Fetched planks Monday, 12-May-25 21:24:55 CEST

Tuesday, 20-May-25 20:36:16 CEST

Preparations for the growing season

This week, we continued with the preparations for the growing season. I filled in a trench between the barn and the driveway.

Monday 12 May

Today I worked from home. DW went to her office. In the evening, I finished the blog from last week.

Tuesday 13 May

Today I went to the office while DW worked from home. I brought a neighbor with me to the train station. It was such nice weather, I had better be biking to work, but I forgot about that. When I came home from the office, I removed the beds from the upcoming weed. I 6 Ola Gabriella plants. It is a courgette plant without seeds. They are marvellous.

I also gave the sheep a little more to eat.

Wednesday 14 May

Today I worked from home in the morning and did not work from home in the afternoon. But I was at home and I worked. Why is language so complex at times?

After lunch, I started filling up the trenches of the rainwater pipes from the barn. I managed to fill in the pipe from the driveway to the corner of the barn. I used the tiller machine to make the soil fluffier and make it easier to fill shovels. We had dry weather since before the holiday. In dry conditions, the clay blocks are like wood or stone blocks.

Tonight, I got stuck in the phoneme conversion program. I discovered cases like the abbreviation of letter phonemes. Found that two phonemes make up one character, i.e., 'X' is the phoneme K and S. I found out that there is a whole set of phonemes in the reverse order of the letters in the word, i.e., the word 'Able' becomes 'A B E L'. This is besides the silent letters at the beginning and end of words and inside words. I also had one word with two sets of phonemes, one with a silent letter and the other with a silent phoneme. What have I started on?

Thursday 15 May

Today we both went to the office. It was a productive day for both of us. When we came home in the evening, we were tired.

Right before bed, I devised an idea for solving all the exceptional cases. Perhaps. That is the case when I usually cannot sleep well, but tonight I could.

I watched a movie of Veritasium tonight: https://youtu.be/SC2eSujzrUY?si=te9AavsgGzkzr7IQ. It was about PFAS. This is a movie I can recommend watching. It explains how PFAS was created, how it is spreading in the environment, and how poisonous it is.

Friday 16 May

This morning I woke up early. I had a day off today. I had a dish to do and was eager to fix my issue with the phoneme exceptional cases. There were other things to do, so I could not sit programming the whole day. I started on fixing the dishes from the night before. Then breakfast. I made a smoothie.

Then I programmed the phoneme conversion program. I am taking the solution in steps, partly because I don't know how to proceed. I figured that I need to parse longer strings of phonemes. I need to match not only one phoneme, but two or more. The current solution then becomes a special case. So all phoneme recognition entries were converted to a list, and I made one longer to test. I got that working, but the next challenge is, what will I do in these cases? Instead of biting into this part, I started working on other things.

I weeded the beds. It has been dry, so there is not much weed. There are not many slugs either, because they hide when it is dry. It is ideal to have dry soil when the plants are small and tender. Not all beds have been populated, so I also wanted to work on that.

In one bed, I still had to sow the cucumbers. For that, we also wanted to have a scaffold on top to let the cucumber climb. I dismantled the scaffold for last season's planting. Then I moved it to the new location. I had to fetch six feet from the neighbor, borrowing the scaffold. He was busy setting up planks on the house; his carpenters were busy. It will be great.

At home, I built up a scaffold for the bean bed. The other scaffold is at the cucumber bed. The cucumber scaffold stands on two beds—one row over the cucumber bed, and the other over the squash bed. The squash bed doesn't need any scaffold, but that was the solution I came up with.

Then I sowed the cucumber seeds. I had hoped for more Hokus seeds, but they were unavailable at the shop. We had one bag of Hokus seeds that we pre-sowed before the holiday. They sprouted already, but I would like to see that they are less fragile before I put them in the ground. With the new cucumber, called Marketshare, I sowed directly in the ground. We will see if anything survives the slugs.

Then I had a look at our apple trees. I found they are in the early stages of a moth infection. There were larvae to be found. I picked these from the apple trees. Sometimes I cut off a branch if it had too many leaves, and sometimes I just picked the infected leaves. I did two of the three trees. One tree has no apples this year. It died off a little. The peer trees are fine.

In the evening, I was so tired that I had no energy to program the phoneme conversion program.

Saturday 17 May

Today, we were on a mission to travel around the country for several reasons. We want to acquire a lawn moving tractor to cut the grass when the sheep have been grazing a part. We wanted to find tiles for several of our remaining tiling projects. We could also go to a garden center to get cat food for Merida and deliver things to a second-hand shop while we're at it.

We first went to the machine shop, where the tiller machine was repaired. They were open in the morning. The salesperson was not present so he would call back next week.

Next, we went to a tile shop. We need tiles for the kitchen, around the sink in the workshop in the house, and for the barn's restroom. We did not find what we were looking for. That was my feeling anyway. DW was pleased with the shopping tour because she can now shop for tiles online.

We went to a second-hand shop that we had never been to. We bought a couple of wrenches, a disco light, a small table, and DW bought a sweater.

When we came home, I had to rest. When I woke up, Merida was hungry. Now I have decided on the solution for the phoneme conversion program. I decided to make the phoneme specification into two types of items. One still is the original phoneme specification item. It has the "type" specifying fricative, etc. The other has the type "transform". The transformation entry has one list of input phonemes, and then there is a list of output phonemes. I have no idea how the program will handle this, but that is for later.

While I was programming the phoneme database conversion program, DW watched the Eurovision Song Contest. I tampered with the new structure. It is not easy with the new structure. We went to bed before the results of the contest were given.

Sunday 17 May

We woke up late this morning. Austria had won. I dreamed that Zylensky had an accident, which was not a good dream.

Today, I did not feel like doing very much. We had a slow morning. And I was thinking about the phoneme conversion program. Finding out how to handle the new idea of the phoneme database was challenging. In the old situation, each different phoneme was its own match candidate. In the new situation, I had a list of phonemes that formed the match candidate, and I realized this morning that yes, that's indeed how I need to do it, but then I need to rebuild the infrastructure in the program so that is a lot of work and I don't know how to do it very quickly.

So instead of working on that, I decided to make breakfast and weed a little in the garden.

Right after breakfast, we wanted to look at the apple trees to see how well my project progressed, removing the germs from the trees. As it happened, we were invited to our neighbors' for coffee. That was joyful.

Then I took the brush cutter to clear the weeds along the road. After that, it was time for lunch. We had to go to the grocery store. And just before driving away, I discovered what I feared: our sheep were munching on our Birch trees. We bought protective spirals for the Birch trees. The advertisement said that the protective spirals were fantastic. Well, now we have damaged birch trees. So when we came back from the grocery store. We put a fence around the Birch.

Our sheep are mischievous when they feel a bit hungry, and they feel hungry because right now they have a field along the road and don't like that field. With the gates we put in place last winter, it is possible to lock up the sheep in the southwest field. But how would I get them there? Well. I took a bit of case piping and swung it around the air, and they got scared of me, and I drove the sheep in front of me until we reached the southwest field, and then I closed the gate. I also discovered that Hannah can climb along the poles of the pier trees. They are beasts sometimes, and always curious.

I spent some time with the sheep while DW was making our dinner. This is so that they get used to the southwest field.

Here ends this week's blog. It is a short blog. I spent a lot of time on the phoneme conversion program. I wrote 1721 words this week. Not bad at all for such a busy week.