The 2025 garden season has started Sunday, 04-May-25 22:42:01 CEST

Monday, 12-May-25 21:24:55 CEST

Fetched planks

This week we fetched the planks of the timber we brought during our previous holiday.

Monday 5 May

Hello. Monday morning. Right now we are driving to the nearest city. The trailer with the garbage we loaded yesterday is behind me. In front of me, DM is driving the white car, and behind DW is driving the blue car. It is an operation to drive a caravan. DM asked us yesterday if we would like to help her get the blue car to the garage.

Yesterday evening, I finalized the blog from last week. I started writing a blog on my mobile phone and forgot about it. The Word template on the phone has settings for compressing images. For the blog, I need the images to be uncompressed; there are other issues as well, but that is the most essential difference. That does not work on the block—images to be uncompressed. So I transferred the document from the telephone to the laptop and continued working on my laptop. The settings stayed the same.

When I was drained in the evening, I just wanted to upload to the blog when I realized the images were compressed. It did not look good. This morning, I had to enter all the images again with the correct compression settings. This time, the upload worked fine.

How do I change the document settings on the phone, especially regarding compression? I have to look into that.

We are not just bringing garbage to the recycling center. We are also going to the police station. I went there to renew my passport. It will be interesting to see how that goes. I had to fill in a peculiar new form for the investigation of my nationality. As far as I can remember, I have always been Swedish, but if this is what it takes, then we do this. So, what has your occupation been? I answered yes. It's such a strange question. I lived in the Netherlands for 30 years. I will not list what I have been doing for 30 years. They could get a link to the blog and read about what I have been doing in great detail here.

There were other strange questions on the form: When were my parents married? I have no idea. I have an idea, but. I don't know. This form feels so strange in the era of GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, to fill in a form with data they already have. One shall not gather data you don't need. We have databases in Sweden, and I am Swedish, so I have an identification number. With that number, they have all the data about my parents and children, what I own. They can bring up all the tax forms. What's going on with Sweden? What is this form for? I'm winding up about this passport; I should not do that.

In a moment, I will be at the police station. But first, we will go to the car company to pick up the blue car. Then, with the trailer full of garbage, we go to the police station. They have a large parking area, so that should work fine.

I got the application for the passport submitted. The passport people will do their investigation, so I cannot get the passport this week. It will be sent to the Hague. I can pick up the passport there. Just imagine if they conclude that I am not Swedish anymore because I am not a supporter of Jimmy from the Super Dumb party. That would be a surprise!

We emptied the trailer at the recycling center. It was a large load of stuff. DM came to help us unload the trailer.

Then we went back to the cottage. It was sunny, but the wind was icy.

I tried to start the tractor, but that did not work. I had to charge the battery. I drilled a hole in the wagon hall for a hook. Now I can use the crane to move the wagon into the hall. DM cut the grass in front of the barn so BIL and SIL can place their caravan there when they arrive.

The trailer got maintenance. Last time, when I took the trailer to the MOT test, I was told to put the registration sign at the back. Right now, it is on the wheel flap on the left side. The trailer was not failing, but he wanted to see it improved, with a new sign at the back. Last time we were in Sweden, I bought a sign holder. Now I put it on the back of the trailer. It turned out that the trailer is registered on DF, so he had to submit a request to get a new sign. It takes a couple of days to get the registration sign.

In the evening, I started to structure my dictionary research project better. I uncompressed the Moby database from 2017 and found a more recent version. I decided to process the data with Python, but did not get it going this evening. My Python skills are rusty right now. I know how to do it, but there is no guarantee that it is possible. I will see.

Tuesday 6 May

Today is our 7th anniversary of our new house project in the Netherlands. We started on it on 6 May 2018. I wrote about it in this blog.

We went to the city again. The blue car of DM was finished and could be picked up at the garage. We brought DM to the garage and continued with the other shopping. We went to the second-hand shop.

I found a lawn scarifying machine. The second-hand shop had two, and we bought the smaller, simpler version. This can be a way forward in maintaining the grass for our sheep. I bought a book in English. We also bought regular groceries.

At home, I started the maintenance of the tractor. I injected grease into all the little grease nipples. Then I went to the local grocery store and bought oil for the transmission and the motor. 10W30. I filled up more oil in the gearbox and replaced the oil in the motor. The oil was suitable for both the gearbox and motor.

There are ten litres of oil in the motor.

The crane also got greased. Then I put the crane on the tractor. The power transmission bar was a little uncooperative. It was stuck. I tried to get it separated. I put it on the crane anyway, hoping it would all work. Then I drove to the hall where we store the wagon. They put the crane down, and the power transmission bar fell off. I started working at the bar. I had forgotten I had the lights on the tractor.

Then it was time to eat. After dinner, I just wanted to close the door when I discovered the tractor still had the lamps on. The battery was exhausted. I left it like that. I will fix that tomorrow.

Then I went inside and continued programming in Python. I started loading the file with the phonetic data from the Moby project. I had the latest version of Python 3.13 and Visual Studio Code. There was AI help to get into the integrated development environment. It was the first time I tried this. It worked pretty well. I got the file loaded, and I could start parsing the data. I plan to parse the data and turn it into a JSON structure. This is just the intermediate form. Then I will convert this into a MySQL database running on my server. Then I can make an API to get access to the data. That is for much later. First, I need to understand the file structure, what is in it, and how to deal with it.

There are words and phonetic data, but there are also comments. There are also several pronunciations of each word. I need a structure for each word that can hold all this. Then, when that is sorted, I can start with the real challenge: Matching the phonetic parts of the word. More about that later.

Wednesday 7 May

Early in the morning, I put the tractor on the charger again. Then I started working on the power transmission bar. It is essentially a diamond-shaped rod that fits into a diamond-shaped pipe. These two can slide in and out, and at the ends, some grippers can hold on to a rotating bar on the tractor and the tool you are using. I am using this for the crane.

Immense forces are going on with the bar. It has been beaten a lot for over ten years. It is now stuck in the last couple of inches. After much trying and fiddling, I cut back the bars so the contraption was slightly shorter. It is long enough to extend properly.

When the tractor started, the crane was happily mounted, the wagon was as well, then I called the carpenter Gunnar to see if I could come and pick up my planks. He was busy. I was welcome tomorrow.

What should I do then? I took out the new acquisition from the second-hand shop. The tarrifying lawn scarifying machine. I could produce enormous amounts of fluffy moss. The machine picks up the moss from the lawn. The grass was left intact; it is brilliant. I could remove it if I liked, but this was also an intense task. Small springs rotate over the lawn, and the frills of moss are caught by the springs and flung up and in front of the feet of the operator, me. It is a simple contraption, really.

When I got bored with doing this, I sat down and read in the book we bought at the second-hand shop. Apparently, it is a women's book. It did not say on the back side. I did not even read the back side. It has been a long time since I read a book. I am such a busy person. This was feeling great.

But you cannot sit down for too long, can you? I started on a project I wanted to do for a long time. Perhaps more than ten years. I wanted a detachable nose wheel for the tractor wagon. I want the tractor to work correctly and be easier to handle. A nose wheel on the wagon is essential in that plan. When I have that, I can lift the bar of the wagon and drag the wagon out of the hall with the crane. I will need less strength to get the wagon out of the hall. That will be great. I just started welding. The welds did not look great, and I was unhappy with the design. I will reconsider the redesign tomorrow.

In the evening, I programmed the phoneme database program again. I got the comments extracted from the CMUDict file. I have the comments stored in a comment property next to a list of pronunciations. The comments are not thrown away.

I converted the flat phone list into a structured list, making it possible to add additional information about each phone easily. I made a property for a regular expression. Somehow I will need that. There are about fifty phones.

Then I started programming the actual innermost parsing of each word. I decided to walk over the word from the beginning of the word. I loop over all phones trying their regular expression; I store it if there is a match. Then I have a list of matching phone expressions. At that point, decisions needed to be made, but I did not get that far. I will work on that tomorrow.

Thursday 8 May

In the morning, I continued working on the wagon's nosewheel bracket. Half past ten, it was time to go and pick up the planks from the carpenter.

The tractor did not start. It appeared as if the battery had died. We could drive the nose of the car to the nose of the tractor and connect the tractor to the battery of the car. This succeeded, and we drove off to the sawmill. DW drove behind me. I cannot drive quickly with this tractor; it is not made for quick driving. It goes at the pace of a bike.

We arrived at the sawmill and Gunnar. He was already busy. I was sure the tractor had sufficient time to charge when we arrived at the sawmill, but that was not the case. The tractor did not start again. This was the first clear signal that something is wrong with the charging of the battery of the battery itself.

We loaded the planks onto the trailer. It was sixty planks.

When the planks had been loaded, Gunnar loaded the rests. It is called Bakved in Swedish. It has nothing to do with baking. It is that the rounded cutoffs are called Bak meaning butt in English because it is round. So the literal translation is butt-firewood. Gunnar loaded this firewood on top of the planks.

I pulled the bar of our crane to the side to give Gunnar more space to put the wood on the wagon. He was not satisfied with the load. He called it a magpie nest. I assured him that it was fine. Then I manually put the butt-firewood in a neat order on the wagon.

We drove to the cottage. First, I unloaded the firewood.

Then I drove to the barn so we could load the planks into the barn's first floor.

The tallest pile was 7-inch-wide planks in the middle. To the left of that is the pile of 8-inch planks. On the right side is the 6-inch pile. The wood industry is still based on the tradition of imperial measurements. The length is in metric, though. The planks are four meters long.

I turned off the tractor while we loaded the planks. Indeed, it would not start again. The trick with the car would not work anymore. This got me wondering if the battery or the battery charging was wrong. I put the tractor on the charger again. If the battery is getting charged, it might be an issue with the dynamo.

Then I finished the nosewheel bracket! I botched the welding horribly. The very last weld was nice. It doesn't look nice, but I will keep it like this. It would be nice to improve at welding, but I would like to practice in the Netherlands in the new barn.

Late in the evening, I tried to start the tractor. It worked. I noticed the engine belt was too loose, so the dynamo was not moving. I will need to fasten this to make the dynamo turn more reliably. That is for tomorrow. I will also test the nosewheel and the new hook in the wagon hall. So exciting!

I also programmed the phoneme conversion program. I got into the innermost part of the algorithm and the crucial part of whether I can match phonemes with the word's letters. I am not sure yet.

Friday 9 May

I started the day by buying a socket wrench set at the local grocery store. They are also a hardware store and a well-equipped one, too. Tallberga Köpcentrum is a marvellous place.

Back at the cottage, I fastened the belt around the dynamo. Then I tried to start the tractor again. That did not work, not even with the car's help. I put the battery on the charger again.

DM and DF arrived. They brought with them the new sign. I put it on the trailer, and one thing is fixed. They looked at the neat heaps of planks, and I showed them the second-hand lawn scarifier. They were mighty impressed by how it extracted moss from the lawn. In the midst of this, my sister called. That was nice.

You wonder why she is not called DS? That is because my son is also called DS. It would be too confusing to call them the same thing.

It started drizzling, and DF and DM went home to cover their firewood.

When the tractor was sufficiently charged, I started it. This time with the dynamo rolling. This holiday, I had some quality time with the tractor. I drove the tractor to the wagon hall. This was the moment to test if the hook in the wall of the wagon hall would hold. It was also the moment to see if the nosewheel contraption would work.

I got the hook right. It worked marvellously. The nose wheel contraption was too weak. The wagon is too heavy for the thing. No welds did not get loose, which is a win, but the metal is too weak for this construction. I need thicker metal for this to work and something that grips around the entire boom.

The wagon was dragged into the hall with the help of the hook in the wall. I took the wire from the crane to a block on the hook. Then from the hook to the wagon. Now I could pull back the wire with the crane, pulling the wagon into the hall. Fantastic.

Then I put the crane in the crane storage, and the tractor in the tractor hall. It will be interesting to see if the tractor will start the next time we are at the cottage.

I tidied up the workshop the rest of the day and brought a pile of moss to the compost heap. I found a flower that had grown right through a hole in a leaf. Poor guy.

In the Netherlands, our plumbers were busy with the rainwater pipes around the barn. Should we call him DP? He sent pictures of the work when he was done. I managed to work around the sheep, and they did not bother him.

Sweet. Now I can fill up the trenches. It will be so much easier to walk around. The rainwater will be transported to the pond as it should be. No soggy mess in front of the barn.

In the evening, I programmed the phoneme conversion program. I got to the word aachener. I will progress through the dictionary alphabetically, so I am still in a very early stage. Here at this word, the algorithm got confused. I gave up for this evening and started dishing while listening to Ukraine-the-latest podcast.

There was a parade in Moscow, and all of Trump's friends were there. Trump himself was not there. I think he watched it on television.

Saturday 10 May

This is the pack-and-go day. The house got the regular tidy-up, things put back where they should be, and then we left the cottage for this time.

I started driving at 1 PM. We drove to the local grocery store and filled up with gas. We continued south along E4, E6, E20, E45 to Scheswig. We drove by Tarp and the hotel we had on the way up. DW picked up her jacket. We arrived at the new hotel at 8 PM.

We had opted for Hotel Hohenzollern. The name has something to do with the last royal family of Germany, or something like it. My interest in royal history is not that extensive, and I looked up the Hohenzollern information, and it's a long page with much information. It is something that has to do with the royal family in Germany. Now Germany is not a kingdom anymore, but some of its ancestors are still around. I have no idea if they are running a hotel in Schleswig. Could be, but I doubt it.

The room appeared okay-ish, although it was quirky to say the least. We decided to eat at the hotel restaurant.

DW had a vegetarian burger, and I had salmon and tagliatelle. We wanted a dessert, but somehow we miscommunicated with the owner, so she never delivered any dessert. She was not keen on selling the dessert either, so she did not return to check our status; others got that check. Eventually, she came to us, and we declined the dessert. We were done.

Already, while eating, I noted the peculiarity of the building itself. The windows are half-covered on the inside. It looked like someone had a talent for bolting on plywood constructions to walls and ceilings and covering them with plaster, lists, and carpet. I looked and wondered, What is that for? Why would one do that?

We went to the room. I had a closer look at the art. The main painting was a lighthouse in the configuration of a raised middle finger. It was a figurative sign when we came from the restaurant without any dessert. The central point of interest was placed in the middle, and the horizon was also in the middle. Interesting.

There were two more paintings. They also based their composition on the idea that putting the lighthouse in the center would be easier. Is it a royal composition to put the lighthouse in the middle? We will not know.

We went to bed. I blogged a little, and DW read her book.

Sunday 11 May

The room is odd. It has 13 walls, a continuation of the theme of the plywood carpenter. There was also a bit of a slanted roof.

The bathroom has a bathtub, a separate shower, and a large mirror. That is quite a luxurious bathroom, you could say.

The mattress of the bed slanted a little bit. It wasn't easy to understand why. The duvet was made for an arctic temperature of minus 30 degrees Celsius, but the room was not cold.

The roof window in the bathroom could be opened, and the window in the bedroom could also be opened. The thing was that the roof window in the bathroom let in smoke. The two windows aren't far away from each other, but that's what happened. The window in the bedroom did not let in that much smoke. We closed the window in the bathroom.

Everything is functional, but just slightly off. When I was taking a shower this morning. The shower head could not be angled correctly. It was angled towards the wall. But I fixed that with a cotton swab. I did not bring a screwdriver this time.

There is an escape route. But is it working? It was blocked by a table. It was not a light table, but I suppose you get strong in a case of emergency.

We had breakfast and I did not get a spoon; there were only teaspoons at the counter. DW suggested I ask for a spoon, but I declined. I ate with the teaspoon. It takes longer, but it does not matter. Have I lived through without dessert, cottonswab modified shower head, smoke from a window, and a slanting bed under a duvet for arctic conditions, a teaspoon is a mild obstacle.

DW hates soft-boiled eggs, but I am fine with them if they contain no salmonella. You win some and you lose some. It is fair to say we will probably not book a room at this hotel in the future unless we forget about this episode and book here again. That is so typical for us. Hohensollern, is that a place we have been to before?

We checked out of the hotel and filled the car at the gas station outside the hotel. There, they had a greater variety of freshly baked bread than in the hotel. I made me think about choices that have been made. There were a lot more traffic jams on the way south. The first happened at the Elbtunnel. There followed more traffic jams.

We had a late lunch at Hasbruch Nord between Delmenhorst and Oldenburg. In Germany, along the autobahn, there is a restroom service you pay for, and when doing that, you get a voucher you can use at the restaurant at the same place. At first, we collected these vouchers, but we are not doing that anymore. Either we use them right away or throw them away right away. It does not fit anymore. Paying with the phone, but no place for paper vouchers. If we could get an electronic voucher, it would be fine, but that is not how it works.

We came home at 5 PM. It was the full summer when we arrived. Merida appreciated that we came home. She had a good time with DS. He gave her a few challenges to get to her food.

Here ends this week's blog. I had quality time with the tractor this week; we fetched the planks. We went home. I wrote 4130 words this week. That is not bad at all. See you next week!