehler trail, around the Duke golf course. It was beautiful. We even saw a few runners, braving the icy conditions.

When I cleaned the car on Saturday I used a kitchen utensil to get rid of the snow. Worked pretty well. This is a rental, our own car is at the airport in Philadelphia.

I arrived Friday afternoon in Durham. I took an earlier flight since I didn’t want to get caught in cancellations due to the snow storm here. Sasha and I went for dinner in our favorite restaurant in Durham; that was great.

Yesterday we woke up in a white world. Since North Carolina rarely gets snow the roads were plowed or brined, so it was tricky to drive. I made it safely to the grocery store in the morning but it was difficult to drive up some hills because it was so icy. Strange.

In the afternoon we went to the Duke Chapel to witness Bia’s baptism. That was beautiful. She grew a lot in a few months and didn’t cry much during the ceremony.

In the evening we visited friends for a fun dinner. We walked through the snow.

It’s 2010 and I’m still using Windows XP, and I’m actually quite happy with it.

One of the small annoyances is the ‘beep’ that sounds when you change the volume. Since it’s a quite Saturday morning and the snow is impacting some of the plans we had I googled for a solution.

Howtogeek.com has the answer I was looking for.

Sasha is leaving to NC tomorrow so we’ll get up early to drive to Newark airport. It’s not far, around 30 minutes, so I’ll be back at work before 9.00 am.

We’re watching the State of the Union address tonight; one of the two major events today. The other was the long awaited announcement of the Apple iPad. For the first time I was really looking forward to an Apple product roll-out; I really like what I’ve seen about the iPad so far. We watched the commercial on the Apple website at work.

It’s strange to watch CNN with a political program without DVR! The apartment we’re in doesn’t have Tivo or DVR so we can’t skip the commercials.

This weekend we’re together; Sasha came from North Carolina on Friday evening.

We had a wonderful evening with Johanna on Saturday — great guests and so many stories. We were home around 2.00 am. The next day we had lunch with the Zanes which was great.

I usually start my days at 8.00 am here and stay till late. The commute is trivial though. Sasha is going to Durham on Thursday, I’ll follow her a day later. We made a roster of ‘who is where’ for the next few weeks.

I’m making Dutch pea soup (erwtensoep) and red cabbage with apples tonight. Visiting the Dutch stores this weekend inspired me.

It was the first time ever that I’ve cooked with celeriac, knolselderij in Dutch. It’s an ingredient for the pea soup, according to the recipe I’m using. It smells good.

Sasha left for Durham on Thursday morning, and she’ll be back on Friday so I spent the weekend alone.

Yesterday I traveled to Connecticut; the first time in that state. It’s about two hours from here. I visited two Dutch stores there, for reviews for ‘the other website’. That was a lot of fun. Had good phone conversations while driving in the car (hands free, yes).

Today was an easy day; I wrote one of the articles about yesterday, went for a run and did some housekeeping and shopping. Ready for the new week.

On Sunday I went for a run in a park near our apartment, Six Mile Run. A gorgeous run.

For fun I sent an SMS text to someone in the area: ‘haha, do you think there are bears here’. The reply: ‘it’s where the state releases bears, yes’. Hmmm.

When I came home I saw this letter, from 2005: http://www.franklintwpnj.org/bear_release.html: “…released a 240 pound black bear…”.

Cool demonstration of the possibilities of SixthSense by Pranav Mistry, its inventor.

TED talk

(thanks Mark).