dailylife

Last night I celebrated the result of the soccer game, and the fact that we’re back home, with a small dinner with friends.

Now on to Esteban & Belen’s, where I’ll watch the game between Germany and Argentina with German and Argentine friends.

I arrived in Durham a little after 8.00 pm. It’s nice to be home again.

It took me a while to unload the car — moving is a lot of work! If we ever move out of this apartment it would be a major project.

The road I usually take to work, I-40, was closed in both directions in the afternoon due to a suspect package. In the end it turned out to be harmless.

I just finished most of the packing… I underestimated the effort somewhat.

Now I’ll find out if it will all fit in the car.

Tonight I started packing our things. We’ve had this apartment in Somerset since November last year and Wednesday I’m returning to North Carolina.

It’s incredible how many things you can collect in 7 months. True to form we had a box full of books and more than two boxes of cooking tools and ingredients.

With the packing our home in Somerset is disappearing and becoming an empty apartment. We’ve had good times here, especially with the Zanes, so it’s a little sad to leave. At the same time I’m looking forward to be back in our real home in Durham and see our friends and pick up our regular lives.

Sadly the USA lost its game against Ghana on Saturday. We watched it at the pool in Secaucus; it was great weather and we went for a swim after wards. In the evening we prepared for the week; lots of travel and things to arrange. Sunday morning we saw a great game between Germany and England over breakfast.

Sunday afternoon we drove to Trenton where Sasha took the train to DC for the last time. I visited Noor to drop of some materials that I had borrowed and stopped by at the Zanes for a few minutes.

This morning’s match between the Netherlands and Slowakia was exciting, but the Dutch were clearly the stronger team. Friday, against Brazil, will be a very difficult match…

Ouch — a whole week since my previous run! Traveling does my training no good. Next week I’ll be back in North Carolina; hopefully things will get more normal there.

The customer meetings went very well this week. I demonstrated an alpha version of our product to them; it all worked and the customer likes the functionality. It’s so valuable to meet people face-to-face.

We left the hotel at 6.00 am this morning. There wasn’t much traffic on the way to San Francisco airport so we arrived early. Due to the 3 hours time difference with the East Coast I had my first conference call at 7.00 am.

Over breakfast (home-made Californian granola) I watched the game between Slovenia and the USA. The game started at 7.00 am Pacific Time, and lots of people in the airport were watching it. A great game with the USA coming back from 2-0. It really should have been 2-3, that last goal was valid!

Went for a run at 5.30 pm PT, felt like 8.30 pm EST :) Had a big lunch, didn’t eat very well yesterday either. Was good to be running. Ran with Jim, a colleague.

We watched two games today, and went for a run/walk in between. It was nice to see Ghana defeat Serbia with 1-0, with my old friend Mr. Kingston saving the day a few times.

After a great run/walk along the canal we saw Germany-Australia over lunch. In the middle of the second half it started raining and the apartment complex lost its satellite connection. That was quite annoying since we missed goals three and four. A very strong German team.

We’ll be leaving to the Trenton train station in a while when Sasha is going back to DC.

The downside of traveling so much is that you always have to think ahead about logistics. It usually works out well but today we ran into a hug snag: no breakfast in house.

On the way to the grocery store I saw a big bird on the road, picking on some roadkill. I stopped to take a picture of the bird, and saw that there were five of them.

Note to self: going out in flips-flops in New Jersey early in the morning is not as nice as it is in North Carolina. It’s too cold!