Today at around 16:00 o'clock Dutch time the server for this website went down.

My father was home, and he quickly fixed the problem. He took a nice picture of the screen, to allow me to see the error message.

It's a strange idea, that the server is so far away and I'm happy that I have good backups in place. The error message "kernel: page fault trap" is not a very healthy sign.

It's raining this morning.

And of course, the weather service is very happy with that: something important. So instead of saying "it's raining and it's windy", they issue an urgent weather message:

BE SURE TO SECURE ALL LOOSE OUTDOOR OBJECTS SUCH AS GARBAGE CANS.
ALSO...REMAIN ALERT FOR BLOWING AND FALLING DEBRIS. STAY TUNED TO
NOAA WEATHER RADIO FOR WEATHER UPDATES.

Sunday we rented the first season of "The Office" on DVD.

I've seen this British TV show a couple of times in the Netherlands, and the other day we saw Ricky Gervais, the main actor, in Saturday Night Live. Sasha had never seen it and I loved to watch it, so we rented the DVD and saw all episodes of the first season in one lazy evening. Hilarious!

The humor is different than in many other series or movies, but it's really funny and we loved it. The DVD came with a long interview with the creators of the series ("only geeks watch the DVD bonus material") and a few deleted scenes, which was nice.

Sunday afternoon I made a walk to the Marine Corps Memorial.

This is a memorial for the U.S. Marine Corps, and all their actions since the 18th century.

The statue is made after a famous picture from World War II on Iwo Jima, where American soldiers are installing the American flag on a conquered island.

The memorial is located in Rosslyn, VA. In the background is Washington D.C, with the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial.

Yesterday, after our visit to the library, we walked back home.

We had dinner in Clarendon, in a very beautiful place: the Silver Diner. It's a typical American place, and although the chain is relatively new, being founded in 1986, it is decorated completely in 1950's style. The restaurant has small juxeboxes on the table: when you enter a quarter you can choose the next song that will play in the restaurant, and you can modify the volume that the music plays at your table.

The menu is a nice mixture of modern cuisine such as Thai recipes and old-fashioned diner plates like meatloaf and hamburgers.

In the morning we had bagels at Brooklyn bagels, so we continued with "American cuisine". The sun is shining nicely today, and even though it's still quite windy it really feels like spring.

This afternoon we went to Arlington's central library. We saw on internet that it's located two metro stops away from our house, but the weather was very nice so we went for a long walk. It was really sunny today and not so cold anymore.

The library is south of Clarendon, and while we were walking we saw that we were entering suburbs: lower houses, wider street, more gardens; different than the part of Arlington where we live which consists mainly of apartment buildings. It wasn't hard to find the street of the library: all streets are ordered alphabetically, as someone on the street who we asked mentioned.

It's really fun to be a tourist in the area where you live: so many interesting things and you don't have to travel to see them. There weren't a lot of people walking where we went -- mainly cars.

We subscribed to the library, which is free if you have an address in Arlington. It's a fairly large library, but not as big as the one in Haarlem.

A painting on a building in Clarendon that we saw while walking to the library.

Entrance of the library.

Downstairs were the most popular books, in smaller bookshelves. Upstairs (no picture) had a more traditional library layout.

Exhibition.

Joost sent me a very useful tip: an explanation how to increase your Hotmail inbox size for free.

Traditionally the inbox of a Hotmail account is 2 MB but last year, when Google announced GMail, Hotmail planned an upgrade to larger mailbox sizes. For some reason, this increase is only available to people in the U.S. However, using Joost's tip, which basically comes down to temporary changing your address to a U.S. based one, you can get the large Inbox even when you live in Holland.

Right after I executed the trick, I got a 25 MB size account, and an hour that was increased again to 250 MB.

Not as large as GMail, but much better than the original 2 MB. Thanks Joost!

Thursday was March 3rd, Bulgaria's National Day. On that day in 1878 the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire became official by the signing of the Peace Treaty of San Stefano between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

To celebrate, we went out with Ramiro, Bella, Elena and Antonia on Thursday night. I left work a bit earlier and we went to Levante's, an eastern Mediterranean restaurant downtown D.C.

So, we were four Bulgarians and two semi-outsiders, and most of us were wearing a martenitsa: the token that is sent to friends on March 1st, and is a sign of the coming spring. Of course, a lot of the conversation was about Bulgaria and it was a very enjoyable evening.

It was quite windy yesterday.

The snow is, unlike in Holland, almost completely gone but the blowing wind makes it chilly.

When I was walking to work I had to wear my hat and gloves again.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted Tuesday to abolish the death penalty for juveniles, people under 18 years old:

"In concluding that the death penalty for minors is cruel and unusual punishment, the court cited a "national consensus" against the practice, along with medical and social-science evidence that teenagers are too immature to be held accountable for their crimes to the same extent as adults."

A good thing in my opinion.