Saturday afternoon I took the Q-line bus, the quick service to Leeuwarden. It was a beautiful trip across the Afsluitdijk and through Friesland. Ettie & Gerben met me at the bus station. It was sunny and although not as warm as Friday the weather was great to sit outdoors. We had lunch with coffee at 'Bagels & Beans', a US inspired place. It was great to see Ettie & Gerben and to be together.

We walked through downtown Leeuwarden. I had never really been there before and it's a great place. Lots of people, lots of stores, lots of outdoor seating. It reminded me of Haarlem. Bikes everywhere of course, and at 5.30 pm most shops started to close. We visited the Gruttersmuseum, an old-fashioned store, and then spend an hour in the Boomsma museum next doors which is dedicated to this liquor that is produced in Leeuwarden.

Ettie and Gerben's new house is beautiful. It's very light inside and everything is very new. For those of you who know Ettie it's no surprise the house has a great garden. In the evening we had dinner together, hutspot andijvie with bacon bits and fresh onions. We made a gorgeous walk through the country side -- about 5 minutes from the front-door you're in the Frisian country side. We did a great walk, 5 kilometers through the fields.

The next morning Gerben and I went for a run together on that same course. It was fun to run together with him. Then around 10.30 am we all left to go to Heereveen to see our grandmother.

Ettie and Gerben chasing sheep.

Gerben and Guus.

When you come back to your hometown after two years, you'll notice the changes. The bakery has a new owner (although the personnel is partially the same), the Kroon clothing store is out of business (which is no surprise since there was nobody ever there), the library moved to the same building as my mother's school and the old building is now in use for the biljart club, the Beurs is called the Oude Beurs again but is sadly closed and will be demolished, just like one of the three old churches.

And other things stay the same.

The butcher 'Van het Riet' is still there, and the Duizendpoot (which was Poot until years ago), the cute Wieringermeer museum is still there (open on Saturday afternoon's and by appointments), and of course the grocery store which I'm looking forward to to visit just to ogle all the familiar-but-now-slightly-unknown brands and products, including the wonderful and super cheap cheeses.

My parents house has changed some too, with a new kitchen, light in color and without the old piano. The living room is nicely light and more spacey now. New positions for the plates in the kitchen though. The server for the website is still going strong, but it's more noisy than it was two years ago. The hard drives and fans must be wearing out after 5+ years of non-stop use. When I went up to the attic I found a smoke detector that was beeping every few minutes to warn it's losing its charge; that battery lasted five year also, amazing. I think there's another one up there.

Around the village of Middenmeer things are changing also. There's now a huge area of land with hothouses, for tomatos, peppers etc. The number of windmills hasn't significantly increased recently. There's a plan to create an artificial lake between the old island of Wieringen and the Wieringermeer, connecting the island with the mainly through bridges, in the hope to attract more tourism to the area. I understand that desire but somehow it doesn't feel right to reinundiate parts of the polder, only 50 years after it was reclaimed from the sea.

Friday evening Ettie & Gerben came to Middenmeer, and we had a nice family dinner. Jaap baked delicious home-made pizza and it was as great as I remembered.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to sleep well. The first night in Middenmeer I was exhausted after the traveling; it's the second night that's usually the hardest due to the time difference. However, I slept great. I woke up at 4:45 am, and it took my a good hour to fall back to sleep but I woke up at 8.45 am, a little groggy but with 8 hours of rest. Yesterday's morning run and the long walks later in the day surely helped.

In the morning a fun project was waiting for me -- going up in the attic at my parent's place. Five years ago we stored our belongings there and every time I've been back it's been fun to dive into the boxes and pick up things to bring to the States. I picked up some goodies and selected some boxes to empty out. We also prepared the audio equipment for Jaap's birthday party next week.

The next morning I woke up at 8.30 am, full of energy. Over breakfast we organized some things for next week's party and I went for a run.

It was a gorgeous run through the Wieringermeer, a triangle through the country over the Molenweg ("Mill Road"). Roads here are straight, flat and windy -- very different than in North Carolina. It was absolutely beautiful to be out in the fields.

There were many farms with more modern things, like horseback riding, just housing and there's even a Bed & Breakfast on the Molenweg. There was the smell of kruitefluit, onions or flower bulbs, dry mud and yes, manure. The wind made it easy, even though it was warm and sunny.

I like to talk a walk break half-way, but that felt awkward because I kept on meeting people I know. I wouldn't one people who see me once in a blue moon to catch me taking a walk break!

After a 7,5 hour flight I arrived at London Heathrow early in the morning. The plane landed at 7.00 am, and I managed to get a couple of hours sleep on the plane. The plane wasn't full and the stewardess pointed me to a row with three empty seats in the back ('oh you're so tall'). It's not exactly comfortable but some sleep is a lot better than none at all.

I had breakfast on the airport and took the train to Paddington station. There I took the circle line to Liverpool street, which is where our UK office is. I spent the morning with them and we had lunch together. It's small office with great atmosphere. Talked about the product I work on and some other initiatives we're doing.

At 4.00 pm I was in the air again, on my way to Amsterdam. I sat next to a British couple with a young baby on their lap. It liked me and was interested in the sound of my newspaper and water bottle. I learned that, in British, a rhino says: "mud, mud, mud". It was nice to have some distraction because even with the grande coffee in the morning (Starbucks is everywhere) followed by a dopio at Heathrow, I was getting very tired.

In the arrival hall I was met by my parents, Steven, Jerry and Marjolein and it was great to see them. We had dinner together, and chatted. Jerry told about their adventures on vacation. I still had banana in my laptop bag which was heavily bruised. I hope Steven found his car back.

We drove to Middenmeer. We immediately saw a lady I recognized by name and other people who I recognized just by face. Middenmeer is a very friendly place where people say 'hi' on the street, and I think I know someone in about every street of the village. We chatted for a while at home and I went to a deep, long sleep.

At Schiphol.

The next few articles will be available for registered users only.

This means those articles will not show up in the RSS feed. This is a temporary thing.

Please log in at http://www.guusbosman.nl to read those articles.

For the address book on our site I used CiviCRM, an open source CRM system. I recently upgraded from CiviCRM 1.9 to 2.0, and since the APIs changed I had to update the block with birthdays that I wrote two years ago.

The primary change in CiviCRM 2 that impacted the block was the merge of civicrm_individual into civicrm_contact, a sensible schema change. Secondly, the public API's method calls are now organized in smaller modules and were renamed.

Here's the updated birthday block for CiviCRM 2.0:

<?php
// Check if CiviCRM is installed here.
if (!module_exists('civicrm')) return false;

// Initialization call is required to use CiviCRM APIs.
civicrm_initialize(true);
require_once('api/v2/Contact.php');

$select = "SELECT id, birth_date, CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) 
< RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), RIGHT(birth_date,6)) AS bday,
concat(concat(month(birth_date), '/'), day(birth_date)) as displaydate,  
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE)) AS toBday FROM civicrm_contact WHERE 
(TO_DAYS(CONCAT(((RIGHT(birth_date,5) < RIGHT(CURRENT_DATE,5)) + YEAR(CURRENT_DATE)), 
RIGHT(birth_date,6))) - TO_DAYS(CURRENT_DATE) < 7) ORDER BY bday, RIGHT(birth_date,5);";

$query  = $select;
$params = array( );

$dao =& CRM_Core_DAO::executeQuery( $query, $params );

echo "<div class=\"item-list\"><ul>\n";
while ( $dao->fetch( ) ) {

// Contact API returns contact info

$params = array('contact_id' => $dao->id);
$contact = &civicrm_contact_get( $params );

if ( civicrm_error( $contact ) ) {
    echo $contact['error_message'];
}

echo "<li><a href=\"/civicrm/contact/view?reset=1&cid=" . $dao->id . "\">" . $contact['display_name'] . 
"</a>, " . $dao->displaydate;

echo "</li>\n";

}
echo "</div></ul>\n";

?>

While developing this database query was useful; it disables the block.

update blocks set status = 0 where title = 'Birthdays';