Guus Bosman

Sasha's parents Milan and Nadia arrived today!

We went to pick them up at Charlotte airport, after making sure that the house is in immaculate shape.

It is great to see them again, and we had a very nice evening together. It's the first time they visit us in the States, so there is a lot to show them.

Two photographs that I took in Haarlem, the Netherlands, years ago are now used in a newsletter.

Hale Kū‘ike, a residential facility in Hawaii for people with Alzheimer's disease, used two photographs of Dutch 'hofjes' that I posted on Wikipedia in their most recent letter.

[...] Hofje van Bakenes, located in the Netherlands, stands out in my memory. It was founded in 1395 to care for twenty women and has been in operation ever since. Imagine that, over six centuries of assisted living!

Sasha is leaving for the UK in a little bit. She will be presenting at the Royal Economic Society in London, pretty cool. There's a direct flight from RDU to Heathrow that she'll take.

We saw two nice movies this morning and came home for lunch; I'm going back to the festival in a little bit.

Over the years I've become an avid reader of the New York Times. I don't always agree with their commentary, but their reporting and analysis are excellent and I've come to read it several times a day.

I always wondered why they made all their news available for free. After all, other major newspapers such as The Economist and the Financial Times have had paywalls for years. We had a subscription to the New York Times in the past but a newspaper made out of paper is very inefficient -- reading it on the phone is so much more practical.

I ran into the "soft limit" of the Times within 4 days of the new month, both on my browser and my BlackBerry. It's a valuable news source to us, so as of this morning we're subscribed.

It's strange to see how easy it is to circumvent the paywall (using NoScript in your browser in sufficient); I suppose they assume most casual readers won't go to that length. Still, sending the whole article but overlapping it with a CSS popup is trivially easy to get around.

Yesterday evening we went to the opening reception of a photo exhibition in Cary, NC. The exhibition was with works by Saskia Leary and Laura Holley.

Saskia, who was born in the Netherlands, started photographing after her retirement. This exhibition was about spring flowers and the Keukenhof in the Netherlands. Saskia has been to Sofia, Bulgaria and took several nice photo's there also -- yesterday we saw one of them in a restaurant nearby.

We met up with Petra at the exhibition --it was nice to see her-- and when we went for dinner in the evening we saw several other people we know. A small world.

We're in Paris, and life is good.

Highlights so far: a day in Versailles, the palace created by Louis XIV, and our first ever visit to the Louvre Museum. And the food, of course!

Sasha was at her conference yesterday and today; she'll be back in a while and we'll hit the town again. I took two French lessons, which was great.

Today we prepared for our trip to Paris, and in the process organized our storage room. In a box with things from our stay in New Jersey I found some Mighty Leaf tea, so we're having a nice cup of chamomile.

There are always a lot of small things to prepare (don't forget to return that library book, pick up the dry cleaning, last minute shopping) and I really like it that we're not getting up at a crazy early time to get to the airport. Our flight is at 8.05 pm tomorrow, from Charlotte.

During the last few days I studied about ordering meals in restaurant, and reading menu's in French (la carte, not le menu). I'm all set to order some cuisses de grenouille.

Today is Sasha's birthday.

Happy birthday!

Tomorrow it will be 75 degrees, according to the weather forecast (24 in Celsius). Pretty amazing for February.

My little nephew Jasper is doing well; Ettie told me he has gotten his second tooth.

Thursday I took the afternoon off and we drove to Washington. Sasha gave a presentation there on Friday, and I worked from the hotel.

We were lucky with the traffic. On Wednesday there had been a big snowstorm and thousands of people were stranded for hours on the highways. On Thursday things were fine, and since many people were working from home there was little traffic. In the evening we had dinner in a place that Obama and Medvedev once visited.

Friday evening I went to Mackey's Pub, a few blocks from our hotel, where some 40 Dutch people met for drinks. I met a lot of different people and had a great evening. There were several Americans who were learning Dutch, and took the opportunity to practice. The organizers even arranged for bitterballen, made by a company in Atlanta.

We drove back on Saturday, and made a beautiful detour through southern Virginia in the afternoon.