Emptying the sea container Sunday, 17-Aug-25 22:08:34 CEST

Sunday, 24-Aug-25 21:48:51 CEST

Continued to empty the sea container

This week, we drove more trailers from the sea container to the recycling center.

Monday 18 August

When I go to bed, I brush my teeth, but that means I am also brushing a large burn-wound in my mouth. Then I go to sleep as well as possible. When I woke up, the back of my mouth was feeling swollen.

We had a regular breakfast with a smoothie, then we commuted to work—30 seconds to our home offices.

After work, I continued sorting seathorn berries. The goal was to reach a sufficient amount of separated berries that we could make seathorn liquor.

	This is the last branch of the seathorn that I separate.
	We collected almost 700 grams of seathorn berries.
	Put the berries in a jar.
	Measure 7 deciliters of vodka.
	Add the vodka to the berries.
	Measure 250 grams of white sugar.
	Add the sugar to the mix.

Now we let this stand in a cool and dark place. Every week, we will gently mix the berries. After three to four weeks, the liquor is ready to be sifted from the berries.

In the evening, after finishing the dish, I was programming the phoneme project again. I had previously defined the ol to be part of the sound AH, but when an L sound follows AH, then the letter l is lost. I had to remove it from AH. I have similar expressions ending with l, but they have not failed so far. It is a bit flawed to only move forward in this case. One should go back to the case when I added ol and retry that, but I have not noted the testcase for every expression. I do realize that when I am done with all phonemes, I will have to run through the file one more time. I passed 92220 at 10:45 PM.

Tuesday 19 August

Today it was a perfect day for biking to work, but the idea was to drive both DW and me to the city. We woke up 10 minutes earlier than usual so that DW would not miss her train. It went very well, and we got to the train station on time. I was early at the office. I turned on my music, and it played almost the entire day. After lunch, I let it be quiet, and some also appreciated that. The air conditioning was on from time to time, but not at ridiculously low temperatures like last summer. Some people had temporarily come back from their holidays. It was nice.

In the afternoon, DW and I went home well on time, and that was nice. I had pain in my mouth from the wound, but I could concentrate well on my work.

When we came home, I picked a bucket of grape vine berries. I picked and sorted 1944 grams of grape vine berries. I continued to pick berries after dinner. In total, I picked 4226 grams today. I think it is well on par with what I picked last year. There is more to be picked, but I will work on that tomorrow.

While sorting out the grape vine berries, I listened to Ukraine-the-latest. They had a bonus episode about the meeting in Washington with the European leaders, President Zelensky, and mr Trump. The panel at the Telegraph emphasized that we are in an extraordinary moment of history. I have no idea.

I started working on the phoneme project. I had to remove the og pattern from the AH sound. Somewhere up until line 92220, the og pattern was essential to get forward. But where? I have no idea anymore. I was thinking that every time I had to debug, I changed the skips file. It is a file that specifies where the run should begin. Every time I debugged a line, I changed that file. If I could get the history of that file, then I could extract only those lines from the file and rerun those lines first. Interesting! I have not installed the version control system, but VSCode has a rudimentary version built in. It reached one week back. I could recover all the skip locations from that time. I wonder if I can get more history data from OneDrive? Yes, I have the complete history, but it is inconvenient to collect the data.

I passed 100k! Line 102709 to be precise. Fantastic!

Wednesday 20 August

Today, DW had a day off. She has the rest of the week off. I worked from home for the first half of the day. After lunch, I picked up the potatoes for today's delivery. We also delivered two zucchinis and one bundle of runner beans. It was great weather for biking, so I brought the goods by bike. I heard no clicking sound; it was terrific.

After lunch, I continued with harvesting grape vine berries.

Thursday 21 August

This morning, I harvested corn to bring to a colleague because her daughter really likes corn.

Good morning. It is Thursday, 21 August, and I'm biking to work. Yesterday I harvested the rest of the wine grape berries. Over 7 kilograms of wine grapes. It feels like a treasure, something valuable. It has been a good garden season. Last year, I had the patch along the sea container. This meant I was spending my time at the sea container and DW at the kitchen garden.

Here I had to stop to take a photo of a newly harvested onion field. This province is the largest producer of onions in the Netherlands, and the Netherlands is the largest producer of onions in the world. Consequently, when I took that photo, I was at the center of the onion world.

There's room for improvement on our property. I want to develop a grazing patch for the sheep around the barn and the tiny house. Look for that to happen, I first need to get rid of the sea container. I still have a couple of trailers to bring to the recycling. It had been nice to fill a trailer yesterday, but the wine grape berries got a higher priority. I don't know if you recall two years ago when I wanted to pick grapes, but someone had already done it! I don't want that to happen again!

Removing garbage from the sea container is not all that needs to happen. I also got a pile of very long planks to move from the sea container to the barn's attic. For things like that, I would like to have a hatch in the attic of the barn. I figured out I want to have the hatch on the east side of the attic under the canopy.

I envision some rails mounted on the ceiling stretching through the building. I want the winch to be able to roll on the rails so that I can pick up things and transport them to a location in the attic. If the rails are on the east side, then the winch can be used for the hatch and the opening in the floor.

I am on my way home by bike. Perhaps you recall me biking through the forest a week ago. When I reached a T junction, I took the left. This time I took the right. When the canal ended, I could take a turn to the left, and after a while, I reached the campground. There is a camping. Soon after, I came back to the street, right across from the location for the farmers' market on Saturday mornings. This was a funny but bumpy detour.

I'm looking forward to having the barn finished so that I can start tinkering with electronics, welding, painting, making music, and other projects.

It's lovely weather today. I like it! It's a bit chilly and windy but sunny. It's great. The bike is not ticking, it's lovely.

Friday 22 August

Today, both DW and I had a day off. It was overcast weather and around 18 or 19 degrees Celsius—perfect weather for hard manual labour. I began the day by programming the phoneme project, because I was tantalizingly near reaching the line 120 thousand. The program had stopped yesterday evening at line 119599, and the word tantalizingly. It is a word that originates from Greek mythology and a person named Tantalos. He had been cheating on the gods, so they punished him by letting him stand in a pool of water that resided when he wanted to drink, under a tree of fruits he could not reach—poor guy. I got stuck at this word because I had made AH recognize al and ul, but if there is a sound L behind AH, then the l is already consumed. I removed al and ul, but this means that some earlier patterns are now failing, but I have no clue which one. I have no worries because I will run from the beginning again when I reach the end of the file.

I filled the trailer with a new load. After lunch, both DW and I went to the recycling center. There was a long queue waiting to enter the center. Luckily, DW had her knitting with her, so she knitted. When it was our turn, we emptied the trailer together, and then we went to a second-hand shop. I did not find anything I liked. We bought a shirt for FIL. He started drooling since the last crisis, so he is running out of shirts at a quick pace, but we are here to provide him with new shirts in a steady flow. We will go and visit the PILs on Sunday.

When we came home, I programmed the phoneme project again. It is going well right now. At 6:30 PM, I reached the end of the file!!! Line 135166. You might think I would start dancing polonaise through the house of happiness, but that is not the case. I restarted the counter at 1 because I made many changes throughout the process. The idea is that it will take an increasingly longer time between failures. At some point, I will be able to run over the whole file in one go, and then it will be ready.

Saturday 23 August

This morning, when I woke up, I was thinking that I had forgotten about the wound in my mouth from the scorching hot corn last week. That is a good sign; it means that it has healed.

My collection of small wood snippets is mostly discarded. I saved some larger pieces of wood. Now starts the trickier part: finding a new place for things. I decided that we will remove the car roof box. I don't believe in transporting things in a flimsy plastic box on the roof of the car. If we have too little space to transport things, then we should not put them on the roof, especially not with a construction that is taking up space year in year out in the barn.

We had racks for transporting bikes on the roof; they are gone. I used them once. Standing there with a bike on top of your head, trying to get into a rail on the roof of a car. That is as difficult as it sounds. Unless you are the Hulk and the bike is extremely lightweight, then it is no issue. We don't have those kinds of bikes. It has taken more than ten years to realize it. All the time, those bike rails have been cluttering our shed at our previous house, and then the sea container at our new house. Now they are finally gone.

I restarted the phonem conversion program. Yesterday I restarted at the first line, and this morning I already reached 20k! It means that I am steadily improving the quality of the program. There is a bug in the unravelling of the Cartesian product. I have not fixed it, but instead worked around it, defining clauses that prevent the bug from triggering. At one point, I would like to look into it, though.

Today I loaded another trailer with stuff. It was more challenging today. It is not easy to say farewell to some of the items. DW and I had different ideas about this. It was not easy. The trailer was filled, and we went to the recycling center and delivered the trash.

Then we went to a second-hand shop. DW looked for sweaters but couldn't find any. I went to a hardware store where I bought a Dremel. I almost bought a machine of that brand, but I found a competitor using the same battery system as my hand drill, and I am pleased with it. I bought that, so now I have a compatible battery for both the drill and the so-called Dremel. I think I will still call it Dremel, although it says Workx.

Superman came to us this evening. He wanted to make use of the small scaffold that is his, but we borrowed it for a long time. He will come to work on our projects after our holiday.

In the evening, I continued with the phoneme project. I reached 34k.

Sunday 24 August

This morning I read that the person with the same name as me, Jens Malmgren in Bjurholm, in Sweden, has sold his company Evermat because he will retire. The company produces a dryer for vegetables, herbs, mushrooms, fruit, and other produce. We actually thought of ordering one, but since then, we found a dryer on the second hand. The new owner moved the company to the center of Bjurholm.

We had a cup of tea in bed in the morning, and I managed to reach line 39925! It feels like it goes quicker now.

This morning, after breakfast, we had a walk with the sheep to the street in the southeast field to let them munch on the herbs, grass, and flowers. After this, we moved the sheep to a new field, the southwest field. It is not that lush, so they will not be able to graze there for very long.

 

Then I mowed the southeast field so that it could start growing evenly again. This was followed by cleaning the mower and putting it on the charger. I figured I could charge the tractor in the sea container while having the doors shut and locked.

When the mowing was done, we drove to the PILs. There was a traffic jam on the east side of Amsterdam, so we took the west side and drove up, passing Alkmar, to get to the PILs. Before we got to the PILs, we stopped at their old house and visited BIL. After a cup of coffee, we continued to the PILs. FIL's speaking ability had improved since the last time. He did not have much to say, though. He lost one of his hearing aids, so he was not that talkative. His wife, though, talked about her last journey that the house arranged. She liked it a lot. She showed us photos.

It turned out that the issue with the door I wanted to inspect had been fixed already by BIL. No need for power tools. Instead, we had more coffee and tea and cookies and chatted about little things.

Then we drove home. On the way home, the right wheel started to make rattling noises when turning the steering wheel. This is not nice. Especially since we are planning to use the car for a long trip at the end of next week, we will see how that goes.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2533 words this week. The emptying of the sea container is progressing nicely, and we have been confirmed that the electricity, tiling, etc. will be finished after our holidays.