We had a lovely Thanksgiving meal with the Zane family and my cousin Eva.

More text later -- here are the pictures.

Eva arrived today! She is joining us for Thanksgiving and she traveled from Chicago today. In the morning she went to the Dutch Embassy, and in the afternoon she came to Arlington. Eva and I picked up Nora from the bus -- Nora loved it. She jumped up and down and pretending to be shy but then they walked home hand-in-hand.

We made a Sinterklaas kijkdoos together and in the evening when Sasha came home we to Pilates the three of us. At night Eva read a story to the kids, and more went they went to bed (though Adrian insisted to be read by me).

It's great to see her, and an excellent start of the holiday.

The cap of a soap bottle got stuck in the drain of the bathtub. We use it for bathing the kids, so it's no big deal if draining is slower, but next week we'll have guests so I wanted to fix it.

I spent 30 minutes trying to get the bottle cap out, no luck. I went downstairs to call a plumber, when I did a quick Google search. Someone recommended to use a shopvac for this situation and sure enough -- that did it! The cap came out in 5 seconds.

It's really wonderful to work with a kid one-on-one, teaching them.

Even on Sunday morning at 6.30 am.

We went to the Haring & Paling event at the Dutch Embassy last night, always a nice event. We had a really good time together, enjoying the good food and having a relaxed dinner. The kids loved the sandwiches with Dutch cheese and vlokken and Adrian even had a haring sandwich which he liked a lot.

Nora did all the ordering of our food and drinks for us, which went well, and the kids played with another Dutch girl they met.

We bought vlokken, drop and a package of herring to take home.

We went to vote this morning. Always a good feeling.

On our way out we saw Matt, who is running for County Board, and he took our picture.

The day of Halloween itself is always full with activities, and often a bit stressful for the kids and parents alike. So we've learned over the years to spread out the activities as much as possible. The AMH party is a wonderful low-key event to don costumes and hang out with other parents, and for the kids there are other kids, juice and cookies. We had a lovely morning.

Nora's witch costume worked really well -- after some tears over whether or not to wear a sweater underneath -- and the boys were terrific in their firemen outfits.

One of the kids at school had an inflatable dinosaur costume, that scared Adrian a bit and he kept his distance. When Sasha asked Adrian what he liked afterwards, he said "xраната" (food) and, surprisingly, "диносавр" (the dinosaur).

The Chrome browser is now explicitly marking non-https websites as Not Secure, a good step for them to take. A few years ago I was a Usenix Conference where the UX folks for Chrome were discussing their roadmap towards this -- time has flown and now http is officially "no good".

A good nudge for me also... I finally set up a HTTPS cert for my site. I've used a free certificate from letsencrypt.org; it will expire in a few months but by then I should be fully running on AWS and have the auto-renewal acme scripts in place.

Halloween is a big event in our house... today we went to get Nora's new outfit. The boys received a nice fireman costume from Oma & Opa in the summer, so they're all set.

We went to the Party City store on Columbia Pike. It was busy but not crazily so. Getting there was a bit of an adventure though -- the car didn't start! It seems like there's a problem with the battery. I took my bike to Cherrydale Auto Parts and got a jump start pack, and that did the trick. We didn't need it on our way back from Party City but I'm going to bring it in for service for sure.

Nora choose to be a witch, with a black hat and a broom.

Earlier in the morning it was raining and we went for a walk in Hayes Park, collecting acorns.