Tiny house installation was finished Sunday, 25-Jun-23 18:16:28 CEST

Merida arrived Sunday, 09-Jul-23 21:56:28 CEST

Sunday, 02-Jul-23 19:40:07 CEST

I got the DJ controller

This week my own DJ controller arrived. I started practicing mixing!

Monday 26 June

The weather this morning started as a repetition of the previous weekend. We were early and checked up on the garden. DW picked a bowl of strawberries. It was rather windy when we arrived at work, a sign of weather change. Later in the day, the worst heat dissipated, and it was comfortable.

In the evening after work, I took the brushcutter and trimmed along the road on the inside of the fence. The sheep have been stubborn about adopting the new area, so I cut them off from the west side of the property inside the dyke. Now they had access to the rain roof but for the rest, only the area between the properties on the west and north side of the border.

Then I continued with the brushcutter along the dyke inside. I had to remove the temporary net along the dyke. I finished all the way until I reached the north side of the dyke. Then it was time for dinner.

After dinner, I cleared the driveway garden of weeds.

The DJ controller will arrive tomorrow. I was promised it would come tonight, and I was undoubtedly excited to receive the package, but there was no package.

A message came that my package had arrived at the distributor and will be brought tomorrow evening. I am so excited!

Tuesday 27 June

Today I worked from home, as such a normal day. After work, we inspected the progress of the property. We discovered that one of our hazelnut shrubs (or tree whatchamacallit) had given birth to three beautiful pale hazelnuts! That is it, there are some flowery thingies on another shrub, but they are in a questionable state. The three hazelnuts here, they are the real thing!

We also have long, fluffy things on our sweet chestnut trees. I do believe that is the sweet chestnut catkins. It will be interesting to see how these transform into the copules holding the chestnuts.

The newly seeded parts of the salad beds were provided with plastic covers to ensure they sprout properly. The time after the seeds are put into the ground is critical for moist soil. I read somewhere that a plastic sheet helps moisten the soil. The challenge here is to take away the plastic at the right time.

Three minutes past eight on Tuesday evening, it happened! The DJ controller arrived. I unpacked it. The top side of the controller was in good condition. The bottom side was bulging out. I saw that my colleague's controller had the same issue. I must put something on each side of the controller to make it stable.

Moments later, I started experimenting with the controller.

From here on, my week transformed. I got soaked into trying the controller. When I went to bed, I thought about tricks I could do on the controller. I was dreaming about the controller. Perhaps not the most healthy condition, but it stabilized after a couple of days.

There was one clear loser during my controller frenzy, not DW, as you might think – shame on you, but this blog. Usually, I write up the week as I go along. That was put on hold, which is not good for the blog. I think the stories are better when I write things along with the week. When I reconstruct the blog afterward, it gets slightly wordier.

It rained a little this evening. Good for the grass!

Wednesday 28 June

Today I worked from home in the morning. In the afternoon, I mainly worked on cleaning up the last few things from DDs birthday party. Also, I trimmed thistles a lot. I made a clockwise movement around the property regarding the trimming.

Last week, on 21 June, I trimmed along the dirt road. This week I continued along the dyke on the west side. Now it was time for the north side of the dyke.

A brief recap of the brushcutter story goes like this: On 19 May, I cut a schub with the brushcutter with the triangular metal knife. Then I took out the trimmer head for the first time. Working with the trimmer head was awful; the line broke really quick. On 1 June, I bought new trimmer lines and put that in a bucket of water. This was excellent advice from a YouTuber. The trimmer line that I dipped in water works really well. I must say, though, that the brushcutter spends more energy on the trimmer head than the metal knife. I bruised one larger shrub with the line, fearing it would die, but it survived! The permanent fence survives the nylon line. A small tree does not survive, but I never expected it to either.

I discovered the first tiny little squash in the garden along the driveway!

Thursday 29 June

We were early this morning. I went out and picked strawberries for breakfast! Up until now, we had an excellent harvest of strawberries. That was during arid conditions when slugs had no chance to roam around. Now that has changed. The slugs are full-on active in the garden.

We enjoyed the breakfast and looked out in the garden. We noticed bird activity. There was a large number of starling birds. They picked seeds in the grass. That is fine; we are okay with that. Then they moved to the blackcurrant bush. The reaction of DW was strong and immediate. She rushed out into the garden and scared away the starlings!

But what should we do next? I had to go to work, and DW would work from home, but none of us could sit and guard a blackcurrant bush.

Here came the use of an unfinished art project by DW! We mounted the puppet on the nearest pole and hoped it would work.

After work, I removed the plastic over the seeds. I detected sprouted seeds, so it was about time to remove it.

This evening I practiced with the DJ controller. It works better, but it is still much to learn. Luckily.

Friday 30 June

Today I went to the office. DW worked from home. It was a little rainy. I must say that rain from time to time makes me happy. I have wondered if the dry conditions would continue for another month, but the rain has returned. We got hay in our sea container, so we could feed them for a couple of weeks, but eventually, we would need more hay, which is scarce this time of the year. Now it started raining, and in one week, I am optimistic we will get enough rain for the next month. We will see how it goes.

In the evening, we did our old pizza routine. We invited DS to eat with us. After dinner, I encouraged him to buy a washing machine. That will come in handy when he wants to clean clothes. The washing machine has been discussed this week, but now it is time to get it.

Saturday 1 July

I managed to spend an entire day without taking a single photo. DW and I were highly focused on the day's task, so we did not take the time to relax for a few seconds and take a photo. We went to FIL and MIL to help MIL remove a boxwood bush. Today we brought with us the large trailer. The bush had been attacked by the boxwood moth.

Apparently, the moth originates from Asia. There it is controlled by natural regulation. Here in Europe, we don't have that. The moth arrived in Germany in 2006. I found a Wikipedia article about the Cydamina perspectalis where the years for the time of arrival were jumbled up. Here I tried to make the timeline chronological.

Germany	2006
The Netherlands, Switzerland	2007
Great Britain	2008
France, Austria	2009
Hungary	2011
Belgium	2013
Italy	2014
Spain, Canada	2018
USA	2021

 

The moth has been spreading around ten kilometers yearly in The Netherlands from south to north. The distance is a guess from part. The spreading has been consistent, though. Many years ago, at our old house, our buxus plants died. Now it was time for the bush at MIL.

After we finished the cleaning operation, we went to two second-hand shops in the area where MIL and FIL live. I found a compact wireless keyboard that I can use with my phone! That was really fun. I also found a couple of porcelain bowls with a lid. A book about cats, a led strip, coasters, etc.

When we came home, I was exhausted. Driving with a trailer takes a little more concentration. With a power nap, I got recharged. Then I tried the new keyboard, and it worked very well. I did not practice with the DJ controller this evening because I had to blog!

Sunday 2 July

This morning, I sat blogging happily. I got an error message from Word and decided to save the document and restart Word. I thought I had not given the document a name, so after it quit, I searched for an untitled document, which I could not find. After figuratively speaking, falling to the ground for a while and continuing to fall to the center of the earth due to the feeling I lost a couple of days of blogging, I found that I had indeed given the blog post a name, and it was saved regularly, and nothing was lost. I was relieved. The good thing about this is that I read information about how to turn on backup features in Word. That was good!

We pottered around in the garden after breakfast. Potato plants had flowers! Beautiful flowers that also smelled nice.

After lunch, we went to the garden and animal center. There we bought many things for the cat that will arrive next Saturday. We got a cage, a litter box, a climbing pole, food, and litter sand.

I also found a spade for baking pizza and other stuff. When we came home, I made pizza dough. This evening I was trying to make pizza.

Somehow I forgot to add the oil while the recipe clearly stated that the dough should have oil.

I made a simple tomato sauce with onion and garlic.

For the topping, I did not have so much. I found smoked tofu in the fridge.

That was combined with bell pepper and cheese. It had also been nice with olives, but this was what we had tonight.

It was challenging to bake the pizza in the pan in the oven. That was not optimal. I would like to have a pizza stone.

Here ends this week's blog!