Intense week Sunday, 12-Mar-23 20:40:03 CET

Finished plastering the bedroom hall Sunday, 26-Mar-23 21:41:16 CEST

Sunday, 19-Mar-23 20:48:46 CET

Plastering TopFinish in the bedroom hall

This week I was wondering why I make these blog posts. Just writing them to myself, until now, seemed like a sufficient reason for making them. Last week I was wondering if that was still correct. This thought stayed with me the whole week. It was another very intense week. I had no willpower to blog in the evenings. I was working on music, though. Let alone painting that I have not done since the pandemic started; there is no place for that. That is sad, actually. On Friday night, I started writing a blog post about the week.

The most relevant activity this week was that I plastered the bedroom hall.

Monday 13 March

This was a regular work-from-the-office day. I had meetings almost the entire day.

Tuesday 14 March

This day was supposed to be a day I worked from home. We knew some public transport companies had a strike but were unsure where this was. DW had to go to the office, and at the very last moment, she discovered that going by public transport would be possible with an enormous detour.

I drove her to the station and worked from the office the rest of the day.

In the evening, I decided to make cinnamon rolls. Before you start baking, wash your hands carefully.

This is the recipe I used for the roll's ingredients for the dough:

• 25 grams dry yeast.
• 50 grams of palm-fat-free margarine. The rolls taste much better when you know you are not destroying the planet.
• 3 deciliters of oat milk. The rolls taste much better when consuming less CO₂ when you don't use cow milk.
• ½ deciliters of sugar.
• ¼ teaspoon of salt.
• 8 deciliters of flour.

Ingredients for the filling:

• 100 grams of room-tempered margarine.
• 1 tablespoon of cinnamon powder.

Ingredients for the topping:

• Nib sugar. You can buy it in many places in Europe, except the Netherlands. I bought my nib sugar during a holiday in Sweden. It is also possible to make nib sugar, although I have not tried that yet.
• One egg.

Utilities:

• One bucket for the dough.
• One bucket for the wet ingredients (consider a bucket that can be used in a microwave oven)
• A teaspoon.
• A tablespoon.
• A measurement cup for deciliters, up to one liter.
• A microwave oven. Either that or a stove and pan to melt the margarine.
• A regular oven.
• Kitchen towel.
• A kitchen timer, or set the timer on your smartphone.
• A kitchen scale, or buy margarine with an indication of grams on the package.
• A baking pan (for baking the rolls in the oven). For optimal workflow, it is better with two baking pans.
• One sheet of baking pan paper. Or two if you have two baking pans.
• Doughroller.
• Kitchen knife.
• A cup for the egg. It is also possible to wipe out the rest of the wet ingredients bucket and reuse that bucket.
• A kitchen brush.
• An oven rack.
• Protective gloves (so you can handle the hot baking pan).
• It can be handy with a couple of coasters if you need to put away the hot baking pan.

Here are the steps for making the cinnamon rolls:

1. Put the dry ingredients in a bucket: flour, salt, sugar, and yeast. Mix the dry ingredients.
2. Put margarine in a bucket that you warm in a microwave oven. When melted, add oat milk and warm this until it is 37 degrees celsius (finger warm).
3. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.
4. Work on the dough until it is smooth.
5. Let the dough rise for thirty minutes under a kitchen towel.
6. While the dough is rising, you can prepare the filling. Measure the margarine for the filling. It can be mixed in the bucket you recently used for the wet ingredients. Add the sugar and the cinnamon powder. Mix this thoroughly. If the margarine is still too cold, you can warm the mix in the microwave oven shortly. The mix needs to be spread evenly to ensure the consistency you are looking for.
7. Depending on how quickly your oven is to heat up, this is the moment to start preheating the oven. It must be set to 250 degrees (no fan function) with the top and bottom heat elements.
8. When the dough finishes rising, you can roll it to a sheet similar in size to your baking pan, or around 30 x 40 centimeters.
9. Apply the filling on top of the dough sheet. Smear it out in a thin, even layer on the dough.
10. Roll the dough sheet along the long edge. You can also roll it along the short edge, which gives bigger but fewer buns. Smaller and more buns start rolling the long edge.
11. Put a sheet of baking pan paper on the baking pan.
12. Cut the roll into slices of two centimeters each, and put the slices on the baking pan. Give room around each roll so they can rise without bumping into each other. If you have a second pan, using it is also lovely to give enough space around the rolls.
13. Let the rolls rise for twenty minutes under a kitchen towel.
14. While the rolls are rising, crack an egg in the cup. Stir it with a spoon. When the rolls finished rising, paint the rolls with the stirred egg and pour the nib sugar chunks on top of the cinnamon rolls.
15. Put one plate of rolls in the middle of the oven. Set the timer to 8 minutes. If the rolls become a little pale after eight minutes in the oven, I often eyeball when the cinnamon rolls become golden brown.
16. Take out the baking pan. Lift the rolls off the pan and put them on the oven rack to cool down under the kitchen towel. If you got more plates, put them in the next plate and let it bake in the middle of the oven. It is not worth it to bake more plates in the same oven. It is better to do the plates one after the other.

Yummy, delicious!

Wednesday 15 March

Today I had a meeting at the office again. It was planned to be the whole day. DW had a day off. I usually have a half day off and work from home on Wednesdays, but I switched that to Friday.

I had brought with me cinnamon rolls, and my colleagues appreciated them!

We went to the poll voting in the evening. A tent was set up in our neighborhood's supermarket parking lot.

Thursday 16 March

Today I went to Amsterdam and the office we got there. It was also a very intensive day. Can you imagine how intense this week has become? I was standing at the train station and noticed that the glass roof of the station had little solar panels embedded into the glass. This is something they introduced during the pandemic.

DW also went to the office today.

After work, we met in Amsterdam and went home by train. That was nice. The office is near the museums in Amsterdam. Usually, I got off beside the Rijksmuseum. This time it was in front of the van Gogh museum. I did not reflect on this more than that: Perhaps they added another tram stop? After work, I went to the Rijksmuseum place where the stop was before, but it was gone.

Friday 17 March

DW went to the office again. I worked from home. It was a blissful delight to work alone for a moment. Not that I had no pressure on me; I had loads of things to do.

At lunchtime, I signed off from work and wondered what to do. It was such lovely weather. That was when Google Street View came by to refresh their photos. My neighbors came out of their house, and we waved to the Street View car. The driver waved back.

I wanted to plaster but fancied doing something in the nice weather. It became moving the sheep fence so the sheep could graze in a new area. They got the area between the two northern neighbors. There is not an abundance of grass to eat there, but it is good to keep it short, what there is.

When the sheep was done, I started plastering. I decided to put metal corner rods along the window and the door opening towards the rest of the hall. Until now, I had only put the corner rods on the sides inside the bedroom hall, but I figured that when DW is painting this hall, it is better to include the wall until the window of the staircase wall. In that case, that window needs to be adequately prepared for painting, thus, correctly plastered. This meant I had to work with course mud again.

With the course mud of the window and door opening finished, I continued plastering TopFinish onto the east wall of the bedroom hall. That is an irritating wall because the transformer for the solar panels is hanging on it, and I will not remove it to plaster and paint the wall. I have to work around it, and that isn't very pleasant.

I had done one bucket of TopFinish when DW texted me to ask if I could fetch her at the train station. Of course, I could.

Saturday 18 March

This morning I continued writing on the blog post of this week. That nagging feeling of "should I do this" evaporated completely. I do enjoy writing my blog posts.

The first thing we did this morning was that DW cut my hair. It was getting long again, so it was time for a trim.

Outside, it was absolutely fantastic spring weather. The grass was growing so hard you could almost see it with your bare eyes. It was tempting to go outside and enjoy the good weather and come up with one or another seemingly important outdoor activity.

However, I did not do that. DW went outside to do various tasks, but I decided to continue plastering the bedroom hall.

Today I worked on the east wall with the converter. I provided a proper first layer on the entire east wall. I also reworked the north wall near the converter. The south wall near the window is also done with the first layer of TopFinish.

Sunday 19 March

We had morning tea in bed, I blogged about music, and DW prepared for work this morning.

For one moment, let us reflect on matters. We had one-hour-long lunch walks when the pandemic started around the spring of 2020. Later we had no time for those walks, but we worked from home and saved a tremendous amount of time in commutes we did not need to do.

Then I started to work two days per week, which later became three days per week. DW could still work from home. Now she goes to the office at least once a week but worked all day last week. Now she is sitting beside me in bed on a Sunday morning, preparing for work; it feels surreal.

I, on the other side, had a great time. I tested Bing with the new chat functionality, and it was great. My goal was to learn more about stressed and unstressed syllables. Great fun! Bing chat performed very well.

After breakfast, DW went out to work in the garden, and I started plastering. I plastered the south wall with TopFinish.

We talked about our season planning. We will put the plates below the façade planks this spring and summer. Then when that is done, we will start thinking about filling up with gravel. That means we can keep the salad beds where they are for most of the vegetable season. When we are ready for gravel, I will perhaps need to remove the beds to give access to machines that will drive along the house.

Our raspberries will grow tall this year, so they need support, and this evening we mounted a grid for the bush. When the branches grow longer, we will tie them to the grid. It will look amazing.

The raspberry bush had sent out 20+ shoots. Some of the shoots will not be needed. That does not matter; we will tie the branches we need. The others we can cut back.

Here ends this week's blog. It was a phenomenally intense week, almost more intense than last week. We are making good progress on plastering.