Guus Bosman

We are visiting Svetla this afternoon. She'll have a baby soon!

We'll come between Christmas and New Year for a longer visit, and to see Radoslav as well.

Yesterday we went out with Joana, Svetlio and Tsetsa in Sofia.

First we went to a restaurant, where we had dinner. I forgot the name, but it was from the same chain as where we had dinner once with Jaap and Mieke, three years ago. Later we went for some drinks in a bar nearby. It was very cosy!

Yesterday evening I've been experimenting with a graphical tool again; this time with a different subject.

See the result here, or here in a larger format. What do you think?

Nice: a baby princess was born yesterday.

I traveled back from Middenmeer this morning, so I had time to look at the newspapers. There were many advertisements related to the royal baby. The thing I liked the best was the 10% discount offered by the coffee vendor at the station because of the birth.

Yesterday evening we celebrated Sinterklaas at my parents, which was very nice.

Some nice news today: my uncle Peter successfully finished his study.

He has been studying part-time in the last years and now he'll have a Master of Business Administration degree. His official graduation will be in January. Congratulations!

I'm in Middenmeer now, it's Sinterklaas weekend and we'll celebrate it tomorrow evening.

I spent the whole afternoon shopping. I saw almost every shoe-shop in the center of Haarlem, without result though. I did find a travel-bag, which is useful for my journey to Bulgaria next week, but also for smaller trips, such as to my parents or to Groningen.

Today I spent about six hours in the train! I went to Groningen today, there was a little thing to be fixed. Things went smooth, and we were done around 16:30 o'clock.

I was prepared to stay a night in Groningen, in case I had to work there tomorrow too. Somehow it was a bit of a disappointment that I didn't have a reason to stay there tonight. At the other hand: it's nice to be home. And... this way I could restart my server. Somewhere around 14:00 o'clock the website didn't work anymore. There has probably been a small power-outage this afternoon; some other things were shut down as well.

Funny: today we changed only around ten lines of code, which was done in an hour. However, it took us a whole day to test it thoroughly, wrap it up and put it on the real server.

This weekend I'm preparing things for Sinterklaas. Yesterday I bought most of the things I need, but I'll go to one shop once more.

I went out Friday evening with some colleague’s; it was great fun. After dinner we spent the whole evening in Van Stoffelen, and later we met some other colleague’s there.

It's Thanksgiving weekend in the States. Sasha is spending the weekend with Irena and Jonathan and family of Jonathan in Columbia, a city north of Washington.

Yesterday evening I was watching TV when the visit of President Bush to Iraq was announced.

Mr. Bush is really good in situations like those; many Dutch people underestimate how popular he is, partly because public appearances like yesterday's. His visit made a big impact on the soldiers in Iraq and many Americans at home.

Tonight I had dinner with Jennie, Samantha and Ronald.

We had a really wonderful meal: hot pot. Hot pot is a Chinese recipe, where there's a big pan with spicy, boiling soup in the middle of the table, and a variety of things to boil in it in smaller dishes around it. In a sense it's a bit like fondue, except that the taste of the soup is very delicious: a lot of herbs and spices have been added.

There were a lot of Chinese vegetables to put in the soup. Additionally there were mushrooms, tofu and different types of meat. The name "hot pot" relates to the taste: Jennie added around 20 red peppers to our version. Extremely spicy, extremely delicious!