Things are back in their normal rhythm. This was my first full week at work since before Christmas, and it was good to be back in full working mode. We completed a minor release this week, with new translations of the product in several languages. It's cool to see your software in Chinese.

Tomorrow I may clean up the Christmas tree, I think it is about time. The tree is indestructible, it has hardly lost any needles.

Denver really is a pretty city, with a great downtown area. Sasha is at her conference during the day, so I'm exploring the city by myself, but we also spent time together in between things.

This afternoon I met Anna Chase and Dennis for coffee, which was fun. I've been reading Dennis' blog for years, and it was nice to meet in real life.

There is snow predicted both here and in North Carolina, that may make our flight home quite interesting. We'll see.

And oh, for lunch I got us two sandwiches from Dubbel Dutch (again). Very healthy, a broodje gezond. Dubbel Dutch is a nice store; I enjoyed meeting Eef, the owner.

This morning I drove to Colorado Springs, about an hour south of Denver. I visited a Dutch bakery there.

The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour.

We're staying on the 19th floor of the Crowne Plaza hotel, which has a great view. On the right in the picture you can see the mountains that surround the city.

It's a little colder here than in North Carolina, but not much. The snow you see is the first of the season, according to the guy at the rental company.

There is a two hour time difference with the East Coast.

Yesterday night we celebrated the New Year with a dinner party at friends.

Great company, good food and champagne made for a terrific evening.

We called with Bulgaria and the Netherlands when the new year arrived; especially in Leeuwarden there was a lot of fireworks in the background.

During the day we had prepared oliebollen and they were well received.

For the first time in years we celebrated Christmas at home. It was great to cook budni vecher, a tradition we started in Haarlem many years ago. It's a Bulgarian Christmas Eve dinner, made without any animals products like meat, milk or butter.

The main dishes we had were stuffed grape and cabbage leaves, various beans and a home made bread. The latter with a coin for luck, which fell to Sasha. Dessert was baklava from a Turkish store in Chapel Hill.

It was delicious and a lot of fun to prepare together.

Yesterday was an easy and relaxing day. This morning we woke up to a snowy world, around 4 to 5 inches of snow.

I had planned to work from home today, since many co-workers are out of office and it's very quiet, work-wise. Yesterday evening I decided to come in to assist a customer with their pre-holiday shutdown of their lab. It's a power savings initiative and using our product they automatically shutdown a large number of servers, which is pretty cool.

The phone call with them this morning went smoothly and I left the office around 2.00 pm.

At home the postman delivered a package, with a big smile:

"A package for Mr. Bosman?"

"Eh, yeah, that would be me" -- I was expecting a package from our headquarters, to replace my laptop screen.

"So, are you going to sign it as 'The Man'?" he said with a grin.

This year our company celebrates it's 25th anniversary, and the holiday party was bigger than usual. The people from our office were invited to join the celebrations in Somerset, New Jersey, so we had a fun two day trip.

We left on Thursday. Because it was snowing, I left an hour earlier to the airport than I'd usually do. I saw several wrecks on 147 and I40, but made it to the airport fine, just like my colleagues. The plane had to wait for two hours for de-icing, since RDU doesn't have a lot of experience with snow, and we arrived in Philadelphia around 12:30 pm. We had a Philly cheese steak for lunch, and after a few meetings in the office we went to the party.

That was a lot of fun -- the highlight was the band out company employees who were playing music; very enjoyable. Lots of dancing.

Yesterday we went to the office, and after a celebration lunch we travel back to Philadelphia. We got stuck in traffic there for 45 minutes, and we would have missed our flight if it didn't have a delay. There were a few scary moments when the check-in lady said that the flight was already closed, but the gate agent got all of us seat assignments, the last ones on the plane.

I was happy to be back in Durham on time, since we celebrated our two year wedding anniversary yesterday. We went out for dinner in a favorite restaurant.

Max Struik is born!

Our friends Jerry and Marjolein were blessed with a baby boy today.

Max weighs 2690 gram, and mother and child are doing well (daddy also).

Congratulations!