We're ready for a very special vacation in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. Tomorrow at 5.00 am we'll leave for Charlotte International Airport, where we'll take a direct flight to Cancun.

We just completed packing.

Tomorrow morning I'm traveling back to Raleigh.

Yesterday it was very cold here, today is more bearable. I went to pick up some yogurt from a grocery store, and took a picture of this decorated house.

We drove up to New Jersey for Thanksgiving, and on the way to there we made a stop at Ikea at I-95. When we moved the United States we bought a lot of our furniture and home equipment from Ikea near D.C., and four year later some items were up for replacement.

On February 18 a new Ikea store will open in Charlotte, the first Ikea in North Carolina. Charlotte is not far and it's nice to have a store nearby.

I worked in our headquarters in New Jersey today. When I'm here my calendar is always packed with meetings; today I was in the office from 8.30 am to 7.00 pm. I'm staying until Wednesday morning.

I'm staying in the Holiday Inn, and they've made some nice changes. I received a bottle of water and a power bar when I checked in (smart choices -- they must realize nowadays that most business traveler's don't care for unhealthy cookies so much), but most of all there's coffee in the lobby now. That saves me a trip to the Starbucks down the road. I don't drink much Starbucks during the week anymore, but when I'm on the road I allow myself some luxury.

Yesterday's trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was great. I spend a lot of time in the paintings gallery again. I was very tempted to buy "How to read a painting" in the store and use it while I was in the museum, but $35 seemed aggressive. I checked Amazon, they sell it for $23 and better yet, the library in Durham has two copies on the shelf. In the afternoon I saw a presentation about the departing director of the Met, Philippe de Montebello. It was very interesting to learn about the purchasing policies of the Met, the process they go through to acquire new work etc. After the videos I went upstairs to the exhibition about the things that were acquired while he was the director.

Now I'm about to go for a run on the treadmill. It's been a long time since I did that, and I strongly disliked it, but it's very dark outside and I don't know where to go for a run around here in the dark. And okay, I'll admit -- it's very cold also.

I'm in the Met; it's great.

I doubt that I'll have time for the Frick collection, there is so much to see here.

Tomorrow morning I'm taking the 6.55 am flight to Newark, NJ. I need to be in New Jersey Monday morning early, and the early flight on Sunday is a lot cheaper than other flights, later in the day.

I'll meet up with colleagues in the evening, but I have the entire day for myself, so I hope to go back to the Metropolitan, and in the afternoon visit the Frick Collection.

Last year Kiss FM, one of the stations that we have programmed in the car, started broadcasting Christmas music mid-November.

This year the station changed format and no longer has the non-stop Christmas music, but I found another station that provides "holidays immersion", at 99.5 FM.

The morning DJs are positively awful on this station, and some of the song choices are awful ("A Baby Changes Everything" comes to mind), but over-all it's great. At work I listen to Sky.fm, which has a 24-hours live stream.

Yesterday when we were in the National Gallery of Art, I was wondering where the "View of Haarlem" was that I saw there two years ago.

It turns out that there is a very exiting exhibition now in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, "Pride of place: Dutch cityscapes of the Golden Age". The best news is that the exhibition will be on display in the National Gallery from February 2009. The Jan Lieven exhibition by the way, will move on to the Milwaukee Art Museum, and later in 2009 to the Netherlands.

I'm really looking forward to see the Dutch Cityscapes exhibition. It will even include the famous "View of Delft" by Vermeer, that Sasha and I saw when we visited the Mauritshuis in The Hague four years ago.