Today I replaced 15 boards of our deck, the smaller part at the entrance of the backyard.

Our deck is from 1996 but the wood hasn't been cared for very well so some of the boards were cracked and splintered. The main deck is in better shape, thankfully.

It was a fun project to replace the boards but it was hard work. I started at 11.30 am and finished around 6.00 pm. Milan helped me get started and I'm proud of the end result.

The most exciting part was at the end, when I had to cut a board to fit in a smaller opening. I used my own circle saw for the first time.

Saturday we watched the game between the Netherlands and Costa Rico from Secaucus. When Nora woke up from her nap she watched the last hour of the game on my lap.

The game was exciting, even though the final score before penalty kicks was 0-0. Nora repeated the things we yelled at the TV.

Guus: "Oh, de bal tegen de paal!"
Nora: "Oh, de bal tegen de paal!"
... a few moments later...
Nora: "Waar is de paal?"

She really enjoyed the moment when the game ended and we all jumped up and shouted and clapped.

Nora is having a great time with her grandparents.

Here she is with Dyado, who is reading her a new book.

Nadya helped us in the yard this weekend. One of the things she did was pruning our roses. They are mature roses but hadn't been pruned in many years so it was time to cut them back drastically. Nadya has a lot of experience with roses.

It's nice to make progress on the yard. There are many more small projects we want to do but slowly but surely it's truly becoming "our yard".

Today we watched the round of 16 game between Mexico and the Netherlands. Sasha, Milan and I went to Elephant & Castle downtime where we joined Wouter and Candice who had invited us at their table. It was great to watch the match with friends.

Nora was a little disappointed that she couldn't come with us ("Nora ook voetbalwedstrijd?") but she had a nice and relaxing morning with Baba Nadya.

Nora and Lelya Snezha came to visit me at my work this morning.

Nora was a little intimated by all the people but not shy. A co-worker asked: "where are you going?" and she said: "house". "Where is your house?" "Outside!".

Today is the soccer game between Australia and the Netherlands. It's at lunch time here, and I'll go to Elephant and Castle downtown to watch the game.

After many years I said goodbye to Blackberry today. Yesterday the charging port of my Blackberry Storm 2 fell out of the phone.

Today I went to the Verizon reseller in the mall at my work and got the HTC One M8, an Android phone.

I am looking forward to installing apps I haven't been able to use, such as Waze, Uber and Anki SRS, and the phone has been nice to play with so far. My corporate email hasn't switched over yet, hopefully tomorrow.

It's been six years since my first smartphone, a BlackBerry Pearl.

Today I talked with man who used to be a supervisor of programmers at the Pentagon. He looked fit -- but he was 90 years old, born in 1923.

We were in the mall and Nora was eating a pear while I listened to his stories about the first mainframes ("we upgraded from 20,000 tubes to 40,000 tubes"). He had teams working in 3 shifts, to use the machines 24/7. He said with a smile: "I would get calls at 2.00 or 3.00 am. The problems always got resolved but I got an ulcer."

He mentioned that he created a detailed flowchart for a new office in New York, which showed the connection between the various machines: CPUs, card readers, tape units, printer etc. He said: "the diagram was 15 foot long, on thick brown paper. My boss wanted to show it off, to Congress, but when he unrolled it they just said: 'oh sure, that looks fine' and approved it".

It was special to talk with someone who shares my profession -- but who did so 30 years before I was born.

Nora had finished her pear, and the man's wife --just as spry-- came back from shopping and we said goodbye.

Nora still has a cold, she started coughing yesterday and has a stuffy nose. She doesn't seem to be too unhappy, thankfully.

The other days she got a some crayons from Lelya Mariela. We put her table outside and she started drawing.

It's 10.00 am now and Nora is still sleeping.