Guus Bosman

Ettie and Gerben, my sister and her husband, arrived in Durham!

They were at home when we arrived home yesterday, and it was great to see them again. It's been so long since we've all been together! So that asked for a picture to be taken.

In the evening went together to the Cheesecake Factory in Southpoint Mall, and the guests were duly impressed by the huge portions. A very nice evening.

Jaap and Mieke arrived in Durham today!

We spend a great day together around Duke and in the Sarah Duke Gardens.

Ettie and Gerben arrived in the U.S. yesterday, and they'll join us next week.

We came home from a great weekend in Asheville. We visited the Biltmore Estate for the first time, and it was gorgeous.

Saturday afternoon we spent in the winery, the farm and various trails. Today we visited the gardens and the main house.

Friday we made it just in time to our car when a huge lightning storm hit Durham, including the trail around the Duke golf course where we were walking. The storm stayed above Durham for at least 1,5 hours that night.

Today my run brought me on the trail again, and since I now have a phone with a camera built-in I took a few pictures of the storm damage.

This weekend we did a lot of preparations for our coming guests. Ettie & Gerben and Jaap & Mieke will be in the USA soon! We're looking forward to it, and now the house is getting ready also.

I know we live in a state with beautiful nature and lots of wilderness, but this news article still surprised me: black bear spotted in Chapel Hill.

Sadly, the bear was apparently hit by a car and died, but I had no idea that there were black bears around here.

A related article on WRAL.com talks about two bear sightings in May of this year in Raleigh and Durham: "Law-enforcement officers said they believe the larger bear could weigh around 200 pounds. Residents are urged to stay away from the animals."

It's over 10 years ago that I saw bears in real live, from the bus in Tannersville, NY.

The Lego company has a vault with all models they ever sold, in their original boxes.

Tonight I saw a video of this vault and it's was a real trip down memory lane. They showed the castle, the space ships and many other goodies.

They even showed the Monorail, one of my all-time favorite Sinterklaas presents. Oh, the memories!

I woke up early this morning and spend a productive morning working on a new feature. A co-worker recommended RadRails, and I plan to install it and check it out but I'm pretty comfortable with the command line tools so there's no rush. I played around with a commercial JavaScript/CSS library that we're using, and it is very impressive.

Today at 2.45 pm the game between Russia and the Netherlands starts. I'll be watching it with some friends in a bar in Cary, where a Dutch group gets together to watch the Dutch soccer games. We're prepared!

The other night we went to Kroger for groceries, and the self service checkout machine crashed half-way.

Perhaps it was the cucumber I was trying to scan.

When I left home in the morning I smelled something burned or burning, and I was worried about fire. Luckily there was nothing and I left for work. Then when I arrived in Raleigh, 30 miles further, it still smelled of smoke.

It turns out there are 3 large wildfires near the coast, and the smog and ash from those fires is blown across the Triangle and even as far as Greensboro. There's a serious health advisory in effect, strongly recommending against outdoors exercise. Let's hope the 5k race on Saturday won't be impacted.