Applied gypsum boards to the ceiling of the barn Sunday, 29-Jun-25 17:11:52 CEST

We got back the repaired lawnmower Sunday, 13-Jul-25 22:30:51 CEST

Sunday, 06-Jul-25 17:22:54 CEST

Next phase of the barn finalization

This week was hot, followed by a period of rain. The electrician arrived and discussed the next phase of the barn project. We went on an excursion to Rotterdam on Friday!

Monday 30 June

Today I worked from home. In the morning, I had to ask Merida if I could retrieve my keyboard. I am glad I had turned off the computer because she pressed all the keys at once.

After work, I set up a few more boards in the barn's attic.

Tuesday 1 July

Good morning, it’s Tuesday, 1 July. The time is 9:00 AM, and I’m biking to work. That’s a little bit on the late side, I know. And my back tire was. Flat. So I had to repair that before I could start biking. It’s going to be an extremely warm day today. I think it’s already 25°C by the time I get home. I fear it will be at least 10 degrees warmer than it is now. But nature is beautiful.

Along the road, I found a canister containing something that looked like an N2O canister. Laughing gas. The canister contained much steel. Is it not possible to use that steel for something? Why is it disposed of like this?

I had a puncture in the back wheel tyre this morning. That’s not because I have been running over some stones. It was in the upper part of the tyre. The wheel is held in place by spokes, and for every spoke, there is a bolt inside the wheel. There should be a rubber band over the whole wheel covering those holes, but it didn’t look like that had happened at this part of the tire had been covered. So the tire had popped into the hole of a bolt. I’ve never seen that before. Now, theoretically, my repair patch enforced the tire at that point. Good, but not good.

The repair kit was at the bottom of the bags. I had to remove all the stuff from the bags before I could find the repair kit. In that process, I found a nut for a front wheel. Why am I carrying around a nut from the DS bike? The curious case of the lost nut that has been found again.

After repairing the back tire, I replaced the oil in the pedal shaft. This time, I used the oil I had the first time. So, you're curious if the bike is ticking, and I can tell you it’s ticking like crazy.

The ticking bike and I.

How is the phoneme conversion program progressing? It was a significant rewrite of the infrastructure for the new solution to address the multi-sound issue. But I think I got the patient stitched up yesterday. There are issues with the new solution as well, but I’m working on that.

Yesterday evening, it was already hot, but I went to the barn and added more boards to the attic. Once the milestone is reached, the electrician can return and complete the connections, allowing us to proceed with the tiling of the restroom.

Yesterday, I became a member of the seller's section of the local food corporation. I will sell succini.

I arrived at work at 9:40 AM.

The time is 7:00 PM. I’m standing at my bike, ready to bike home. The back tire held up the pressure. I think it’s 35°C. I finished a subcomponent today. That was necessary to get this part of the project into a minimum viable product stage. Now I think we can proceed with the project in an incremental agile manner. We had a precursor of this component that was not implemented in a scalable way, so I have rewritten that part now. I mean, we are pretty much working in an agile fashion, but. We are not following the agile ceremonies, such as Scrum and sprints. We are using scrums and sprints, but we don’t refer to them by those names. I mean, I like this way of working. I think you need a proper attitude to work in an agile way. Rigid waterfall personalities often struggle. What I need is a happy customer. We have business results to achieve. We have no problems; we only have challenges to overcome.

I called the lawn mower company today. They are working on the tractor lawn mower. He couldn’t promise to deliver it the next day. Which essentially means I will not get it back this week. However, I know that we will be busy on Friday. That’s the only possible delivery before the weekend. Never mind.

Our electrician asked me what I was doing. I told him about the progress. And he was delighted. The electrician will visit us tomorrow, and we will discuss the status of the barn and outline the next steps. I mean, he’s Superman; he can do anything. So, he will arrange for someone to tile the restroom and the kitchen in our house.

What I want to see is that we can start clearing out the sea container. For that, I need the attic of the barn to be in the proper order. It’s going to be challenging to get to the planks in the barn. I don’t know. Shouldn’t paint the devil on the wall? As we say in Swedish.

There is much stuff in the container that we are going to get rid of. For example, we have a substantial store of wood scraps. I will take a careful look at those pieces, and only the most useful ones will be moved to the barn.

I stopped in the forest for a little break. Drank a bit of water from the water bottle that I have cooled in the fridge at work today. Then I switched to the recording app and recorded a bit of the birds chirping in the forest. That was great. Not a single person came by while I recorded the birds.

Then I started biking again, and a few moments later, I noticed roe deer in a field. It was a mother roe deer with her cub. I took a photo. The deer is a little dot in the distance. I did not have my telelens camera with me.

The fishing spots along the canal were not populated by fishermen today. It wasn’t populated by geese either. Today, it was people in bathing suits. The canister of laugh gas I found this morning had been picked up.

I’m holding out my shirt so that an air flow can cool my chest while biking. It is hot. Arrived at home at 7:42 PM.

Wednesday 2 July

Good morning. It is Wednesday morning. It’s not going to be that warm today. I’m working from home this afternoon.

We harvested potatoes for the first time this season. DW made an excellent dish with the potatoes. It was a Finnish dish called Hölskyperunat. She found the recipe on the Swedish Television website.

Hölskyperunat – Mashed Potatoes with Herbs and Crème Fraîche.

For this recipe, you need the following ingredients (metric system):

• 1½kg freshly harvested potatoes
• 75g butter; it is also possible to replace this with Non-Palm margarine.
• ½dl chives (finely chopped)
• ½dl dill (finely chopped)
• 2 onion tops (shredded)
• 200g crème fraîche salt to taste. You can also use Oatly vegan cuisine.

Here is how to make the dish:

1. Scrub the new potatoes thoroughly, leaving the skin on.
2. Boil the potatoes in lightly salted water until they are soft but not overcooked (about 15 minutes, depending on their size).
3. Pour off the water and let the potatoes steam off in the saucepan.
4. Add the diced butter and crème fraiche to the saucepan with the hot potatoes.
5. Sprinkle with chopped herbs and spring onions.
6. Put a lid on and shake the saucepan vigorously so that the potatoes get a slightly mashed, buttery surface.

Thursday 3 July

Good morning. It is Thursday, the 3rd of July 2025, and I’m celebrating my 58th birthday. So, how am I celebrating my birthday? Not much.

My goodness. Found kids playing with the giant hogweed plants! It is a poisonous plant. I told the kids that you can get burn wounds from this plant; it reacts with light and causes burn damage. If you get the stuff in your eyes, you can become blind. I’m in shock.

A few hundred meters along the same road, workers from the municipality were decimating the giant hogweed plants because they are so poisonous. It's an upside-down world we're living in. I hope I saved the eyes of two beautiful kids. But I’m not sure. I feel highly frustrated. Anyway. It’s my 58th birthday, and I’m biking to work.

I have not published the blog from last week. It is not going well. Yesterday evening, I spent some time working on the blog. I then continued with the phone number conversion project. Yesterday afternoon, it was so hot in the barn that I couldn't work there, and I needed to finish some tasks in the attic.

Our electrician and Superman arrived in the evening, and we discussed the project. He will arrange a tiling subcontractor. He will finish their electricity installations. He has some work to do in the barn.

Since it was so warm, I spent the afternoon working on the phoneme conversion program. I reached line 27,000. You might think that I'm happy about that, but actually, it's not as sweet as it seems. I had some strange errors with multiple sound patterns. My multi-sound pattern handling is not working.

So let’s say I have a multi-sound pattern. It fails. As a fallback, I search for the individual sounds. There are several factors I need to attend to. The sounds need to be in the correct order. They need to be next to each other or in each other. That’s also fine. However, this is not enough, as we can also encounter ambiguity during this process. So let’s say I have the multisound pattern with two sounds. First, I test the regular expression representing these two sounds, and it fails. So then we parse for the first individual sound. And it succeeds. That’s still easy. And then comes the second sound. It needs to match directly after the first sound. It can also overlap. All combinations of the second sound need to be combined with all combinations of the first sound.

Usually, when I can explain something, I can also create a program based on the idea. Now, I explained it to myself, so that should not be a problem. It feels like I’m late because there are so many kids biking around—9:15 AM at the cow field.

The time is now 6:15 PM, and I’m on my way home. I was thinking about the phoneme conversion program this morning. How important is it to understand the algorithm and the thing I want to achieve? I mean, I will rewrite that function again. So if I could get my thoughts straight about it before doing it, that would be nice.

How did it go with the kids? The kids stayed with me in my head the whole day. I hope they went to their mom and asked for advice on what to do. "These things are poisonous a man said, what should we do?" And the mother let the kids wash their hands. I’m afraid that didn’t happen. The first skin reaction occurs 15 minutes after contact, and significant damage can be done within this timeframe. The peak of the reaction can occur as long as two hours after initial contact with the plant. New burn reactions can develop up to two hours after initial contact with the plant. Indeed, the kids said they had no problems. I met them within the first fifteen minutes. The parents were in the camper van on the other side of the road. They had no idea what the kids were doing.

That holiday must have ended abruptly. I think the parents are at the hospital with the kids right now. I hope the kids are not losing their eyesight.

Today I went to buy a cake for my colleagues. One of my colleagues did not like the choice of cake, so I am bringing home that piece of cake. It was large pieces. DS and I had a half piece each. It was delicious.

Friday 4 July

First, we went to the Hague and the Swedish Embassy, where I got my new passport. Then we went to Rotterdam for an excursion to the Euromast, also known as the Rotterdam Tower. It was terrific, marvelous weather to visit a tower.

	We arrived from the Park, Het Park.
	The entrance to the Euromast is reached via a bridge over the motorway.
	Here is a selfie of me with the famous Rotterdam Bridge in the background.
	There were laughing mirrors at the lift in the tower.
	We went to the top. The gondola had floor windows.
	We had parked at the hospital. It had blue and white pedestrian crossings in layers.
	We drove out of Rotterdam, satisfied with the activities we had done.

 

I shot a film when we sat in the gondola as we took off.

Saturday 5 July

Today we went to the Pil's old house. All of us! We went to the old house to select the items we wanted to keep from it. It was primarily the grandchildren who gathered to pick up things they would like to have. I decided on a stretcher, and I picked up a painting I made in 1997. It was an aquarelle of the garden. I blogged about it in 2011 fourteen years later. In 1997 I had a painting hiatus. The blog post about the painting is vague, perhaps slightly amusing.

We let off DD at a festival on the way home.

Sunday 6 July

It was as if we used all our energy over the last couple of days. It was not a very active day. It rained a lot, and that did not improve the situation. I hope DD was not flushed away on a windy, wet field somewhere at a festival.

Today, DS told us he wanted to have the desk in the guest room. To make room for it, he had decided to get rid of the sofa. I helped him dismantle the sofa and bring it to the second-hand shop. Then we moved the desk to his house. In the process, I also gave him the missing nut from his bike. I had found it in my bag the other day—no idea why it was there. He must have dropped it there.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2355 words. That is not bad.