Guus Bosman

My father started a photo project a few weeks ago, and since then he placed a new picture every day.

Many of the pictures are pictures about Middenmeer and other places I know, which makes it even more nice to see the daily addition to the site.

Visit Jaap's photo project, and for the Dutch visitors: be sure to also read the accompanying blog.

The snow from yesterday has covered the whole city in white. The bright sunshine makes that it's very shiny outside, and it's almost time for sunglasses. The major roads and footpaths are cleared of snow, but it's still slippery because of the melted snow and ice.

I worked again today; in the morning from home and in the afternoon I went to the office. It's not to bad to work on Sunday, because the work is really fun. We've made good progress this weekend.

I received my new ATM card today, so it really took only one week. However, when I tried to activate the card in the ATM the machine said I was using a wrong PIN number. I'll have to visit the bank tomorrow to find out what's going on because I'm pretty sure I used the correct one.

This weekend is a working weekend for me and my team. Today I was in the office. Originally we all planned to come in, but due to the weather my colleagues stayed at home and worked from there.

It's been snowing all day, and that's big news in all the media. There's an official "winter storm", and a "sever weather warning" is active. When they announced that on the news last week I thought it would really storm, and snowing 50cm per day, but it turns out to be a moderate snow, nothing as dramatic as been shown in the news. We just saw more than 5 different news channels, and they all had specials on the "severe" weather.

But even though it's not as bad as all the warnings would have you believe, the snow has a big impact on people's lives here. Traffic is going very slow because the snow is falling so quickly that it's hard to keep the roads clean. Many shops and buildings are closed too, even the Kinko's near our apartment building that's usually open 24 hours is closed untill tomorrow morning.

Yesterday evening Sasha and I went out for dinner together, which was great. Later we briefly went to a birthday party in a bar at Adam's Morgan. On the way back the driver of our cab was a lady from Romania, who had rather interesting views of the world.

What do Dutch people bring when travelling from and to the US?

Read about in in a nice discussion on AllesAmerika.com.

On the list to the U.S. are pindakaas (peanut butter) and borrelnootjes (coated nuts). Favorites to bring to Holland from the U.S. are clothes and BBQ sauce. No one mentioned volkorenbrood yet.

Today was Inauguration Day, the day of the installation of President Bush. It was more quiet than usual on the streets when I walked to work; all federal buildings were closed.

Yesterday it was snowing, and today I wore the special winter boots that I bought before going to Bulgaria last year. The road to work was still covered with snow and ice and pretty slippery. The winter shoes are wonderful: nice, warm and with a solid grip so you don't slip.

At work there's a lot to do, and a deadline is approaching, so it's quite busy now.

A lot of colleagues came in later today because the metros were so crowded due to the festivities downtown. We watched the official celebrations on TV in the evening. After the swearing-in ceremony there were many balls and parties in the city; President Bush visited nine of them in one day.

Today it was snowing for the first time since I've been here. It's been pretty cold the last few days, and in the morning it started snowing.

Both Sasha and I are over our colds; it took us about a week.

Tomorrow it's Inauguration Day. President Bush will get officially installed, and it's a holiday in the U.S. for federal employees. Sasha's office is closed tomorrow but I'll go to work.

Today was Marten Luther King Day. It's a federal holiday, so Sasha had a day off. Many companies in the private sector don't have a free day though, and it was a working day for me.

It's very cold outside, now it's -8 degrees Celcius. I still enjoyed walking to and from work -- I was well prepared this time.

It's raining today, and everytime that happens there's a traffic jam on the road that we can see from far from our window.

Someone joked that the traffic in Washington immediately slows to a crawl as soon as it rains, snows or is too windy. A bit like the Dutch railways, I guess.

At work we're almost done with development of the new functionality and next week the first testers will try the programs. An interesting difference between the way things work here and at Chess is that in Haarlem we had a lot of automated testing, and only very little manual testing. Here is the other way around.

My cold is almost over, but I'm afraid it looks like it's Sasha's turn now.

Several people have asked me if the tsunami disaster is still on the news here, or why I didn't write about it on this website.

To answer the latter question -- I guess there was just not much to say, except for describing an emotion of great sadness.

Until last week the major TV stations were full-time covering the tsunami and its aftermath. We've seen a lot of interviews with survivors on CNN, very personal and very gripping. Now the coverage is not full-time anymore, but it's still very prominent. I usually get my news from newspapers and magazines, and everyday the newspapers open with news about the disaster and the relief efforts.

Yesterday was my first day after our short vacation. Our project is quite busy, and as I had a lot to arrange I stayed till 20:00 o'clock.

I walked home, where Sasha had also just arrived, and we went shopping together. We had a very late dinner at 22:00 o'clock. It was though to wake up in the morning, but a nice breakfast -- fresh Italian bread with cheese -- and coffee at home made for a nice start of the day. I walked to work through the Washington drizzle (motregen); very refreshing.