Guus Bosman

Today I ran some errants: I went to the post office, super market, shoe maker, library, dry cleaners and Target all in one afternoon. Since nothing is close to each other that means a lot of driving.

Shortly after we moved to Durham I found a good shoe maker nearby, one of the important amenities to have around. It's a family owned business and they do shoe repair and clothes alterations. I've been at Butlers a few times and their work is of high quality.

The only downside is that it's hard to get to their store as the entrance for cars is very steep. If you're not careful the car won't get enough clearance and you'll hear a loud scraping sound under the car -- not nice.

One of my all-time favorite books has been voted the "best Dutch book of all times". It's The Discovery Of Heaven by Harry Mulisch, a novel about the mystical journey of a man to return the Ten Commandments to Heaven.

The vote is based on an internet poll, and I am always skeptical of those because it's so easy to manipulate. However, this first place for what is De Ontdekking Van De Hemel in Dutch is completely deserved. The second place was for Het Huis Van De Moskee by Kader Abdolah, a book completely unknown to me. I looked it up and it was published in 2005.

Strange that this new book ended up above such classics as Max Havelaar or De Avonden, which I suppose proves my point above the unreliability of internet polls (or the odd literary taste of the people that voted). Simon Vestdijk's books didn't even make it into the top 10, neither did Erik, of het klein insectenboek by Godfried Bomans.

The Discovery Of Heaven was published in 1992, the 2nd year I was in high school. Although at that time reading Dutch literature wasn't high on my list with favorite things, I enjoyed reading Mulisch a lot (and so did many of my classmates). In 2001 a movie made of the book came out, which was okay but not as brilliant as the book.

Last night I made couscous, inspired by my father's couscous dish. He placed a recipe for couscous on his website a while ago.

Interestingly, one of the ingredients is "koeskoes kruiden", literally "couscous spices". If you'd do a google for "koeskoes kruiden", like I did, you'll see as a first result... indeed, my father's website.

Further research learned that the spices may have been turmeric, ground cumin and paprika powder.

The result, over whole grain couscous, was nice but a little bit bland so I'll have to keep working on getting that right.

Tonight I noticed that the website was very slow so I checked if there was enough free space available. And the /var partition was 100% full again, while I had just cleaned it up yesterday.

So I did a quick sanity check and quickly found that I had left MySQL logging on "verbose", with this result:

A 2.5 GB log file on a 3.0 GB partition... So there is clearly no need for a new hard disk yet.