Finished OSB boards on the west wall of the barn Sunday, 08-Jun-25 20:53:34 CEST

Sunday, 15-Jun-25 21:04:10 CEST

Painted and distributed the cubes along the road

This week, I finished boarding up the west wall and the outside of the restroom. I painted and distributed the concrete cubes.

Monday 9 June

Today was a compulsory day off. I never really remembered the difference between compulsory, obligatory, and mandatory. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that I am not a native English speaker. The words essentially mean the same thing. It turns out that mandatory is the least formal, with the least consequences if you don't follow. Compulsory is more formal, and there are usually some negative results of not following. Obligatory is more formal and also moral. There you have it. I mean to say we had a mandatory day off.

We had a day off from building the barn. A couple of gardens in the neighborhood had an open garden weekend. They opened their gardens with presentations of what they were growing and doing. We could walk around and take a tour of the gardens. It was very inspiring. I feel we are slowly getting into that community. The two gardens we visited also deliver vegetables to the food cooperative we are a member of. DW is helping there once every two months. I hope we can also deliver vegetables to that cooperation this season.

Something revolutionary happened to my bike. I got a short film in my YouTube feed about making the bike peddles more smooth. I had issues with ticking sounds since the bike was new. In the film, they explained that you take off the saddle and pour oil into the pipe. The ticking sound has annoyed me immensely. I brought the bike to the shop have them look after it, but they couldn't fix it. It stopped me from biking at some point. Before we left looking at the gardens, I filled the oil and was eager to see how it worked.

Most of the oil came out below the bike. I was disappointed and thinking this is not going to work. Then we went to those gardens I was talking about, and I could not hear any ticking sound. I have not heard a single tick sound.

The good thing is that if you view a few gardens, you are full of energy and can upload a blog in the evening, but that was not the case. However, I had the energy to work on the phoneme project. I reached the word number 17,000. It was funny because the program stopped when I came to the word breakthrough. Then I fixed that issue, which worked for almost 1000 words, like a real breakthrough.

This evening, I renewed the certificate for the site. I bought an SSL certificate for one year. I find the procedure for the certificate unintuitive and hocus pocus. It works, and that is what matters. I did not upload the blog from last week, though.

Tuesday 10 June

So, good morning, I'm on my way to work. I am biking, and it is 8:19 AM. It is Tuesday morning.

It was like snowing in the park, but it wasn't snowing. It was seeds from willow trees. I made a film of it. Usually, when I take snow films, I do it in slow motion to capture the flakes falling. That was unnecessary here because the flakes came softly to the ground. Will we ever see snow again?

It is 617. PM. 6:17 PM, and it is windy. Ooh. There are clouds, but it is also sunny and pretty pleasant. Ooh. I have the wind in the back. Ohh. When I'm having a bump, I'm uttering Ooh. The ticking sound is still not heard. I will be disappointed when I hear it again, but for now, it is gone.

Today, I forgot my screen eyeglasses. Luckily, I have a section on my regular eyeglasses. The glasses are made to view closer objects when I tilt my head. So that's so annoying, working with the head flipped backward. Like the real MacGyver I am, I created a way to lift my glasses. A contraption, making my regular glasses into reading glasses. It was not pleasant. I had a good day at work, but it was so annoying that I left my eyeglasses at home. I worked on interesting stuff; nevertheless, it was a great day.

The phoneme conversion program is progressing slowly. I started on a new version. It is built around the idea that some phonemes are less ambiguous. These sounds are processed first. That forms a skeleton of the word. The subsequent, more ambiguous sounds are then matched in the remaining spots of the word. The issue I have right now is that sounds made up of multiple sounds, like K and S, represent the letter x. These multi-sound patterns were outside the program's skeleton infrastructure. That was inconvenient.

There was a swan family with chickens. I had to take a photo of this swan family. That's such a beautiful sight. I'm drained now. Goodness. This way, I will never come home if I see swans and fruits in trees.

When I came home, I discovered that I had the screen eyeglasses with me the whole day. Had I just checked my bag better, I would have found them.

After work, I sat programming on the phoneme conversion project. Things went well, and I almost reached 20,000. Then I came to the letter combination CC. Now, my algorithm hangs in an eternal loop. We went to bed, and I figured out the solution before falling asleep.

Wednesday 11 June

This morning, I worked from home. DW had a day off and went to a wool event in the morning.

After lunch, I started programming my solution, which I had figured out last night. But I was not able to finish that. The solution is based on replacing the multi-sound patterns in the word's phonemes. Now, they can work with the same routines as the rest of the sounds. It is possible to rank the sounds based on ambiguity. I make less ambiguous sounds parse first. I am enthusiastic about this idea. But I didn't have time to finish it before DW came home.

We had lunch, and now I'm driving to the hardware store to buy 80mm insulation. This is the installation we will put on the wall for the restroom. I decided on Rockwool at Pontmayer. They have a drive-in shop. That is pretty cool.

When I came home from the hardware store, I insulated the restroom wall and installed the OSB boards to cover the insulation. Now, we can start on the gypsum boards. But that is for another day.

 

Thursday12 June

Today, both of us went to the office. I had my screen eyeglasses with me, both physically and mentally.

Friday 13 June

Today, DW had a hectic day. She was in meetings practically the entire day. I had hoped to sneak in some meetings with DW to discuss the gypsum plate plans, but that was impossible. I had a day off. It was warm. I got the gypsum boards figured out. We can talk about the plans another day and order the boards.

I went to the hardware store and bought paint for concrete. Then, I painted the cubes white. I made the molds for the cubes around December last year. Then, when the floor was poured, I let them fill the molds for the cubes. That way, they did not need to pour the rest of the concrete on the ground. It was brilliant! Now, I have painted the cubes to be more visible.

In the evening we went to a garden party. I played a DJ set at the party. It was nice!

Saturday 14 June

Today, I transported the cubes to their final destination along the road. I used the trade lifts to get them onto the wagon. I love those trade-lifts; I have made so much great use of them.

When I finished the cubes, I picked red currant berries. DW picked most of the berries. I picked the berries and got a lesson on how to sort them from DW.

My contribution was a little more than one kilo of berries. I put them in the freezer.

The black currant berries are not that good this year. Many of the berries are falling off. We don't know what it is. Is it a sickness or weather condition? No idea.

Sunday 15 June

Today, we did several small tasks. DW finished sorting out the batch of berries she had picked. The total of the red currants came to well over six kilograms. We are delighted with this harvest. We recalculated the order for gypsum boards and placed an order for delivery next Friday.

Then, I took the brushcutter and cleared weeds around the pond. I also cleared some weeds around the cubes along the road. I had no intention of making the area completely weed-free, but it could be nice to reduce the amount of weed just a little bit. It looked nice! The last time I went around with the brush cutter, I had cut a branch of dune rose. It had been lying there since. I took it with me to cut it into tiny pieces that fit the garbage container. This brush features a couple of inch-long needles. How could any sane thinking person volunteer to put one of these in the garden unless you are a self-destructive who enjoys pain and suffering? So DW asked what I think about dune roses and regular wild roses. I had no idea. Now I know it hurts. It hurts a lot.

When I finished mourning the pain, I was ready for new adventures. I went to the alternative grocery store, the farm shop. There, they did not have a functioning bread-cutting machine. That was a little disappointing. I refrained from buying bread that I had to cut into slices. You know that sliced bread is a great invention? Unsliced bread is difficult to handle. I went to the regular shop where they had sliced bread. I had to pick up the bio kind, but they still had some of those, so that was fine. When I returned from the shopping tour, I found Merida on top of the DJ gear parked in the workshop.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 1744 words this week, which is impressive considering how much time and effort went into the phoneme conversion program.