Finished the roof of the wood-store house Sunday, 29-Mar-26 21:56:51 CEST

Sunday, 05-Apr-26 21:08:15 CEST

Garden preparations

This week, we started tending seeds and preparing beds for sowing and planting. I had my email server issue fixed!

Monday 30 March

Today, it was mostly sunny. There was some rain falling, but that was just in short bursts.

I was able to work in a concentrated way, which was really great. I received some questions about the reporting module's UI. With minor modifications, the UI could be easier to understand.

DW went to the office. Merida was sweet today. I worked from home.

After work, I went out to the barn's workshop and started working on the tending station. We received a table from the PILs, which I initially had deemed unnecessary. Now it will be used to tend the seeds. At first, I thought I just put plastic on the table and called it a day.

Then I decided to frame the edge of the table. This way, I can be more sure that any spilled water stays on the table.

With the frame in place, I put the plastic over the frame. That looks good! It actually looks a little like a pool table.

Then I collected the plastic pots we had collected over the years. Every time we bought a plant, we saved the cup the plant came in. There is a fortune of plants here. There must have been many failed plant projects, given how many cups we collected over the years.

Tuesday 31 March

After making breakfast, I went out to feed the sheep. That was when I discovered a little cat sleeping in the temporary hay shed.

The cat got scared and ran away.

The cat was limping on one of its back legs.

The temperature is 6°C, and there are scattered clouds. I was almost biking to work without my lunch. I had to go back in and make my sandwiches, and then I was about to leave again. Then it occurs to me that the bike still had a pending grease round. I got the chain greased. I also removed the saddle pin and filled the tube with WD-40 to stop the ticking sound. A dreadful ticking sound. Luckily, this trick seems to be working quite well!

When I came this far into my bike tour to work, I had an accident. The phone fell from the bike holder and hit the lower right corner. The rubber cover took the shock well, and I'm happy about that. It is a combination of a hard shell and rubber. While the phone tumbled around in the mud, it lost the microphone communication pod I had in the USB-C slot. Well, I didn't notice that, so I biked away. I got annoyed with MS Word when the dictation stopped working, and that was when I realized I had lost the Hollyland communication plug. So I turned back to search for the communication thingy. Luckily, I had been standing, looking at the road, contemplating why this happened here, so I had an inner picture of where I stood when it happened, and sure enough, I could find the little thing. Then I was anxious that the Hollyland USB-C plug had actually absorbed the shock when the phone hit the ground, but after wiping it off with my napkin, I inserted it again into the phone, and it worked like a charm.

Now, obviously, comes the question: how could this happen? It has to do with the cover. The cover is a snug fit and made of a combination of hard plastic and rubber, so theoretically it should be fine. However, since I insisted on keeping my driving license in the cover, it no longer fits snugly. I'm also keeping a bank note in that cover for the eventuality that someone is selling something I want but doesn't have an electronic NFC payment system. All that extra stuff caused the bike holder's claw to miss the phone's grip, so it got loose on bumpy roads. I will need to look into this and reevaluate if I should really have the driver's license in the cover.

Oh, I was in a pretty good mood. I started biking, then I had a phone accident, and it wasn't that funny anymore.

Merida slept next to me last night, purring loudly. Although I love it, it is not good for my sleep.

I'm on my way home. It is sunny, but the air is a little chilly. At the end of the working day, I was feeling a bit funny. I don't mean that in a positive way.

It was a productive day. The business development manager used the reporting module to determine additional rollouts of the product offering. It was great to see him understand the reporting module and that it worked as intended. He found an inconsistency that might be a bug; I will look into it.

We started talking about an Easter lunch at work. The thing was, it was bring-your-own-lunch. I don't feel like cooking. I do think I want to make cinnamon rolls, so I asked if that was OK. I've got everybody enthusiastic!

It's just great to bike. It is peaceful here. Got the wind in the back. I took a photo of the road near the High-Farting canal. The golden hour light is streaking through the fresh grass. It is lovely.

During the holidays, I made a couple of attempts to get the mail server to accept emails from several domains. I was not able to work on that in a concentrated way, so tonight I will make a new attempt.

Yesterday I saw zucchinis and cucumbers of two sorts. Reading the text on the seed packages, it appears I am slightly ahead of schedule on this project. I do think the temperature in the barn is just perfect, so I am hopeful about a good result. There is preparation work to be done in the garden as well, so I think I will work on that, and perhaps next week I will sow a new batch of seeds. The previous season, we were on the late side, but it still worked out well. Pre-seeding in the house is not a good idea because it is too warm. The seedlings grow too quickly; they get weak, and you don't want that.

In the evening, I worked on the email server and got it working! This is so exciting. It was more than a year ago that the old server stopped working. I have been mourning this loss since then. For long stretches, I have not worked on the issue, believing it would not be so bad. It was bad. I realized a couple of weeks ago that I had signed up for services I no longer have access to because I cannot log in anymore, and I cannot reset the logins either. Many services offer no option to change the email address. Especially not when you lost access to the original email. Usually, you have to call them, and you know how much customer service likes it when people call. Over the phone, you need to convey your situation; they have to make sure that you are you. Then you need to bring over your new email address orally, and that is never a great success. I remember calling my credit card provider. The girl at customer service needed three attempts before she could enter my new email address. Such a waste of time.

I went over the instructions for setting up a multi-domain email server one more time. I had a couple of aha moments. It was absolutely fantastic when I received an email at an email address I had lost one year ago! It was magical, it was wonderful, and I was thrilled. This does not mean that I got all lost emails back up and running. I still have some configurations to do. I will also need to create an account for DW and set up aliases for those old, lost email addresses.

There are actually a couple of really big improvements I have made. These issues have been nagging me for a long time.

1. The ticking sound of the bike is fixed.
2. I found a backup of the music files from the lost SD card.
3. I restored the failing email server that I had lost one year ago.
4. The roof of the wood-store house is repaired.

It feels great! I could now practice more on walking like a proud person.

Now that the email problem has been solved, I feel I can return to the lyrics editor functionality.

Wednesday 1 April

It is such nice weather! 15°C, sunny and not much wind. In the morning, I worked from home. DW had a day off.

I haven't told much about the home battery story. This story started before the holidays on 6 March when a salesperson approached me while I was cleaning the car. He came from a company that sells home battery solutions, and we agreed to meet with them after the holidays.

During our holiday, it has become clear that oil markets will be more volatile. The United States has lost control of the situation in the Middle East. Trump started a fire he can't put out himself. Iran has come out of this so far surprisingly strong, holding the world economy hostage. The United States cannot pull out, cannot stay, and cannot act professionally. So I heard now they are sending ground troops, too few, too late. They are making a sticky mess of this situation. No one knows how long this will last. The Iraq war lasted for something like 11 years; it was a much smaller country. A less organized government. It doesn't look like this war will be any shorter than the Iraq war. I hope I am wrong.

So what does this have to do with the home battery? Well, we need to figure out how to use our money responsibly. It looks like petrol prices could double. In that situation, an electric car is a better decision.

So I sent an email to the company saying we didn't need the appointment, and I expected to receive an answer from Eco Partners: "That's too bad, have a nice day," but I didn't get anything like that. So today, at the time the appointment was supposed to happen, I thought someone would show up anyway and try to convince us to change our minds. That did not happen either; in fact, nothing happened. That makes me believe that Eco Partners are not that reliable after all.

So then I went out in the garden to weed. When doing that, I realized I had to buy more sand because the clay is very sticky. Sticky clay can make it harder to grow vegetables in some cases.

I went to the hardware store and noted that the sandbags were conveniently placed in the parking lot. I went to the cash register and bought 20 bags. That was just a random number, really. I did not realize that it would be 500 kg of sand. When I came to bag number 13, I decided it was about time to stop filling the cars with sandbags. I went back into the shop, and it was OK to come back another time to pick up the remaining 7 bags.

I put 3 bags in the front seat, 6 in the back seat, and 4 in the trunk so the weight would be evenly distributed across the car's suspension.

Then I went back and loaded the remaining 7 bags in the car. It was a bit of a strain on the lower back to move around 25 kg sandbags, but I was still standing and smiling.

I do think it is strange for the shop to keep the bags in the parking lot. They did not come with me to check how many bags I loaded. I could have loaded twenty each time. Now I am not doing that, I am not that kind of person .

In the evening, I baked the cinnamon rolls. I blogged about the cinnamon roll recipe on 14 March 2023. So I looked it up and found that I had tried it on 11 April 2024, and concluded that it was missing 1 ingredient. I adjusted the recipe according to my suggestions and then started baking.

The recipe improvements worked really well. This time, I got confused about the yeast. Swedish traditional yeast comes in blocks of 50 grams. They call it fresh yeast. There is also something like dry yeast. The Swedish dry yeast package is mapped to the fresh yeast. The package clearly says 14 grams of dry yeast, which is equivalent to 50 grams of fresh yeast. We did not have any packages of dry yeast from the Netherlands, but I thought each package was 20 grams. I was confused. It turned out that the Dutch yeast comes in bags of 7 grams. Exactly right.

But I have to say the buns I made look slightly less fluffy than I am used to. I previously made a scientific discovery: if you cut the rolls into slices about 2 centimeters thick, you get drier cinnamon rolls. When I cut them into about 1-inch (2.54 centimeter) pieces, the buns are moister. So now I'm curious to see how my colleagues receive my cinnamon rolls.

Thursday 2 April

Good morning. It is an overcast morning. It is not going to rain until tonight, so I'm on the bike. I have the cinnamon rolls I baked yesterday evening with me today.

I will instruct my colleagues to give a nearly scientific answer to the question: what do they think of my cinnamon rolls? I have a couple of colleagues who are always happy, but that's not what I am after this time. I want to improve my cinnamon roll skills, and I would appreciate a real critique. I want to reach the cinnamon roll baking bliss point, if that is a thing. We will see how it goes.

Now I am on my way home. It is still chilly, but in a moment I will be warm from biking. My colleagues received the cinnamon rolls well. I want to try the recipe with the Dutch yeast. Hup, one bag!

The other colleagues' food today was truly delicious. They brought quiche, muffins, pasta, and salad. Too much to eat everything.

It was great to meet the colleagues again. I've been away for a couple of weeks. I had a meeting with the business development manager about the current project. I was unsure about his vision on this. The solution at hand felt a little like fitting a square peg in a round hole. We talked through the project, came to a good solution, and I like that very much.

So now I'm biking home, and it is completely overcast and a little chilly, but I've reached a good working temperature, so I am fine.

I might continue to configure the email server tonight. I have the proof-of-concept working. Now I need to migrate 100 email addresses or something like that. I also need to blog. I have been writing the blog, but I haven't edited it, and when too much text piles up, it's not feeling good.

When I came home, I found a letter informing me I had received a speeding ticket while driving in Germany on the way to the ferry. Bummer.

Friday 3 April

Today I had a day off. I worked on the garden, preparing the beds. Over the winter, there has been a lot of weed growth in the beds. The soil has become compact again. It is clay soil, so it is vital to add organic matter and sand to improve it, making it easier to weed and work with.

I took out the tiller machine. It started nicely, and I tilled the beds from A5 to D5. Here, we have not laid any paths with woodchips, so it was just a matter of tilling the whole area. Then I tilled C1 through C4, and likewise with A1 through A4. In all these areas, I spread the 500 kg of sand that I bought last Wednesday. It was all fluffy when I was done. I am not ready just yet. I will put sheep manure and hay rests in these beds as well. Especially the potatoes like that treatment. But that is for tomorrow.

DW worked from home today. For dinner, she made beetroot risotto. I found a beetroot in the garden that had survived the winter. It is special that a beetroot can stay fresh outside in the garden until 3 April. We even had sub-zero temperatures this winter, yet this beetroot was still fine!

Saturday 4 April

Today, it was sunny and beautiful. I moved 5 wheelbarrows of manure from under the rain roof to the garden.

I had prepared a sixth barrow, but I moved it to the compost. I mixed the manure into the soil with the tiller. Then I created paths and beds. Last year, I made five beds here. This year, there are four beds. Now it looks fluffy and even. I tried this last year, and it was wonderful to work with these beds. It is almost impossible to imagine that I put 500 kg of sand in this part of the garden. Although the tiller machine is processing the soil, not all parts are broken apart. There are still chunks of clay left.

At that point, I was rather tired and had a nap. After the nap, the weather was still beautiful, and I set up the pergola for the runner beans and cucumbers. The pergola is made of the scaffold, nothing new here.

The runner beans will form a green arch as an entrance to the garden. I hope it will look beautiful. DW noticed that there were perhaps more runner beans than she had in mind. We will also sow flask pumpkins here. They can also climb if you help them. Not everything needs to be runner beans.

In the evening, I configured the new email server. I was able to log in to several services I had previously lost access to. The app for the solar panel converter, for example. Wonderful! The maintenance panel for my music on streaming platforms. It goes on and on about how much stuff I signed up for.

Usually, I created a unique email address for each service. Then each service got a strong password. This is all stored in my digital vault. If, for example, an email from PayPal that wasn't sent to my PayPal email address, I knew it was phishing. Now, suppose someone hacked into PayPal and found my credentials; they would not be able to use them for any other services I am signed up for, because each service has its own strong password and email address. I made a personal security system, and when the old email server stopped working, so did that system. That was a vulnerability I had not anticipated.

Sunday 5 April

Today I did the finishing touch on the work from yesterday. The paths between the beds were covered with wood chips. I still had the Crab 42 scaffold on bed I4. Ants had been building a skyscraper in one of the tubes. When I took away the scaffold, it was standing there by itself. I thought I would leave it, but DW knocked it over.

I gave our three pots of flowers some maintenance and weeded some dandelions. The wind was hard today. I think it was the same weather system that got the name Dave that entered Sweden today. They had problems with that. Here in the Netherlands, it was a hard wind but much less intense.

Friday and Saturday, I already did a lot of hard work. My body had to have it easier today. I set up a shelf in the barn's workshop. We went to the grocery store to buy things for next week. Normal things you are doing on a Sunday.

Of course, this was Easter Sunday. Do you know the Easter algorithm? It all starts with Equinox. This year, it was on 20 March at 3:46 PM here in the Netherlands. At that point, the Earth's rotation axis was neither pointing toward the sun nor away from the sun. That makes day and night equal length. So this happens on 20 March or 21 March every year. It also happens in September. Are we all sitting with our stopwatches, measuring the length of the day and the night to figure out that they are equal? These days, we can Google those things.

After the Equinox, we wait for the first full moon. It sounds so simple, but when is the moon completely full? Again, we Google that. The full moon after the Equinox was on 2 April.

Then we wait again, this time for the first Sunday after the full moon on 2 April. That is how we arrive at Easter of 2026. This is the day when a fantasy figure died. He did not die on a specific day; he died on a formula day. How funny is that!

From here starts the liturgical cycle. It has already started, but since it has not included any compulsory holidays for me, I can blissfully remain ignorant of them. I do like algorithms, and I like funny inconsistencies, like using a formula to express a person's day of death.

Anyway, 40 days after easter Sunday, the fantasy figure takes the escalator. He goes up into space, as if it were possible without a rocket. 50 days after Easter Sunday, we celebrate the formation of the multinational corporation selling the concept of the fantasy figure.

When you hear me talk about these things, you might think I am opposed to the whole phenomenon, but that is not the case. It is just that when you believe things with no scientific basis, I prefer you keep them to yourself. I don't want to be bothered by it. Our life here on Earth is becoming increasingly challenging due to climate change, extinction, and pandemics. In such a world, it is better to cooperate than squabble about superficial things. One way to foster better cooperation between people is to make personal beliefs a practice for individuals. So as long as people are getting along, let them believe whatever they want. That is what I believe in.

Here ends this week's blog, because a week starts on Mondays and ends on Sundays according to ISO 8601. As you know, I am an ISO kind of person because I am from Sweden. We like standards in Sweden.

This week I started tending seeds. I started preparing beds. The left side of the garden, rows A-D, is our digging area. The rest of the garden is no-dig, at least for now. I tilled all but the onion bed. That bed is DW busy with. The pergola is set up.

The rest of the beds need more weeding, but that is for next week. I wrote 3893 words although I had an hefty backlog to edit at the end of the week. That is the perfect recipy for little mistakes in the text. Welcome back next week!