When you come back to your hometown after two years, you'll notice the changes. The bakery has a new owner (although the personnel is partially the same), the Kroon clothing store is out of business (which is no surprise since there was nobody ever there), the library moved to the same building as my mother's school and the old building is now in use for the biljart club, the Beurs is called the Oude Beurs again but is sadly closed and will be demolished, just like one of the three old churches.

And other things stay the same.

The butcher 'Van het Riet' is still there, and the Duizendpoot (which was Poot until years ago), the cute Wieringermeer museum is still there (open on Saturday afternoon's and by appointments), and of course the grocery store which I'm looking forward to to visit just to ogle all the familiar-but-now-slightly-unknown brands and products, including the wonderful and super cheap cheeses.

My parents house has changed some too, with a new kitchen, light in color and without the old piano. The living room is nicely light and more spacey now. New positions for the plates in the kitchen though. The server for the website is still going strong, but it's more noisy than it was two years ago. The hard drives and fans must be wearing out after 5+ years of non-stop use. When I went up to the attic I found a smoke detector that was beeping every few minutes to warn it's losing its charge; that battery lasted five year also, amazing. I think there's another one up there.

Around the village of Middenmeer things are changing also. There's now a huge area of land with hothouses, for tomatos, peppers etc. The number of windmills hasn't significantly increased recently. There's a plan to create an artificial lake between the old island of Wieringen and the Wieringermeer, connecting the island with the mainly through bridges, in the hope to attract more tourism to the area. I understand that desire but somehow it doesn't feel right to reinundiate parts of the polder, only 50 years after it was reclaimed from the sea.

Friday evening Ettie & Gerben came to Middenmeer, and we had a nice family dinner. Jaap baked delicious home-made pizza and it was as great as I remembered.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to sleep well. The first night in Middenmeer I was exhausted after the traveling; it's the second night that's usually the hardest due to the time difference. However, I slept great. I woke up at 4:45 am, and it took my a good hour to fall back to sleep but I woke up at 8.45 am, a little groggy but with 8 hours of rest. Yesterday's morning run and the long walks later in the day surely helped.

In the morning a fun project was waiting for me -- going up in the attic at my parent's place. Five years ago we stored our belongings there and every time I've been back it's been fun to dive into the boxes and pick up things to bring to the States. I picked up some goodies and selected some boxes to empty out. We also prepared the audio equipment for Jaap's birthday party next week.

The next morning I woke up at 8.30 am, full of energy. Over breakfast we organized some things for next week's party and I went for a run.

It was a gorgeous run through the Wieringermeer, a triangle through the country over the Molenweg ("Mill Road"). Roads here are straight, flat and windy -- very different than in North Carolina. It was absolutely beautiful to be out in the fields.

There were many farms with more modern things, like horseback riding, just housing and there's even a Bed & Breakfast on the Molenweg. There was the smell of kruitefluit, onions or flower bulbs, dry mud and yes, manure. The wind made it easy, even though it was warm and sunny.

I like to talk a walk break half-way, but that felt awkward because I kept on meeting people I know. I wouldn't one people who see me once in a blue moon to catch me taking a walk break!

After a 7,5 hour flight I arrived at London Heathrow early in the morning. The plane landed at 7.00 am, and I managed to get a couple of hours sleep on the plane. The plane wasn't full and the stewardess pointed me to a row with three empty seats in the back ('oh you're so tall'). It's not exactly comfortable but some sleep is a lot better than none at all.

I had breakfast on the airport and took the train to Paddington station. There I took the circle line to Liverpool street, which is where our UK office is. I spent the morning with them and we had lunch together. It's small office with great atmosphere. Talked about the product I work on and some other initiatives we're doing.

At 4.00 pm I was in the air again, on my way to Amsterdam. I sat next to a British couple with a young baby on their lap. It liked me and was interested in the sound of my newspaper and water bottle. I learned that, in British, a rhino says: "mud, mud, mud". It was nice to have some distraction because even with the grande coffee in the morning (Starbucks is everywhere) followed by a dopio at Heathrow, I was getting very tired.

In the arrival hall I was met by my parents, Steven, Jerry and Marjolein and it was great to see them. We had dinner together, and chatted. Jerry told about their adventures on vacation. I still had banana in my laptop bag which was heavily bruised. I hope Steven found his car back.

We drove to Middenmeer. We immediately saw a lady I recognized by name and other people who I recognized just by face. Middenmeer is a very friendly place where people say 'hi' on the street, and I think I know someone in about every street of the village. We chatted for a while at home and I went to a deep, long sleep.

At Schiphol.

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For the address book on our site I used CiviCRM, an open source CRM system. I recently upgraded from CiviCRM 1.9 to 2.0, and since the APIs changed I had to update the block with birthdays that I wrote two years ago.

The primary change in CiviCRM 2 that impacted the block was the merge of civicrm_individual into civicrm_contact, a sensible schema change. Secondly, the public API's method calls are now organized in smaller modules and were renamed.

Here's the updated birthday block for CiviCRM 2.0:

<?php
// Check if CiviCRM is installed here.
if (!module_exists('civicrm')) return false;

// Initialization call is required to use CiviCRM APIs.
civicrm_initialize(true);
require_once('api/v2/Contact.php');

$select = "SELECT id, birth_date, CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) 
< RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth_date,6)) AS bday,
concat(concat(month(birth_date), '/'), day(birth_date)) as displaydate,  
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE)) AS toBday FROM civicrm_contact WHERE 
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE) < 7) ORDER BY bday, RIGHT(birth_date,5);";

$query  = $select;
$params = array( );

$dao =& CRM_Core_DAO::executeQuery( $query, $params );

echo "<div class=\"item-list\"><ul>\n";
while ( $dao->fetch( ) ) {

// Contact API returns contact info

$params = array('contact_id' => $dao->id);
$contact = &civicrm_contact_get( $params );

if ( civicrm_error( $contact ) ) {
    echo $contact['error_message'];
}

echo "<li><a href=\"/civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&cid=" . $dao->id . "\">" . $contact['display_name'] . 
"</a>, " . $dao->displaydate;

echo "</li>\n";

}
echo "</div></ul>\n";

?>

While developing this database query was useful; it disables the block.

update blocks set status = 0 where title = 'Birthdays';

It took me two hours to get home from the office today while usually it only takes 30 minutes. There were 2 big pile-ups of cars on I-40 very near each other; blocking the highway completely for 30 minutes followed by a few hours of 1 lane traffic (1 instead of 4).

Still, glad I wasn't in the pile-up. When I finally drove past it I saw 28 damaged cars, some in really bad shape.

We went for a long hike yesterday in Umstead Park. We walked in the middle of the day, and it was humid and hot, around 90 degrees.

We walked the Company Mill trail, a beautiful 6 mile walk through the woods. It took us about 2 hours and 20 minutes.

We saw two large snakes, larger than I've ever seen in the wild before. Both of them were around 3 feet long (90 centimeters).

The first one we heard before we saw it, a couple of feet away from the trail in the bushes when we were near a creek. It was brown and patterned. We're no snake experts but after looking at pictures later it might have been a hognose, northern water snake or a copperhead. We respectfully kept our distance.

Just a few minutes later we saw a similar sized snake, but completely black. That was almost certainly a black rat snake. It quickly moved away and crossed the trail behind us.

We went for a walk at the Eno River today. We were there around 7.00 pm when the sun wasn't shining very bright anymore and we saw a lot of deer.

On the road near the park someone had put home-made signs: "slow, baby deer", and in their garden were at least 8 deer, including young ones.

There's a large park around the Eno river and on our walk through the woods near the river we saw a beautiful animal that we had seen only once or twice before. I thought it was called a possum, but tonight I looked it up and the animal we saw is a raccoon.

The raccoon was about to climb in to a tree when it saw us. It stared at us for a while, hid behind the tree trunk and then walked away. It reminded me of a cat in the way it seemed to pretend "Oh, I wasn't never planning to climb in that tree, you silly human".

I just discovered through a review in the WSJ that the National Gallery has again a great exhibition of a Dutch 17th century artist, this time about Judith Leyster.

I don't know Judith Leyster's work, but she worked with Frans Hals and was one of the two only women accepted to the Guild of St. Luke in 17th century Haarlem.

The exhibition will run through November 29 and Sasha and will definitely go check it out, probably in September. According to the WSJ: "She deserves attention".

I'm also very excited about "The Complete Rembrandt, Life Size", an show with life-size reprints of all known works by Rembrandt. It's on display in Amsterdam, which I'll visit in about two weeks.