Pickled cuecumber Sunday, 27-Jul-25 22:00:25 CEST

Sunday, 03-Aug-25 20:58:24 CEST

Fence maintenance

This week I did fence maintenance. I created a replacement for the rain roof.

Monday 28 July

Today we worked from home—no seizures of Merida or other spectacle experiences. The veterinarian called us to give the result of Merida's blood sample from last Friday. It was the levels of phenobarbital. He said she had a level 128, where it should be between 100 and 130; he said that was good. I forgot to ask him what measurement we are talking about here. It is not micrograms per milliliter. I don't know. We must have the diazepam for emergency treatment. For the rest, we have to monitor the situation, and if we are unsure or have questions, we should call the veterinarian again.

It was lovely weather this afternoon. I put up more threads to guide runner beans. I am always delighted by how large the zucchini flowers are and how beautiful they are.

I called my sister to congratulate her on her birthday.

In the phoneme conversion project, I reached line 51120. I am above 50k!

Tuesday 29 July

Today it was nice weather for biking to work, but DW also went to the office, and we could also bring a neighbor, so I drove the car to the office. The commute is much quicker if I drive. It was unfortunate that I missed my bike tour, but it was better for DW.

I arrived early at the office and I left late. I had a productive day; it was nice.

When we came home, we had dinner. After dinner, I harvested zucchini. I want them to be no more than about 40 centimetres long. I could harvest a heap that looked good!

I harvested four potato plants. It gave me 6.988 Kilograms of potatoes. The largest of them was 616 grams. It fit nicely in my large, warm hand.

The potatoes can stay in the fridge until tomorrow, when I will distribute them to the food cooperative.

I found that the cucumbers started to develop yellow spots on the leaves. That is not good. This evening, I thought they were begging for more food. I gave them bokashi sap diluted in the watering can. I gave the cucumbers two watering cans of bokashi sap. In a couple of days, I will give them more bokashi supplement. I do hope this is the remedy and that it is efficient. Next year, I will make sure they have more nutrients already at the beginning of the season.

Wednesday 30 July

This morning, I looked up how to treat powdery mildew. I did as the lady said, measured 3.7 litres of water, added one teaspoon of baking soda, and one teaspoon of soap. Then I sprayed the leaves from below and from the top. In another video, they said you could cut away totally infected leaves. So did that as well.

Then I made breakfast. I picked raspberries for breakfast. We had the raspberries in the muesli. Some leftovers went into the freezer.

Next, it was time for me to work. I worked a half day from home.

After work, we first delivered the zucchini and the potatoes to the food cooperative. Then we went to the hardware store to buy more netting for the birch tree protection. That was unnecessary because we had the same net in the sea container, but I was unaware of this. What you don't know that you have, you don't have. DW also went with me, and she wanted to go to the second-hand shop to buy some shirts for FIL. He is drooling a lot more now than he was when he was last in the hospital.

The sheep were glad they got back the area around the birch trees. I do hope that this method works because it was a considerable amount of work to get these nets set up.

After that, the sheep and I had a walk in the area between the neighbours on the west side.

Then I started searching for wire staples. It became a fruitless pursuit. The wire staples were last used on 12 April. How is it possible that the staples are impossible to find? I looked in the barn, and I looked in the sea container. I looked in the workshop in the house. It is frustrating. The missing staples riddled me long into the evening.

Eventually, I did the dishes and blogged a little, followed by work on the phoneme conversion project. I reached line 51292.

Thursday 31 July

Good morning, it is Thursday, 31 July, and today I'm working from home. I have now decided to give the cucumbers a treatment every morning and every evening. I'm spraying the cucumber leaves with the water and baking soda solution. DW thinks that one should let nature have its run; if the cucumbers are dying, they are dying. I don't think I agree with that. We can still have a few more cucumbers from these plants before I give up. So I'm spraying the top and bottom of the leaves. I'm removing completely infected leaves. I'm not just removing them, I'm also bringing them to the compost. I'm unsure if I should bring them to the waste bin instead. I will have to look into that.

Just before work, I had the idea that I should go to the barn and search one more time for the staples. At this time, I was thinking like it was in April when I used the staples for the last time. It occurred to me that I moved around the tools in a banana paper box in April. I found the box, and can you imagine I found the staples! Yeah

DW went to work. She biked the first stretch to a bus stop. Then she travelled the usual way from there.

Today, the neighbor's house was cleaned. You might recall I wrote a song about the color of the neighbor's house in Overcast Skies.

Merida has had less appetite since yesterday. It is not clear what the reason is. We might need to buy another sort of food for her, but it's unclear what the issue is. She can also eat less. She is not too big, but she can get slightly lighter. Either that or she managed to catch a mize. That would be wonderful. This evening, she was lying on the couch looking beautiful.

This evening, I reached line 58598 in the phoneme conversion project!

Friday 1 August

Today I had a day off, and DW worked from home. Merida still had a pile of chunks on her plate from yesterday. This was worrying. We decided to have her checked up at the veterinary. I will go there again in the afternoon. The theory is that she has an issue with her gums.

This put my mood back to the feeling that things are breaking down before I got a chance to put them together. In a way, it is not that bad. We knew about her gums already. They were signalled in an earlier visit to the veterinary. Now they are giving problems, we could have known.

In my YouTube feed, I got a movie from Jeramy Fielding. Het talked about keeping your things in order.

"If you will not remember that you have it, or you cannot find it when you need it, throw it away." – Jeramy Fielding. That is a little different than mine: "If you don't know that you have it, then you don't have it". That is the thing I am usually muttering to myself when searching for things I thought I had but can no longer find, or finding a thing I just went to the shop buying because I thought I did not have, like the metal net from the other day.

He came up with many good suggestions for making life easier. I liked that video!

I worked on the phoneme conversion project. At line 59310, I had the word: "indemnifying IH2 N D EH2 M N IH0 F AY1 IH0 NG." My program could not find the letter F. I changed the search level of F from 2 to 1, and then it worked. That should not make a difference, so there is something shady going on there. I just made a note of this for now; perhaps I will look deeper into the issue at another time. With that, I reached line 60k, which means I parsed 44% of the file.

The sun shone, all was great. One cannot sit programming for fun all day. So I went outside to work on the fence on the north side. Collected the tools, had a look at the sheep, and then it started raining heavily. I hid under the rain roof together with the sheep. There, I noticed that the tarp is starting to tear. It is about time to replace the tarp, and it has to be done in a couple of weeks. Perhaps already this weekend. It is probably a good idea to make a new one, and then we will see when I replace the old one.

It was raining a lot today. I worked in the morning to fix the fence on the north side of the property. That was about it for working outside. I continued with the phoneme project behind my desk.

In the afternoon, I brought Merida to the veterinarian to see why she was no longer eating. She had a slightly higher temperature. The wound on her left front leg is most probably the reason for the situation. Merida got a painkiller and medicine to reduce the inflammation in the left paw. When the doctor handled Merida, she growled deeply, but she stayed civilised.

After the visit to the veterinarian, I continued with the phonemen conversion project, and outside, it continued to rain. I found out that the flattening of the result of the Cartesian product worked, but the validation of the result had a bug. I separated the two. So now I have a pure flattening routine followed by a pure validation routine. At line 61117, I had the word "Iraq's" and the QS was a multisound pattern, but the validation routine was too strict. It could not handle apostrophes.

Saturday 2 August

It rained during the night, but I slept well. Merida is lying on a chair outside our bedroom. She is not coming to our bed, but she is near us. In the morning, we had tea in bed, and I fixed the apostrophe problem. I made the validation less strict. The next issue was at 63507! I will look into that later.

This morning, we applied KLIK fluid to our sheep. For the next three months, our sheep will be immune to fly-strikes. It looked like it was going to be a rainy day, but right now in the afternoon it's not that bad. We checked out the apple trees. There have been some apples falling off, and I picked them up. I cut out the bad parts and made chunks for use in smoothies. I put the chunks in a bag in the freezer. The next task for today was to recreate the rain route. I'm now on my way to the specialized hardware store where I will buy the necessary materials for the rain roof.

Merida is still not eating so much, but she played around a little bit with a toy this morning.

The sheep don't dare get into the road. We walked with them, and then they followed us to the road., There were a lot of delicious things to eat, and on top of that, none of the sisters had been peeing and pooping there, so it was doubly delicious. You would think they would learn that they have more to eat there, but they do not like the area near the road. When we left them, they ran back to their home area.

I shopped for items to create the rain roof. I bought bolts, nuts, and rings. I also got double-sided tape and a tarp, 3 by 4 meters. The shop has buckets so that you can pick what you want, put that in a bag, and then weigh the bag and get a price tag. I like that system.

Then I went home and started putting the rain roof together. It is tedious work to assemble the rain roof. Fourteen triangles are sandwiching the tarp. So 28 in triangles in total. I put double-sided tape on these 28 triangles on one side. For each triangle, it is four strokes of tape. That is 112 strokes. I got the triangles glued onto the tarp. Tomorrow I can drill holes through the triangles. There will be four holes for each triangle. That is 56 holes.

I also went to the store to buy two sorts of cat chunks. It looked like Merida liked one of the sorts. She did not eat much, but she ate some of it. Much better than before. The other sort she disliked very much. I had not thought she had so strong views on what is delicious or not. That is surprising.

Sunday 3 August

This morning, Merida stopped liking the EasyPill medication dispenser we use to administer her medication. She sniffed on it and started waving with her tongue. Her taste buds are telling her that stuff is not delicious anymore.

The weather was beautiful. The prediction promised sun in the morning, clouds in the afternoon, and rain in the evening.

We had a cup of tea in bed. I edited the blog and found what I talked about on Friday. It worked on the word "Iraq's". At that point, I made the algorithm less strict, but since then, I realized that I created an opportunity for unintentional errors. So I fixed that now. Essentially, I let two multisound patterns have any number of characters in between them. Now I made it so that it still can have any number of characters in between, but all characters can only be apostrophes and quotes, etc.

It was a wonderful morning! It was beautiful weather until the evening. The wind picked up during the day. After breakfast, we moved the sheep to a new area. We let them graze between the properties of the neighbours to the north and east. I moved the previous area between the neighbours to the west. There is a field of stinging nettles there. I mowed this in the hope that other grasses will get a chance to compete with the nettles.

DW worked in the garden and on her wool projects. I continued on the rain roof. The old wire tensioners had a more extended lip compared to the new tensioners. There was little material out in the corners. I added metal bands to the corner tensioners to hold the corners together. This construction can handle wind speeds up to and more than 11 Beaufort, between 64 and 72 knots, 74-82 mph, 117-133 km/h. I know that because we had earlier constructions like these survive that level of storm. This version of the rain roof had larger rings, and I used M6 bolts. I tightened the bolts by hand, all 56 of them. I will put up the rain roof on Wednesday if the weather is nice. Rain is no problem, but it is better if it is not windy when putting up the rain roof.

Merida did not eat anything today. The situation is not nice. Fortunately, she drank water, but I will have to call the veterinarian tomorrow morning to discuss the situation.

Here ends this week's blog. There was no work in the barn, but I worked on fence maintenance. I discovered that our rain roof reached the end of its life, and created a new rain roof. Merida has been eating less and less over the week. We are worried about her. The paw looks fine, but why is she not eating? I made good progress in the phoneme conversion project. All in all, it was a great week.