Emptying the atelier Sunday, 03-May-26 21:19:44 CEST

Sunday, 10-May-26 18:38:25 CEST

Building fence week

Processed building fences this week.

Monday 4 May

This morning it was misty. The garden looked a little bit mysterious this way. I sometimes wish I were in a stage of my life when, on a misty morning, I could pick up my camera and go out to make great photos. Perhaps even better, I check the weather the evening before to see if it will be a misty morning and set the alarm. Now obviously, it was a regular day of work from home. But you heard me before talking about making better use of the early mornings, and until now, that has not happened. Would you not think I am lazy staying in bed? I am surprised too! DW had a day off today.

At lunchtime, I noticed that runner beans had sprouted in the garden. Not all of them, but three were visible. We had almost lost hope of seeing runner beans sprout, but here they are, and we are so happy. It was not so I could sit down and enjoy my lunch; DD wanted to be taken to the train station, so I did. I was not annoyed, but I do remark that it is a bit of a luxury attitude. What should I say? It's our daughter. Did she get it from DW or from me?

I noticed my Sansevieria are flowering!

Today is Remembrance Day with a grand ceremony in the heart of Amsterdam. The King and his wife, generals, the cabinet, volunteer orgs, and all sorts of people came to hang up flower wreaths on stands. We had a silent two minutes, and it was a worthy ceremony. We watched the streaming of it. All sorts of Dutch people showed up. People of all Dutch origins, or were we missing some kinds of Dutch that did not feel represented by the remembrance ceremony?

After the remembrance ceremonies, I finished last week's blog and uploaded it. Again, I asked the AI for help improving the text. I started to feel insecure about my writing after the AI's comments, and that was a new, surprising feeling for me. I don't want my joy of writing the blog to be taken away from me. It is fine to remove the worst couple of paragraphs and learn from the process, so that is what I did.

This is the approach I apply, for example, to painting portraits. I would rather do quick paintings while I enjoy them, rather than work slowly and anxiously striving for the "perfect" result—the same with language. I babble in Dutch, making a fool of myself, but I do learn how to speak Dutch in the process.

Tuesday 5 May

After Remembrance Day comes Liberation Day. Some employers allow their workforce to take a compulsory holiday so people can go out and celebrate that we are a free nation. It is a good course for a compulsory day off, but it is still compulsory. I am of the view that we should remove all compulsory holidays. All of them! As it stands, the roads, shopping malls, and beaches are either empty or congested. It is much better to evenly distribute the use of shared resources. DW has a day off, and I'm going to the office.

It was drizzly this morning at 9.5°C, and I could very well have biked, but I drove to work. It was somehow really difficult to get out of bed. Now, when I'm driving, it appears to me that the drizzle is more than I had thought, so perhaps, honestly, I'm even glad I took the car.

After work, I went back to the hardware store. Jens, are you not a little too often in the hardware store? This time, I picked up one more board for my cat fortress. Had I gotten to work by bike, I wouldn't have been able to buy the board, so this worked out fine.

In the evening, I made the cat fortress. It is five boards duct-taped together in such a way that I can fold the construction into one compact package for use, or, when unfolded, it can stand around my chair and workplace, protecting me from Merida. I had elaborate ideas involving hinges, but at this point, it was too overwhelming to carry them out. It became duct tape; we will see how long that lasts.

Wednesday 6 May

Today I worked from home in the morning, and DW had a day off. It was overcast. After work, I continued emptying the atelier.

We moved the sheep to the north and east of our property. Neighbor's dog Tito will be indoors for a week. We will see how that works out. Our sheep are so overly sheepish as of late that they do not dare go around as freely as they did in other seasons. In human terms, they are rather stupid animals, but they have instincts and can smell. If people in the area have let their dogs out, the sheep can smell dog piss and dog shit. They know it is not "safe". I don't think they remember Tito's attacks from last year. Who knows.

Now came the moment to cut the grass in their previous southeast field. It did hurt my feelings that the untouched chicory and grass near the road were cut away without feeding the sheep. If I could harvest that part and feed it to them, it would feel better. As it is now, it is just cut down.

The lawnmower is a beast. It cuts 40-centimeter-high, thick grass, chicory, thyme, etc., that we got in our sheep grass mix.

When I was done cutting the field, I cleaned the lawnmower's cutting bed. I made a temporary ramp with fence blocks. Then I got access to the underside of the cutting bed and used the pressure washer to clean it. This got me thinking that I should build a more permanent solution that lets me drive the lawnmower up to the cutting bed for access. We will see. I got plenty of steel material to make something. If I could make pretty welds, it would be a sure pleasure.

This whole situation with sheep that are too afraid is so dumb. I wish there were a simple solution to it. It occurred to me that sheepish is a word; I knew it, but I had not thought this through beforehand.

After dinner, I programmed on the lyrics editor project inside my new cat fortress, and it worked! I worked on visual feedback that indicates the activation was successful and that everything is ready for use. One missing feature is that when you refresh the page, it should not lose the page state. It was fun to program again, and Merida is perhaps more surprised by the new situation.

Then it was time for this slug elimination routine. DW and I go out in the garden equipped with a torch and a knife, and we kill slugs. We cut their heads off. Unfortunately, we cannot obtain the certificate stating that "no animals were killed in the production of these vegetables." I can assure you, very few can. We want to find other animals feeding on slugs, but they are not here yet. I would rather feed the hedgehog, but I haven't seen them lately. Snails are cannibals, so they clean up after each other.

Thursday 7 May

Good morning! It is an absolutely beautiful morning with totally blue sky. It is a little chilly, but I have gloves, so I am fine. The cow parsley is flowering, and it's beautiful. This morning I had a challenge waking up again, but we did the morning routine efficiently, so now I'm on time biking to work.

I had a nice day at work. The business development manager loaded my to-do lists and assured me that more was to come. I was unsure whether I would have enough to do, but I can set that aside. Both he and I are aware of how artificial intelligence is transforming the workplace. But as brilliant as AI can be, it also makes brutally stupid mistakes. Someone needs to check the result.

Today I got a message from a neighbor saying they want to plant bushes in the area where the sheep are grazing. The municipalities aim to have landowners in this area make 50% of their land productive, and you are required to maintain a 2-meter-wide common area between properties. You can also allow animals to use the land; that is, another way to make the land productive. It feels a bit sad that our neighbors need 2000 square meters of lawn and then fill their edible obligations exactly where we could keep our sheep. So now they are planning to plant berry bushes in places where dog owners in the area let their dogs piss on them. So our neighbors will not be able to eat the berries because they taste like dog piss, and we can't have our sheep there either because we need to put an extra layer of fencing around their useless berry bushes to keep our sheep from eating them. I feel sad. It is their land, I cannot stop them, but it's stupid.

It was around lunchtime when I got this message, and a colleague asked if I had perhaps received a challenging one. It appears those are the moments when I am transparent, and everybody can read me. Apparently.

While biking home, I thought I should stop caring about the common areas between the properties. There is no common good. We need all our own fields to produce enough calories for our sheep, and then the neighbors can do what they want. After all, this is the Netherlands, and here the own interests are key. Use all common public spaces for your own interests. The common ground is for looting and for pissing on. If you plant berry bushes on common ground, they get pissed on. Today, I need other great things to be happy about, such as biking.

In the evening, I continued programming the lyrics editor. I made it so that the activation page recognizes when the activation is successful and notifies the user. The page also uses session storage, so if you refresh the page, it still remembers that the activation was successful. I need to look into how I will report error situations as well. That is for another time. Merida was behaving well. She is a little flabbergasted by my cat fortress.

Friday 8 May

Today I had a day off, and DW worked from home. I cleared out more of the atelier. The most exciting part of the day was my experiments with building fences. I removed the nets from a couple of fences. I found that it is possible to knock the mesh off the tubes, and now I have a tube I can use for other construction projects!

This work is not without risks. I knocked the knuckle on my left hand as well, so now I have a blue spot there. I was sitting on my knees on the ground, and that felt okay. I am enthusiastic about this because I would like to learn to weld, and then need some material to try it out on. Here I have a huge pile of old fences, and it just turned into great project material. There is still an issue with the fence pile lying in the wrong place, in front of the barn. Exactly here, I would like the ground leveled to match the entrance of the barn. In that respect, it had been better to wait with the fences, but the neighbors wanted to get rid of them now.

The fences come in two types. One type is easier to take apart. It would be better to separate the fences into two heaps by type. If we move them away from the groundwork area at the same time, then that is solved as well.

I called the company we would like to do the groundwork around the barn. It is the same company that bought our sea container. I will discuss the project with them next week.

Somehow, knocking off pieces of metal from pipes made me happier. For the rest, I was unhappy about the sheep situation. DW and I went to the neighbor to talk about their plan. It is their land, they should, of course, do what they like with it.

Saturday 9 May

Today we took the trailer to the recycling station. On the way to the recycling station, we stopped at the farmers' market. It was beautiful weather, and we had a cup of coffee at the market. I had forgotten to put the license plate on the trailer. I could borrow a pen, so I wrote the license number on the back of the trailer. It is always such a great feeling to get rid of garbage. I like it!

Then we went to a garden center near the recycling station. There we bought more tomato seeds. There is poor sprouting of the seeds we bought last time. There is still time to sprout more tomatoes. We also bought celeriac seeds, and DW wanted heric cots verts beans as well. We had completely forgotten about the celeriac seeds. When we came home, I sowed the seeds right away.

It was a beautiful day. There was not much wind. Apart from some rain this week, it is still really dry. The clay in the soil still has cracks. Behind the tiny house, the dandelions stood ready, their seeds ready to fly. DW does not like dandelions, but they are beautiful flowers. It is a little calmer behind the tiny house, by the pond.

We brought two pumpkins to friends, and as it happened, they had leftover planting buckets. I sowed more of the seeds we bought today. The planting table is now almost at its maximum. I still want to sow another batch of butternut squash seeds. We put the first batch directly in the ground, and it is lost. It should be sprouting by now, but it is nowhere to be seen. I have not dug out the seed to see what happened to it.

Sunday 10 May

This morning, we moved the building fence sections behind the house to lean on the rain roof construction. While doing this, my knees were complaining. Perhaps sitting on the ground was not such a good idea after all. We moved the more challenging parts to repurpose 22 fence sections. 6 Fences were of the type that I can disassemble, and we left them in a neat pile in front of the barn. When driveway activities start, we have to move the fence parts out of the way.

I can use the nets to make tree protection, but I also need to fasten it to a pole, and for that, I need a working earth auger. It is currently broken. We researched whether it would be possible to repair the earth auger. It is possible, but I don't like it. It will be a longer process to replace the earth auger. It will be a story we come back to another time.

The runner bean sprout count had reached 18 today!

The wind picked up today. It was almost a storm. It was still sunny, but it was less pleasant. When the wind is blowing, a new weather system can move around. I do hope for more rain. We rearranged the grazing area so the neighbor can plant the berry bushes.

Here ends this week's blog. The atelier got emptier, but there is still much to remove. The driveway project got a nudge forward. I worked on processing the pile of building fences. We prepared more seeds in the barn. I wrote 2649 words this week.