lucas's blog

And I'm late ! Oops. I was working on a simulation of which the result was needed for a meeting. The meeting was still ongoing when I finished it. This all meant I'm late ... a good 1.5 hour late. Which is not exactly ok, because I forgot Fran is giving her first English lesson tonight at 19:00. I'll arrive (if everything goes well) at home at 18:45. So I'll keep my fingers crossed. Very busy now in the train. I'm in the front train section, just behind the locomotive. And ... just left Rotterdam and already our first unscheduled stop ... aarghh. Just after station Rotterdam Zuid.

I woke up at 3:30 thinking, wow, still have approx. 1.5 hours of sleep left ! Then my phone woke me up at 5:00 ... somehow the radio alarm clock didn't go off at 4:50 ! hmmm, not good. Still made it in time for the train, but hurrying in the morning is not my cup of tea. Of course I had time enough to make my coffee for in the thermos, make some sandwiches, pack apples etc. So nothing really happened, except my fallback system had to wake me up. And yesterday I was thinking: oh, why bother so much, am I really that paranoid with all these backups ?

The weather quite ok today again. It was hot in our bedroom last night. Sleeping with the fan on is not something I'm very fond of, but without AC there are not much alternatives.

Nice weather, now and in the weekend. Didn't do anything special the last 2 days. Rested a bit. Read the newspaper (saw an interesting ad from ASML, registered for a workshop/interactive seminar blah blah on a by public transport unreachable spot (The House of the Future). Anyways, first wait for a confirmation, maybe they think I don't fit in their profile. We'll see.

I spent last evening and night at Henk in Rotterdam. Had dinner in the cafe het Trefpunt. Decent food for decent prices. We stayed up way too late discussing GIS, Imagem, software etc. We had a good time.

Getting up this morning was a bit of a struggle, but managed to get to work in time: 7:15AM.

Yesterday my mom was in Eindhoven. Very exciting for Hannah, they went downtown and had lunch in the V&D after picking up Hannah from school. So it was very nice to come home to a house filled with warmth. My mom sewn a very nice dress for Hannah. It looks splendid on her. And my goodness, the things that come out of her little mouth ! unbelievable at times. Allthough most of it is in Dutch, we really have to make more effort in getting more English out of her. Understanding it is no problem, actively speaking it is another thing ...

It's a sunny start of the day, even had to change seats to avoid the glare. Just found: http://www.projectwonderful.com a different kind of web advertising initiative. Found the link on drupal.org where a discussion is going on about how to get more funding for that project. I just signed up and I'll see what happens. This site is not getting enough visitors for anybody to bid on advertisements. But you never know. The Google adsense is bringing so little (a few dollars a month) that I don't think I can quit my day job soon ;-)

I wonder how Angelo is doing. On the 21st of this month Kim gave birth to Michael ! So now Isabel has a brand new brother. Hopefully everything goes well. I'll call him today.

It's the last short week for weeks ! Had a good relaxing long weekend. Bastiaan and Maarten Staal (our old neighbours on nr 9) visited us. During the lunch we had time to catch up. Admiring the photo of his wife to be: Rosa. And they had a chance to see what has become of their old house. It changed a bit during the last 18 months ...

Sunday Annie and her children: Savannah and Alex came by. It was their first visit to our house. The children enjoyed themselves enormously. Franny made somosa's (not sure about the spelling ...) she used filo pastry because we can't buy the loempia pastry in the supermarket. Because of that we had to use the oven to cook them, but they didn't come out so well as we had hoped. By the way: always check the bus schedule on Sundays ... not much busses in the mornings. So I had to take a taxi from the station. It was not too bad actually, the fare was a bit more than 10 euros. About double the bus fare for the 5 of us (I took Hannah with me on the bike to pick them up).