Sea container picked up Sunday, 30-Nov-25 20:35:16 CET

Sunday, 07-Dec-25 21:32:39 CET

Light installations

This was a week of light installations.

Monday 1 December

This week began an hour after midnight. All weeks start at that time, but I usually think of the actual week beginning in the morning, when there is a lovely sunrise or interesting mist. I am making breakfast while DW is getting out of bed. Something like that. This week started when Merida came to lie next to me in bed, already at an hour after midnight. She was purring loudly and kneading me as if I were a sturdy dough of bread. She licked my nose and tucked herself to my side. When I moved, she put a paw over my mouth as if to say, "Stay calm." It was a warm paw. No nails, just silently kneading my mouth. When I relaxed, she took it away, and she fell asleep, breathing heavily. I could not sleep. I had something tickling my face, no wonder.

With considerable willpower, I managed to relax and fall asleep. I had a dream that I had postponed washing the dishes in some apartment somewhere. An old friend came to visit me, and I opened the door for him. On the way to the kitchen, I realized I hadn't washed the dishes, and when we got there, it was filthy. Maggots crawling. It was not a pleasant dream. The friend was not delighted to see me in this condition.

My sleep lasted an hour. At about 10 minutes past 2 AM, Merida had an epileptic seizure. I brought her to the floor, and in that process, she scratched my belly. It was a 10-centimeter-long scratch. The seizure stopped by itself after she had peed herself on the floor. After a couple of minutes, she woke up from her bad dream and started cleaning herself. I cleaned the floor. The rest of the night was calm. I did not reach any deep sleep this night, though, and I was a bit knocked out in the morning. DW was totally knocked out.

In the morning, before work, I discovered that I can write on the new phone with a pen. I remember many years ago, when I had a personal digital assistant that could add text with a pen. I still have the PDA in my drawer. I will see if I can find it. It feels great to write with a pen on this new phone. The pen got a little button. I will find out what I can do with it. Is there a drawing program compatible with this pen? Yes, there is!

I will practice drawing a little more. It feels like I missed it, and here I have a drawing tool in my pocket. That is nice.

This was a special morning. Across the horizon, a regiment of leafless trees stands in silhouette, their branches like ink strokes from a confident calligrapher. They form a dark, delicate lace that anchors the scene while everything above them dissolves into color.

The clouds are layered like drifting continents: some soft and peach-colored, glowing as if lit from within; others a deep mauve, bruised with the first secrets of the aspiring day. They stretch across the sky in sweeping sheets, each one holding its own shade of brilliant light, rose-gold melting into lavender, lavender giving way to a cool, hesitant blue.

Below it all, at the horizon, the first light of sunrise paints the atmosphere with luminous warmth, brushing the sky in strokes so gentle they feel whispered rather than drawn. It’s the kind of sky that makes you pause mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-anything, because it proves nature is still the most outstanding show of all, an utterly unapologetic spectacle.

Now that is a start of a week you will remember. At lunchtime, I collected fresh sage leaves from the garden for our tea. At that exact moment, the monthly disaster alarm exercise occurred.

In the evening, I worked on migrating the signal chat application's backup to the new phone. It was a rather technical exercise. How do regular users do this? I had to dedicate the entire evening to this.

Tuesday 2 December

Good morning. I am on my way to work by bike. I feel something is grinding on the bike chain, and that doesn't feel right, but I’m on my way to work and I’m already late, so here we go. I must remember to grease the chain tomorrow.

I feel the decision to buy this combo of a smartwatch and phone was the right one. I had a hard time motivating myself for this purchase because the packages were expensive. DW got a fair phone, and she's happy with that. She hoped I would also go for that type of phone. That brand is bigger on an environmental standpoint. You read my blog, you also know it’s important to me, but I also have another side of myself, photography, drawing, etc. This was the telephone I wanted. When it comes to climate, I am doing my best, but around me, there are plenty of actors who aren't doing theirs. You can easily punch a hole in my climate consciousness, but I’m not flying, and I am mostly vegetarian unless the social situation does not cater to it. We all have to do our part.

Then I had to stop because it was so beautiful. The Maple trees along the long water canal are turning yellow. I had to take photos.

I like that spot.

I’m on my way home. It was a lovely day at the office. I was a tad late, so I had to leave a tad late. I spoke with Franco, and he was really enthusiastic about this DevOps method we are following. Feedback is fed into the process, and he was really enthusiastic. Other parts of the organisation are still in the agile stage, or, may I even say, in the waterfall stage. It is very lovely to be at the forefront of development in this young and dynamic multinational corporation! We released a new version of the software today. There are issues with the automatic testing, but I will be able to address those tomorrow.

Nicole was back from holiday. She had been to Denmark doing cultural things. Also, Ellie was in the office. Ellie asked about the sheep, how they were doing. I told her about the new path and how the sheep were blocking it. She liked that story. Ellie actually got long blonde hair, but she keeps it in a really tight knot. That is her look most of the time. I do remember she had her hair down once, and that moment I said to her, "You're Ellie 2.0," and she liked that joke from an IT guy.

As I said, the work was going very well today. We rolled out the software to the Dutch userbase. I hope we can deploy the American user base tomorrow; that would be grand. I make it sound simple, but it's oh-so-complex behind the scenes.

At the end of the day, after work, I had decided to go to the hardware shop. I bought stuff for light in the temporary hay shed. I had in mind a simple switch; I would turn on the light when you open the door. That’s the solution of yesteryear; this is not what you can get today. I bought an outdoor wall contact. It can be turned on and off with a remote sensor or application. I also bought a magnetic sensor to put on the door, so these two things need to talk to each other. Then I bought a skinny cable. I could not find outdoor cables. I think I have enough pipes to run the cable through, so that will be nice. It would be fantastic if I could install the lightning installation tomorrow. I also want to make some order in the barn, and I have a trailer full of garbage to bring to the recycling center. It will be a busy day.

Wednesday 3 December

I felt stressed the entire morning. Things were feeling much better yesterday. I had issues with the source code that I couldn't understand. On top of all the regular issues, the cursors stopped working. We are working on the next phase of the software rollout for the American market, and I missed the flow today.

I continued working much longer than I had to, but eventually I logged out, and DW and I had lunch.

Somehow, I kept my grumpy mood as I started installing the light for the hay shed. At first, I had decided to run a cable from the outdoor outlet to the hay shed, but I realized I wanted to run a line from the utility room.

I dug up the opening in the foundation and pulled the cable from the cupboard, down below the house, and out of the foundation. At the foundation outside the house, I pulled the cable through a case pipe to the shed. The pipe was dug into a shallow trench. The end of the cable in the utility room got a contact, and the other end was connected to a lamp holder in the shed.

It was not nice to crawl under the house. We got spiders and whatnot under the house. The side near the foundation below the house is less accessible because of the sewer pipes running across it. I can crawl in there, but there is not much space. If I ran a long enough rod from the outside, I wouldn't need to do the complicated crawl. This worked!

In the utility room, I installed the remote-control socket that works like an on-off switch. I paired the remote control socket with a magnetic sensor. The magnetic sensor turns on the light when the magnet is removed. The rest was easy. It was a question of putting the magnet on the door and the other part of the sensor on the frame. It works beautifully! It would have been nice to extend the cable to the sheep area, but it was too short, and I did not have a simple outdoor lamp. That will come later.

Now, for the rest, I wanted to bring the garbage to the recycling center, but I didn't have enough time. I had to go to the veterinarian to buy more medication for Merida. There was a package waiting to be picked up. There is significant road maintenance in the area, so it was a challenge to get these things done.

Thursday 4 December

Both DW and I went to the office today. DW had to be early, so I brought her to the train station well on time. There I was alone in the office. Other coworkers from another section were early. An hour later, Ed, Nicole, and Erika arrived. The rest were off, working from home or sick.

I worked on the challenge from yesterday without being grumpy. Methodically, I worked through the matter and resolved all the issues. After lunch, I began rolling out the product to the US user base. That was great. The rest of the day, I resolved minor issues.

We got a Yule tree in the office. It is made of plastic, and it pops up from a flat box. It has all the decorations and lights, which is highly convenient. The tree is mounted in about three minutes. Under the tree, there are presents made by two coworkers, Rita and Erika. They like doing arts and crafts in their spare time. They set up an Advent calendar where we get packages on specific days. Today it was my turn to open my package. I got a felted green heart with a red flower button in the middle and pearls around the edge with threads arranged so that it looked like a firework! I also got chocolate candy.

All this was in a bag with a reindeer printed on it and a sticker with a four on it. I put the sticker on my shirt. Then I had that sticker the rest of the day. It was a pity Rita wasn't in the office, but I texted her, and she was happy to hear that the present was well received. There are similar traditions in other office locations around Europe and the world. I don't know how the US offices are doing this.

During lunch, I had time to doodle. I will continue to develop my doodle skills and make drawings from time to time. This is an unexpected result of the new phone. It has a pen, and since I got all the drawing tools with me, I can also use them in an off moment. That feels much better than surfing. Doodling can also be done while socialising with other people. It is a little like knitting.

At the end of the day, we had a "Borrel." It is Dutch for snacks and non alcoholic drinks. It was not an extended Borrel because we were so few. Most of us continued working while Borrelling. I had such a good day that I decided to take the time to sketch Erika. This is like a thirty-second sketch, not more.

After work, I picked up DW, and we went home. At home, I gave the sheep hay and enjoyed the new light in the temporary hay shed. If you look closely, you can see the sensor in the upper left corner of the picture. It was almost cosy in there. Much nicer than picking up hay in the dark. Now that the door cannot accidentally lock you up, it is also much nicer. I am so happy with this improvement of the temporary hay shed.

In the evening, I worked on the sign-up page for lyrics-editor.com and had time to think about the validation routines. If you want a password to have an uppercase, a lowercase, and a digit, you can do that verification with a regular expression. Anyone can do that, but there is a catch. An uppercase character can be defined as a range from A to Z, but they are Latin characters. There are no Greek, Swedish, or Ukrainian characters in that range. To do that, I need to make use of a Unicode expression. Simple enough, but this is done in JavaScript, and I need to use the "u" argument of the regular expression constructor. In that mode, I cannot use standard regular expression constructions.

You would think that by 2025, Unicode would be universally supported and everybody would understand it, but that is not the case. JavaScript regular expressions cannot handle curly brackets in the standard way in the "u" mode. These things make this project less fun, to be honest. I found a decent workaround, and then I was okay again.

Friday 5 December

Today I had a day off. I brought the hay to the sheep, cleared some of their platform from dirt, and removed the fly traps for the winter. Then I brought coffee to DW while she was in a meeting. I spilled coffee on her table, but I was behind her camera, and she did as if nothing had happened. It was an important meeting. I cleared the mess.

Then it was time to go to the recycling center with the trailer and to go to the hardware store to buy the stuff I needed to install a lamp in the rain roof. I bought a gray flexible case pipe—an outdoor lamp of the simplest kind. I also bought a cable.

When I came home from the recycling and hardware store, we had lunch. After lunch, we had a walk around the area. Everything was okay. We did not notice anything special. I was low on energy, so I had a powernap after the walk. I am good at powernaps. DW continued working from home.

At 2 PM, DW woke me up. She was upset because a neighbor's house was on fire. Not our direct neighbors, but about ten houses along the road. The firetrucks could not find the location at first. They drove around in the area.

The fire started at 1:45 PM. There came five firetrucks, several additional personnel in regular buses, and three police cars. No medical emergency vehicles arrived.

This was a building project in the final stages of completion. The information I have is incomplete and partly speculative, but this is what I know: The owner was not present when the fire started. There were other people at the house. It was thought that people worked on making the roof water-tight. For this, they usually use molten tar heated by a burner. Many neighbors thought that could be the cause. There have to be additional factors, though, because a good professional roofer can handle such situations, so something else must have happened.

When the roof no longer burned, the firefighters tore down the walls. It was burning inside the walls. This is because they used insulation material based on wood fibres. We have the same material in our walls.

Groups of neighbors stood at a distance, watching. I had a couple of chats with neighbors, but then I went home again because I had better things to do. I wanted to finish the project with the lamp above the hay rack!

I inserted the cable into the quarter-inch case pipe. Then I dug down the pipe starting at the hay shed, all the way to the rainroof.

Here, I mounted the case pipe on the scaffold pipe until it reached the point where I wanted to mount the lamp.

It was cold, and it was fiddly to get the cables right in the lamp. Luckily for me, it was dry. It was a cheap lamp, so it wasn't excellent, but I got it mounted in the end. Then I moved on to the other end of the cable. I mounted that to the light point in the shed. Here I had bought a little black box to fit the connection work. That was feeling good. The installation worked! Now, when opening the door of the hay shed, there is a lamp also above the hay rack. This makes it much easier to feed the sheep.

We had a pizza evening, and DS was invited. It was nice! I doodled a little instead of blogging or programming. I drew DS while he and DW solved kakuro puzzles.

First, I made a black-and-white drawing of DS. Then colored the drawing a little. I really like this doodle functionality!

We went to bed early. I was drained.

Saturday 6 December

The main task for today was to fetch a load of hay from the nearby farmer. He had also seen the fire. When we finished loading the hay, it started raining. He invited us to drink a cup of coffee, which was nice. We had skipped the coffee because we were a little late. He showed us his house. From the outside, it looks like one big barn with a living section on one side, and essentially, that is what it is. But it is luxurious and spacious. The other side of the barn has room for working on the farm equipment and for driving the tractors in and out.

We bought thirteen bales of hay from the farmer. His store was not very full, but we should not worry. He had hay bales elsewhere.

After the coffee, we drove home with the load, and we filled our temporary hay shed, now with light. The ropes around the bales were not as tight as they used to be. It was hard to keep them together. We use one ratchet band to repair one bale.

With this task done, we had the rest of the day off. No, I was kidding. I started moving the outlet in the guest room. We will install the Murphy Bed, and the bed frame will obscure the power outlet at its original location. I had placed magnets on the wall where the screws holding the gypsum board to the beam are. That way, I knew where the beam was.

I marked out the new location for the outlet on the other side of the beam and much higher on the wall. This is because when the Murphy bed is folded out, we want the outlet to remain accessible. It is a three-dimensional puzzle, and we like puzzles.

After sawing out the new hole in the outlet, I drilled two holes in the beam. I placed the new outlet adjacent to the beam for easy access. Then I took a metal rod and pushed it through the insulation material to the old outlet. Then I widened that canal until I thought two quarter-inch case pipes would fit.

Then I installed the old box in the new place. Dragged the electrical wire and connected the new wire to the old wire in the old hole. I had the same plan for the data cables, but that took the rest of the evening. It sounds so easy, but it was not.

I had brought many tools to the location. Merida sat there viewing me, wondering why I was so interested in the wall at this place. What could it be that I had to worship this wall this intensely? She was amused and curious about the idea.

There is a crack in the plaster in the corner, but I will not fix that right now. It will be behind the bed. That is fine for now. This is how I left the scene—a huge mess. I will clean up that tomorrow. There was no time to program the sign-up page this evening.

Sunday 7 December

The forecast promised rain today—much rain. DW woke up really early. She went downstairs to knit, and I slept for another 45 minutes. Eventually, I woke up and went downstairs. We had a cup of tea. Usually, we drink a cup of tea while still in bed, but this was also nice. I blogged, and DW kept knitting. She is working on making gloves right now. She used to have her own blog, but she stopped blogging. Some stories could have been told, but she puts her energy into the craft itself. Initially, she was the one who inspired me to start blogging. I had a website, but it was not lively in any way. It took another ten years before I started blogging regularly.

It was a perfect day to continue the home decor theme. I had a year of barn, barn, barn, but that is somewhat over now. I still want to clear up the mess in the barn and prepare for a barn party, but that will come when I am ready.

I brought a whole lot of tooling to the guest room. It was a great moment to use those tools to install the bathroom lamps on the first floor. We had the two fixtures lying around for more than a year. Until now I was not ready to install them, but now it was time. I got them installed.

While I worked on the fixtures, DW rolled out the mattress we bought at IKEA on 23 November. We haven't got the bed yet, but DD is coming, and she needs somewhere to sleep.

With the fixtures on the ceiling, we realized the lamps were made for halogen lamps. I was sure there were LED equivalents, but we did not have those. I felt like a bummer about postponing the bathroom light project just because we didn't have the lamps. I suggested we go to the hardware store and get the lamps.

DW was all in for this excursion if we also had time to go to a second-hand shop. That was an okay deal for me. We got the lamps and continued to the second-hand shop.

The second-hand shop had no baskets. That was inconvenient. We kept looking for a customer leaving to see if we could get a basket from them. That succeeded eventually.

I found a foldable keyboard at the second-hand shop. It was foldable and cost €8.99! It looks like it is working correctly. I could even start using it because it was charged. Now I need to find a banana for scale, but I cannot see any here in the shop. I already have a keyboard, but it cannot fold. It is perfect for the car. I can hold the keyboard on my lap. That is nice. I also wanted to have a foldable keyboard. Now I have that!

Back in the days, I had a foldable keyboard. I blogged about it on 25 November 2018. It was after we decided to build a house, but before we had a location. I talk about "the dot" in that blog. That was the approximate position for the property. Back then, I had a foldable keyboard with bugs. That wasn't very pleasant. I talked about wanting a woodworking workshop and related things. That is the Barn; it took seven years.

We found typical things at the second-hand shop, such as a metal round box with a painted motif, a glass jar without a rubber gasket, and a glass lamp without the lamp holder. DW also found a bag of wood knots. I am blogging with my new keyboard in the books department while DW searches for second-hand hobby books and two vegetarian cookbooks.

I decided I will not buy any more books. At least not until I finish reading the book I found in Sweden on 6 May: The Truth About Melody Brown by Lisa Jewell. I will read the whole book, but I have so many other things to do, so it is a slow process. It is not a fantastic book that sucks me into the story, but I read it from time to time.

This is a lovely second-hand shop where they are sorting the items. That is essential for a second-hand shop. If they don’t sort things out, then the value of going to the shop is vanishing.

When we came home, I installed the lamps into the fixtures, and then that task was finished.

This has been an eventful week. In general, this was a week of light installations. We installed a motion-activated lamp at the canopy of the barn, a lamp in the temporary hay shed, a lamp under the rain roof, and lamps in the bathroom on the first floor. Today, DW ordered lamps for the hall on the ground floor. The electricity in the guest room has been moved, so we are ready to install the bed. A neighbor's house had a fire.

I wrote 4468 words this week. Not bad at all. Welcome back next week!