Canvas Sunday, 31-May-26 21:38:34 CEST

Sunday, 07-Jun-26 21:35:29 CEST

A week of social activities

This week we had a couple of social activities.

Monday 1 June

This week began with a grand opening. Our bedroom was filled with a warm yellow-orange light, indicating a spectacular sunrise. I stood up, took the photo, and went to bed again. Then I slept for another hour.

When I woke up, to my surprise, it had now become properly overcast. No sun in sight. It is fascinating how quickly things can change.

It is already June! We finished everything we had in mind for May, which feels nice. There are a few plants still in the barn, but there is no hurry for them. They will be fine.

I worked from home today, and DW went to the office. She had a special meeting she wanted to make something extra, so she brought a bag of M&M's, but the meeting was canceled, which was not nice.

After work, I planted the remaining beetroot seedlings. It was lovely weather, with not much wind and just warm enough. The sun had returned in the afternoon.

I decided to fire up FL Studio for the first time in a very long time. I had this feeling that I wanted to make a simple tune. I have been using FL Studio on and off for over ten years. I wrote a book about Harmor, so I am sufficiently nerdy about this DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software. Now it seemed I had lost all the little handy tricks for getting along with the software. That was frustrating. Merida came to my desk, a little annoyed by the sounds I was making.

I have been contemplating whether to blog about making music, but I conclude that it is intrinsically challenging to blog about something as technical as making music with a DAW. Others can do it, and they keep their skills up to date, but I'm not doing that right now. I want to have a little fun, so I cannot blog at the same time. We will see if I make any progress, and if I do, I will talk about it here, of course.

Tuesday 2 June

This morning, I had to move the scarecrow puppet I made last season. We had birds eating from our berry bushes. I moved it just a little bit to another location. That is usually sufficient to scare the birds of the scarecrow.

Today I went to the office, and DW worked from home. There was a massive thunderstorm forecasted for the afternoon. That made it unpleasant to take the bike. Secondly, we had a company outing planned for the evening. I decided to take the bus to work.

It was the first time I went to work by bus in a really long time. I do remember doing that a couple of times when we first moved to the new house. That was four years ago? Since then, we got a new bus line in the neighborhood, and the system for checking in and out of the bus has changed. It is now done primarily by NFC on a card or phone. It went well to check in, but checking out from the bus went wrong. I had to accept the terms and conditions for the service, and I had no idea about it. That was stressful. When that was sorted, it was working pretty much as I was used to in the old days.

There came rain throughout the day, but it was not as massive as I had anticipated. I could have commuted by bike as well, but this was a refreshing experience. Next time, I will be less stressed, and everything will go smoothly.

I made good progress and released a new version of the software. In the afternoon, we all went to a restaurant to eat together. It was a nice Mexican restaurant. It was not as social as I had hoped because the music was slightly loud, but the food was delicious.

A colleague brought me back home, so that was great. No need to practice bus commuting during off-hours. That had otherwise been an interesting experience as well.

We chased slugs in the evening.

Wednesday 3 June

DW had a day off, and I worked from home in the morning. After lunch, I transplanted more of the Hokus cucumbers. The zucchinis are now about two inches long, and several plants have flowers. The carrots are doing fine in the electrified fortress; they started to develop their first true leaves. Some of the runner beans have climbed halfway up the scaffold. We harvested the first raspberries.

This morning I moved the scarecrow to a new place. It has to move around in the garden until the berries are safe for the birds.

As it stands, we still need to transplant the tomato plants. It feels like it is not the right moment. I moved these seedlings to new pots. That way, they can grow bigger before we put them in the ground. I am surprised by how long it has taken for the tomatoes to grow from seed. I thought we were well on time this year, but I am not sure about the chilies and tomatoes. We could probably use proper grow lights to grow seedlings. That is something we could look into for the next season.

I cut more of the building fences in half so that I can use them for the sheep. We fenced off the area around the birch trees so the grass there can recover.

In the evening, I worked on the lyrics editor for the first time in a really long time. I spent most of the time finding my way back, which was inefficient and frustrating, but it feels great to be back. I think I will need to program the lyrics editor at least one evening per week. The trouble getting started was annoying, but when I stood up from the desk and turned off the computer, I was mighty satisfied to have been working on the lyrics editor project.

Thursday 4 June

Good morning. There is so much stuff you need before you can go to work. You would say that it should be possible to pick up the things in two minutes and go, but not me. Today I’m going to work by car. It is 15°C and overcast. It will rain heavily this afternoon, so I decided to take the car instead of the bike.

When I parked at work, I found a little group of white peach-leaved bellflowers in the parking lot. There was a ladybird on a yet-to-open flower. It looked so pristine and eloquent. Can I not have a group of peach-leaved bellflowers just like that in my garden?

Good evening. It has rained awfully much today. But it is not raining right now, so I could have been biking today.

Today I spent researching a bug caused by a Microsoft library that has not been fixed for the last 741 days. It is so strange. It feels like a dead technology that way. All the cool guys are programming with AI, and they don't care about legacy technologies. These days, legacy has lost its value; everything is made from scratch.

Friday 5 June

Today I worked from home. I have had Fridays off since 1 November 2024. During that period, we were building the barn. The Fridays off were for the barn project, among other things. The driveway will soon be finished, making the barn easily accessible. It will be great.

I worked from home on the issue caused by a bug in the Microsoft library. I had an older version installed. After installing the latest version, I got it working.

Around lunch, I had a stroll in the garden. There, I noticed that a broad-bodied chaser had landed on the fence. It is essentially a dragonfly, with the special feature of a flatter body. For a moment, I thought it was a hornet.

This insect is typically found in wetlands, so perhaps it was disoriented. Either that or our pond is doing a great job.

I noticed the start of flowers among the cucumbers. We could make use of a few warmer days. Not too hot, because that is not good either.

Saturday 6 June

This morning we picked raspberries for breakfast. We started picking the berries last weekend.

DW sowed onions. It is funny because we bought those onions for a single dinner last summer, and after that dinner, DW put the stems in water. She lost interest in the stems, but I gave them water now and then. This was last summer. After a while, I transplanted the stems to the garden. They survived the winter, and we even picked a couple of stems sometimes. This year, they started flowering and producing seeds; these are the seeds that DW sowed today.

Today it’s time for the local country fair. DD and her friend WB will come. DW suggested we would get around by bike. We had three bikes in good condition, but how good was the 4th one? It had a puncture in its rear tire. No worries, I repaired the rear tire, so now everything is fine. Except, was it? If DS decided to join, we would need five bikes. He decided to walk.

I fetched DD and her friend from the train station. We biked to the country fair area. The first act we went to was from a singer singing her own songs. This was a show in a small amphitheater. I liked the atmosphere with people humming along with the singer.

After the singer's act, we went to a creative area with a clothes swap and a henna tattoos workshop. DW painted a tattoo on her friend.

Next up, we visited two artists having their ateliers next to each other in a large house. One was making light sculptures with willow sticks as frames and covering them with thin paper. Then he put lamps inside the constructions.

The other artist made tiny sculptures out of polymer clay. I was curious how it is possible to make a living from these activities. The light sculpture artist made constructions for festivals.

Next up, we went to the central area of the country fair. Here, it was more like a market with stalls where you could buy cookies, plants, pottery, and all sorts of things. I stopped at the cutting board producer. He makes cutting boards, but he also sells bottles of oil to use for cutting boards. It was grape seed oil in the bottles. I bought a little bottle of this oil.

As the day transitioned into the afternoon, the creative parts and the stalls ended, and more music acts appeared on a couple of stages. We got ourselves a drink in a bar located in a tent with yellow and red stripes.

We met many friends. It was really nice.

At the large podium, several acts took place. A DJ played music. There was also a klezmer band, and they invited people to dance.

I was impressed by how many people knew the steps to take to dance. It looked great. I did not join in on the dance. There was no Swedish type of dance here.

When we left, we found a DJ playing at the perimeter of the festivity.

I was impressed by the very fun DJ. It would have been better to have the DJ closer to the center of the fair.

When we came home, it started raining heavily. I wonder if people were still at the country fair.

Sunday 7 June

I had been an active day yesterday, so this morning we were tired, not hungover like so, but with an energy deficit. I blogged in bed with a cup of tea. DW was knitting.

Eventually, I started on the real tasks of this day. I created a fence by building fence elements, each cut in half. For this section, we also needed a gate.

I noticed that the cucumber flower was now open, a beautiful little flower resembling a miniature zucchini flower.

I could put the drill press on the floor to drill holes for the hinges. Luckily, the hinges I got can be mounted on the side of the gate. This drill press is the only method I have for drilling 12-millimeter-wide holes. It feels a little constraining, so I will look into other methods for drilling 12-millimeter holes in steel. In wood, I got drills, but they don't work for metal.

When the gate was finished, I went ahead and created the rest of the new fence along the driveway. I placed the fence about five meters from the driveway so that when Pawel's team arrives, they can move around more freely. They will need to put the material somewhere, and this area is suitable for that.

I noticed that we have a couple of places infected by thistles. When the fence was finished, I took out the brushcutter and moved the thistles and as much of Ragwort as I could identify. We are not fond of the plant because it is poisonous, although the sheep will need to eat a lot of it before it is lethal. In that sense, we have relaxed our annoyance with the plant, but it is taking over ever so slowly, which still annoys us.

This week, no work was done on the atelier. I started working on Fridays again, so that might explain why. I created new fencing so that it will be easier when the driveway construction starts. This was a week of social activities. I wrote 2263 words.