Driveway construction started Sunday, 05-Jul-26 21:27:39 CEST

Sunday, 12-Jul-26 21:39:58 CEST

It starts to look like a driveway

The driveway construction is underway.

Monday 6 July

Today we got up really early. We had to be at the mortuary at 8:30 AM. It was as if the Construction-Netherlands were out driving with their diggers. There were large diggers, but also really small and cute diggers. You know the type of digger no one would mind having in their barn.

	Here is the coffin loaded into the hearse.
	The local flag is on half-mast at the old house.
	MIL reads her speech, seconded by DW.
	A last farewell.

The family appreciated the photos I collected. The whole ceremony went really smoothly, and it was dignified. I think that will help the healing process.

At home, Pawel from the construction company came with a large bouquet to DW. That was really nice!

Tuesday 7 July

Good morning! It’s 22°C and partly overcast, but I can still see the sun, and that is nice. I am biking to work. I think that both DW and I are now longing for normality, regular everyday patterns. I love to bike to the office on a warm summer day. DW is working from home.

Although sadness is something we usually avoid, I must say it has a function. Feeling both happiness and sadness is part of life. We need both. Just a small philosophical thought while biking to work.

The farmer's grain field looks like it is ready for harvest pretty soon.

Each grain perhaps needs to be drier before it can be harvested.

I filled the thermos with coffee for the construction workers. They’re hammering in each stone individually, and I do not envy them that work.

Today it was cake time! I had my birthday last Friday, and of course I treated my colleagues to cake. Last year I went into the city center, and that was inconvenient. This year, I biked to a regular grocery store along the train tracks further east. I could find a package with exactly the number of precut cake pieces I needed. I was feeling unnaturally lucky. I had to count the pieces several times because I did not expect so much luck. It had been a long time since I went to this grocery store. It was nice.

In the afternoon, it was windier and more overcast. There is a little bit of a headwind, but I am fine. I wonder how fun it is to own a motorboat when fuel prices are increasing? We talked about our car and how we would like to switch to a battery-electric vehicle. I want a car that can pull a trailer weighing over 1,000 kilograms with brakes. DW would like the car to be integrated into the house's energy system, including the solar panels. Those solutions exist, but they are expensive at the moment. Yesterday, DW came up with the idea of us buying a second-hand EV and of waiting for more affordable EVs to emerge on the market that can also be integrated with a home system that better integrates with solar panels, etc. We have to think about it. I don’t feel like we need to do anything about this urgently.

I decided that I want to feel hungrier from time to time.

In the evening, I finished last week’s blog. I didn't review it as thoroughly as I'd like; I would like to improve all the sections, but the blog is ready to publish online. Lately, I have been trying to up my blog game and make the text more engaging. It has also felt fun and interesting to do, but last week everything I had to do came crashing down on me.

Obviously, the ceremony on Monday took a great deal of my energy. I decided that, whatever it takes, I will force myself to upload the blog this evening. It was already early Wednesday morning when I pressed the publish button.

Wednesday 8 July

DW biked to a bus stop and a bus that brings her to the new office. It is still new that she is working on Wednesdays. I worked from home in the morning. Outside, the construction went on.

There’s a new project coming up on Saturday. I will play a DJ set at friends'. I do want to make a good impression. I was first thinking I could play some tunes from my regular library, but these friends are music connoisseurs. They sent me a 10-hour-long playlist of music, and I have no idea how long the party is planned for. I selected 1 1/2 hours from that list, but they kept requesting more. At one point, I drew the line, and I said I think it’s enough now. "You see, I also go to sleep and I work as well", and apparently that was really funny.

After work, I prepared songs from the list for our friends. I think I spent 15 minutes per song.

The pavement looks nice in the evening sun. It will be compacted with a vibrating plate to make it stronger.

 

Thursday 9 July

This morning I had an intense stuff crisis. I had dispersed my stuff from wide and far, and I had to find it all back before I could leave on my bike.

I also got practical questions to answer from the driveway construction team headed by Pawel. Of course, I had also made a smoothie for ourselves this morning and coffee for the construction team. All these things took time. Anyway, I am biking now, and the bike is ticking more than ever. I am so frustrated with this Gazelle bike. This morning I tried 2-stroke engine oil. That is clearly not helping. I might need to open the cassette and grease it manually. This ticking sound is grinding my mood.

I’m glad I could prepare a DJ set yesterday because I’m working full-time on Friday; there's not much spare time. Our friends are into drum and bass among other styles, and I found that interesting. I want to be better at mixing drum and bass.

I think it’s kids' holidays now, because the school has usually been crowded, especially with the black fat bike kids in black hoodies and oversized black Bluetooth headsets, like they were mobile DJs or something. So there is no one here—just me and my ticking bike.

I’m biking home from work and figured I'd go to a shopping center on my way home. The Polish driveway construction workers need their coffee, lemonade, and sugar, and we are running out of them. When I bought cakes for my birthday on Tuesday, I rediscovered the shopping center. So now I figured I would try out the detour for that shopping center. So this got me biking along the high-farting canal much further north than I’m used to, and this was interesting. There was a friendly atmosphere. The previous sentence, I spent 10 minutes transcribing into Word. Sometimes I’m not a friend of Microsoft Word.

There is a beautiful forest along the canal. This route definitely feels like a detour. How blessed I am to be able to bike through these lush landscapes when commuting to work.

Today, the left arc was created (as seen from the road), connecting to the road.

The bouquet from DW's colleagues and Pawel looks beautiful in the evening sun.

Friday 10 July

Today we both worked from home. The construction team started at 7 AM. I made a thermos of coffee and filled the lemonade bottle. I could give them all the lemonade in one go, but then it would just be consumed, and if I portion it, it will be sufficient for more days. Coffee and sugar, we have much more of.

Merida came to sit on my lap while I was programming. She has not been on my lap very often. It looks like she is content with the situation here. I am honored that she is lying on my lap, but I have to hold my legs together so it is not effortless, so to speak.

Today, the right arc (looking from the road) was constructed. I had wanted it to be a larger arc, but DW wants it to be symmetrical. I reason that this will be a spot where large trucks are backing into the property. As a compromise, the area outside the arc was supported with a solid foundation.

It was sunny today. Mirek went home to Poland, so now Sylwester and Pawel are working on the construction. We really do hope the stones will be sufficient. It would not be nice to run out of stones before the driveway is finished.

Saturday 11 July

I was completely convinced, without checking the weather forecast, that it would be a sunny day with sweltering heat. When I woke up at 6:00 AM, I noticed a haze of mist. I was really surprised. The mist dissolved, but it stayed overcast. If you don’t check your weather forecast, you get surprises, obviously.

The construction team arrived at 6:30 AM. Pawel and I talked about the remaining quantity of stones and whether it would be sufficient. It turned out to be a misunderstanding on my part of what was delivered. The delivery note from the driver said 145 cubic meters, but it should be 145 square meters. That is theoretically 11 square meters too much. But we didn’t anticipate the delivery of the larger-type stones. Powell said it could be as much as 8 square meters of larger stones that they set aside.

We will fill the entire driveway with the smaller stones, which we believe were ordered. In my mind, we never ordered the large stones. Pawel will discuss the delivery with VSB, and if we can get the correct stones in a reasonable time, then we will take that route. If all avenues fail, we can always use the larger stones for the parking lot, but I prefer not. An additional challenge is that if we go with the parking lot solution, I really want the entire parking lot laid with larger stones, not just a little bit. But that is Plan B if everything else fails.

DW picked red onions from the B2 bed.

My task was to mount curtain brackets. Now that is not something you do. It is a task that is preceded by countless do-it-before processes. Ideally, we would like to have a screw of 77 millimeters with a black screw head with a round top. It sounds like a totally impossible wish, but it's not good to give up before trying. We need to stay positive until the impossible turns out to be a bridge too far. Full of enthusiasm, I drove into the city center to the special hardware store with an extensive range of products. It is like a candy store for tinkers. They had two options. An 80 millimeter screw with a metal colored head, so that was close but not close enough. They also had a bolt screw that I could mount an M6 head on, with a black plastic cap, but the drawback is that the hole in the bracket is 5 millimeters, and the M6 requires 6 millimeters. For this solution, I would need to drill several larger holes in the brackets.

Meanwhile, DW found 80-millimeter screws with black heads online, exactly the product we were looking for.

When I came home from the failed shopping tour, it was time to start preparing for this afternoon's and evening's DJ sets. The sky opened up, and it became sunny with a bright blue sky.

To this private party, I brought with me the DJ table, the controller, a smoke machine with a jerrycan of fog juice, two small rotating reflective disco balls, the subwoofer, tulip cables, headphones, and a bottle of sunscreen. This all fit nicely on the four-wheel carriage. I said goodbye to Sylwester, hammering stones into the driveway. DW arrived later, when the party began at 3 PM.

I was earlier to set up the equipment and do the sound check. I helped hang decorative flags in a tree.

There were a lot of kids at this party. They had a great time. Everybody had a great time. These were kids who knew each other and played along well. It helped that there was a water slide as well.

There was good food and drinks as well. I played a DJ set for perhaps two hours. Then a band played songs for a while, and a poet read a poem. It was all great fun. While the band and the poet ran the show, I tasted the food. It was really good.

 

Then I played the next DJ set until the party was over at about half past eight in the evening. DW had picked up that people liked the selection of music. The kids liked the smoke machine!

Saturday 12 July

DW took the onions to the drying rack we mounted in the barn's canopy. They will be hanging there to dry for a while. We will need to put them inside the barn when it starts to get freezing in the winter.

Today, the construction workers had a day off. I had decided to move the sheep to a new area along the property border of the two eastern properties. The issue is that berry bushes have been planted, and we cannot let the sheep graze here because they would eat them all. We need to add additional fencing. I had an idea of using our beloved building fence parts that I cut in half. I started on this plan, but it was no fun. It was heavy, and it is not exactly an ideal situation. I became really grumpy about this work.

I took a break from setting up the fence and DW, and I talked through the options. We decided to abandon the building fence plan. We would buy a new fence for this stretch. Something we can roll out with much smaller gaps in the fencing so the sheep cannot eat through it. We will need to electrify it so they will get scared by the fence, but as soon as that is done, we can turn off the electricity.

When the new net was decided and ordered online, we went and took back all the fence parts I had prepared. Here somewhere, my back had taken such a beating that I was not feeling well in my back. I sat down with our stubborn and irritating sheep.

We did some weeding in the garden in the afternoon. I recovered from my grumpiness. In the end, the good mood won over me. It will be great when the net arrives, and we can let the sheep graze in that area without eating all the berry bushes.

Here ends this week's blog. It started with a funeral and ended with a DJ set. The driveway construction is progressing steadily. I wrote 2496 words this week.