Barn’s ceiling painted Sunday, 25-Jan-26 21:20:10 CET

Monday, 02-Feb-26 20:40:16 CET

Started plastering the walls

This week, I started plastering the walls of the barn!

Monday 26 January

Today, DW went to the office, and I worked from home. I had a productive day! I started working on putting all the data in the appropriate places. It is good to be out of the confusion stage.

It was cold today, around zero degrees all day, and overcast. Nothing spectacular.

I had a better sense of contentment with how the world is right now. We got the malignant narcissist in the White House, fairly busy with domestic failures he caused himself. He will not be on my mind so much this week. That is good.

Tuesday 27 January

Good morning. I’m driving to work, and it's minus 1 °C and overcast. We had a magnificent sunrise this morning. I suppose the rays of light came from the side, below the clouds, and that's it.

Yesterday evening, I was considering whether I should plaster or program in the lyrics editor. I decided to program the lyrics editor. It's been some time since I was programming on that project. I continued on the activation part of the sign-up. In this part, I sent the user an email with a link to the activation page and a four-digit code. I’m creating the activation page right now. The page includes a simple box to enter the code and a button.

As I said before, the code is only there to prevent a denial-of-service attack. So I started implementing the functionality that triggers when you push the button. That is the actual registration in the database that this user has been activated. I will need to validate the input data, obviously, and then I can send it to the database. But that will be next time. It feels great though!

I had a good day at work. I got the confusion resolved, and now I know where all the pieces fit together. Now that I know exactly where things are going, the urge to finish the projects comes on like a ketchup bottle squeezing. However, things will be done in due order, so it is what it is.

On the way home from work, I drove Ed to the car garage. He had his car for service at the garage. Then I went to the dentist to pick up DD. She had a wisdom tooth removed. It is always nice to have DD coming home, but perhaps it is not that fun for her to have a tooth removed. We had a nice evening with a fire in the wood stove.

Wednesday 28 January

This was a dull, misty morning with 3°C. We got up at our usual time while DD was still asleep. She had to recover from her tooth operation. The new Murphy bed is excellent; she likes it. Merida finds it strange to have strangers in the house.

This morning I worked from home. Things went really smoothly, that's nice. I love it when everything is flowing.

DD slept until about the time I logged out from work. That bed really makes her sleep! She had a really hard time with her tooth being removed, but she's a good sleeper. We had lunch together, but for her it was breakfast.

I started plastering the walls of the barn. While doing this, I listened to the Ezra Klein podcast titled "The Most Important Speech in Foreign Policy in Years." I listened to this episode two times in a row. Ezra played snippets from Mark Carney's Davos speech and analysed the different parts. Actually, he even played the part with the glitch I talked about last week. The guest was Henry Farrell, an international-relations professor at Johns Hopkins University. It was a really interesting discussion between Ezra and Henry.

In the late afternoon, DD wanted to be brought to the train station, so I drove her there. Then I went to a hardware store and bought another bag of 25K of MP-75.

Thursday 29 January

Good morning. It is minus1°C, and it snowed during the night. It’s a beautiful landscape. And now I’m in a traffic jam. Yesterday evening, I did not program anything on my project or log anything; I was scrolling. It is mad how much time one spends scrolling. It’s also mad how much time you’re losing in a traffic jam. Half an hour in the traffic jam was incredible.

I’m on my way home. At work, I am still busy with the reporting module. It is going well, but it’s really tedious.

There were many in the office today, and it was nice. At the end of the day, I was really tired. It was nice to go home, but it would have been nice to continue the project as well to get it in a more finished state before the weekend.

It snowed a little more over the day, and it looked lovely.

Friday 30 January

This was a misty morning. It is now above freezing; there are remnants of snow, but no more is falling. We may not get three decimeters of snow this year. DW worked from home, and I had a day off.

Today I worked on plastering the workshop of the barn. I plastered the seams between the gypsum boards without the scrim tape. I mounted the gypsum boards on top of OSB boards so the seams will not shift. I might be wrong on this assumption, but I will try plastering the seams without the scrim tape.

All inner corners are applied with scrim tape, so I am not totally leaving plaster common sense. I got low on MP-75. I figured that for my plastering work this weekend, I need another 25-kilogram bag of MP-75.

I finished the seam work on Friday. It was great. We went to the farm shop five minutes before closing. We picked up two deep-freeze pizzas. They were not delicious. While munching on the pizzas, we watched "Money for Nothing."

Saturday 31 January

This morning, we first went to the grocery store for hay bales. Just kidding, it is a local farmer providing these hay bales. The farmer was not at home when we arrived. I had a chat with his horses while we waited for the farmer to show up. He has three horses on his farm. They all wanted to sniff my gloves.

When he arrived, we loaded 14 bales on our trailer. It is not a long drive from the haybales farmer to our farm.

We loaded the hay into our temporary hay shed. With that done, we switched to our small trailer with a blue hood. It has been filled with garbage for several months. We drove it to the recycling center. This recycling center is not as posh as those in the UK, where Money for Nothing is recorded. At our recycling center, we have to deliver items to the proper places. I got complaints about a bag and what it contained.

When the trailer was empty, we went to a hardware store. A pro hardware store. Regular private hardware stores do not carry TopFinish. They do have MP75. TopFinish is not sold via regular hardware stores in the Netherlands, such as Gamma and Praxis. They can be bought at Hornbach, but we don't have one here. We do have GGoedkoop and BouwMaat, but neither is open on weekends. In BouwMaat, you need to have a company to be let in. GGoedkoop accepts private persons. PontMayer also accepts private persons, and they are open on Saturday. So that was good! I was allowed to drive in the shop even with a trailer, which is cool.

I am sure my explanation above was confusing, so here is a table showing the variations of hardware stores and their TopFinish features:

Hardware Store	Allows private persons	Open weekends	Has TopFinish
Gamma	Yes	Yes	No
Praxis	Yes	Yes	No
GGoedkoop	Yes	No	Yes
BouwMaat	No	No	Yes
PontMayer	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hornbach	Yes	Yes	Yes

 

When we came home, I started plastering right away. I did the second and last layer. This will take some time because this is the layer you will see. It will need to be ready for painting, so it has to look good. I have to polish this layer to make it look nice. I worked in the barn's restroom and then outside it. I will do this layer counterclockwise. So I will finish the restroom first. Then the hallway outside the restroom. Then I will do the west wall with the large doors, and then continue like this around the hall. This evening, I finished the first section of the west wall.

Sunday 1 February

Today I continued on the west wall. I got it finished! We talked about the name of the workshop in the house and the workshop in the barn. DW suggested we rename the workshop in the house to the studio, and the workshop in the barn will be THE workshop. In the previous house, we had a storage room, but I don't want the studio labeled as one. It has taken a lot of effort to call it a workshop; it will be challenging to rename it again. We did not have the barn when we started living here, so this confusion has grown on us since we finished it. We also struggled with what we will call the open space under the canopy. We got names for it in Dutch, but not in Swedish. I suggested "Altan," but DW is not happy with that name. We will see what sticks.

So here we are, I am plastering the workshop in the barn. The studio still needs its walls and ceiling plastered, and I will work on that when the workshop in the barn is finished.

I installed the NonUSA app today. Ironically, the app allows you to create an account via Google to access it. I did not make use of the Google feature. Now I can scan products and see if US companies own them. When I see that a product is a US product, I can buy another comparable European product. For now, I will not replace my Microsoft subscription. It will be too cumbersome, but I will keep an eye on alternatives to Microsoft 365.

Here ends this week's blog. This week I started plastering the walls of the barn. We aquired another batch of 14 hay bales. I wrote 1747 words. Welcome back next week!