Sunday, 19-Nov-23 20:02:44 CET

Prepared for the road construction

This week, we prepared for the road construction along our property.

Week 46, 13 to 19 November

This week, I started blogging on Wednesday, which is okay. It is raining every day. When we had almost a month without rain this summer, I did nothing other than hope for more rain. Now I hope that it stops raining.

I worked from home on Monday, and DW went to the office. After a while, she came back, her trains had problems. It was nice to work together. Merida assisted me for a while by telling me where the cursor was. I have three large monitors, so it is good that she can assist me with that.

I went to the office on Tuesday, and DW worked from home.

DW had a day off as usual on Wednesday, and I worked from home in the morning. After lunch, we went out to prepare for the road construction that might happen next week. We must park the car at a school further away during construction. We will come back to that subject later.

We removed the rebar poles along the dirt road so that the roadworkers don't need to be bothered by that. The poles have really helped to protect our property from off-road driving. We are unsure what to do with the fences along the road. There are a couple of fence sections that are a little too close. We will see how to handle that. Soon, the dirt road's potholes will only exist in our memories.

We started to give the sheep hay. That is definitely the start of the winter season. I photographed the sheep on Thursday morning when we gave hay. The road builders were working in the background, perhaps not so easy to see, but they were easy to hear.

Thursday evening, I worked on the fluid simulations again. I now know the math behind it all is Savier-Stokes equations. I copied snippets of code from a paper written by Jos Stam in 2003. I want to improve his code and perhaps even understand what he is doing, but his code is nothing short of a shell game. I have struggled with his magician art for two weeks, but I cracked the mystery this evening. I even unraveled errors that Jos Stam made in his code, or rather, he is saying that he is computing something, but in reality, the code is doing something else.

You might think a software developer has no emotions when programming, but that is untrue. There are all sorts of feelings going on. In this case, admiration and hate simultaneously exist when working with Jos Stam's code. Often, when working on a specific part of the source code, a function becomes like a room. Obviously, you have a screen of a specific size, so you try to look at that part that concerns you, and many times, that is the current "room" you are in. You try to achieve things to make the things in the room function in a specific way, and it is not easy many times. The room metaphor is not bad at all.

Friday morning, I discovered that the work on our road had started. Before going to work, I decided to save our only surviving Cardoon. It appears I have not written about Cardoon before. It is a plant that can grow really big. We got seeds from neighbors, and DW made the seeds germinate this spring. When it was time to plant them, she did not have much energy left for the plants, so I adopted them. I did not know what they were, so I planted them within 20 centimeters of distance. Each plant will be one and a half meters in diameter! Before I discovered this, a couple of Cardoon plants had already died. Then, I moved the three remaining Cardoon plants to the flower garden, and there died two. Now, there was only one left. I dug out the Cardoon this Friday morning to save it from the digging machine.

I had several Verbascum thapsus, the great mullein, greater mullein, or common mullein. We got the first plants of this sort on 17 September 2022. I saved two of these plants. Then I went to work a little late. I had to compensate for that in the evening, but that did not matter. I had saved some of my plants, that was great!

During the day, DD announced that she would come to us this weekend. DD and I agreed that I would pick her up at the train after work, and I said that half past five would be great. Her train got delayed, and my employer got my late arrival at work richly compensated. There is giving and taking in the employer-employee relationship, but I seem to be the more giving kind of person.

We made homemade pizza. It got late when we had our meal and finished catching up on each other's stories. DD had been to Tallinn in Estonia. She showed us a movie she made about architecture in Tallinn. She is busy with a project where she will make a design for a building project in Tallinn. DD had an idea about making this project, which looked promising.

On Saturday morning, DW went to the second course of spinning wool. She is one of the teachers. There are eight pupils in the group, and they did very well. While DW was spinning, DD and I continued sleeping. I woke up at noon. I have not been sleeping like that for several years. For DD, it is more common.

It was raining continuously and heavily on Saturday. I noticed the sheep were grazing in the field, which is not a good sign when they do that while it rains heavily. It means they are hungry. I cleaned their rain roof platform and gave them fresh water. Then they got more hay. I arranged the hay rack to stand correctly and even fastened it so it would not blow over if it got windy. We will see how that works.

Then I planted the Cardoon and the Mulliein. This time, a little bit further away from the road. Also, in this case, time will tell if this worked out as intended.

On Sunday, we went to PILs. DD joined us. DD also showed the video to PILs about architecture in Tallinn, Estonia.

On the way home, we brought DD to Amsterdam. It is not that often I drive around in the middle of Amsterdam in the dark. Now, I can add that to my life's achievements list.

When we came home, I continued to program the fluid simulations.

Here ends this week's blog.