December 2018 | Guus Bosman.nl

Back home

Sat, 12/29/2018 - 10:27am

It's Saturday morning, and there's a big pile of Lego and Duplo and toys in front of you...

This weekend there is no gymnastics so we slept in and are taking it easy today.

Yesterday I went back to work, a quiet day at the office due to the holidays. I've added photo's to the articles I wrote over the past 10 days, it's nice to work on that.

EC2 instance unavailable

Sat, 12/15/2018 - 4:33pm

I moved my blog to EC2 last weekend and last night the instance stopped working for the first time.

"Design for failure", is the mantra, and I'll do some work on automated reboots when monitoring fails.

Seems like the httpd server went ran out of memory last night.

Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Out of memory: Kill process 8250 (httpd) score 37 or sacrifice child
Dec 15 00:26:49 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: Killed process 8250 (httpd) total-vm:526616kB,...
Dec 15 00:26:53 ip-172-31-60-46 kernel: httpd invoked oom-killer...

Read more about EC2 instance unavailable

Nora completed Veilig Leren Lezen

Sun, 12/09/2018 - 5:45pm

Nora completed Veilig Leren Lezen, a Dutch reading curriculum for first grade. It's the curriculum used by 75% of all Dutch kids to learn how to read and write.

I'm extremely proud. We started in February 2017, and in those 22 months Nora has learned how to read chapter books in Dutch, how to spell basic words and she expanded her vocabulary greatly. I remember that I had to tell her what a put was.

One of her favorite first books was Op is op by Annemarie Bon, who became one of her favorite authors. A big thank you to Mieke, who helped us with a lot of materials.

It's been fun for me to teach her. It's like homeschooling, I suppose. We did one or two sessions a week, mostly in the weekends. In the past few months she has been reading independently so wrapping up Kern 12 today was a formality, but a nice milestone.

Putting up the Christmas tree, 2018

Sun, 12/09/2018 - 5:30pm

Yesterday morning after gymnastics we went to Home Depot to buy the tree. Like last year, we wanted a manageable size -- on that wouldn't be too dangerous if falling over -- and we found a fresh 5' tree that suited our needs.

Adrian took some branches from Home Depot ("baby boom") and Nora took random string of rope (which I secretly threw away a few hours later). After lunch we brought the tree inside, as promised, and then it was nap time. It took Leo a long time to fall sleep. I brought Nora to a birthday party in Clarendon and when I came back the boys were deep asleep.

After dinner we decorated the tree. The kids also played with the Dick Bruna nativity scene, always a favorite.

In the morning the boys were downstairs for a while... then I saw Adrian walking around with a dustpan. When I asked what happened, Leo explained that they were kicking the big blue exercise ball, it bounced off the fireplace and then hit the tree and broke one of the Christmas balls. "We waren erg geschrokken", said Leo. Other than that, no damage so far.