It is getting darker Sunday, 08-Nov-26 21:53:54 CET

Sunday, 15-Nov-26 21:43:02 CET

Metal rain roof

This week I started working on the new rain roof to get the sheep ready for winter.

Monday 9 November

This Monday, I forgot to start the robot vacuum cleaner. Both DW and I worked from home.

It was clear and sunny, and all was good. Well, almost.

After work, I decided to expand the sheep's grazing area. We got plenty of grass around the barn. I figured it would be good to use this before it freezes. Our sheep got enthusiastic when I guided them to this new area. It had become completely dark at that moment. I put up fencing so they could not go under the canopy. Then, for the rest, a temporary net held them along the driveway around the barn. From now on, if I had to do something in the barn, I had to climb over the temporary net.

Tuesday 10 November

DW worked from home. It is really misty and cold today. I took the car to work.

It is annoying that I switched to the left lane for no reason. I was stuck there while the right lane kept going. I never seem to learn this lesson, or do I?

While driving, I thought about the mist and the leaves in autumn colors; it's nice. It would have been nice if I had biked to work; I would have taken photos, but now I am sitting in the car. All the nice scenery passes by, and I am holding a steering wheel, not a camera. It's just so typical.

What did I do? When I arrived at the office, I took a couple of photos around the parking lot and the office building.

 

The mist hung around all day. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

Now I'm driving home in the mist. It is funny that I'm sitting here thinking a lot about work, but for the rest of it, I am not blogging much. It was a useful day at work.

Street lamps are casting beams of light, extra visible in the mist. I like that view; I think it has to do with how the light looks in the mist. I recall drawing a misty streetlamp outside our house in Vågdalen when I was a kid. That was 1983.

Speaking of mist: I even got my own fog machine for my DJ sets to make the lights stand out better! I recently heard you can cool the fog from a fog machine to make it flow along the floor. It would be nice to try that effect someday. The trick is to use a box with ice blocks to cool the fog. I think it's easy to make with a little DIY.

When I came home from work, I stopped thinking about mist. Instead, I threw myself into the mysteries of our heat pump. The pump itself is an F2120-12 outdoor unit. Outside, on the wall, there is also a temperature sensor. The system's brain hangs in the utility room; it is called SMO 40, and a room unit in the living room measures the current indoor temperature.

Ever since our recent holiday, the indoor temperature has been behaving strangely. I dug up an old analog thermometer to compare with the temperature displayed by the room unit. I found that the room unit consistently read about 3 or 4 degrees higher than the analog thermometer.

I wanted a clear story to tell Gijs, who installed the system, but I also wanted to understand how it works. The heat pump uses the outdoor temperature in a formula to determine how warm the floor-heating water needs to be. Before the holidays, that formula worked well.

The room unit lets you influence the heating formula. In general, the heating should do the job, but if the room unit detects a sudden temperature increase, the system's brain can compensate. So if the room unit is set to 22°C and the room is hotter, the heating is lowered automatically.

You can imagine that if the room sensor is off by 3 to 4 degrees, the house can get cold. After we figured out that the room unit was the culprit, we also managed to disable its influence on the heating formula; the situation became bearable until the heat pump specialist comes by to control the installation.

Wednesday 11 November

It is a rather gray, uninspiring day. DW went to a wool event, and I worked from home in the morning. She has been preparing for almost a week.

In the afternoon, I cleaned the sheep platform, then went to the hardware store and bought a blind rivet gun. Despite the dramatic name, it is simply a tool for joining thin sheets of metal with blind rivets. I also worked out a plan for building the new rain roof.

I also picked up food at the food cooperative. I remembered to start the vacuum cleaner robot today.

Children from the area came to our door to sing songs in exchange for candy. This is the Sint Maarten tradition. I set out proper Swedish outdoor candles about four inches wide. We call them "Marschall" in Swedish. I set them behind the fencing so no child could be harmed. One group of about 7 young girls was especially memorable; they all wore pink coats. So right now the fashion color for young girls is pink, and pink only. The singing quality was not that excellent. It would have been nice if we had a children's choir in the neighborhood, but apparently not. The youngest struggled with the text but got candy anyway. The older kids rattled off the most common text without much tonality, making the transaction as efficient as possible.

Thursday 12 November

This morning, the weather was nice and calm. So you would think that I would bike to work. The forecast said it would rain heavily, so I took the car. A slight mist and morning sun were all it took to activate my photographic sensors. I had just dictated that sentence into my phone and immediately realized I actually had to listen to myself.

In that moment, I did something I never thought I would do! I detoured and drove to the canal, the high farting canal. The Dutch name is "Hoge Vaart," and I keep butchering that name into a joke. At the canal, I stopped at the shore and snapped a couple of pictures.

In the first picture, I captured the canal curving to the left, the sun rising over the horizon, and the clouds reflected in the still water. On the right side, the dark reeds; on the other side of the canal, the trees reflected in the water.

I recently watched a movie about composition and how many established, so-called composition rules restrain beginners: I actually believed these things. For example, avoiding symmetry. I was thinking about that when I shot this photo.

It feels a little awkward to look at the photo. I don't think I've taken any vertically centered landscape photos in over thirty years. I do recall thinking several times, "It is a pity I cannot center the photo due to strict laws of composition." And here I am doing it, and of course I can. It feels strange but also good.

The ground near the canal shore was muddy. There had been heavy traffic here. With my photographic needs covered for today, I stepped into the car and kept driving to work. This has proven to me that if I want to make room for my creativity, I just have to do it, and it doesn't necessarily mean I am getting too late for work.

It started raining, but by then I had already stopped for photos. I felt like I got the best of both worlds on my commute. There wasn't much traffic, and I stayed in the right lane.

I had just cleared the traffic jam around the motorway entrance when a warning light on the dashboard lit up, telling me to check the tires' air pressure. I was very close to a gas station, so I went there and used their tire-pumping service. It occurred to me that perhaps I had driven into a sharp thing at the shore of the high farting canal. I paid €1 just to figure out how the apparatus worked. I got two minutes on the machine. Then I paid another €2 to fill up the tires. Now I wasn't that early for work anymore. Had I checked the tires with my own compressor, it would have been €0 and probably quicker.

That was a workday at the office. Except for a couple of rainy spells, the weather was actually nice today, but I enjoyed it from inside. It is now 6.5 °C, and I could have been biking.

At lunchtime, our sheep had escaped from their grazing area. DW lured them back into the area. They had dodged the temporary net near the driveway.

In the evening, I watched the sheep graze in the dark. They were still inside their nets.

Friday 13 November

Today, the first thing in the morning, I moved the sheep to a new area: The northwest field inside the dyke. It has sturdy permanent fencing, so it is much more reliable for our mischievous sheep.

There was frost on the car, but the grass was still doing fine.

The electricity company announced that they would carry out maintenance today. Normally we would work from home today. The outage would last for several hours. DW and I had figured out we would go to the office and work from there. Another team was using her office, so she couldn't go there easily anyway. Friday is normally not an office day for my team, so she could come with me.

We went to the office, and it was just the two of us. Other teams were on the floor, but in my regular office space, we could both work easily.

At lunchtime, we went to the canteen and had lunch. Later that afternoon, we took a break and walked in the sunshine in a nearby park. I am really squeezing every bit I can out of autumn photography in a busy schedule.

Neither DW nor I had any remote meetings, so we could work side by side without distractions. I could finish an iteration just before the end of the day, so that was a great way to start the weekend.

The sunset from the office this evening wasn't that shabby.

Saturday 14 November

The first task today was to get ready to work on the rain roof. I wanted the sheep to eat from the patch next to the atelier door. I had to remove the fencing of their previous area so that I could park the car in front of the barn. There was so much to do.

Then I could start working on the rain roof. The rain roof is made from a tarp. I hung the tarp and stretched it so that, in strong winds, nothing really happens to it. After a year, it starts to become brittle. When I started this project, the tarps were of better quality. Every year, the quality got worse. I bought the tarps at the same shop every time, and each time they got cheaper and cheaper.

It would have been nice to have the sheep stable, but right now there is no time for that. So I want to put up a more durable temporary solution that I think will last for two years. We will use the roof boards we picked up from a neighbor on 7 November.

I remember thinking it would be nice to document the entire project for the blog. At first, I took plenty of photos.

The first task was to take down the old tarp. I put spanners on the tarp. These spanners have no built-in release mechanism. They are really simple: a shaft with teeth that hooks into metal counterhooks. To release the shaft, one has to bend it away from the counterhooks. It was a tedious operation.

Then I hung up ratchet bands as a temporary platform for the metal roofboards. Now DW helped me lay the roof boards on the ratchet bands. Here, I fastened the board edges together with blind rivets. The rivet gun was hard to use. I found two metal pipes and used them to extend the rivet gun's handles. Now I had enough force to pop the rivets. Once the proof of concept worked, I kept drilling holes and popping rivets into them. In the photo, you can see one rivet poking up. I had hoped you would see all of them in a straight line, but the other rivets got blurred. Normally, I would be happy with bokeh, but this time you can only see one rivet. A little unsatisfying.

Next, I fastened the roof boards along the edges. Plenty of fastening points exist at the top and bottom of the boards. The longer sides only have three spots. I am a little unhappy about it, but I compensated by adding more fasteners at the top and bottom. This is how far I got this afternoon.

DD and WB visited this evening. WB is a friend of our dear daughter. First, we had an alcohol-free drink and a snack at home together with DS. Then DD and WB, DW, and I went to a restaurant. We went to the Krachtcentrale restaurant in Huizen.

We came here on 25 April. This time there was no chef's menu. I think we enjoyed our visit on 25 April more..

Sunday 15 November

This morning I opened up the south-east field for the sheep. I think it is the last time they'll graze in the fields this season. The sheep were pretty hard on the little area at the door. They almost wrecked it.

Today we had a solid gray, overcast day. DW had a new event. She was mentoring a knitting event at the wool association. Years back, she was more involved in the wool association. This was a little like a comeback for her.

I brought her to the event. On the way back, I bought 150 kilos of sand as part of the preparations for the sheep platform. When I finish the roof, I will use the sand to level the platform below the rain roof. Actually, we will not level it; we'll create a slight ridge so water flows off the sides of the platform.

Instead of applying sand, I continued fastening the new roof boards. I fastened the side boards in four places. The original idea was to use flat boards that are non-rigid in all directions. Now we have these corrugated boards, and they flex in the corrugation direction. I can't suspend them on their own. They will be sagging. To avoid sagging, I figured I would put up a cable to rest the boards on. For that, I needed another trip to the hardware store. When picking up DW, we both went to the city center. Here, DW went to the thrift store, and I went to buy cable and cable spanners. While I was there, I bought another 150 kilos of sand. I think I could easily have gotten a couple of more rounds to pick up sand. 150 kilos of sand is about €15, so it is not that costly.

I managed to set up one cable before it was time to eat. After dinner, I didn't go out; I have to do that tomorrow afternoon.

Here ends this week's blog. It was a lot about photography and the new rain roof. Welcome back next week!