Plastered the ceiling of the barn Sunday, 18-Jan-26 22:13:25 CET

Sunday, 25-Jan-26 21:20:10 CET

Barn’s ceiling painted

This week, we attended BIL's mother's funeral, and DW painted the barn's ceiling.

Monday 19 January

This morning I woke up early. DW had to get to work earlier than usual because she was going to another office further away. I was groggy when I woke up. My watch told me I had woken up from a deep sleep stage, which is not the best moment to wake up.

I took a movie of DW walking to the bus. She had two blinking lights on her to make her visible.

Today I worked on the project I started last week. It is a lot of data, and I am still confused.

The world is buzzing with talk about Greenland. Trade tariffs will hit countries supporting Denmark, and the United States Northern Command has placed two Arctic battalions of the 11th Airborne Division from Anchorage, Alaska, on alert for deployment to Minnesota. Apparently, winters are harsher in Minnesota than in Anchorage.

This evening we had a display of borealis! It was cold, and the sky was clear. It was a rather special experience.

 

Tuesday 20 January

It was -0.5°C this morning. I had to scrape the car's windows before I could drive to work.

Now that Sweden has just joined NATO, it's sad that we quarrel within the organization. Look, the Swedes are reacting strongly to bullying. Now, a neighboring country, Denmark, is under attack; our sympathy will be extensive. I am sure.

I had a good day of work in the office. I moved the project further. Somehow, I will bring order and understanding to a vast amount of data. To do this, I first need to understand the data myself. I made progress on this subject today.

Wednesday 21 January

Good morning, I’m having a day off. Right now, I'm driving to the nearest car wash facility. I know BIL likes cars a lot, but he wants to see them clean. Well, we are going to his mother's funeral, so I'd better clean the car before we go. I can tell you it's been a long time since I cleaned the car, so it’s about time.

The car cleaner is fully automatic. I should really clean the interior as well, but that’s for another day.

After cleaning the car, I drove home again, then had to decide what to wear and get to the funeral. A couple of years ago, we went to MIL's brother's funeral, which was a ceremony in Amsterdam. Both DW and I come from families of strong people getting really, really old. Well, now the car has got a shiny coating, so that’s nice.

It appears I gained weight since I bought the neat clothing appropriate for funerals. That clothing is old, I can admit. Perhaps more than twenty years old. I got bigger over these twenty years, which was a little confrontational. It was not much, but just a little inconvenient. There are two choices: either I lose weight, or I buy new clothing. None of these options could be implemented this morning. DW helped me move a button, and it worked like a charm.

We arrived on time. The ceremony was worthy. On the coffin stood the portrait of BIL's mother that I had taken on 26 August 2012. In the photo, she smiled. I was honored that the family used that portrait for the ceremony. I had arranged for her to stand by a window for light, and it had been cloudy that day, so the light on her face was nicely diffused. I remember she was amused and happy about me taking her portrait.

That day, when I took that photo, the village celebrated its 400th anniversary. It was a happy day. There had been a parade of tractors dragging trailers with festive decorations. BIL asked me a couple of months earlier to draw the trailer ornament to present his idea. Then he took that drawing to a team building the trailer. It had been a massive undertaking.

After the funeral, we drove home again. I went to the care bakery to pick up the paint packages that DW ordered a couple of days ago. This is the paint we will use for the barn's ceiling. At the bakery, I spoke to the owner. We agreed on 27 February for the caretakers' disco party at the bakery. He promised it was possible to turn off the smoke alarm in the room so that I could use the smoke machine. There was a large monitor to use for the visual effects program. This will be nice.

Today, we heard that Trump backed out of using military force to seize the entire island of Greenland.

I tried listening to Mr Trump's speech in Davos, but I cannot stand hearing his voice. It hurt my feelings when Mr Trump criticized Europe's handling of the refugee crisis because some of this crisis is manufactured by the Russian Wagner group and other Russian militia groups operating in Africa. They transported people to Europe for big money to cause havoc in the European democracies.

I do agree that politicians in Europe had no idea what was coming their way in 2014; they were naive at that time. We all were. I remember how Barack Obama was standing in Stockholm on 4 September 2014 next to Fredrik Reinfeldt, and literally invited all refugees to Sweden. I choked when I heard it. He urged refugees to come to Sweden, and he did this while dropping bombs on 7 countries, gradually more every year until 2017, when Obama dropped 43.938 bombs, that is a bomb every twelve minutes a whole year long. Having one president cause a crisis, and the next criticizes us for how we handle the crisis. I don't like that.

Why are we inviting Trump to hold speeches in Davos? He is dishonored and shown to be a rapists by the court and a persistent fraudster. Why do we let him hold speeches?

Trump wants you to define yourself as the result of what the US has let you be. Switzerland is what it is just because the US let it be that. Across Europe, we have already seen US culture push local film and music aside. We got Black Friday and Halloween. The US obesity lifestyle has been exported to large parts of the world. Now, Mr. Trump tells us that we are who we are only because the US lets us be it, but most importantly, we need to thank Mr Trump.

Thursday 22 January

Today it is 1°C. Traffic is rolling on well, and I’m thinking of the state of the world. I feel empty.

I cannot say that my output at work was excellent today. I moved the project forward, which is good!

Now, it’s evening, and I’m on my way home.

Friday 23 January

Today I had a day off while DW worked from home. I plastered the ceiling in the restroom of the barn. I listened to Mark Carney's speech at Davos. I noticed glitches in the recording, and all the recordings I could find had the same glitch. Here is the text written out completely, without a glitch. The speech is really good. It appeals to me personally as a Swede living abroad in the European Union. Mark wants to create all sorts of new deals between Canada, the EU, and other countries. Go for it, Carney. Buy those JAS 39 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden!

Mark Carney mentioned Finland's President Alexander Stubb. Conveniently, YouTube suggested that I watch an interview with President Stubb. It was a nice interview in which, among other things, he explained several ways Putin has already lost the war in Ukraine. The Russian economy is in such bad shape that we need to have faith in the peace process.

I plastered the restroom ceiling today. It is a small surface, but that does not make it any easier. Plastering the restroom means that I first had to cover the bowl, sink, and radiator with plastic so I don't have to clean them afterward of gypsum debris. Then I mixed a bucket of two kilograms of MP75. I used almost all of it in the ceiling. While working on the ceiling, I was thinking of a colleague I worked with a long time ago. He was two meters tall and two meters wide. Not really, but he was massive. He came from Denmark. He taught me to curse in Danish because he did that a lot. I became good at it; I can still curse convincingly in Danish. He still lives and works in the Netherlands, but we have not spoken for many years. I'd like to know what he would have said about Greenland's situation. I am sure I would hear another curse from him.

With the restroom ceiling plastered, I went on to cover the barn floor with thin plastic. DW will start painting the ceiling tomorrow, so we need to protect the floor. I had the lawn mower and all other things arranged along the east wall of the hall. I hoped to move it over to the west side when the time was right.

In the evening, we had pizza, and we watched an episode of Money for Nothing. It is a British show about picking up garbage from the recycling center. That is then transformed into fashionable objects and sold. It is a nice program available on Banijay Deals' YouTube channel.

Saturday 24 January

Today we started painting the barn's ceiling. DW started applying primer to the part below the plastic. I spread out more plastic to cover the rest of the large hall of the barn. I had thought it would be easy to apply the plastic, but it took longer than expected. DW primed as far as she could come without dripping on our things. She suggested putting all the stuff in a lane a bit from the west wall and covering it all. That way, it would be possible to paint the ceiling above the things in one go. Another benefit would be that I could start plastering the walls afterwards.

We came short of one sheet of plastic. They are 65 eurocents per sheet and 4 by 5 meters. How is it possible to make them so cheaply? Here is a YouTube video from Hank Green explaining that plastic, especially in the US, is a byproduct of extracting energy. That is why it is "artificially" cheap, especially since the companies producing this stuff do not need to pay any charge for destroying the earth.

This week, there has been no end to insults from the US. Mr Trump said in an interview that all other Nato countries kept their soldiers out of the front line. This upset Danes and people in the UK, and I even heard Swedish parents of dead soldiers complain on Swedish radio. On Saturday evening, Mr. Trump backed out the usual way, claiming that the British soldiers were especially good. The rest of the coalition was not good enough, then?

On Wednesday, I learned that a large Danish pension fund had decided to sell its US Treasury bonds. The US economy is fragile on this point. Also, pension funds in Sweden began to pull back their US Treasury holdings in 2025, and Germany and Italy are considering withdrawing their gold stored in the U.S as well.

My first reaction this week was that we should all back out of U.S. Treasury bonds to punish Mr. Trump, but that is not a clever idea. The economies of many countries depend on the dollar's health. We could do it the way Trump always does it. We would publicly announce our withdrawal from the U.S. Treasury bond market and state that it is due to Donald J. Trump's unstable policies and tariffs. It would look like how the pension fund in Denmark did it on Wednesday. With this strategy, it is important to do so boldly and publicly, just as Mr. Trump does.

This needs to be done well in advance of the US midterm elections. Mortgages will rise, groceries will be more expensive, etc. The idea is that Mr. Trump then loses the majority of the midterm election, and that is when we all chicken out and start buying bonds again. The US can always print more money, so the US can always recover from a crisis like this, unlike the rest of the world. It is brilliant! It is just a little rap on the knuckles right over the bruised hands of Mr Trump. The beautiful thing is that the world can do this over and over again. It will work every time. Everything can be weaponised, Trump taught us that.

Sunday 25 January

Today we both went to the barn. DW painted the ceiling, and I plastered two walls of the restroom. While working, we listened to Swedish folk music.

When DW opened the paint box, we found they had used newspaper as packaging material. The papers came from a village up north. All that paper was convenient because I used it to cover the appliances in the utility corner. All powerswitches also got newspapers to cover them.

DW opened the bucket and mixed the paint. This was the point of no return. She started painting the ceiling. Because I had plastered the entire surface, she had to paint only one layer.

She finished painting the ceiling much quicker than I did, plastering two walls of the restroom. She will probably have some muscle aches tomorrow.

DW also finished a batch of yarns today! These are from Hannah's back fur from 2024. It is 1400 meters of yarn. Home-made yarn.

This week, I struggled with writing the blog. At first, I got ahead of myself, insulting Mr. Trump in every creative way I could imagine. I later removed that and made the blog feel more matter-of-fact. This week is special; it will be remembered. Everything around Trump follows this pattern of spectacles to get under your skin. Right now, he is doing everything he can to avoid the Jeffrey Epstein case. There is a new scandal every day; it never ends. It never ends. It goes on and on. I hate it.

We moved the barn project forward! That is great! I wrote 2396 words. Welcome back next week!