Guus Bosman

Ettie and Gerben are getting married! Friday November 23rd will be their wedding day in Leeuwarden.

It's great news -- many congratulations from both of us!

Below you'll see the picture on their wedding invitation.

Friday afternoon we went for lunch at Dickey's, a barbecue place in Crossroads.

There are a couple of different restaurants there, and since a few weeks a Starbucks opened also. It's a lot closer to us than the one on Walnut Street, so that's really convenient.

Of course, my resolution to drink less coffee still stands, but on a Friday afternoon I'll drink a nice cup of coffee. Starbucks is now using the holiday cups.

Yesterday was my 29th birthday, and we celebrated it with an great party in our apartment.

In the morning we celebrated the traditional way, with presents, postcards, e-mails and lots of nice phone calls. The rest of the day we prepared for the party. We did most of the shopping on Friday evening (2,5 hours in the supermarket) so we only had to get some last minute things like fresh bread.

The first guests arrived just after 7.00 pm, and within an hour the house was full with people -- wonderful! We had food, drinks and a cake with 29 candles that I managed to blow out at once.

It was great to have so many people over. It's been years since we threw a big party at home and this was the first such a party we've done in the States. Hosting a party is so much fun! It reminded me of the cool parties we used to have in Florijn, and later in Haarlem. A special thanks to the folks who helped in the kitchen and offered to help during the evening.

For many people it was the first time in our house, and I think everybody had a very good time. It was nice that the different groups of people in my life met each other. In the course of the evening we had almost 40 people at the party.

After midnight the dancing started ('Beautiful Girls' was a particular favorite). Around 2.00 am we broke things up.

The Dutch TV news showed a 'robot pharmacy' the other day.

It's machine that fully automatically takes the wholesale supplies, stores them in an archive and on-demand prepares medications for patients.

The pharmacy robot is designed and manufactured by the company Gerben works for, and he has played an important part in the technical implementation. When I was in Holland he showed me video footage of the robot -- it's cool to see how fast and smoothly it operates.

See the TV coverage online (in Dutch).

Yesterday we went to help out the Durham Jaycees with their Halloween Haunted House.

A Haunted House is a maze with different scary rooms, through which customers walk (with guides). There are many special effects, lots of different lights and sounds and of course, the actors. I was a 'scary clown' for the evening, and that was a lot of fun.

This is an annual fund raiser for the Durham Jaycees (the Raleigh Jaycees have one as well). The House was set up in a hallway in the Durham Bulls Stadium.

It wasn't very busy since it was raining and a weekday night, but there were guests coming and going and it was an entertaining evening. There is something very satisfying about being allowed to scare people and say "booh".

In a new residential building on Erwin Road three new restaurants will open, including Chipotle and T.G.I. Fridays.

This is nice since there aren't a lot of restaurants in walking distance from our house. There's Nosh, which I really like, but some more variety, even from chain restaurants, is always good.

Thursday evening I had a great conversation over good beer in Tyler's Taproom, in the American Tobacco District. I got the advise to check out "Sam's Quickshop", a few minutes driving from our house on Erwin Road.

I've seen the store many times -- it's right on the way to Whole Foods and downtown Durham -- but I could never be bothered to go in. Although I had read about a 'nice beer selection' on-line I figured that the author meant they had both Budweiser and Miller. The store looks like a typical gas station store with cold beer, cigarettes and car things, and I never paid it real attention.

How wrong could I have been!

I'm leaving for the NC State Fair now, so I'm ready for a long time in traffic and looking for a parking spot. I'll bring a cup of coffee with me in the car.

Yesterday I made a very, very nice discovery here in Durham, later more.

Yesterday I worked for the Raleigh Jaycees Turkey Shoot at the North Carolina State Fair.

For $3.00 a shot you can shoot a real 20 gauge shotgun, together with 11 other contestants. And no, it's not about shooting real turkeys: the targets are pieces of paper. The person who shot a pellet closest to the cross hairs wins a frozen turkey.

The Jaycee group in Raleigh has been organizing this game since 1952 at the State Fair, and it's a major fund raiser. Some people come back every year to win their Thanksgiving turkey at the fair.

I was at the Fair at 5.00 pm, and we closed the game at 11.00 pm. In my dinner break I went to get some fair food, a big roasted turkey leg of course. It was great fun to do, people really enjoyed the shooting and it was a nice group of people to work with.

The Jaycees website has a slideshow with some older pictures.

Today I went with for a wine tasting tour in North Carolina. We were five people and drove in one car, a big truck, from Chapel Hill to the area around Burlington, which is between Durham and Greensboro. The Haw River Wine Trail is a tour along a different wineries in rural North Carolina.

Over the course of the afternoon we went to four different wineries, and we had a great time. There are some quite drinkable North Carolina wines out there. It was inspiring to see how on a small scale products like these wines are being made. In one of the wineries the owner told us how she and her husband decided to switch to growing grapes in 2001 after having grown tobacco for years.

I bought two bottles, both sweet white wines. One nice blend from the Grove winery made of grapes from along the Eno River near our house, and the other is a delicious (sweet) white wine.