We got back the repaired lawnmower Sunday, 13-Jul-25 22:30:51 CEST

Sunday, 20-Jul-25 21:14:02 CEST

The next phase of the barn can start

This week, I finished the preparations for the electrician/plumber.

Monday 14 July

Yesterday evening, after the DJ set and dinner, I crashed on the couch. The prospects of ending the week properly felt meager when I woke up. I had to force myself to finish the blog from last week, upload it, and then load the dishwasher so that we could start next week on a clean slate. Against all odds, it succeeded! We went to be in a timely fashion after I finished my tasks.

This morning we woke up early. DW had meetings already from 8:30 AM. I had to gather my belongings to set up my workplace. It was fantastic weather, and since I was early, I could check out the garden a little before the work started. Those small moments in the morning garden during the summer, when it's quieter, are incredible. One should stop trying to stretch the evening and stand up earlier; that is a much more valuable time, emotionally.

DW collected berries for breakfast, and I made a smoothie of pears, apples, bananas, and our red currants.

Then it was time to work. Both DW and I worked from home. She had plenty of meetings, and I programmed as usual. It was a productive day for both of us. After lunch, it started raining heavily. We received 3 millimeters of rain. Last week, we received plenty of rain, and it's good to get some more. When it is raining too much, you will also hear me complain, but we are not there yet. While it rained, it was rather windy, but our vegetables did not fall over.

After work, I moved the sheep to the south-east field, in front of our house. I took out the lawn mower and cut the grass in the previous area between neighbors to the east and north. It looked pretty! The south-east field is not a grass field. We had a look at it and concluded that we regretted tilling it and sowing it in an arid spring season. I had not expected to find many cool things growing in the field. It does not look like a regular lawn. The most important thing is that there are calories for the sheep; how it looks is not essential.

Then I emptied the fly catcher buckets. Unfortunately, I forgot to put on silicone gloves. The rest of the evening, my hands smelled badly. It was not nice.

Tuesday 15 July

Good morning, 15 July, 8:35 AM. For a couple of weeks, I've had the feeling I didn't have my things in good order. Late Sunday evening, I turned the tide. I got the sheep moved, I topped the grass, and I blogged; that's all very good things.

Also had a look at the phoneme conversion project. I'm still grappling with the multiple sound patterns. I might understand if even the regular reader of the blog cannot follow what I'm doing with the multi-sound pattern issue. So, if you don't mind, I will explain this one more time. Carnegie Mellon University provides me with a list, where each line consists of a word followed by a list of phonemes. So what I set out to do is to create a program that matches each letter of the word with its corresponding phoneme. Sometimes, several sounds together form a letter. For example, K and S can be X.But this is not always the case. Additionally, K can be found in various locations, and the S sound can also be found in different places.

A combinatorial explosion is taking place. The search results of the first sound need to be combined with the search results of the second sound. For this, I'm using the Cartesian product.

At first, I tried to create this Cartesian product routine myself, and I was optimistic, considering myself clever. Then I imported a ready-made Cartesian product routine. The last two weeks, I've been discovering what comes out of this product. It has not been that straightforward as I first thought. Essentially, I need to process the result that follows from the product and transform the output into a valid result; invalid cases must be omitted.

So that's where I am. I am also at the cow field, almost at work. I arrived at work at 9:10 AM.

The time is now 6:00 PM, and I'm biking home. Today, I brought 4 zucchinis with me. I handed out zucchinis to my happy colleagues. I had one colleague who only eats meat, and she didn't want to have any zucchini.

I just realized I didn't put the tire on evenly, which created a bump in the tire. I have to look into that. Can there be anything that works on the first attempt? I hope the tire doesn't have the bump imprinted on it, because then it won't be possible to remove it.

I heard that Deutsche Welle has visited our neighborhood, making a report about the food corporation and the construction of houses in the area. It was a nice movie. Deutsche Welle came to this town also two years ago and made a movie.

In the evening, I worked on the bike again. I removed the tire and found the issue: the tape was too broad. I made it narrower, and it worked. I tried adding fat to the back wheel grease to stop the ticking, but it didn't work. Not this evening anyway.

My hands were still smelly from the previous evening when I refilled the flycatchers.

Wednesday 16 July

This morning, I worked from home. DW had a day off. It was raining heavily today. Just before lunch, the electricity in the area went out. My working day was essentially finished, but I wanted to do one last thing. However, we had lunch first. The electricity returned during lunch.

After lunch, I harvested potatoes and zucchini for the food cooperative. I know I called it a corporation, but that is not correct. It is a cooperative. There were not many zucchinis to deliver, so we currently have too many.

Then I biked to the collection point of the food cooperative. There was no one there. I brought the vegetables and biked home. I noticed the bike had stopped ticking. Could it be that greasing the cogwheel axis helped remove the sound?

At home, I sowed carrots where I had harvested potatoes. I think I can already see the sprouts from the carrots of the previous batch, last week. The soil is perfect for carrots. Perhaps there will be carrots at one point; that would be grand!

Thursday 17 July

This morning, the garden was lovely. I made a film documenting the progress.

Good morning. The time is 8:30 AM on Thursday, 17 July. I'm biking on the east side of the large canal, through the old Villa Park. The parkland features ponds and well-preserved, maintained gardens, with trees arranged in straight lines and concrete paths.

When I worked on the bike on Tuesday evening, I had an 'aha' experience. Up until now, my theory has been that the pedal shaft has been wiggling. After all, that's the thing I'm pushing to get forward on the bike. When I finished eliminating the bump in the wheel, it was already late, but I thought I had to investigate the ticking problem. I had this idea that if something is wiggling, you will be able to feel it. The pedal shaft isn't wiggling at all. The cogwheel package on the rear wheel is wobbling significantly. My second theory is that if something is wiggling, applying grease will result in an almost instant resolution of the issue. I put the bike together with the greased cogwheel axis and tried it. It still ticked. It wasn't very nice. What I did not realize was that the grease had to spread around before it would start working.

As you already know, Wednesday was fantastic, with no ticking sounds. Now, while I'm biking to work, I occasionally hear a ticking sound. That means I now know where the problem is for the first time in seven years. I think I had the bike for seven years.

I need to learn how the cog wheel package is mounted. I require the tools to disassemble and reassemble it. I will clean, grease, and adjust it to ensure it turns perfectly without wiggling. I will remove a 7-year-old irritation.

I arrived at work at 9:10 AM.

The time is 5:55 PM, and I'm on my way home. The bike is ticking like crazy, but I'm not worried about it or irritated.

Yesterday evening we went to bed early. I've worked on the phoneme conversion program a bit and managed to reach line 28,600. There was a new and interesting case I hadn't encountered before, where the correct result was generated in the first pass. However, I didn't stop, so it continued to find a suitable search result forever. I changed it so that it checks if the search generates the correct result, and then it stops. I noticed that French words are sparse in sounds and are written with many characters. When the program crashed in a completely different place, we went to bed. I will look into this, perhaps as early as this evening.

I feel peaceful this afternoon. The weather is lovely; it's great for biking. Biking through beautiful parks. I came home at 6:30 PM.

It was beautiful weather. I went to the sheep to encourage them to graze nearer to the road. As long as I was near them, they were okay, but when I left, they did not stay; they went with me.

DW told me she won an award at her work! That is nice. There were no tangible results of the award, but fame and happy colleagues.

Friday 18 July

Today I had a day off, and DW worked from home. She had many meetings, as she usually does.

I worked in the barn. The plan for the day was to finish the eastern wall in the attic. Before working on the boards, I decided to tidy up the workplace in the barn. I still had OSB boards lying in a pile on the floor, and the DJ equipment was still piled up on the wagon.

It is nice to have the tools in ordered piles. I moved up the leftovers of the ceiling beams. We ordered too many of these beams. That does not matter because I can use them for all sorts of things. It is nice to have.

Then I took a break from the barn. I planted the rosemary plant I had bought several months ago. It doesn't look like I documented when I bought it. I found it in a farm shop, and since we had so much work on producing one rosemary plant, I thought it was good to have spare plants.

To plant the rosemary, I decided to place a layer of manure beneath the plant and then add the original soil. That's the way to make things grow nicely. For this, I started a chain reaction because I needed a wheelbarrow, and it had an empty wheel. So, that had to be filled. I had to use two wheelbarrows: one with sheep manure and another to temporarily hold the soil while I filled in the manure and then replaced the soil.

Now the new rosemary plant is growing on a hump. Besides, it is the original rosemary, much greener and healthier. I wrote the story of that rosemary on 24 May 1924 on this blog.

With this break, it was time to get started on putting up boards on the east side of the attic in the barn.

Today, I also filled in the products we will deliver next Wednesday. I decided on more zucchinis at a cheaper price and potatoes at a slightly higher price. I will deliver potatoes in one-kilogram bags of various sizes. Then I will deliver 500-gram bags with smaller potatoes. I made the one kilogram slightly cheaper than twice the price of the 500-gram bags. We will see how it works.

I worked in the attic, and it was warm there. At the end of the afternoon, I had finished the east wall. That means the electrician can come and do his work (also) in the attic. Nice!

That meant I could tidy up the workplace even better! I put out the DJ equipment and removed the OSB boards. There was one board left. We calculated the boards much better.

We went to the farm shop and picked up our dinner. We had ordered a leek pie. We ate our dinner together with DS. For dessert, we had ice cream with chocolate sauce and fruit salad. It was delicious!

In the evening, I worked on the phoneme project. I reached line 29313!

Saturday 19 July

Yesterday evening, I had the feeling that it was Saturday, and I started to feel sad that it was already going to be Sunday tomorrow. It was surreal to realize that all this was bogus and that we had Saturday tomorrow. This morning, I thought I would make a cup of tea for DW and myself, but she suggested other plans. How about standing up, going to the canopy of the barn, and starting the wool preparations? Then I could bring the tea to the canopy. It was like opening the eyes and starting to run moments later. From 0 to 100 kilometres per hour in 3 seconds.

DW was eager to process her wool. She is washing the wool under the barn's canopy. It was a warm day. I brought breakfast, including a smoothie, to the canopy. I found one raspberry, and I gave it to DW.

I am still in the process of preparing for the next phase with the electrician/plumber. He will hire a tiler, a person who sets tiles. I have completed the preparations in the barn; now we want to have the tiles installed in the house as well: in the kitchen and the workshop. I cleared out stuff in the workshop and moved a shelf so that we can rework the corner of the workshop. The current sink will be replaced with a little cupboard.

In the cucumber jungle, I found a plant holding on to a thread in a sweet way. We harvested one jar of cucumbers, but I hope the production will increase.

The cupboard came together late in the evening. Now I need to saw a wider opening for the sink, but that is for tomorrow.

Sunday 20 July

Today, I brought breakfast to the barn's canopy again. We are using our berries in the smoothie. This season, we harvested 7.185 kilograms of red currants and 4.328 kilograms of blackcurrants. The real topper this year was the gooseberries with 13.333 kilograms! If we use 100 grams of berries for each smoothie, then we have enough for 248 smoothies. We have smoothie berries available until the end of March next year. If we use about 80 grams for each smoothie, we can stretch it to 310 days until the end of May next year.

We can also harvest the grapevine berries at some point. If we were to harvest 2 kilograms of those, we would be well into next year's harvest, considering our smoothie consumption. That would be grand!

I worked on the kitchen cupboard for the workshop. The stainless steel top was particularly flimsy. Besides the flimsiness, it lacked the tabs described in the assembly instructions. The idea was to put four screws in the cupboard and slide the stainless steel top into these screws. I decided to fill the stainless steel top with OSB and then screw the top onto the cupboard. I decided to scew into the OSB from below. There were two benefits of this plan: 1. I needed no tabs and holes, and they were missing, so no miss there. 2. The top would be substantially more sturdy. You would suddenly be able to put a whole bucket of water on top without it collapsing.

It was much more work than I had anticipated, but it worked! I still need to put on the handles and remove the blue protective film, but that is for later.

This means that the electrician/plumber can come and continue the work! I texted him in the evening, telling him about the significant progress we had made. It is not that he lets everything fall to the ground and then arrives to start working on our project. He has other things planned as well, but I hope he feels encouraged by the fact that he doesn't need to wait for us to finish things. All is prepared!

I moved the sheep to the southwest field. It is our least productive field right now. The grass is lousy, and the weeds that the sheep don't like are having the upper hand in that field. We call it the ragwort field. Ragwort is a beautiful yellow flowering plant that, unfortunately, is toxic to sheep. It is not that they are dying from it, but it is not suitable for them in large quantities.

Then I sowed more grass in the south-east field that they had just left. After sowing that field, I mowed it. It was the second time I mowed this field. This regime works very well; the grass responds positively to being mowed. Right now, you can hardly call it a grass field. It has a variety of vegetables, excluding grass. If the thistle population could vanish, it would not be so bad. We will see how it progresses.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2989 words. That is quite a lot lately. The best thing about this week is that I reached the milestone I had set out to reach. The preparation for the electrician/plumber and tiler is finished.