Sunday, 12-Feb-23 19:45:45 CET

Finished plastering the hall

This week I finished plastering the hall on the first floor!

Week 6 of 2023, 6 February until 12 February

Last weekend I went to a music course in Austerlitz, so my energy was a little drained at the beginning of this week. Because of this, it took several days to finish last week's blog, but it did not end there; I started blogging about the current week on Saturday.

It was a beautiful sunset on Tuesday evening!

On Saturday morning, I decided to blog about this week. As a title, I wanted my blog to include the week's number. That should be easy? No, it is not. There are different systems for when a week starts. The ISO 8601 standard is that the week starts on a Monday. This standard also specifies the first week of a year; I recall the first week holds the first Thursday of the year, but I could be wrong. It has annoyed me immensely that the week numbers in my calendar show the incorrect week numbers.

Today I found the reason for this. The calendar of google displays the week number based on your language settings. You get the broken week numbers if you set your language to US English and the superior ISO standard week numbers if you set your language to a European language. Online google calendar allows you to set the number to something ordinary, but I found that on my Android phone, I could set my language to English in region Sweden. With that, we got week numbers solved. This bug has irritated me for well over five years.

It took a couple of days to publish last week's blog, although I set it to display as if I had already published it on Sunday. It had been nice to publish the sound files from the music course, but Hans explicitly asked not to have them published online. I do respect that.

I worked on the new song in the evenings for the first part of the week. I made the album art on Monday evening. Then much time went into mastering the song. It is tedious and not that straightforward when having little experience.

On Wednesday, I worked on plastering the hall. The entire ceiling has now been plastered with TopFinish one layer. The south wall had two layers of TopFinish. Most of the west wall of the north hall had two layers of TopFinish.

Thursday and Friday, no DIY. Instead, I continued mastering the new song. It is really close to being finished right now.

On Saturday morning, we went to the farmers' market. I believe that the market belongs to those farmers. We bought vegetables without plastic wrapping and nuts, mostly without plastic packaging.

The next mission on our journey went to the local garden center, where we bought a Mirabelle tree. It fits into the car! Were we done yet? No, we went to a drop-in Corona vaccination center and took a booster jab for free.

Then we went home and planted our new tree. It will be standing on the edge of our vegetable garden. At first, we planned to have our vegetable garden in front of the entire house. In that plan, we decided on having a tree in the garden's center. It became a cherry tree. Then we decided to make the garden more compact and connected to the house so we could have permanent fencing around the garden. In that new plan, we now added the Mirabelle tree to the other side.

The pole got slightly crooked into the ground, but we will live with that.

It was a busy morning, indeed. Had we planned that beforehand, it had not have happened. After lunch, I got a decent lunch dip, but I started to plaster the hall again when I got over that.

I plastered three buckets of TopFinish, and DW prepared a sowing bed for onions. I had a sore arm from the jab, but for the rest, I was fine. I finished the north hall's west wall, which is the wall towards the washing room. I finished the north wall of the south hall, which is the wall towards the utility room. I almost finished the entire east wall of the north hall, which is the wall towards the workshop. The project is slowly wrapping up.

In the evening, I continued mastering the song again. It was not finished when we went to bed. DW was feverish at that point due to the vaccine jab earlier today. I hope she will get over it soon.

Sunday morning, it was a solid grey overcast. In the morning, we had a cup of tea, and I changed the album art to include a silhouette of a house in the background. We had our guess the peak watt game during breakfast, and I guessed three hundred and won because it was 344 watts at that point.

We were not feeling well because the vaccine was not received well. It was worse for DW than for me. I had a sore arm and was feeling okay for the rest. DW said everything hurt. I took the lead throughout the day, starting with making breakfast. Then I took a nap. After the nap, I started plastering the hall. After two buckets, we had a lunch break, and I had another nap.

It stayed grey throughout the day, but it was not bad weather for the rest. Not so windy and dry. We took a walk around the neighborhood.

After the walk, I did the two final buckets of TopFinish in the hall; the walls and ceiling were all done. This time I duck-taped the lamp to the scaffold so that it would stay with me the whole time while working on the ceiling.

I was so pleased with finishing the plastering project. I started on this project on 14 December last year. That was eight weeks and four days ago. Now DW will take over and paint this. When that is done, we can remove the protective paper in the hall. I am so looking forward to that already now.

DW was still not feeling well, so I tried to make a homemade pizza on Sunday evening. It was surprisingly successful. The dough was based on bicarbonate, so it did not need to rise for a long time. I managed to make the whole dish in 55 minutes. The recipe claimed I had to use 5 deciliters of flour and 2.5 deciliters of milk, which turned into some sauce. I had to add more flour until it became dough. A little like adding more TopFinish to correct the consistency of the plaster. This was the first time following a recipe that was simply wrong. A new experience.

Here ends this week's blog. Interestingly, I produced a blog post. Not only that, I got so excited when I realized I was actually really close to being finished, so I just kept going. That feels really good!