Sunday night Chris came over for dinner. He was Sasha's professor for her internship last year, and they work together often.

It was a really fun evening. We never had anyone over for dinner before here, and it was nice to cook for a guest. With most of the furniture being ready the house is becoming a real home. The missing box for the cupboard should arrive this week.

My work is more quiet this week. It's been snowing lightly here yesterday, although Sunday night the news was announcing "severe weather conditions". Hard to predict tomorrow's weather I guess.

We spent a wonderful afternoon in Barnes & Nobles last Saturday. Sasha and I both needed a new book, and we spent 2,5 hours walking around, reading a bit, looking at books, drinking coffee... Very relaxing.

We had restricted ourselves to buy just one book per person. It's so tempting to get a lot of books, but if we did so we wouldn't have a reason to go the bookstore in a long time, which wouldn't be nice.

Sasha found a really nice biography, "Nicholas and Alexandra", on the last royals in Russia. I'm afraid I cheated a bit in my choice. It's one book, fair enough, but it will keep me busy for quite a while. I bought the complete works of William Shakespeare, over 1200 pages of text, in a beautiful edition.

I don't really know Shakespeares work, and I felt that's a shame. I've only read Macbeth, in secondary school, and didn't pay a lot of attention to it then.

Drinking coffee and making a selection of all the books we like.

Using a dvd-player it is possible to play regular CD-ROMs with pictures, and this morning we were watching some old pictures on our TV, that was very nice. It's a nice and lazy Saturday morning.

In Middenmeer it seems like the spring is carefully starting. According to this picture on Jaap's photo project the ducks in the water near my parents' house are looking for a place to build their home. Traditionally they use the backyard as a breeding place, and when Ettie & I were living there we gave names to the ducks and the same ducks came back every year, and later their offspring.

A nice commercial in the metro: "for the ipod who has everything".

It's a commercial for a speaker set to attach to an Ipod.

I guess it's some kind of sign if the people in Starbucks say "dopio espresso, sir?" whenever I walk in.

An even stronger sign is if they know your name by heart and write it on the cup to indicate the type of coffee.

Work is less busy than the last few weeks, which is nice for a change because it's been quite hectic.

The first days of the week I was home early but yesterday I wanted to finish something and I left work late. Sasha was also still at work, and we didn't feel like cooking. We went for dinner at Cosi's, a nice place near the Courthouse metro station. they serve a lot of different salads and sandwiches, the bread for which they bake themselves in a wide oven. I had a cobb salad, which is my favorite salad there, with a small bowl of chili.

This morning it was snowing; a stark contrast with the previous days. In fact, a "winter storm" warning was issued by the government and all schools were closed.

I took the metro in the morning. If you look carefully at the picture you can see the snowflakes in the air. On the right is the bus to downtown D.C. I could also take that to get to my work, but most of the time I walk and if I don't feel like it or the weather is too bad I take the metro because it's more frequent than the bus.

Here's a part of the bridge between our office building and the shopping area above the metro. I took it when I went to lunch. It was snowing all day (it still is), but the snow is not very sticky and disappears after a while.

Yes, Rob is the one who read between the lines correctly.

The cake we had for dinner on Sasha's birthday was a birthday cake, and of course no such cake is complete without candles.

I had accidentally bought "magic candles": when you blow them out, they automatically go on again. The only way to turn them off completely is put them in water. Now, that by itself would have been okay, but it specifically said "keep 3 inch between the candles and don't use more than 12 per cake".

Well. Pictures below.

Yesterday morning we celebrated Sasha's birthday with presents and the postcards that she received. We had breakfast together, fresh bagels, and I went to my work late.

In the evening we went out for dinner. We went to Club Sake, a Japanese restaurant in north west D.C. The food was very delicious: we had sushi and other Japanese dishes. I like the dishes in which the food was server: authentic and very stylish. The restaurant itself was beautiful in real Japanese style.

We had a desert at home, hazelnut cake with cream. We learned a useful lesson about "magic candles": when it says you should put only 12 of them of a cake then that's probably a good idea.

Today is Sasha's birthday!

A nice start of the day, with presents and a lot of mail to open.

Today was a nice and easy day. In the morning I wrote a couple of e-mails and verified some things for work, but everything's under control and the UAT push worked out nicely. In the afternoon I went to the office for a little while; my parents called me there because I still don't have a cellphone.

Below are some pictures of last night, when I was assembling our new furniture. So far I've installed the couch, one bedside table, a chair and two lamps.

I'm not done yet, but I'm missing one (crucial) box with things for the cupboard that was supposed to be in one of the big packages but wasn't there. I wanted to assemble the cupboard this morning but without the bolts and screws that won't work. I'll have to call Ikea tomorrow.

This week Ikea will open a shop in Haarlem as well.

The final result, the next day.