December 2004

Saturday evening we went to see a movie, Closer. It's a new movie that's been nominated for five golden globes. And with reason!

We really loved it: an intriguing story, great performance and fascinating dialogue. Two scenes I particularly enjoyed were the erotic computer chat-scene, and the break-up fight between Anna and her husband (brilliant).

Clive Owen, who has a marvellous role as Larry in the movie, performed the role of Dan in the orignal play the movie is based on.

Around 18:30 o'clock I went to Starbucks, a coffee shop near my work, to get drinks for me and a colleague. I remembered that it's pretty cold outside, so at the last moment I grapped my coat.

When I returned to our building the doors were locked. I forgot to bring my electronic building pass, that can be used to open the door in the evening, but luckily somebody else was just leaving and held the door open for me. I entered the elevator and pressed the button for our floor. However, just when I was one floor below mine, the elevator stopped, without opening, and went down again. Turns out: to operate the elevators in the evening you also need this personalized building pass that will let the elevator stop only on your own floor. Very secure.

The end result was that I went home, and that I drank my hot chocolade but my colleague spent the evening without his coffee. Oh well, at least I had my coat, with the keys of the apartment and my money in it.

We have internet at home!

This afternoon somebody from Comcast came and installed the TV decoder as well as the internet modem. The connection seems to be very good. I am currently listening to one of my favourite internet radio stations, and I watched a part of the Dutch newsbroadcast. The connection is has a theoretical maximum of 3Mbit/s, but as this is a cable connection it depends a lot on the usage of the people in this area. So far it's been very good.

It's great to be online from home; it's the same feeling as I had when DSL was installed in Haarlem, two years ago.

A nice things about Sunday mornings is that we have a lot of time for breakfast.

Important things on our table are the coffee, French or Dutch imported cheese, juice and fresh bread. American food is usually very good, but one thing that is hard to find is nice, fresh bread. In regular supermarkets they just don't have it! There is one special supermarket, called Whole Foods, that does have the right (European) bread close to us, so that's where we did shopping yesterday evening. American cheese is usually pretty good (I like the cheddar cheese), and next to that there's a large variety of European cheese to choose from. Including, of course, Dutch "Kaas Unie" cheese.

Today we are arranging a lot of small practical matters. One of the things we did was ordering internet and cable tv.

We had been thinking a lot about what exactly we wanted for TV. When we bought it two weeks ago, we also took an antenna. However, the reception in our apartment is pretty bad, and we exchanged it last Friday for a stronger one. Still -- the image and sound quality is very bad, there is simply no good signal in our apartment. So an antenna wasn't really an option.

The thing is: we hardly watch any TV. Since we moved here we've seen the news once, and twice we've been watching some entertainment. Cable TV is quite expensive (compared to cable in Holland), and we were wondering if it's worth it. We decided to take it anyway, partly because getting cable TV would also give us a discount on cable internet, which we certainly want.

The last weeks Comcast, the cable provider, has been sending us a lot of promotional offers and letters, asking us to become subscriber. Yesterday's offer was the "Complete Holiday Package" -- a 50% discount for 3 months on both internet and TV, as well as a waiver for the installation fee. I just called and ordered it, and they'll come and install it tomorrow afternoon.

The extra antenna that we have looks a bit like a Startrek device:

Sunday afternoon we went to a museum, the National Gallery of Art. Most of the large musea in Washington DC are located close to each other, near the Capitol and the White House. It's a beautiful place, and the weather Sunday was very nice.

We visited an exhibition on Gerard ter Borch. Rosa told us about this temporary exhibition about the Dutch painter. Ter Borch made quite some famous paintings, such as Signing of the Peace of Munster, and he inspired many other great names, such as Vermeer.

Entrance of the museum.

We asked at least three times if it was really okay to take a picture with flash until we dared to do this. I guess they have a protective element in the glass to prevent damage to the picture because of flash lights.

The picture on the background is a painting by Gerrit Berckheyde of the Grote Kerk in Haarlem; I used it on my website about a year ago.

Saturday we went to a shopping mall near the Pentagon, "Pentagon City". These malls are a real American phenomenon: a mall is a very large shopping center with many shops in one big building. Most of them are outside the city, and reachable only by car. We have been to this one here a few times to get our new things for the house, because it's well reachable by metro. The "Arena Boulevard" in Amsterdam is perhaps comparable to this type of malls.

In the mall we saw Santa Claus. He is there all day for children to have their picture taken with him.

I've prepared this story and pictures at home; I didn't have time to go downstairs and upload them yesterday. We didn't order internet yet. Not that that's so terribly complicated but we want to have the best deal possible, and a combination package with cable-TV seems now the best way to go.

The last picture is of a small shopping district near our house. In the background you can see the lighted logo of Barnes & Nobles, a bookstore.

At my work many people use AOL Messenger (or "AIM") to communicate with colleagues in other offices.

This weekend someone told me that she couldn't sent me any messages anymore, and when I came in the office I experienced the same: my account seems to have been blocked by AOL. I have really no idea what could have caused it, and it's rather annoying. I'd rather not create a new account and have to add my name to everybody's buddy list again so I'm trying to contact AOL but that's not been very succesful so far.

For now: my MSN Messenger account is guusbosman@hotmail.com.

Today it is Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. This is probably the family celebration that I will miss the most of all the holidays. I have great memories of the Sinterklaas party: the presents, the poems etc, but most of all the great atmosphere with my closest family. Jaap and Mieke are now in Leeuwarden where they'll celebrate with Ettie and Gerben. Sinterklaas visited the United States yesterday, he was at the Dutch embassy in Washington D.C.

Here the preparations for Christmas are going on everywhere. Yesterday we went to a shopping mall where they had a huge Christmas tree with Santa Claus under it, for the children of course.