We painted the barn’s walls and the ceiling Sunday, 01-Mar-26 21:37:06 CET

Sunday, 08-Mar-26 21:22:16 CET

Operational barn

This week, the barn was made operational again after the painting. Ordered the tools, etc. I cleaned the car to prepare for the journey to Sweden.

Monday 2 March

This morning we had an efficient breakfast to make it possible for DW to get to the office by public transport, well on time. It was a beautiful morning. Our sheep got their breakfast hay, and Merida got her breakfast chunks. Now, all were ready to start the day.

As the day progressed, it remained beautiful.

I had our vacuum cleaner robot run on both floors. It tried to swallow a charger cable and the thread from one of DW's spool bobbins. The robot has fragile spinning rolls that collect dust, and they're now a little too damaged for my liking. I will need to order new parts.

In my work, I started on a new feature. It is not an especially challenging feature, but it was challenging to get up to speed with the new feature. That was annoying.

Tuesday 3 March

Good morning! It is a beautiful morning. It is 3°C sunny now. I’m biking to work. I’m not especially early.

Yesterday evening, I worked on the sign-up functionality for the lyrics editor. I made a program that checks the user's codes against the database, and when everything is fine, I will send a welcome email to the user with the reset code, in case the user has lost access to their email account.

I was thinking about the situation in the world right now. I mean, to be honest, it makes me numb. For the anniversary of the failed Russian invasion of Ukraine, I went back to my blog to see what I wrote about four years ago: one sentence. It was not much, and I was disappointed in myself. Could I not have written some of my feelings about it at least? I do recognize the feeling I have about the war this time; it makes me numb.

You know when the reporting of the war resembles weather reporting or the reporting from a sports event. But a war is not a sports event or a weather phenomenon. There is a human dimension to war; people are really getting hurt. The bombs kill real women and real children.

I am fully aware that I am a native speaker of Swedish, but why would an editing software with built-in artificial intelligence capabilities still insist on using Swedish spell-checking? After I have been talking English for more than half an hour, you would think Word would realize that the language is English? Find the difference between computer stupidity on one end and the fact that supposedly all white-collar jobs will be wiped out by AI, like a gap impossible to fathom.

Hello! The sun is still out, and I’m biking home. I changed Word's spelling check to operate in English, so I’m hoping that words such as numb, are detected correctly. We talked about the bombing of Iran at work, and it feels like we all share a similar skepticism about a new war. I’m pleased to share feelings with my colleagues.

It is so funny that the Internet almost always stops working at the beginning of the long watering canal. Is there a jammer in operation somewhere in the houses along the canal?

Here I had to stop to take photos of the pollarded willows along the long watering canal. What you notice in the photo is that they pollarded every other tree, and I find that interesting.

It is lovely to bike again! I slept really well last night. I got 91 points from my sleep. That is more than I usually get, way more.

Tomorrow I will pick up my violin. There was some misunderstanding at the violin maker. They had promised to make a wider wedge between the fingerboard and the neck of the violin, but what did they do? They just glued the violin back together. They were sorry about the incident, but wanted me to try the violin as it is. On the one hand, I would have loved to have the violin improved, but on the other hand, I now have a violin I’m used to, and it cost me €20, as if nothing had happened.

It’s going to be a social weekend because DS is celebrating his birthday at our place. The in-laws are coming. So both BILs and SIL will come. The PILs stay in their apartment, and that's good too, because they need their care nonstop. We will go there on Sunday, and DS too. But this means my opportunity to clean the car before going on holiday to Sweden will be tomorrow afternoon or Friday.

I’m tired and deprived of energy, and now I’m at home, so that’s good.

Wednesday 4 March

Hello hello. It is marvellous weather! After work in the morning, I went to the violin shop to pick up my repaired violin. It was a hectic morning, to be honest.

Thursday 5 March

Good morning! Last night, DW borrowed my smartwatch. She was curious how it would register her sleep. DW has calmer sleep. She got more deep sleep than I usually do.

I have this thought about the political movement behind Trump, and often on the far right, they are really keen on immigration issues. Regardless of whether you agree on handling immigration more strictly or less strictly, you do understand that causing immigration and at the same time using it for your own political purposes. Like a firefighter and an arsonist, it causes a lot of disruption, which is annoying. Russia's Putin is setting up an immigration taxi from Africa to Europe, and at the same time sponsoring far-right political parties in Europe running on immigration issues. Like JD Vance going to Europe to criticise our immigration policies, and then the United States and Israel start bombing Iran.

I really do think, in general, people should be allowed to stay where they are, but on the other hand, people will migrate when there is war, and there is not much you can do about it, other than not starting wars. The double standard where Putin and Trump are causing the problem and at the same time using it for their own political purposes annoys me a lot.

Another thing that annoys me is starting a war without a clear end goal. You cannot just tell people to go out on the streets and protest as Donald has done, and also the son of the late Shah of Iran. People got killed. Is Donald taking responsibility for perhaps up to 50,000 dead people now? Of course not. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about anything. It’s all about the optics, and he can change his mind in a moment. In the meantime, we, living in the countries around Iran, will suffer the consequences.

Just one more thing before I stop this rant. Let's consider the sustainability side of warfare, for a moment. Iran is using Shaheed drones that cost about $35,000 to build. These drones are taken down with Patriot missiles that cost nearly four million dollars. It is not sustainable. Iran can produce the shaheeds indefinitely on multiple decentralized sites.

When DW painted in the barn last week, she wanted to listen to music. Not just any music, but specifically music he had stored in her OneDrive from CDs she bought a long time ago. You can open a file and play it, but there isn't a (standard) tool on your phone that can continue playing the next file. I helped her with that. While checking out her files, I discovered a folder named "Jens' folk music MP3". I looked into the folder and to my surprise, I found it contained the music files I lost when the SD card crashed! I’ve been sad about that SD card for a long time now. I blogged about it for the first time on 11 February 2024. In that blog post, I said it was a year ago that I discovered the SD card in the phone had crashed. So I missed the files for three years. All this time, she had a copy in her cloud storage.

Some tools let you stream from your OneDrive, but you have to pay for them. As DW said, "I paid for the music, it’s mine, and now I have to pay to listen to it". Well, I wouldn’t bother in her place. I would make a playlist on YouTube Music. She’s coming back to this again and again. She won’t let it go.

Yesterday, after picking up the violin, I, of course, wanted to test it. I played the music from the long-forgotten files, and it was wonderful!

I am biking home from work, it is sunny, marvellous autumn weather, but something is not right. You cannot imagine the feeling, but if you read my blog more regularly, you might have heard me mention the ticking sound my bike makes. The sound is back! I know what I will do tomorrow: unscrew the saddle-pin and file the saddle pole with WD40. If I fix it once, it should be possible to fix it again.

Today Rita told me that I had really cute pictures of Merida in my last week’s blog, and I do enjoy getting those kinds of comments!

We had a server outage today. I did not like it. After an hour, the services were restored. Had I brought my Bluetooth keyboard, I could have been blogging, but it was at home.

Here I stopped and took a photo of the Starley path along the long watering canal. When I went to the violin shop yesterday, the lady told me that she was so pleased with my reply to the mishap. I had assured her that I was fine with the fact that the violin was only glued. I told her I was having a pragmatic personality, but I really don’t think she understood how pragmatic I can be. I can gladly rename streets and canals to blog about them more conveniently when dictating in Word. My favorite is the high farting canal.

I have to edit the blog tonight. I’ve been accumulating stories and photos of things I have been thinking about and seeing, and it's about time to start editing the text. I am having a day off tomorrow, and I think I will continue cleaning the car to prepare for the trip to Sweden in two weeks. I would also like to do more tidying up in the barn's workshop.

My smart watch says I finished my 2nd lap. It’s cool, I finished my 2nd lap, but I have no idea what a lap is. It is not so that anyone came and told me what a lap is.

Friday 6 March

Today I had a day off. In the morning, I blogged and edited the texts I’ve been dictating during the week. Then I went out to the barn with my violin, and I practised some of the tunes from my lost collection of tunes. That was great. Then I continued tidying up the barn. Sorting out screws, rearranging tools, and so on. After that, I continued cleaning up the car in preparation for our trip to Sweden.

While I worked on cleaning the car, a salesperson from Latvia came along the street and started selling home batteries. I was curious how that works, so I gave him my details.

When the interior of the car was finished, I drove to the nearest car cleaning station and took the car through the wash, and had the outside washed.

Saturday 7 March

Today we celebrated DS's 33^rd birthday. In the morning, we went to the grocery store together with him to buy a cake. We also bought some other snacks. He had planned to go by bike to buy a cake. It can be done, surely, but we also needed some items, so we went together by car. DS is restless. It is challenging for him to wait. When going shopping together, he has to wait for us. He often scoots away in the shop to appear as if he is searching for an item to buy, but he is not buying anything. He never buys anything unnecessary. We got cheese for cheese blocks, snack nuts, and a cake.

We still had to tidy up some places in the house for the guests. Well, on time, we finished the preparations. Our guests arrived, and we had a regular Dutch birthday party with chairs in a circle. We ate the cake and drank coffee and tea. We caught up on our respective stories of what we have done lately and what we are planning to do in the near future.

We showed our guests around our house to show them what we have achieved since they last visited—cupboards, lamps, kitchen tiles, a Murphy bed, etc. Then we went to the barn and took a look at the workplace. Plastered, painted, and tidy. It was nice.

After the visit to the barn, we had more tea, coffee, nuts, and cheese blocks.

When the visitor had left, I was standing looking out at the garden. Social activities had consumed a lot of the day. It is all important, and I would not like to miss it, but sometimes I wish it were not so time-consuming. I decided to use the angle grinder to improve the fence section we have to support our raspberries. We also got a cherry tree growing here, and one of the branches found its way through the building fence. Now it was time to make a larger opening for a cherry tree branch in the building fence section so the branch would not be choked as it grows.

I tried to blog in the evening, but I was too tired.

Sunday 8 February

Today we combined two tasks. Bringing DS to MIL so she could congratulate him personally, and at the same time, we had a trailer to bring home more stuff from PIL's old house. It was misty when we drove to Pil's old house. It was a little like the last time we drove there.

When PIL bought the house, there was a fence behind the house made of glass plates. That is magnificent, obviously! That fence did not withstand the weather and the wind. It had to be taken down. The wooden parts were disposed of, and the remaining glass plates were stored in the shed to await better times. Those times never arrived. I have ideas for decorative projects that I want to do with the glass, so I loaded a bunch of the remaining glass plates into the trailer. It is always a question of how well a stack of glass plates will survive a ride in a trailer. I packed them carefully.

Before we left, I took photos of PIL's garden.

 

We loaded a large table, another baroque chair, and a wheelbarrow. DD was interested in two metal tool chests, and we brought them with us. There was a wooden chair with a foldable section that made it into a ladder. Clever. We brought a mirror and more.

Next week, on Thursday, a real estate agent will come and talk through the process of selling the property. We will see how that goes. It is SIL and BIL who will meet up with the agent and talk through the details.

After carefully loading the trailer, we went to PIL's new apartment. FIL had just woken up from a nap, so he was a little groggy, but MIL was awake and mirthful as usual. She enjoys meeting us. We talked about the things we picked up at the old house, and she had trouble remembering the baroque chair. It had been her main chair for fifteen years. After a while, the memory kicked in, and she knew exactly which chair we had talked about.

When we drove home, we stopped halfway at SIL and her husband, the other BIL. Here we picked up a ladder from BIL. BIL also showed me things to use on the interior to make the surface look nicer.

The journey home went flawlessly. All glass was intact. All things came off the trailer in good shape.

It was dark when I had finished unloading the trailer. Not all things got the final place; we will do that another time.

Here ends this week's blog. I wrote 2730 words. This week, I worked on tidying up the barn so it would work again. I biked to work again! We went to the Pils to pick up more stuff. Welcome back next week!