Started plastering the walls Monday, 02-Feb-26 20:40:16 CET

Sunday, 08-Feb-26 22:09:45 CET

Finished plastered all walls of the barn

This week I finished plastering all the walls of the barn. We also fetched a Chippendale cupboard with a mystery.

Monday 2 February

Today I worked from home, and DW went to the office. I had a productive day.

Merida came to sleep next to me for the first time in perhaps half a year. I'm not sure why I suddenly earned so much love. It was full-on affection, kneading my side, purring loudly for hours.

After work, I logged out and changed into my plaster gear. I mixed a 4 Kg bucket of MP 75.

When DW came home, I said to her, "I need a little extra time to finish the bucket, so I wouldn't mind if you did some slow cooking." This worked perfectly. I finished the 4K bucket just about when the dinner was ready. DW made a platter of grilled vegetables.

In the evening, I finished last week's blog. I got it uploaded!

Tuesday 3 February

This night, Merida came to sleep next to me again. Not for a little while, but a large part of the night. It is puzzling what changed her.

Today, DW worked from home, and I went to the office.

It is now evening, and I'm on my way home. The speedometer kilometre counter is standing at 188,324 kilometres, which means I'm closing in on a number with 5 times 8 in a row, and I'm wondering if I will remember to stop, perhaps at the right moment, and take a photo, which would be nice.

It was a productive day today. I noticed that sometimes, when I'm really focused, I clench my jaw. That's annoying. I am enjoying the work tremendously and am not stressed at all, but lately I have been clenching my jaw. It is annoying.

Sometimes I wish I had gloves with the batteries and built-in heating elements. I don't know if that's a thing? Another thing I've been thinking about is better lavalier microphones.

In the evening, I ordered a new lavalier microphone. This new microphone is 10 times as expensive as the one I currently have. The new microphone has many more features. I do hope it has the sound quality of a field recorder.

Wednesday 4 February

This was the third night in a row that Merida came to cuddle up next to me.

This morning, I drove DW to the train station early. She's going to a security conference today, and she needs to be there on time. It's a long commute, so I brought her to the train station.

I worked from home in the morning. After lunch, I went to the barn and finished plastering the south wall.

The microphone arrived in the afternoon. I tried it! It had better sound quality than my old lavalier microphone. I recorded a video about plastering. It is an experiment. After editing, I got the video down to 37 minutes.

Thursday 5 February

Good morning. It is Thursday, and I'm driving to work. DW is working from home today. It is her birthday, and she is 62 years old today. We are not going to celebrate it in any fancy fashion. It is minus 1°C today, and it is totally overcast.

I'm using the Holly Land microphone to dictate into Word. Somehow, I have the feeling it is less glitchy.

I recorded a video myself yesterday using the microphone, so now I will need to sit down and edit it. It was just a spontaneous video with pauses in talking and everything, but I will see what I can do with it. I'm curious. If I'm going to make a proper video in the future, I will first need to make a proper plan of what I'm going to say. For that, I need an idea, but I don't have one right now. I noticed that the lamps are flickering in the video recording, so I will need to look into how that is working. Perhaps I can change the recording's frame rate, but I'm not sure. My Nikon camera has several frame rate options, but I don't know if the phone has them; we have to look into that.

Today I had a really productive day. At some point, I thought I would be able to release this version, but I did some crude testing, and there are improvements needed in the usability. But it's definitely near release. I will work on that on Monday.

I got a comment at work that last week's blog wasn't that long! I do recognise that that's true. There has been a lot of plastering, and I was tired, so it is correct. For a good blog, there needs to be material, and if the only thing I'm doing is plastering, there isn't so much to write about, unfortunately. But now I arrived at the grocery store to buy stuff for a simple birthday meal for DW.

Friday 6 February

Last night, Merida came to sleep next to me. She is a really hot lady. Literally.

I'm trying out the new microphone on the laptop. Previously, the problem I had was that dictation stopped after a while. So I am standing there, busy dictating, when suddenly the words stop appearing, which is annoying. If the error has to do with that, making pauses is just a horrible situation, because I always pause. But if it were the sound card, it might work with the new microphone, since I've already connected the new sound card to the laptop.

When I'm working in the barn, it would be nice to be able to dictate directly to the laptop rather than the phone. While saying this, I noticed Word already disengaged dictation once.

So now I can talk to the system, and it can write what I'm saying, and that's really nice. Suppose I'm working with plaster and have my hands dirty; then I can still talk and write in the document. The thing is, when the hands are really dirty, it's super annoying when the dictation function turns off mid-sentence, and that's what happened to me.

I found online that you could increase the microphone gain to prevent the dictation from disengaging automatically. I get the impression there is some intelligent functionality that detects when you're silent and then turns off dictation. Now I'm standing next to the fridge and have connected both microphones, so some of the fridge's sounds might be picked up. If this is the case, then I understand that microphones with aggressive noise cancellation will not work well with Microsoft Word dictation because they would try to make everything silent when there is no talking.

While looking into the settings, I found a summary of dictation commands you can use. I know I've seen those summaries before, but there were many commands I wasn't aware of. So then I got the idea that it would be nice to make a paper or a table I could print out and keep at hand to see if there are commands that could help me do something. And there began a chain of events typical of how technology is these days. It was a disappointment. Mind you, the task for today is to plaster in the barn, not to learn new dictation commands; that is procrastination. But there we are, I got this idea that I should arrange the commands in such a way that I could have them on a piece of paper in a nice compact layout. So I began copying the information from the Microsoft website. Something like 15 minutes into that work, I had this feeling that I shouldn't stop, go out to the barn, and continue plastering. I could speed up the process by letting an AI bot format the tables for me. That worked brilliantly! Now the only problem was to get the properly laid-out tables from AI into Word. I got the download link, but it didn't work, so here I am, feeling so close and yet so far from perfection. It's annoying to me. And I still don't know if I'm going to get used to that dictation function, which spontaneously disengages.

Is it working? I think it's stressful to keep talking continuously. When I'm talking to someone, I want to be able to sit in silence for more than 20 seconds to think about what I want to say next. I find it so frustrating that Word for desktop turns off dictation after 20 seconds of silence.

While I am standing here plastering, I am thinking that plastering is a blue-collar job. You cannot ask Chat GPT to plaster your barn; that will not happen. It feels reassuring to be able to plaster, but it is hard work, so it would not be sustainable for me to do it day in, day out. I usually develop a stiff neck and sore feet from plastering.

All right. I had a lunch break, and after lunch, DW and I took a walk for 1422 steps.

After the walk, I finished the second section of the east wall. While working on that, I noticed I would soon run out of MP-75, so I went to the hardware store to get a new bag before they closed for the weekend.

When I came home, DW and I had a cup of tea and another piece of the cake I bought for her birthday.

After the tea, I started working on the third section on the east wall.

It will be great when this barn is finished. I want to do great things here. At first, I mostly had dreams of woodworking and welding. I envisioned big machines and fancy things, but as time went by, I figured there were many ways to do things with fewer big tools. I will keep this room multi-functional, and in that scenario, it is better to have compact tools I can tuck away if necessary.

For example, I could buy a table saw, but I can do reasonably well with a hand saw as well.

I finished the east wall at 7:20 PM!

Saturday 7 February

Can you imagine that Merida came to lie tucked up next to me this night as well?

Today we went to PIL's old house. It was misty in the morning. Halfway through, the mist was gone, and it was a sunny, beautiful morning, but when we came nearer to the coast, the mist got thicker.

Behind the car was the large trailer. The mission for the day was to pick up shelves and a cupboard. The shelves were Lundia shelves. It was 4 narrow Lundia bookshelves. There was also one deeper lundia bookshelf.

The cupboard is a gift from MIL's parents when she finished law school. This must have happened after the WW2. MIL is not that sentimental about this cupboard; she just went to a furniture store, pointed at the cupboard she wanted, and that was it. She doesn't believe it's particularly old either, but she doesn't know.

DW grew up with the cupboard. It has always been in the house. Now that the old house is being emptied, the question is: who will take the cupboard? We talked about it and decided to take it. It will have a place in the guest room.

The cupboard is a Victorian Chippendale Dutch oak cupboard. We had the cupboard checked for its value, and it's not worth anything. That's kind of surprising, given its magnificent carvings. So how were we going to disassemble this cupboard? Well, you lift the top piece slightly, and the doors fall out because they are anchored to it with a pin. BIL was adamant and said no, there are hinges. There were no hinges. So we did, as I had said: I lifted the top piece just slightly, and the door fell out, and DW could take care of the door. Then the same for the next door.

Then the toppiece was ready to be removed. The top piece also holds the sides and backplate of the cupboard together.

Now what was left was a chest of drawers. We removed the drawers, and the empty chest could be loaded onto the trailer. The different pieces then had to be laid onto the trailer so they could all be transported to our house.

Fastening things to a trailer is my speciality. I had eleven ratchet straps to help me. Since I am the driver, I need to make sure the load is secured, and I take it seriously. People around me have given up on trying to be helpful, fastening things to a trailer. They leave it to me. There is a need to understand how things react when exposed to forces. Loading a trailer with furniture is like building a temporary house and leaving it exposed to constant earthquakes. I got it all fastened neatly. Where edges needed protection from the ratchet straps, I inserted cardboard.

It was nice weather, sunny and not much wind. It was lovely.

When the trailer was packed, we drove to the PIL's. They love to get visits from as many people as possible. In particular, MIL has a strong hunger for social contact. FIL cannot be bothered by people. People are talking and asking questions. That is annoying. That said, he likes it when his wife is in a good mood, so he likes it when we come. MIL had an issue with her wisdom tooth. It had a hole. She was worried about this issue. It is something to be worried about at 97 years old. She was very pleased that her beloved cupboard had got a good spot.

Then we drove home. When the afternoon sun had set, we were still driving. When we came home with the trailer, it was dark.

We unloaded the trailer and placed the cupboard parts in the hallway and the studio. The things in the car had to wait until tomorrow.

The top piece was lying on the floor in the hallway. I had a look at it and discovered letters. It was not easy to make up what kind of letters they were. After puzzling, I figured the letters must be Cyrillic letters. The reverse N was used. There was something that looked like a b, but why use a lowercase b in all the uppercase?

Upon further examination, I noticed the top piece was full of letters. The letters were embossed, as if someone had glued transparent letter cutouts onto the wood and then lacquered them. There were letters of various sizes. I found another place with the reverse N. It is like jibberish. АЕІЊУСПЦИC. I have problems deciphering letters 3 and 4. It could be an H followed by a b as well. Hard to say. After the first C comes the second problem area. There are four vertical stems, which is clear. The last stem looks like an upside-down T. There is another place on the top piece with a reverse N as well. At one place I can see 1820.

Sunday 8 February

DW is not happy that Merida is tucked up against me, but I am all fine with it. I love it. It is a little warm, I can admit.

Today we had things to finish from yesterday. We parked the trailer, and then DW emptied the car of the things we brought yesterday.

I went to the barn and plastered the north wall, the wall with the switchboard, and the boiler. Because of the appliances screwed onto the wall, I decided to leave a distance between the appliances and the plaster. I feathered the edges towards the appliances. It will look magnificent when it is painted.

The next two walls were much easier to plaster. With that, all the walls in the barn are plastered. It does not mean I am finished plastering. I still have window casings to plaster, but that is for next week!

This week I wrote 2690 words. I plastered the east wall of the barn. I got the new microphone. It was a great week!