Finished driveway Sunday, 19-Jul-26 21:21:21 CEST

Sunday, 26-Jul-26 21:39:54 CEST

Three more curtain rods

This week I mounted three curtain rods.

Monday 20 July

This was a regular overcast summer morning. This morning felt like the beginning of the week after the driveway project. There was so much going on last week that this week could be a quiet one, and that would be great. It was 16°C and slightly chilly this morning. Merida came to rest on my lap. That is still a unique and seldom-seen event. It fills my heart with joy that she comes to lie on my lap. It is straining, though, because I am not allowed to move, and I may not help her get into a comfortable position. So then you are sitting there, happy, holding the legs together. That takes an active effort. After a while, I moved her to her platform above the laptop. She looked at me with a question in her face, like What was that good for?

After work, I made a step-stone path to the mailbox. I used six of the larger stones. The mailbox is hanging a little low, but that has to do with the fact that we placed it there before the road, before the driveway. The stones were heavy. I could have broken my back on these stones, but I survived!

Pawel sent me photos he made with his drone.

 

DW pickled cucumber today.

It is the first harvest being pickled this season.

Tuesday 21 July

I woke up with a large orange rectangle on the wall from a sunrise. So I was thinking that if I made myself wake up, I could also take a photo of the sunrise. Then I went to bed again. The next time I woke up from the alarm, I had a feeling I wanted to go back to bed and sleep for another couple of hours. I really felt like I had a driveway hangover.

I have a warm feeling in my chin. That is bad news. I will need to call my dentist and talk about it. I don’t want this drama.

The grain field has been harvested! This morning a tractor was spreading manure on the field.

Yesterday Pawel sent me a couple of photos he made with his drone. He had a couple of charming photos. I wonder what it would be like to have such a little gadget. I have seen tiny drones with 4K cameras, where the wings are inside a cage so the whole thing fits in a bag you can keep in your pocket. You use your phone as the remote control. I will look for that device.

I was done working, and I was going to bike home as usual, but I couldn’t find the key for my bike. How many pockets do I have? Too many. I could theoretically have it in one sack, but that would not be good either. It would be better if I had some system. Then, if I had a system, I also had to have the discipline to follow it, and I’m sure that it wouldn't work. In the end, I found the key in a pocket where it should not be.

I called the dentist today. The assistant said that my body obviously had to take care of a small amount of germs. That is the process. What is important is that if I get a fever, that is a clear sign that I need to call the dentist again. Another sign is an ever-increasing worse feeling or pain. So with that, I worked at the office. And from here on, I had almost no complaints the rest of the day.

Where the water snipe path is leaving the high-farting canal, there is a group of mirabelle plum trees. The fruits are delicious right now. There are thousands upon thousands of plums in the trees, and they are yellow and red.

These fruits are sweet but not disgustingly sweet. I had a bag with me, so I picked some. I know DW loves these plums. We also have a mirabelle plum tree in our garden, but it is not that ripe just yet. DW really liked that I had picked some plums.

Wednesday 22 July

This morning we woke up at our regular time, but we need to proceed more expediently because DW needs to catch her buses. It is a new Wednesday morning regime. It was not that warm this morning. DW biked to the bus stop, and she got on her bus on time, but it had been hectic.

I worked from home in the morning. Merida slept on her platform on top of the laptop. She had a really deep sleep with a bit of a nightmare. I woke her up, but it was not easy.

A couple of times today it rained briefly. We have not sown the seeds of the sheep lawns just yet because it had been predicted that the drought would continue. Now it is raining from time to time. It is hard to know what the best way is. We opted to wait a while.

After lunch, I started on my grapevine project. I decided to sell grapevine plants along the road in front of the barn. I transplanted my cuttings into the pots we bought last Sunday. Then I picked out a scrap board from the barn attic and painted it white with leftover wall paint. And then I painted the text in Dutch. The text said grapevine plants €4. Sweet grapes. Works well in clay soil.

Perhaps I am too cheap with 4€ regarding the total effort, but making profit is not the idea of this project. This is just the proof of concept, where I am checking if it works at all. Not only that, I wanted to prove to myself that I could paint grapes. I think that worked out quite well.

I walked with the sheep this afternoon. They are so sheepish. When I walk with them, they are braver and can eat freely. I found a wasp spider in the grass. It was a female about 20 millimeters in size, slightly bigger than ¾ inch. The sheep could not understand why I blocked a patch of grass where the spider was sitting. They wanted to eat there too. I did not let them.

DW took the same path home as I did yesterday. She picked a few more Mirabelle plums.

Thursday 23 July

Good morning. I am biking to work. It is 19°C and cloudy, but I do see blue patches between the clouds. I brought a paper bag with me today.

I think this week’s zucchini batch will be good as well. Last week I thought there were only leftovers, but I do see I will be able to fill several crates.

The Utrecht blue grain that DS has in a bucket is almost ready to be harvested. They look beautiful, but they are difficult to photograph when they swirl around in the wind. So I wonder what DS will make of them. I mean, if I were him, I would Google what to do, and I suppose Google would say that you first have to dry the grains, then grind them into flour. But somehow DS is not Googling things. He probably thinks I’m a walking encyclopedia, and in many ways I am. Sometimes I think I've given him the impression that a person should know things on their own. That’s obviously a false impression, if true.

Who knows? Perhaps I will be treated on a blue wheat pancake?

So yesterday evening I sold two grapevine plants. Fascinating! I made a QR code and a sign that I taped to the inside of the barn window.

I’m on my way home. The sun shines, but there are plenty of clouds. Why would you care if the sun shines? But the implication is that it’s nice and I feel comfortable; it's a lovely way of commuting to work by bike. That even despite the ticking sound, and as you know, the ticking sound makes me absolutely mad.

I told my colleagues about my grapevine shop during lunch. Gwen said that she knew how to make use of grape plants. Sure enough, my bank application notified me that she had bought 3 Grapevine plants. This means there is only one left.

On the way home, I biked on the east side of the high-farting canal so that I would get to the Mirabelle plum trees. While approaching the trees, a tune came up spontaneously in me: I wish I were a little taller by Skee-Lo.

I picked the plums that I found the most delicious. Then I continued biking home. A bit farther along, a man was standing, eating—a total stranger to me. I said to him I have a tune for you. So I played the tune for him, and he laughed out loud. I thought it was really funny.

When I had just come home, DS came and asked if we had any good suggestions for how he should process the wheat grains from his first batch of Utrecht blue. You know DS is the abbreviation for "Dear Son," but I think you had that figured out already. The grains went into a coffee grinder.

During WWII, MIL used this coffee grinder to grind grains into flour. Now this is not enough for a pancake. DS will need to make a larger wheat field if he is going to make his own wheat pancake.

Then I got crates for this week's zucchini delivery. It was 15.6 kilograms this week. When I walk with my little carriage, I feel proud. This is my produce! It looks really Swedish with these colors, blue and yellow. Well, it could be Ukrainian as well.

Late in the evening, Merida fought with another cat called Terror Fritz in our garden. Fritz is a large cat with Bengal roots. Now, it is difficult to say exactly how much Bengal is in Fritz. He is large and brutal, that is sure. Actually, Bengal cats from the first to the fourth generation are not allowed in the Netherlands. You may not keep them or breed them. Well, this guy got the name Terror Fritz. It is not our name for this cat. Merida did not get too much damage from the fight. She had a small wound on her chin, and she lost a few plucks of hair. She was taken aback by what had happened, though.

Friday 24 July

Today I worked from home, and DW had a day off. The temperatures warmed throughout the day. Merida was not content with the garden. She sat looking at the open door with skepticism. Shure indeed, Terror Fritz came by, and I administered a cup of water that I threw at him, and he did not like that.

I worked from home, and there is not so much to say about that. DW weeded the garden. She sowed the sheep mix around the driveway. This mix contains 17 sorts of grasses and herbs, and it works well for clay soil.

There are 70% grasses in the mix. I am not especially interested in those grass sorts; they just need to feed our sheep and grow well in our soil. The 30% herbs, on the other hand, are interesting. Here I find sorts I have not heard of before: Sainfoin, Alfalfa or Lucerne, White clover, Salad burnet, Alsike clover, Bird's-foot trefoil, Ribwort plantain or Narrow-leaf plantain, Fennel, Chicory, Parsley, Yarrow, and Wild carrot or Queen Anne's lace.

The mix contains two percent chicory, which is not that much, so we have a special bag with only chicory seeds, and she handed out a couple of handfuls extra of those seeds as well. One thing that I particularly like about this mix is that the roots of the plant go deeper than regular villa garden grass. We have high groundwater levels here, so we never have to worry about no food for our sheep.

The regular villa people around here have to worry because they use grasses with shorter root systems, and to compensate, they use regular drinking water from the tap to spread on the lawn. When you take into account that some villa people raised their properties by bringing in soil, they actually increased the distance to the groundwater. Is it clever? No, it is extremely dumb. Especially dumb when they have no idea where the soil is coming from. It could be that they brought in PFAS-contaminated soil. So what do they have now? A brown lawn, on high ground, and potentially cancer.

We had a 10 kg bag of these seeds, and it got empty before she had sown all the patches. She ordered another ten kilograms of the same seed mix. Now it is just the question of how it will rain, if there will be any rain at all.

After work, we sat in the garden. We are really happy here, but there is a small detail that is nagging me slightly. It is when the neighbor is practicing on his guitar with the doors open.

His son is playing drums as well. Just saying. Moments like these, I almost want to bring out my DJ equipment and blast Pump Up the Volume, but I am a nice guy.

In the evening, I had a walk with Merida. We walked around in the garden. She stayed near me to be safe from Terror Fritz. We did not see Fritz, but Merida found it really exciting to walk around our property.

I also practiced with the DJ controller this evening.

Saturday 25 July

This was a relaxed Saturday. I hung up three more curtain rods, and DW tried to find a good piece of curtain to hang. She found a tablecloth, but it was not ideal. From here on, we will visit second-hand shops from time to time to see if we can find any candidates for curtains.

In the evening, I sold the last grapevine plant! This was an inspiring experience.

Sunday 26 July

I had a whopping 86 points for my sleep last night. Could it be that the curtains really help?

This was a rainy, overcast Sunday with 18°C on the thermometer. In the morning we did sheep maintenance. They got their fly medication. Now that was a hassle. Especially Selma was suspicious of getting into the chute. It took some patience to get them in. DW got irritated with me. Look, if someone is talking agitatedly, then the sheep are not going to be calmer. I asked her to stop complaining. After a while, everything was calm, and even Selma came into the chute.

Then we moved our sheep to a new grazing area. This time it was the area between the properties on the north and east side of our property. Here we have the neighbor who planted delicious berry bushes outside the sheep fence. We had bought a new fence specifically for those berry bushes. It’s actually a poultry fence with much smaller openings. The new fence had a new construction for the pins going into the ground. These pins you have to screw on. Consequently, they're pointing everywhere. In the old fence, they were glued in, and they always pointed to one side. It's an improvement, but it's going backward.

DW had a day out in the afternoon with the girls' team. I brought her to the train station.

I practiced with the DJ controller. Until now I’ve been a frequent user of the crossfader. So-called "real DJs” use the channel faders, not the crossfader. I started practicing this to see if I could do without the crossfader in my DJ sets, but it is challenging for me. So now, instead of pushing the crossfader from left to right, I am supposed to keep the crossfader in the middle. The playing song has maximum volume while the incoming song has the fader at silent. The bass is set to zero on the incoming song.

When bringing in the song, the incoming song is made louder, the outgoing song is faded out, and then the outgoing song's bass is faded out while the incoming song's bass is increased. This is a lot more complex than pushing the crossfader from left to right, which also works. There’s currently too little time for me to juggle all these things at the same time. Maybe it is a question of getting used to the knobs. Do I want to be a real DJ or am I fine doing it the hobbyist way?

I picked up DS at the train station.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2818 words, all by myself. As I think about it, I put the effort into writing this so that you can feel it is worthwhile to read it. Welcome back next week!