Twelve Friends Required Sunday, 30-Aug-26 23:35:09 CEST

Sunday, 06-Sep-26 23:54:35 CEST

Merida caught two mice

This week I abandoned the testing-for-testing of my watchface; our cat Merida caught two mice! I went to a Swedish fiddlers' party, and we had a visit from a young man.

Monday 31 August

Good morning. It’s raining, it's 18°C, and I’m driving to work. Isn't it wonderful that we are blessed with so much rain? The pain from the stiff neck is getting better. Last night I dreamed about going to the university. It is a dream I had before. I didn’t know what curriculum I signed up for in the dream. It looked like all the peer students were Asian, and I was feeling misplaced. That was my dream. Our cat, Merida, came to me and licked my nose as if to say that all would be fine.

This was not my regular day at work. Usually I work from home on Mondays. Today we had a visit from a manager from another branch office, and the five of us had decided to go out to a restaurant together with her to catch up on what is going on in other teams. It was Rita who organized this dinner. But first, we had a regular day in the office.

We went to a Mexican restaurant. There was an interesting information-processing quirk during the ordering process. The waitress picked up the orders from each person sequentially, but for the sake of completeness, she would repeat what had just been ordered so we could verify that all was correct.

She did that, but now she mentioned the totals of each food order. She asked us if this was correct. I hadn't paid attention to what the others had ordered, so I was confused, and I found it really amusing that for the sake of completeness we were offered a riddle. I was the only person amused by this.

Tuesday 1 September

Early in the morning, I figured it was about time to get the vacuum-cleaning robot working. It has been acting up lately. Spinning in circles and not doing much good. The robot got a well-deserved reboot, and that worked out well. It started cleaning happily as it should. I am off today, and DW was working from home.

DS and I are going to The Hague to pick up DS's passport today. DS is the acronym for dear son, in case you did not know.

We could not find parking for the embassy. There was a parking lot; it looked insignificant and not the right one. Instead of the garage, we parked along the road in a nearby forest.

After a short walk, we arrived at the Embassy of Sweden. At the entrance, a porter asked if we were visitors to the embassy. We were curious how he could know we were Swedish. Did he see that? The embassy is situated on the fourth floor of the building.

DS got his passport without a glitch, and then we went to vote. We had arrived before many other people, so it was pleasantly calm in the voting room. When we left, there was a long queue of people waiting to vote for the Swedish parliament.

When we left the building, we found a group of policemen at the back who could tell us where the garage entrance was. It was the insignificant entrance, after all. Who would have thought? I took a photo of the entrance and uploaded it to Google Maps. I am at level 4 in the Local Guides grading system. Here you have me not found in games, but I do collect badges from Reddit as well as Google Maps. The gamification of my reality is in full swing.

I asked DS if he fancied a visit to Madurodam, but he was keen on coming home. So we left the sunny, beautiful The Hague and drove back the way we came.

On the motorway before Amsterdam, there is a restaurant built above the motorway. We stopped there and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich. It is special to see the motorway from above.

I published last week's blog. I liked it!

Since I got the vacuum cleaner robot working so well, I decided it deserved a new set of filters, brushes, and rollers. I will make sure it is on duty at least once per week.

Wednesday 2 September

Good morning! It is 16.5°C and overcast. DW missed her bus, so I brought her to the train station, and she is forever grateful.

Merida caught a mouse! Merida, our cat, is not that much of a mouse hunter, and we had almost given up on her catching anything. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that our neighbor's cat, Hunter, was teaching Merida how to catch mice. At least he was sitting, patiently observing a spot in the grass, and it looked like Merida had copied that behavior. Hunter is living up to his name.

Regular readers of the blog know our struggle to grow grass around the driveway. This morning, we discovered that the newly sown grass in the remaining patches of the driveway had started sprouting! I hope it is a story arc that comes to a close.

I continued to till the southwest field. The project is evolving. Where the trucks have been driving, it's obviously concrete-hard, so I used a shovel there. This worked well until I broke the shovel shaft. I’m wondering if I could loosen the soil with an earth auger, but I'd have to repair the machine as well because it’s completely broken.

This evening, I decided that getting my watch face app tested on Reddit was not going to work out the way I wanted. Either it would be flakily tested, or I would be obligated to test other apps. It could be anything, even things I don't like at all. A computer game where I have to test how to simulate killing cute kittens, or an app for daily bible citations. Anything is possible; I don't want to work on it. Besides not having time to help others, I cannot commit to anything without my emotional commitment. So I decided to check out Fiverr.

I usually check that everything is possible, but this time I placed an order with a service provider. Later, I found that the specific provider had no ranking at all.

Thursday 3 September

DW worked from home, and I went to the office. It rained a lot today.

There is something wrong with the ventilation system at work. It is possible to stand outside the building and smoke, and the smoke is sucked into the ventilation system and promptly delivered to my desk. It is annoying; I don't see an easy fix for this. I set up a note informing the smokers about where the ventilation system intake is, and that made me feel better.

On the work side, things went well anyway. I started a new project and left the initial start-up phase. That is usually a little frustrating before the puzzle pieces start to line up properly.

I delivered a new crate of zucchini to the market in Amsterdam. This time it was 13.6 Kg. It was already a little dark when I took this photo, but the zucchinis are almost glowing in the dark. Marvelous vegetables.

Friday 4 September

Today I worked from home, and DW had a day off. I continued with my work project and got to the point where I could start debugging. Luckily, I love debugging.

It rained a lot today. It was also windy. Today Merida caught another mouse. It is amazing!

After work, I finally got in contact with the tester. He had been silent since Wednesday. He told me that he cannot do the testing for 8 euros. He needs 600 euros. That is 75 times more expensive. I told him it is a free app and that I will not earn anything from the watch face. I found it bad that he announced his services for too low a price and then did not talk to me for several days. He could have said it already on Wednesday. But I do understand it; he was located in Germany. Luckily, we could cancel the order, and I got my 8 euros back. It is not a good idea to skip research before buying products or services online.

I found another tester on Fiverr. He was doing Wear OS apps, and his price was as advertised. He was located in Pakistan. It was slightly more expensive, 15 euros, but this person replied immediately.

Saturday 5 September

This afternoon, we were receiving guests. We started the day by tidying up. You have people who love cleaning, and I figured that neither DW nor I are that kind. We'd rather sit and do our hobbies. DW would rather be spinning wool, and I would try to get the tester to start working. Either way, this was necessary.

DW baked an apple pie. I was not sure of the guest's dietary requirements, but when I finally concluded that egg was not going to work, DW had already started on the apple pie. So apple pie it became.

It is actually really nice when the house is decluttered. The plan is still to plaster the atelier, but I have had that project deprioritized and moved on to outdoor projects. That room has accumulated empty packaging and tools that should rather be brought to the workshop in the barn.

While we worked on our decluttering, the weather went from beautiful to windy and rainy and back again. I was thinking it would rain when they arrived, but it turned out to be excellent weather.

Our guests arrived. Their son was one and a half years old and a lovely guy. Merida, our cat, was intimidated by this person. It was like a human but small and unpredictable. We got gifts: a box of chocolate for me and rooibos tea for DW. That was funny because DW is the chocolate person, and it is me who drinks rooibos tea.

The one-and-a-half-year-old guy was in the center of attention. He found a dustpan and brush in the atelier and came out carrying them, a large smile on his face. He even tried to show us how good he was with the tools. That did not work out so well, but I am sure he did a great job in his mind.

The box of Lego, Duplo, and Primo came in handy. That was stuff we had for our kids 33 years ago. The little guy could play with it while grown-ups had cake and tea. We also had a box of wooden blocks that needed to be fit through holes with various shapes. He liked the round shape. The other shapes were not that interesting. DS came by and briefly greeted our guests.

We had a tour around the property, showing our sheep Bea, Hanna, and Selma. All our pets' names end in the letter A; that was something I had not thought about. We showed the vegetable garden, and I picked a zucchini for the guests. They got a bag of homegrown tomatoes as well. Homegrown tomatoes taste so much better than the tomatoes from the grocery store. The workshop in the barn had not been decluttered; it was a mess, but our guests liked that as well.

Such a sweet young family.

Sunday 6 September

This morning DS came to us. He wanted to talk about to-do lists. Well, we love to-do lists, but it's a bit of an art form: what should you put on one? The moments when DS comes and I want to talk about something are scarce and short-lived, so I made him a cup of tea. I presented him with a piece of apple pie leftover from the guests yesterday. He also got a piece of chocolate from the gift our guests gave us yesterday. He did not protest or walk away, and already that was a good start.

So I said that, in my opinion, the items on the to-do list should be well-defined. At that point, DW came and wanted to explain further the art of putting well-defined to-do items on the list. DS inserted that he had studied this and he was using the SMART method.

Wow, 10 points for the correct answer. And DW got 10 points for remembering the acronym meaning. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. So what kind of item was DS going to put on the to-do list today? He answered cleaning—zero points for putting his theoretical knowledge into practice. Oh well, it was nice to see him. He finished his apple pie and went home doing something else entirely, as he usually does.

Later in the morning, we moved the sheep to the southeast field, which is what is left of it after the driveway was built. I am a little worried that our sheep has been nibbling too much on the neighbors' berry bushes. Such naughty ladies!

I went to a Swedish fiddlers' party in Amsterdam in the afternoon. It is called "Spelmansstämma" in Swedish. I brought my violin. We played tunes together. There were typical Swedish waffles to eat.

This was all great fun. I must say that we are all getting older. There is not much new talent brought to the gathering. I don't think this will continue forever.

In the morning, I got a notice that there was a new update on the phone. I just installed it and forgot about it. When it was time to get to the Swedish fiddlers' party, I noticed that my beloved Microsoft Word for Android had a button toolbar hovering at the bottom of the page. In my first naivety, I thought that it must be possible to make it not obscure the text being written. Oh well, I went to the party first. Why fix something when you can have a party first?

On the way home, I tried to fix the minor issue where the tool button bar was obscuring the text. It was impossible. I got sour; I got bitter. Why is Microsoft destroying the product and not testing it before releasing it? How am I going to fix this? I ran experiments with voice typing, and it turned out that Google's voice typing offerings all disengage after a short pause. Then there is a Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard with voice typing, and it is not disengaging. I will need to learn how to work with this new keyboard.

Here ends this week's blog at 2460 words. This week had a lot of nice social activities but also a good share of technology challenges. Welcome back next week!