Southeast bedroom finished Sunday, 13-Feb-22 19:16:44 CET

Continued fixing the old house Sunday, 27-Feb-22 19:15:08 CET

Sunday, 20-Feb-22 22:08:03 CET

Prepared for painting a wall in the old house

This week we had the storm Dudley, Eunice, and Franklin. They were all mild storms around max Beaufort 7. I predict that in the future, there is no point naming mild storms of Beaufort 7. In the winter of the future, there will be a month full of storms every day. For the reader from the future, I might need to tell you that people here and now think that Beaufort 7 storms are the maximum you can have.

How was the week for the rest? We packed and moved things from the old house along the west wall of the second floor. The necessary preparations for working on the wall were finished at the end of the week.

Monday 14 February

Today we worked from our new house as usual. I was back in the southeast bedroom. There were some startup problems. It turned out to be so that only one of the four Internet connections worked. I had a long UTP cable with a working Internet outlet to the hall. Why are you not fixing WIFI, Jens? We got a perfect repeater, but it is still in the old house, and I will keep it there until the last day. Besides, I want the cables to work, and they are already outperforming WIFI, so I am OK with cables. The theory is that the scaffold in the staircase divides the house into a WIFI zone and one troubled zone. I have no intentions to find out if that is correct just yet.

In the afternoon, the clouds were spectacular, and there was a rainbow to be seen over the horizon. This is the current east view from the southeast bedroom.

We decided to go to our old home for supper and spend the evening packing things from the street side of the second floor. We got two shelves with stuff. Much of it is DW wool hobby things that eventually will get to the hobby room of the new house. There are also my paintings. When I packed the paintings, I got flashbacks from 2018 of how I held the paintings in my hand and wished for having a workshop where I could create the frames for the paintings. Now I got that workshop, it is not ready for making frames, though, but we are almost there.

In the evening, DW and I talked about the southeast bedroom; where would the bed for guests be standing? I had no proper answer to that question. We went to bed with the unanswered question, and it was a troubled night where I was dreaming about how we hired a carpenter to build a loft bed, and he came and did it with cardboard! In the dream, I asked him how this was supposed to be strong enough for a bed plus people, and he ensured that, indeed, this was good enough.

Tuesday 15 February

When I woke up, I just had to laugh about the dream. It was just a dream. After I was awake for a while, I concluded that one option for this challenge is to rebuild the table again to be in an L shape as it is supposed to be when the time is right. That way there is room for a sofa bed. DW liked this solution. She also liked the story about the carpenter from my dream.

We went to the new house to work for our employers.

In the evening we went back again to our old house. I continued packing boxes.

Wednesday 16 February

Today the storm Dudley would come to the Netherlands. I worked half a day, but DW was also working; she attended an online conference for work. She usually has a day off on Wednesdays but not today.

Our electrician came today. He got his coffee machine back, and then he installed the three-phase socket in the workshop. Now I can buy a new welding machine! It is good enough to get the old welding machine rewired for 400 volts. I got a stick welder from my uncle-in-law on 16 May 2020. At that time, I could only borrow it. Recently they sold their house and are moving to an apartment, and now he does not want the stick welder back. If you look carefully at the photo with the trailer, you can see a green thing besides the apple tree: the stick welder. He told me I could get the stick welder when I met him at the funeral on 27 January.

I still want to buy an AC/DC tig welder, but we have so much to do to get the house functional it is not the right time to pick up on the welding hobby right now.

DS and I went back to the old house with our small trailer in the afternoon. We packed all the prepared boxes in the trailer. Then we took the things to the new house and unpacked them.

When the hobby room is finished, the shelf is probably not here in the southeast bedroom. Right now, we need to get rid of things at the old house, and this room is finished, so the logic is to put the stuff here.

You snap with your fingers, and then the shelf is filled with stuff. In reality, it is not working like that.

In the evening, we decided to take it easy. We went to the grocery store and picked up easy things to cook in the new house. The storm Dudley was picking up in power. We had both to hold the shopping cart in the parking lot to prevent it from drifting away.

I found a shelf with seeds and could not restrict myself from buying a couple of envelopes. We recently found that onion goes well with carrots because the onion flies are killing the carrot flies and vice versa. So we have to have carrots as well.

The wind from storm Dudley picked up during the day and culminated throughout the night.

Thursday 17 February

We slept well in the new house despite the storm.

Today we worked from the new house. It is a pleasure to go into the new office (the southeast bedroom), sit down, and work.

Our DD came for a short visit over the evening and left in the morning. Since the southeast bedroom has not a bed for her yet, we went to our old house. She planned to go to work in the morning.

Things changed during the evening. DDs plans for Friday changed due to the storm Eunice that would arrive around 14:00 in the afternoon. She decided to work from home.

Friday 18 February

DD went home again instead of to the office. That way, she would not be stuck far from home when all public transport was shut down. Clever.

In the morning, I lost a screw of my glasses. A couple of weeks ago, it happened as well, but I could find the screw at that time. This time there was no time to find it. It was a really awful moment to lose the glasses. I had old glasses lying in a cupboard in the old house, which was good. It worked reasonably well. Then I got the brilliant idea to search for more old glasses to see if I could harvest a screw from them. Then I would not need to go to the optician. Later in the morning, this plan succeeded. I found a suitable screw that fit nicely, and this time, I also used a tiny glue dot.

DS had decided to stay at the old house, work there, and come to the new house later. That later never came because public transport was shut down when he was ready.

During lunch, the storm Eunice's first wind gusts pushed against the windows. We would start to eat and listen to a Twiter space of the UK Met office, and when it started at precisely that moment, the storm came. It was still not very strong, though.

DW had switched her day off Wednesday with Friday, so she had a lovely day off this Friday. A friend of hers came to us to deliver a loom.

I worked in my new office, and through the window, I could see how the wind gradually picked up in intensity. I went out and put up an extra diagonal on the scaffold to ensure it would not fall over.

My initial thought was to strap the garbage containers together with a ratchet strap. I really like endless ratchet straps. That did not work; they fell over. I placed the garbage containers in our sea container. I really don't like to spread our things over the street. The garbage containers fall over quickly, and then it is as if they are crawling around on the ground and slowly spitting out their guts. That sounds disgraceful, and that is also how I feel it.

I have seen that happening several times. I don't understand why people put that garbage container upright again and think it will stay upright.

Sometime around 4 in the afternoon, the wind was Beaufort 7. A large section of the sink roof edge of two neighbors got ripped off. Another neighbor had the roof sealing bulging up, but it looked like it was not getting ripped. The owner decided to put a bucket of sand on the edge of the sink to hold it down. Talking of ripped, a house down the street had the wall sealing ripped off. They had worked hard on putting it on, and now it was gone on one wall. A neighbor had lost a couple of roof tiles. Garbage containers here and there were crawling around again, spitting out their guts. People's personal papers were swirling around in the air.

Around 5, the building fence at the neighbor where we kept our sheep fell over. I quickly reorganized the fence so the sheep could no longer go to that area. Our sheep looked streamlined in the storm. They were hungry. Not until they had got enough to eat did they lay down out of the wind. Our temporary fence was not stormproof. The sticks got warn out clay holes that slowly let the fence loose. When the building fence was down, I collected extra sticks to make the remaining fence stormproof. The remaining fence itself I let lying where it was.

The rest of the evening was all right until 8 when I heard banging from the first floor. It was a plank from the scaffold that had got loose and was now poking on the wall. This happened just outside a window I could open. I had an endless ratchet strap that I could use to fasten the escapist plank. I got it in line with the other planks and fastened it really well. Good enough for 16 meters per second.

At 9, the storm was no longer fierce, but I could feel the house vibrating during the wind gusts. The forecast had predicted that we had Boufort 7 until midnight.

Saturday 19 February

In the morning, I went out to the area where we had the sheep before the storm and collected the nets. The bucket of sand was still standing at the edge of the neighbor's house to hold down the list.

I figured it was better to have the sheep nets removed as soon as possible if the neighbor wants full access to his plot without any hassle.

We decided to expand the fenced area into our own plot. This was a bit challenging to do this while the sheep were around us, but we moved sections bit by bit. They loved getting fresh green grass. Here is DW with our three happy sheep in their new area.

It was actually sunny and pleasant today. It was still a lot of wind but delightful weather to clean up garbage from a storm. I used to say that a lot of rain usually comes after a storm, but not today.

I noticed that Selma started to develop eyeshadow. She is becoming an emo sheep. I will see if I can portray her because it is stylish with her eyeshadow and split ear. Actually, she is the most clever sheep of the three that knows to make the best use of calories when they show up. She is also having a more extended memory than the other two.

Hannah likes to chew on anything loose that hangs from our clothing, especially when it has a little knob at the end. She is still propelling with her tail when you groom her. Bea is the shyest of the three.

There was a lot of barrier tape that had got ripped in the storm. We decided to remove it except along the dirt road. We picked up garbage from the storm that had got stuck in the shrubs.

All four top sections of planks on the scaffold got their own endless ratchet strap to fasten the planks. I think there will be another storm coming soon, so we can strap these planks to avoid escaping planks.

When everything was nice and tidy at our new house, we went to our old house. We started packing another batch of boxes to bring to the new house. I found a folder that has survived 4 moves. That was really bad; the folder's content did not require that it be kept so long. There were receipts from 40 years ago. I started contemplating the value of collecting things, like writing a blog. At the moment, it feels valuable for me to make this blog, but a blog is a little like old receipts. Or is it?

I find it valuable to myself to write the story. Some days I am more inspired than others. It is excellent to have a history of falling back on when you want to improve things. Take painting portraits as an example. When I have practiced painting portraits throughout the years, it has been great to remember methods I tried and evaluate them as I progress in my learning process.

It will be similar to gardening. Unless I write about it, I cannot possibly remember all the details of what we did in the garden last year.

Whatever the process is, it is all about iteration. In each cycle, improve on things learned in the previous cycle. This method works best if one approaches the process systematically. If all you do is ad hoc, there is no way to improve between the cycles; there are no cycles.

That said, there is stuff that I collected over the years that will need to be thrown away to make room for new funnier activities.

We ate supper at the old house. Then we went back to the new house to spend the evening in front of the woodstove. The idea is that we can then give the sheep food the following day and then connect the little trailer and pick up the boxes.

Sunday 20 February

It was a misty wet morning. The forecast is predicted to rain the whole day. I noticed that the area we gave the sheep yesterday had been grazed so much that it was actually more or less bare, already in the early morning.

We had a slow morning, well, not all of us. I was out of bed before DW and DS and washed the dishes to have plates for breakfast. Also, this aspect of the new house is different from our old house. We have not yet a dishwasher, so you have to wash it by hand. We had fruit salad and coffee for breakfast.

We connected the small trailer and drove to the old house. We have two main routes between the new and the old house. One uses motorways (highways), and the other is via local roads. The latter has 14 speedbumps. Since we had an empty trailer, it was inconvenient to drive over speedbumps, making the trailer literally jump around behind the car for every speed bump. I opted for the motorway. The wind of the next storm, named Franklin, was already significant. Especially along the motorway, it came from the southwest, and when driving the motorway, the wind came from the side, and I could see the small trailer catch the wind a little. It was a nervy experience, but we arrived without the trailer tipping over behind the car. It had a broken lamp, though, but I will fix that another time.

DW took down curtains and rolled out and taped the protective paper to prepare for improvements to the wall along the road on the second floor. The house lies east to west with neighbors to the south and north. The front garden and the road is on the west side, and the back garden is on the east side of the house. There are fewer opportunities to grow vegetables in an east-side garden. Our new garden is 50 times bigger.

DS and I packed the trailer with the boxes we prepared yesterday. I also filled new boxes, but I was running out of boxes at some point. We will get 20 boxes next week from my uncle-in-law. That is good, but we can make good use of even more boxes.

I know it is awful to pack things we need to throw away later, but I have settled on this fate. It is not justifiable to delay moving by sitting down and sifting through the garbage. It is hard, and it is tough, to sift through old stuff. This previous sentence could make it into a song on a minor scale. It is a sad song.

On the way to the new house, we went to a shop and bought more boxes. In the new house, we loaded the southeast bedroom with the boxes. It was raining a lot.

The wind started to pick up even more throughout the afternoon. At ten in the evening, we received the peak of the storm. It looked like a red band, on the weather maps, that moved over the country. In that red area, it was raining heavily with stiff wind gusts.

Our house looks like it is holding up well against the storms this week.

We made progress; let's be happy about that for a moment.