Finished cleaning the sea container Sunday, 16-Nov-25 19:36:25 CET

Sunday, 23-Nov-25 21:07:07 CET

Sea container sold

This week, the sea container was sold.

Monday 17 November

Today, the forecast called for partly sunny weather. That sounded like a good idea when I read it because it was raining heavily in the morning. The municipality will rearrange the larger road running through this area, and this morning I witnessed a traffic jam for the first time. It was a non-issue because both DW and I worked from home. It is always better to see traffic jams from a distance than to be part of them. There was no epic sunrise this morning. The sun snuck up behind a dark cloud. When the rain was gone, it was light.

Every time a Swede sees the sun appear behind a cloud, they shout "Solen," but apparently, this is not a documented tradition. That is a pity. Let us now document this tradition, because it is what I have been doing my whole life, and I know plenty of Swedes who do it. Is that also not documented?

One of the feeds on my phone said: "Jens, follow this billionaire:

We got a sudden hailstorm. The stones were five millimeters across. It came suddenly and left just as abruptly. The four members of the chicken group were roaming our property, trying to hide, but it was not easy because they are neither bright nor clever. The sheep had it fine under their rain roof. I tried to take a photo of the situation, but it didn't work out. Merida inspected my cents when I came back to my chair.

DW and I had a lunch walk. This is the first lunch walk in a long time. On the way, we came across the four chickens. This time, they were roaming around their home base at Alja and Sam.

In the afternoon, we had a visit from the presumptive buyer of the sea container. He brought with him a drone to take pictures of the situation around the sea container.

In the evening, I worked on the communication between the page with the signup form and the server. From the form to the server, all is fine. Back from the server to the webpage, something goes wrong.

This evening I learned that my mobile phone is out of date.

Tuesday 18 November

Today, DW had to be in the office really early. It rained, and in the afternoon, it would rain again. No good moment to bike to work. I came to the office at 7:45 AM. The office filled up slowly, we had lunch, and then it slowly emptied. At 6:15 PM, I left the office, went to the train station, and picked up DW.

The presumptive buyer of the sea container transferred the money today. That makes him a genuine buyer. It is unclear when the sea container will be picked up. I will start moving the rack with stuff and cut down the grapevine.

Wednesday 19 November

It rained today. I worked from home in the morning. It was challenging, but I almost finished the current project. It was too early to proclaim I was finished. I might do that tomorrow. After work, I did not feel well. It was like I was in a brain fog. I rested, and the rain fell outside. I tried to program the lyrics editor, but it did not work. I need to find out how to send JSON from the server to the client.

DW received a coronavirus vaccine. I brought her to the location. After that, I brought her to the food coop. While she helped distribute vegetables, I tried using the smoke machine in our house to see if the fire alarm would trigger. It was.

In the evening, I continued resting.

Thursday 20 November

Good morning. I am on my way to work by car. It is 1 1/2°C. I could go by bike, but since it's so cold, I decided to drive. The times I have fallen off the bike were under bridges. It appears that there are places where it is easier to slip under cold conditions.

It was at noon yesterday that I said to myself, "brain fog." I have no idea if it is something real, and I have no idea if I have anything to do with it. The fog stayed with me.

Now I'm stuck in a traffic jam. I have the camera with me, because I hope to take some interesting pictures today. There was a mobile garage repairing a truck. That was interesting!

So I had a lot of rest yesterday. On top of that, we went to bed early. There was a risk I would wake up early in the morning, but that did not happen. Merida came to lie next to me, purring loudly. I like that.

Next to me in the traffic jam, there is a Volkswagen with both the front and rear logos illuminated. It is the first time I have seen that in an ID 7 car.

This morning, I did not feel healed from my brain fog, and DW asked me if I should call in sick. I said I will pretend I'm all fine, and if I'm feeling like it, I will tell my boss I'm not well and go home. Yesterday I was so close to releasing the new version of my software, and I really want to do that properly, hopefully today.

This was a challenging day. I could show my manager a prototype, but it had a bug. My brain felt mushy for most of the day. I was not able to release the new version of the software.

Friday 21 November

This morning, when I woke up, I had the feeling that I was out of the brain fog stage. The head still felt a bit wobbly, but I was fine on the inside. I had a day off, and the weather forecast called for lots of sun today. The temperature was minus two degrees Celsius.

I made breakfast while it was still dark. DW was working from home today. I made a smoothie with banana, apple, and pear, and with gooseberry and red currant berries. To make the smoothie more flowing, I used orange juice.

The reason I knew that the brain fog was flushed is because my inner voice reactivated the blog stories. One of my worst fears is to burn out. Getting a self-induced burnout is the most tragic condition since you are yourself responsible for your condition. On the other hand, most of the time, you are responsible for your own condition. I do wonder if brain fog is some pre-stage of burnout. I have no idea.

My main goal for today was to make the sea container ready for pickup. For that, I had to cut the grapevine loose from the container. The temperature was freezing, so I did not want to climb around on the roof of the sea container, but I allowed myself to lean a ladder against the edge. That was sufficient.

But first, I had decided to start giving the sheep hay to eat and to block access to the north-west side of the property outside the dyke.

Then I started removing the stack of poles we kept next to the container. I moved them behind the main house. That worked well until I got muscle strain in my right side as well as pain in my right hand. What is it with me? Is my health crumbling before I get to enjoy the barn fully? I went inside to rest until it was lunchtime. DW came downstairs to make herself sandwiches. I made sandwiches for myself.

On the north side of the house, birds gathered in the sea thorn bushes to enjoy the berries.

 

I was happy that the stack of poles and Crab42 scaffold parts were removed. It was still sunny in the afternoon when I finished that work. I had walked 11 thousand steps, and I had pain in my right hip joint. I thought I had one hip, but perhaps in English I got two hips? In Swedish, the whole bone structure with the two hip joints is called one "Höft". No worries, I'll handle this.

In the evening, I worked on the signup functionality of lyrics-editor, and I had an eureka moment!

You may recall that the client could send JSON to the server, but the server could not return JSON to the client. It turned out to be incorrect. The issue was that the client had already converted the response to JSON, so I did not have to convert it. Converting something that was already converted threw an error, but it was all unnecessary; I could use the response as-is. One is never too old to learn new things.

At half past four in the night, I could not sleep. I stood up, went downstairs, and started blogging. I had a dream that I had a sort of factory producing things, and it went as easily to produce things as it does to write a SQL query. The issue was that garbage was generated when the query was wrong, and I had nowhere to put it. I became anxious trying new queries. It was just a dream.

Saturday 22 November

Today we brought garbage to the recycling center. It was sunny. I continued working on removing the roof tiles in front of the sea container. I got a long way, but I will need to continue working on these tomorrow.

DW had a night out with her friends, but I brought her to the train station.

Tonight, COP30 ended in Brazil. The result was a disappointment for some. If you had hoped that COP30 would save the world from disasters, you had probably hoped for more. The gathering was neither a step forward nor a step backward. In the COP world, that is a huge success. What I don't understand is that some don't get that the politicians you elected will do the things they were elected to do, also during COP30. If you are not a fan of democracy, you might think that there is no correlation between what large portions of the population are thinking and that they, the people, have no influence on politics. I have a hunch about what will happen to the climate, and I will make my argument through the lens of Brexit.

The European Union. Is it good or bad? You might say it is bad because it costs 350 million pounds sterling per week; for some, that was an undisputed fact. It was the definition of reality. Fast forward, and now you live in a country that left the European Union, and it turns out that the claim that the European Union costs 350 million pounds a week was a lie. Well then, it is too late for the country that left the Union, but everybody else still in the Union, pretty darn well take a close look at how well the leaving country is faring. It has not been an easy ride for Great Britain. Every exit advocate in the 27 remaining countries suddenly shut up in unison when it became clear that the European Union is a really good place to be.

So, back to the climate. Right now, the oil and gas industry has global momentum and is shaping reality. Everyone short of the royal family bet on oil and gas. It is not correct, but it is what it is. Come to think of it, even the royal family is betting on oil and gas. There is no case study like Brexit showing how bad it can get. A couple of flash floods, forest fires, and cholera epidemics or famine won't impress. What we need is a nation that goes under, ceases to exist, and it is not going to be Belize. No one cares enough about Belize. What the world needs is to see that the Netherlands cease to exist. From that point on, the COP meeting will have another weight. When will this happen, Jens? Do you want the answers in decades, years, months, days, or hours? No, I have no idea. Actually, it does not matter. What we need to stipulate is "Will it happen" or "Will it not happen," and the answer is the latter. Even if we stop emitting CO₂ today, it will happen. The Netherlands will cease to exist. That is the moment when climate change is proven.

Suppose the Netherlands will cease to exist in about two or three hundred years. Then that is nothing to be worried about, right? Well, if you want to preserve, for example, the Rijksmuseum or a couple of palaces, you will need a couple of hundred years to dismantle the buildings, move them to higher ground, and rebuild them again. Just saying. It will not be sufficient to be eight meters higher. You will probably need to raise the Netherlands' cultural heritage by more than 20 meters above the current sea level to make it future-proof.

If you are not worried about preserving your own culture, I am not here to help you.

Today, while moving tiles, I listened to the Ezra Klein show. He had an interview with Fareed Zakaria, who said nice things about democracies in northern Europe. Lovely. I think Ezra has a soothing voice that is nice to listen to when doing long, tedious tasks like moving roof tiles from one point to another, for the fifth time.

This evening I programmed the lyrics editor! It went really well. The service receives a message from the client. If the user is not already in the database, a record is added. If the user was in the database, I could switch to password recovery, but that is for later. I started introducing the field code name. This is so that I can address people in an email. The codename also helps people verify that the email is really from lyrics-editor.com; if they don't recognize it, something is wrong.

I switched from my SQLI to DBH because it features SQL injection protection. Have also done other things this evening, such as filling the dishwasher and eating, and all these things I had to do alone because DW is out having fun with her friends. It is cold tonight. We got news updates on all the children and husbands of the friends. They got to hear the latest news on our side. They could just read the blog, but I am sure they are not aware of that.

I am almost at the train station now to pick up DW. I hope she had a lovely time. Indeed, they had a lovely time. First, they had dinner at an Italian restaurant. Then they had a city guide that showed Utrecht from its most interesting and beautiful sides. Some spectacles had broken lamps, but the guide had a lamp with him, so he could shine light himself.

Sunday 23 November

When I woke up this morning, I noticed it had snowed overnight!

I didn't expect the snow to last long, so I took photos of our garden while it was snowing.

The first task for today was to remove the remaining roof tiles lying in front of the sea container. That was perhaps not the most ambitious task because much of it was already done. DW and I worked on this together. That was nice! It is challenging to imagine how it will look without the sea container. It has been such a permanent part of our lives here.

The next task for the day was more ambitious. We had decided to go to IKEA to get more pieces for the bed puzzle we started. We already ordered a Murphy bed, and it will be delivered in December. Inside the bed, there has to be a mattress and stuff. We want the mattress to meet DD's specifications so she will be willing to come to us and stay here from time to time. The whole story about selling the previous bed was part of this process. So today we decided to go to IKEA. It turns out that we live 23 minutes away from two IKEAs. We decided on the more posh of these two.

It has been years since we went to IKEA. I was curious about how I would experience the day. I could not walk around blogging out loud; that had been special. If I had done that, I would have captured many more feelings, but that is how it is.

At the department of beds, I lay down on the mattress that DD wanted. It was softer than our regular mattress. In the ceiling, a lamp was hanging with motivational texts. There was corrugated iron from the ceiling, ducts for electricity. Perhaps the ceiling at IKEA is more intriguing than the furniture? Just saying.

You could install an app on the phone to scan the items yourself at checkout. DW volunteered to install the app on her phone. It was extra enjoyable to see how she signed up for this new service. This app asked for 20 or 30 things from DW before it allowed the signup to take place. This failed two times in a row. The third time it succeeded.

If I had designed this app and could look over DW's shoulder, I would have been appalled by how badly it worked. Now I am aiming for a much simpler approach, but anyway.

After a while, DW got the app working, and we could start scanning products. No way. EAN codes were missing. We had to enter eight-digit numbers to make it work. If I had designed this system, I would have been appalled by how badly it worked.

It was time to check out the restroom. I had a Tork paper towel dispenser that wouldn't dispense paper as easily. It feels like pulling paper out of the other guests' butts when operating the paper dispenser. If I had designed this paper dispenser, I would have been appalled by how badly it worked.

I wanted to wash my hands, and there were these new Dyson cranes at the sink. I put fluffy foam soap in my hand and wanted to get some water, but it didn't work out. Instead, I activated the hand dryer, which sprayed foam onto me. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had a million little white spots all over me. I had been appalled by how badly this worked.

We chose the bed stuff and got a new crane for our kitchen with an extendable arm. In retracted form, it looked normal. I was happy about that.

We had lunch at IKEA. I opted for a vegetarian hamburger, but it was out of stock. Instead, we had vegetarian meatballs with lingonberry jam and green peas.

The lunch was fine; it tasted as it should. We had posh, behaving people around us in the restaurant. It was a lovely experience.

The view from the restaurant's window was fine. The snow was gone by now.

We collected our things and checked out of the warehouse. It was cold outside. The checkout process was swift. It was the quickest IKEA checkout I've ever experienced.

We took our goods to the car on the ground floor, and they all fit as we had measured beforehand. This was great.

Then we went to a second-hand shop near IKEA. It did not have as much as we were looking for, but I found a 35-millimeter film scanner. It was 6 euros, so that was fine. Then, but only then, it was time to drive home. It was a 23-minute drive, but it felt like 23 hours. The journey started at 4 degrees Celsius, and it was dry.

For every kilometer, it got colder, and more precipitation fell. DW was pretty much terrified of this situation. You get a long way by car, driving 23 minutes. Either that, or you get stuck 23 minutes away in a bad situation, with no food, no water, and it is getting colder and colder. At first, it was water falling, then grainy splashes, then real flakes. Huge napkin-sized flakes. That is what the Dutch call significant snowflakes. The Swedes call them Sapmi gloves. Whatever you call it, it fell from the sky, and it promised this could be a long day. I drove slower and slower to accommodate the insignificant view. We arrived at home 23 minutes later and left the goods in the car while we rested. This had been a tiring afternoon.

Now it is evening; I tried the film scanner, and it works. The IKEA things are lying in a heap in the hallway.

The main achievement this week was the sale of the sea container. We cleared the area in front of the container so it is ready to be picked up. I wrote 3597 words this week. That is much more than I expected. Welcome back next week!