Everything embedded in the walls now.
20221012 Plumbing and electrical
20221011 Hole
The electricians were round, and a fellow came and drilled a large hole through the outside wall for the new extractor fan. This is pretty cool, because it shows us what kind of insulation we have between the inner and outer walls. Given that the house was built in 1993, I was pretty sure there would be some kind of insulation, but I didn’t know what it would be.
20221010 Lighting
Very much at the “aaahhhhh what have we done” stage of the kitchen rebuild.
Watched the first two episodes of House of The Dragon with Fiona this evening. Long day, very tired. Off to bed.
20221009 Spooktober
Fiona and Abi are off at a Halloween Fright Night at Walibi World in Harderwijk. They both got dressed up for the occasion. Fiona suffers from back pain when she walks long distances. She has a set of stays that help a bit, but they’re in Scotland. Abi spent yesterday sewing a new pair from fabric she had lying around, and zip ties, which apparently have excellent rigid yet flexible properties for support.
20221008 Still masking
In New York and New Jersey in September, I was surprised by how many people were still masking. And not just indoors, but outdoors as well. It wasn’t a majority of the people, to be sure, but it was a decent proportion. On the PATH trains the majority of people wore coverings.
Here in Oostzaan, masking is effectively at zero. I confess that I didn’t wear a mask when I went to pick up Fiona from Schiphol on Thursday. I forgot. I felt bad. I was masked up when I went shopping this afternoon, though, and for the first time in ages someone threw a negative comment at me. “Trek toch dat mondkapje af,” (“Just take off the mask”) a man said as he passed me in one aisle. I ignored him.
Yeah, nah. The Dutch public health authorities have scaled way back on tracking and reporting. The dashboards are only being updated a couple of times a week, and only selective parts of them. At least they acknowledge that “de najaarsgolf is begonnen.” (The autumn wave has started.) The waste water analysis charts probably paint the most reliable overall picture right now, and it’s not exactly rosy.
Still, my behaviour is different now than at earlier points along that chart. I may be taking more risks now than before, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take all the risks.
20221007 Wet flor
One of the last things the builders did on Thursday was make a quick pilot cut in the floor of the kitchen. Unfortunately, they struck an unexpected heating pipe. It was late in the day and they couldn’t get a plumber out to us until the next morning, so we had no heat or hot water overnight. It may be October, but the weather is still mild, so we didn’t freeze. They were with us again by 07:30 the next morning, ready to do the rest of the drilling to prepare for installing the new under-floor heating.
Fiona is here! We caught up on episodes 6, 7, and 8 of She-Hulk in the evening. Cliffhanger before the finale! No episode 7 flashback. I’m glad that Emil Blonsky genuinely did go off to run a meditation retreat in the countryside, and that his parole from prison wasn’t just a supervillain fake-out. I hope the showrunners don’t turn back on that at the end. Abomaste.
