A week of social activities Sunday, 07-Jun-26 21:35:29 CEST

Sunday, 14-Jun-26 22:32:04 CEST

Preparations for the driveway project

This week, we prepared for the driveway project. Cut weeds and clear the area. We also made good progress in the garden.

Monday 8 June

It is a new week!

I worked from home, and my work went really well today. I was so concentrated that I almost forgot lunch. So I finished one thing on my work To Do List, and right away I got another new thing to do.

I noticed today that the sheep were grazing all the way out at the road, which is so nice to see. 1 May I talked about how they shunned eating near the road. I had to put up fencing to get them nearer to the road. Here we are, and they are going near the road voluntarily.

After work, I transplanted four more hocus cucumber plants. I noticed a one-inch-long baby cucumber!

DW called me. She had missed a train. I went to the train station and picked her up. On the way home, we picked up food at the snack bar.

Tuesday 9 June

This was a beautiful morning! The first thing I did in the morning was to bring out the garbage container. While doing that, I discovered wild strawberries along the road. Beautiful little red dots in the green grass. They did not taste that sweet.

I could have biked to work today, but there will be some rain at the end of the afternoon, and I’m going to some obscure place to pick up a package. The package pick-up points can be random sometimes, and that happened this time.

I made a smoothie, and I picked strawberries in the garden, and DW just wanted to sleep. I even killed two slugs this morning!

After work, I drove to the package pickup point far off at the other side of the city. It is raining.

The package service was located in a typical cheap company street. The entrance was a garage door. I presented a barcode on my phone, and the owner's son scanned it with his father's help. He was perhaps 5 years old, and he could barely look over the counter. He was very eager to scan the barcode. The dad had to help him aim the scanner correctly. They fetched my package from storage together. Now the barcode on the package had to be scanned, but that was easier because the father held the package below his knees, which was nice, because his son was so short. Then they scanned the QR code on my driver's license. I congratulated the kid for doing such great work, and he screamed with excitement. In a couple of weeks, he can do his father's job. Next year, he will own this business.

The package contained sachets of a powder that attracts flies. Now we have enough of this for a couple of years.

In the evening, I programmed the lyrics editor, and I had a great time! The daylight receded as a rain cloud gathered above us, the last rays of light shining in from the side.

Wednesday 10 June

This morning I worked from home. After work, I went with the brush cutter, eliminating thistles in the northwest field inside the dyke. I also cleared the area around the west and south part of the barn. It is here that Pawel and his team will be doing landscaping, so it is prudent to clear up before they arrive.

At the entrance to the atelier, we have a chicory plant with two flowers. The seed mix we bought for the sheep contains chicory, so we got thousands of these plants, but we usually do not let them grow until they can flower—our sheep like them. Just look at these flowers, they are really beautiful!

Today, DW started picking the red currant berries. She did that last year on 10 June as well.

A few moments before we were about to get to the dentist, I noticed that Hannah was stuck in a temporary fence along the dyke. DW got her out. I am increasingly skeptical of the temporary fence. I am glad she did not need to stand there, stuck in the fence, for about two hours.

Then we went to the dentist. They replaced a filling from 2013, the same year we bought the car. The filling could be replaced without anesthesia, and DW was mighty impressed by my bravery. Then we went home again and had a quick dinner.

After dinner, I drove to a side building of a church in Hilversum. The complex had its own parking area, but you had to be an insider to know where to enter. I took the car to a garage instead, and that worked fine too.

We were a couple of people playing Swedish folk music, and there was no religious affiliation beyond the fact that this location could be rented this evening. It was great meeting all the friends playing Swedish folk music.

We played about 20 songs. I was impressed by the tempo at which the tunes were played. There were three fairly new artists, and they struggled a little with the pace. They did not complain, though, so we just kept going, and it was great to play again. I got a book about songs from Jämtland-Härjedalen. I liked that. I will see if there are any interesting songs in that book.

Thursday 11 June

The weather this morning was absolutely magnificent, with 15.5°C, sunny, and not that much wind, but I’m taking the car. The chichory plant at the entrance to the atelier was greeting me with five flowers. The reason was that I couldn’t get up in time this morning.

Here I drove into a traffic jam. It occurred to me that I would rather be late from biking than from a traffic jam.

In the city, there is a Green Wave that helps traffic flow, and it usually works pretty well, but I’m pretty sure I could have biked instead of sitting in this stupid traffic jam. My average speed in the car was 11.2 kilometers per hour, but when I bike, I can easily reach 20 or even 25km/h. I was not the only one caught up in a traffic jam.

At work, I started having issues with my left eye. It started stinging a little. It was annoying.

DW worked from home; she had a 20-second commute to her home office. In the afternoon, it rained heavily when I drove home. I'm not sure the bike was the best option today.

I have not edited the blog yet. It is already Thursday evening, and I still need to start editing the blog. I have been transcribing the blog on my phone, so I have text, but it needs editing to be called a blog. I wrote on the blog this evening.

Here is Merida, as if she were Findus from Sven Nordqvist's books.

Friday 12 June

At 5:20 AM this morning, Merida had a new epileptic seizure. The last time she had it was 120 days ago, in February.

This morning I moved the sheep to the southeast field. It is the field that got the new fencing five meters from the driveway. This means I will need to mow the previous fields, but that is not for today. Today, DW and I are working from home.

I started on a new project. It is often a bit frustrating to start new things. I need to figure out the requirements and where everything is. When that is all done, it is much more fun.

We worked until 6 PM, and then we went to the grocery store to get pizza. It was raining. It has been raining for a while now. It is good because there was a rain deficit. I hope it can become a little warmer. Between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius is a sweetspot for both me and the garden. It has been slightly below 20. When the temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius, it does no good for the garden.

I still had issues with my left eye today. It stings. I'm not sure what it is.

Saturday 13 June

Today we picked two bowls of raspberries! We had some of it for breakfast, but the rest went into the freezer.

We have now collected 1 kilogram of raspberries in the freezer! That is about 2.2 pounds. It's more than the raspberries we collected last year. It was strange, but we did not make any notes of the raspberries.

When I went to the barn, I was greeted by more chicory flowers. This time it was fourteen flowers. What will it be tomorrow?

Today we worked on tasks in the garden and on our property. I planted the remaining cucumbers. I made a To Do list with 13 tasks. Have I ever told you that I like to-do lists? It is important to list finite items. It is not good to put the item "Picking redcurrant berries" when there are about 10 kilos of redcurrant berries. It is better to put some weight or volume you like to pick, and then you can take that off the list. Taking things off the list is the whole point. It is much better to have a list of items you have finished than a list you gave up on.

My next task was to cut the southwest field with the lawn mower. It struggled with the grass and the weeds. I had to take it gently so the mower's knives wouldn't be overwhelmed. It is an electric lawn mower tractor, and there is only so much energy it can use. You can get a petrol mower to stall just as well, so that is not much of a difference. The trick is to take it easy. Then it usually works.

Then I cut away the thistles on the east side of the barn. Here I used the scythe. It worked very well! I had thought of using the brushcutter, but on Wednesday, I had not put the battery in the charger properly, so it was still not charged. That is when I decided on the scythe, and it worked really well.

The runner beans are flowering! It is not a massive flower, but here and there we can see the flowers.

I also noticed that the thyme was flowering.

Then I cut more building fence elements in half to replace the temporary fencing along the dyke. It is not good that the sheep get stuck in the fence. The sheep can get their heads through the temporary fence, but they cannot get them back. It is so annoying. This time, I used other better protective glasses just in case a metal flake is flying around. Then I set up the fencing along the dyke. I liked it very much, but it did not look like the sheep liked it.

Our neighbors came on a short visit. I had to finish the fence, though, because I had locked up the sheep while working on the fence. When that was done, I could release the sheep, go inside, and drink tea with neighbors. Everything needs to happen in the correct order. Our neighbors found a Swedish book about weaving at a flea market and gave it to DW. It was nice.

Sunday 14 June

We had a slow morning this morning. I could blog and got reasonably far on my backlog. I wondered what the chicory would present this morning? Today it was 22 flowers! No, I did not count these myself. I had AI count the flowers. AI is doing really well on many things, but it cannot take a sheet of music and convert it to the ABC format. That experiment failed horribly.

I had not seen the sheep in the southeast field since remaking the fence, so I was curious whether they had started to shun it altogether. Either that, or they are dismayed by the new fencing along the dyke, which they cannot tamper with so easily and get stuck in.

They walked with us to the southeast field without any hesitation. Here, the grass stands tall. A little too tall for my liking. We walked around and found that one of our cherry trees had ripe berries. What should one make of ripe cherry berries? I have no idea. We cannot use them in the smoothie, that is clear. They were sweet and delicious.

We had two potatoes flowering today. One is a forgotten twister from last year. It has a white-and-yellow flower. This photo was made with a DSLR; it is so good at making bokeh portraits of flowers.

There was also a flowering of the Alouette potato. Alouette is the French name for the songbird, the skylark. It has a purple flower with a yellow center.

I could also take a photo of an oxeye daisy with a fly that we have growing on the right side of the living room doors.

My next project was to transplant the remaining tomato plants. We had too much actually, but I planted them slightly too dense so they would fit. It was relatively windy today, so I mounted a windshield made of two pallets. We will see if that works. Most importantly, we will need to figure out if the tomatoes can survive the slugs.

I went around the pond, clearing weeds and brush. The water is not clear anymore. It would have been nice if it were clear. We got a layer of duckweed floating in the pond. It would have been cool if there were a robot that could automatically collect duckweed. The purpose of the pond is to serve as a buffer during heavy rainfall. All our downpipes end here in the pond. Also, the effluent of our filter ends here.

Today I replanted our celeriac seedlings. I sowed these on 9 May. I was a tiny seed, like powdering the soil with powdered sugar. Now some of the seeds have become transplantable, so I gave them individual pots. Celeriac is not a quick crop. It needs a lot of patience. There are probably better ways of handling celeriac, but I have chosen this way. The idea of sowing these in the ground is out of the question if it is a crop that slugs like. The beetroot is now standing in great grandeur because they are brought up in a slug-free barn. It is so easy to say they "should" be sown directly in the ground. There is so much in this world that "should" be easier than reality, like it is here and now in our garden.

At the end of the day, DW picked 8316 grams in total of the red currant berries. That means last year's record has been broken for the red currants.

We will not be able to pick that many vine grapes this year, since they have been moved to a new location out of the way of the driveway construction. The grape stocks are doing well. They look healthy and happy at their new location.

The news from Ukraine is positive, although major news corporations are not running any stories about Ukraine's imminent victory. It is also true that the win is not secured nor imminent, but things are not looking bad for Ukraine. The Russian economy is currently in free fall, according to smaller news outlets such as Inside Russia. If you want someone to talk convincingly about what is going on in Russia, it has to be told with a Russian accent, like Constantin is doing. He talks about food shortages in occupied Crimea. There is a sugar shortage because it is used to preserve products. There are fuel shortages in southern Russia.

In the evening, we hunted for slugs. The slug pressure is not that high right now. It looks like we are doing a great job of keeping the population in check.

Here ends this week's blog. I am happy we finished all the items on the To Do list. Before the weekend, I was worried about how many unfinished tasks we had. We made good progress on the garden, the sheep-grazing fields, and preparations for the driveway project. We started picking berries this week. All plants are transplanted except the celeriac and some chili peppers. I wrote 2739 words this week. Welcome back next week.