Potato harvest Sunday, 20-Sep-26 22:33:55 CEST

Sunday, 27-Sep-26 23:24:08 CEST

This week we had the start of autumn

This week we had the start of autumn.

Monday 21 September

This morning, when I woke up, I was thinking a lot about last week's blog and what happened. In a way, it was not a very eventful week. One recurring thought last week was that I'd like to try to get some traffic to my website through Reddit. I finished blogging late; DW had already gone to bed. I also had a lot of dishes to finish.

I took a photo of the sunrise. Today it was that kind of sunrise, when the sun slides below the clouds. It is surprisingly difficult to find the right moment with the maximum magic. I suppose it's a bit like writing a blog when you don't capture your thoughts in the moment before they're gone.

Something surprised me when I checked my blog's website statistics. Without my realizing it, my posts on Bluesky have brought me visitors. I thought, "What use is it?" and, without knowing it, it was good for me. How ignorant am I, not even knowing it?

After work, I sat down in the garden enjoying the nice weather. The neighbor's son was hammering on his drum set in his room. He is not good at it. There is no good sense of rhythm right now. He got a good amount of energy; ten points for the effort. Zero points for progress right now. It does not help my judgment that he is disturbing my peace with his arrhythmic hammering.

Elsewhere, someone cut the lawn with an electric lawnmower. A dog was barking in the distance. DW had much to do, so she continued working. I also had much to do, but there is no end to it, and this is the last day of summer, 21 September. Tomorrow starts autumn.

In due time, DW finished her work, and she came out of her home office. She started working on our dinner, and I was set to replace the cartridge in our label printer. A little rubber wheel pushing the tape was getting old, and it didn't work anymore with a full cartridge. I let it push harder by putting a spongy Q-tip behind it, and that worked!

Tuesday 22 September

This is the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere. My watchface displays autumn 0%.

I listened to Swedish news, and they said the Swedish economy is doing fine. The story could end there, of course, but there was a twist: the spokesperson for Swedish companies continued, saying, "This is why we don't want to improve the sick leave conditions for workers."

I generated a "deep dive audio" in Notebook LM about last week's blog. It included a disclaimer that what Jens says about Russia reflects his own political views; it comes from Jens's own journal. Google must have a list of political topics that trigger a "disclaimer procedure".

As a software engineer, I see what happened. As a human, it feels absurd to put a disclaimer on someone saying that it is immoral and humanly wrong to kidnap 30 or 40,000 children, and that it is wrong to terrorize innocent civilians on a systematic scale.

A little grumpy from the AI thoughts, I made breakfast. This morning I made müsli with almonds, hazelnuts, papaya, regular raisins, mirabelle raisins from our own tree, and new for today: puffed amaranth. DW was really curious about how to puff amaranth. It smelled nice in the kitchen. How did I do it? What did it sound like? Of course DW gave me suggestions for what I should do better next time because you cannot have an amateur in the kitchen without giving a few suggestions, can you? A little patronizing, but I am fine; I shrug it off.

At work, I discovered I had a hiccup with my work email. No one else has problems with their email; it's only me. Gwen brought a cake because she was celebrating her birthday, and I didn't get an email about it. I never had issues with email before.

This evening I biked past the grocery store to pick up stuff. The cows grazed in their area. It looked like they don't like thistles. Someone gave them bananas, but it didn't look like the cows liked eating them. The bananas were hanging there like black corpses.

It is really overcast this afternoon/evening.

I biked over the bridge and took a photo of the calm water reflecting the trees on the other side. It feels great to bike on this side of the canal. I don't do it that often. I suppose I should find more surprising routes.

While biking through the forest, I saw a roe deer. I could even stop and remove my mobile phone from my bike holder; you do that by unscrewing a bolt. I loaded the camera app, aimed at the roe deer, and took a picture! As you can imagine, he had plenty of time to disappear from my sight. But then he was like, "Now you got your picture; I'm out of here, goodbye." Theoretically, I should be able to zoom in quite a lot; I have a 200-megapixel camera, but I'm not sure I've been able to use that in this situation.

As I used to say, know your tools! Connecting back to exploring new routes, I would say know your paths!

The street lamps are on. It is the first day of fall, and it's already a little dusk, I must say. Daylight changes fastest this time of year. This is because daylight changes look like a sine curve, and right now we are on the steep slope. I'm not a mathematician, but you can understand a curve instinctively. Maybe it's more of a visual understanding. But as my math teacher said, draw a graph of the problem; you will understand it much more easily.

I wrote a poem to reflect my mood.

Reality is warping inward on us. The fabric of humanity dissolves. Who am I, and who are you? Staring out through the laughing mirror. Clock faces melt before our eyes. Don't ask questions, as though facts matter. Boundless men intoxicated with power act like pigs dragging us all down to new lows. Spoiled food sealed in bricked-up fridges. Nothing is real or valuable.

 

Wednesday 23 September

Today DW went to the office, and I worked from home in the morning.

I ran the vacuum cleaner robot on the first floor. I carried the robot and the charging station to the first floor, then started a job with a shortcut describing first-floor cleaning. For a long time, it skipped the guest room, and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. So annoying. Of course, the first-floor entry was programmed incorrectly. It was set to the ground floor. I changed it, and now it works. I'm so delighted.

After lunch, I was so busy changing the watchface design that I almost forgot I wanted to bring stuff to the recycling center.

The recycling center had a police car on exhibition. It looked antique.

Wednesday afternoon, I picked up the vegetables from the food cooperative. It is one of the things making the area where we live so special. We are a group of people who distribute food to each other. Vegetable producers can sell their products, and buyers can buy the products. We also order vegetables from other producers elsewhere. It sounds simple, but it involves a lot of item lists and small sums of money. Last year we sold things, but this year we have been able to produce just enough to use ourselves. Besides the zucchinis, we sell them at a market in Amsterdam.

Thursday 24 September

In my poem, I wanted to compare Donald Trump to an animal, so I posted a question to r/AskReddit: What animal do you think of when I say, Donald Trump? The moderator deleted the post and told me I violated rule number two.

Now, of course, I'm curious what rule number two is. There is a wiki page about the rules, but when I click any of the links on my phone, I don't get to see any text. Usually I take that personally and try to work around it, but this morning I was feeling witty. Of course, I posted a question about it to the same subreddit. They removed this post too, along with the reply telling me to ask my question at r/bugs. I think I'm done with Reddit for today. I decided on a pig.

It is lovely weather. A little chilly on my hands, but I put on fingerless mittens today, and even that is a little too chilly. Now I wrapped the fingerless mittens around my fist to hold it all together. What a miserable life. I say that sarcastically.

At the rowing club, four girls in T-shirts and tights prepare themselves for rowing exercise. The water is calm; I'm sure they will have a wonderful session.

I finished the next iteration of my work today, and that feels good. A few more tests tomorrow and then we are good to go.

Today I decided to go downstairs before the smokers arrived. I noticed a pattern: they smoke at 11:00 a.m. I went to talk to them and explained where the fresh air inlet is located. I also explained the challenge of wind direction. They were surprisingly understanding.

When I came back to my colleagues, I told them about the success. Then Gwen said there is a smoking area on the other side of the parking lot, which completely surprised me. Because there is no smoking area. Instead, there's a sign saying smoking is not appreciated. And then it continues: if you happen to be smoking, put your cigarette here. In other words, here is the smoking area. Dutch and authoritative signs?!

Let me ask you: what is the combination of a round sign showing a person and, below it, a sign showing a bike? For normal people, it means no bikes and no people, but the Dutch think that since no sign combines a bike and a person, it must be allowed to ride a bike, so hey ho, here we go!

This evening, it was time to harvest the zucchini. I had almost forgotten about it. Today it was 11.4 Kg. There are flowers so that we can harvest something next week. We will see!

Friday 25 September

Today DW had a day off, and I worked from home. It was beautiful weather. Suspiciously beautiful weather. 22 °C, sunny, and not much wind. It is too bad I can't fully enjoy even something as simple as absolutely stunning autumn weather anymore. Something about climate change always lurks at the back of my mind. Is it not too hot, actually?

I had a nice day of concentrated work. No distractions. I plowed through my work, and it was fine.

We went to a get-together for a new organization forming in the area to create a village hall or community center. In the Netherlands, they have a word for a party like this: 'Borrel'; it can mean both a get-together and the drinks themselves.

I shot a short turnaround movie at the get-together. Both DW and I are introverts. It is a bit confronting for us to get to an event like this and see people doing social activities with great self-confidence. We are thinkers and knowers, and we will find our roles in this organization in due time. For now, we attend and try to get the people around us to attend too, although that didn't work this evening.

Saturday 26 September

DW and I experimented with taking bokeh photos of our purple pepper plant. She set her phone to a low f-number so the aperture is as wide open as possible and the depth of field is as small as possible. Since it is a small lens, it may not be very effective. So this is the image from a Fairphone 4. Fun fact: we bought the plant at a nearby country and culture fair on 7 June.

I took a picture with my Samsung S25 Ultra, but I used Portrait mode. It tries to create bokeh via software. That is intrinsically difficult with this purple pepper plant. It is almost perfect, but what is that one leaf blurred in front of the plant? That does not look normal.

Then I took out the Nikon 5100 DSLR with the 55-300 lens. I think personally that the Nikon camera won this time, but it is not far ahead anymore.

The idea was that we would go to the harvest festival together with DS to that farm where DS helps in the shop once a week. DS had misunderstood and went there on his own. So he rushed through the festival, bought something delicious, and then went home again. That was the moment DW called him. Luckily, he turned around and went back to the festival, and there we met him.

They had an apple-juice factory on wheels at the festival, and people delivered their apples to make juice. The apple-juice people seemed different from the other visitors. Otherwise, the festival is a great place with various activities. DW met many wool-art acquaintances.

DS knows all the people there, but he is not that much into small talk; he is autistic, after all. I asked DS to show me something special at the farm, and he took me to a place where the cats stay. The cats let me take their portraits from a distance.

Then we looked at the city scroungers. They collect second-hand wood and materials and make things from them. I noticed they are good at collecting; they had a lot of nice material. They also had a lot of fancy machines I would like to have, such as CNC machines, planers, etc. It was a cool place.

For the rest of the day, we viewed handmade garments and produce from the farm itself. Local producers ran market stands. Last year DW stood here to sell her products; it was a great success. She didn't have as much production, so she didn't attend this year's edition as a seller.

After the festival, we went to a nearby city to buy more cat litter box sand. It is a nice little town with a second-hand shop, so we went there too. I became really tired in the second-hand shop while DW was full of energy. I brought my keyboard, and they had a cafe, so I went there to type.

I sat typing in the books and media section of the second-hand shop. Somehow I lost all interest in the books. I haven't read books in years. I wonder if it is just me, or if more people feel that way. I can see people searching through the CDs and LPs, and we don't even have a CD player anymore. The CD player we got in the car is used as a holder for our mobile phones.

This week, during off-moments, I have been working on changing the watch face. The progress bars are in a ring along the edge, and the text inside is curved along the edge. I developed this watch face in several iterations. At first, the hands were small dots along the edge, but in the end they are full hands, behind the progress text.

The curved text makes more room in the watch face. I want to put a pictogram instead of the season abbreviation. When we came home from the harvest festival and second-hand shop, I had a day to try out the watch face with tiny hands, and I wasn't pleased with them. I made new, bigger hands below the text in the center but above the progress area, and slightly transparent. This way, they are clearly visible without obscuring anything.

The moon is at 99% tonight. That is no issue now that we have our curtains. All this time, we lived here every 29½ days; I had a full moon lighting up my pillow at a moment during the night.

We went to bed around midnight, and I watched with delight as my watch face turned from Saturday to Sunday. To my surprise, the week percentage jumped to 100%. I went to bed a little grumpy over this bug. All delight was wiped away.

Sunday 27 September

This morning we had a smoothie with pears, apple, banana, black currant from our garden, and organic orange juice from a package. During the entire breakfast, we talked about the week percentage formula that had a bug in it. Long story short, the incorrect factor was [HOUR_1_24]. I used it as if it were 0-23. When we passed midnight, it should have been 0, but it was 24. It was not until 1 AM that the formula worked again. I could correct this error.

DW cut my hair this morning. My hair had started to get long and fly around, which was most annoying.

The amaranth harvest is still drying in the atelier. In this photo, you can see Merida, our cat, playing with it.

We went to MIL and to her former house. We picked up some garden tools, and that was it. Next Thursday, we hand over the key to the new owners.

The house is empty; BIL will take only a couple of things with him at the last moment. We brought a ceramic sculpture that MIL had forgotten about.

Then we went to MIL to see how she was doing. She is doing fine, but she is missing her husband. She is attending many activities at home. These include shuffleboard tournaments, lawn bowls or other games, drawing, and excursions around the Netherlands. She is having a great time. Her digital picture frame is fantastic.

I looked into why her phone is not displaying the name of the person calling her. The phonebook list on her phone had the numbers written oddly, so they weren't matching. I changed that, so now it works. To her, I am a technological wiz kid. Well, she is 97, and I am 59.

When we drove home, we discovered one front light was dead. We stopped at a gas station, and I switched the headlamp with a spare part. Now I am probably a tech wiz kid. DW discovered an odd object under the hood near the battery. It was an egg. Now that is a mystery. How did we get an egg in the car's engine bay?

When we came home, I blogged. It got really late. We went to bed, but I kept blogging. DW and Merida slept next to me. Sweet actually. I wrote 3131 words. Welcome back next week!