buen8 / wall
145 photos
Behold The Guardian of the House. Some might say Kitsch, we say Quatsch.
Our friends brought us humanitarian help from Germany. I have particularly high hopes for Sauerkraut with... pineapples and DIY Leberkäs.
Info screens on public transit here in Northern Jutland run Windows -- until Windows runs out of memory, that is.
This afternoon, we counted ten butterflies on their favorite bush. This was one of them.
(｡•́︿•̀｡)
A pretty flower? Yes, please!
It's yellow, it's huge, and it's noisy af. I love it!
This is what harvester poop looks like. (I'm 56 years old. Chances of me becoming an adult are slim.)
Did you know that harvesters poop?
There are two (or maybe more) bushes on our property whose Danish name is "butterfly bush." They certainly live up to their name.
We have acquired another piece of heavy machinery: a hedge trimmer. Hence, I've been busy trimming hedges today. You know, gyms were invented for people who don't own houses. Because if you have a house, trimming hedges, taking down stuff, spackling, painting, and whatnot provide more exercise than any gym.
The summer is almost over. 😞
I enjoyed my job (until AI ruined it for me), and I dare say I accomplished a thing or two. But nothing comes close to how proud I am of this corner.
And here's what it looks like after. On a related note, spackling and applying mortar is a satisfying experience. By the way, the light gray spackled areas on the wall? All Malene's work. She's really good at it.
Yesterday’s experiment wasn’t a complete failure, so I finished the job today. Here’s what the exposed part of the wall looked like before.
Next level unlocked. Up until now, we've been filling and spackling holes. Today, I started applying a layer of mortar to cover an exposed section of the brick wall. Since I still have no idea what the fuck I'm doing, I decided to start with just a small area. That way, in the very likely event that I fuck things up, removing a small patch of mortar should be relatively easy.
Malene spotted a minivan from Fürth today! In Tversted of all places.
Sunflowers weren't the huge success we'd hoped for. Lack of rain, strong winds, and -- we suspect -- bad soil made their lives tough. But a couple of them turned out okay. Now we know what to watch out for next year.
It's just a matter of days before our garden finishes blossoming for this year, but there are still a few pretty flowers left for us to enjoy.
IN FÜRTH: Weekend getaway in Munich? Again? Meh. IN BINDSLEV: Let's go grocery shopping at Lidl in Hjørring this week. FUCK, YEAH! WOO-WHOO! \o/ Speaking of which, they had this suçuk-like sausage. It's not the same as the real thing, but I'll take it.
I discovered a hole in my favorite T-shirt and thought to myself, "There must be a clever way to patch holes." Lo and behold, there's a store selling these repair patches. Cut a round piece to cover the hole, iron it on, and you're done. Now, that's what I call progress!
I bought this sauce out of curiosity. It tasted so good that I returned to the store and bought all the remaining 6 bottles.
I power on our vintage Technics CD player and amplifier every now and then to make sure they stay operational. This morning, I wasn't sure which CD to use, so I grabbed the first one I found in the nearest storage box. All of a sudden, our house was giving off German pizzeria vibes.
This stout from Løkken wasn't bad. It was all that good either.
We spent the entire day today in Hirtshals, a fishing town not far from where we live.
For someone who can't cook to save his life, I've managed to make a pretty decent dish. I'm sure it will taste even better next time if I remember to add salt. 🤦‍♂️
To cap it off, another pretty flower.
This was supposed to be a compost box. I thought it would be a relatively simple thing to build. The result is terrible even by my low standards. I'm lobbying Malene to take it down.
Malene discovered a bush with pretty flowers in what we call a little wood in our garden.
Probably one of the last roses this year.
After another day of spackling and scraping off walls, a walk in our garden is what we needed.
Just a pretty picture I took yesterday to remind myself that summer in Denmark can be nice.
First I spackled the wall in the bedroom, then I made flatbread, and finally I made a cabbage soup. I think I've been domesticated. 😱
I baked this morning. New recipe this time. The result was rather convincing.
Last Saturday, our Norwegian neighbors, Britt and Ole Peter, invited the entire neighborhood to a summer party at their place. When we were leaving, I told Britt that I really liked her bread rolls and wouldn't mind trying to bake them myself. She insisted we take the remaining rolls with us, and today I found a card from her with a recipe in our mailbox. ♥️
A while ago, I reserved a small patch of our garden for trying different seed mixes. I called it Experimentarium. Incredibly, we discovered several California poppies there.
Removing glue leftovers and filling holes is a boring job that requires nothing but muscle power. And when I'm about to give up, I ask myself, "Would you rather be sitting through an all-hands or QBR, listening to a middle manager droning on about AI bullshit?" And just like that, I feel a boost of energy and joy.
New additions to our tool box. I can't wait to try them.
Here's what the screw looks like. It's no joke.
This damn screw is driving me insane. None of my tools could make it budge. A contractor fixing our roof used his more powerful screwdriver to unscrew it halfway. Except now the drive recess is stripped, and I can't get the screw to move any further, no matter how hard I try.
Speaking of bumblebees, we're having an unusually warm and dry July. So on a whim, I printed a bee watering station. I'm curious whether the bumblebees in our garden will appreciate my contraption.
We're delighted to see that the bee-friendly area of the garden is a hit with the bumblebees.
From the "this doesn't look good" department: we started removing wallpaper from a wall in the entrance and discovered crumbling plaster hiding shoddy (but of course!) bricklayer work. Sigh! I guess we need to find a mason now.
Guess what? I have another flower for you.
OK, one more for good measure.
Wrapping up the day with a flower from our garden.
But enough ranting. Let's talk about beer! I normally stay away from mainstream brewers like Royal, because, you know, mainstream. But this one was surprisingly good.
BONUS. Here, the son of a bitch didn't even bother to drive the screw all the way in.
3/3 One more, if I may.* Why bother cutting the floorboard straight when you can just stuff in insulation, cover the whole thing, and call it a day? Of course I may: it's my fucking microblog!
2/3 Just look at this shit. Apparently, it wasn't enough to drive the screws in at random places and directions -- the genius also stripped the drive recesses in two of them. Everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- is like that wherever they applied their insane skills.
1/3 It pains me to see so much shoddy work in our house. It feels like everything was done by someone who hates their job and royally sucks at it. I mean, why would you a) use the right screw, b) pre-drill a hole so the wood won't split, or c) drive the screw in straight, when you can do the exact opposite? If I ever meet the son of a bitch who did this, I'll hit his toe with a hammer so hard he'll forget his own mother's name.
Behold our new door. (You can't behold our new window, though, because it's hard to take a decent snapshot of it.)
OK, the last one for today.
Although E-PL7 is old, it's still a joy to use. And it has the best shutter sound of all cameras in existence.
I dug out my Olympus PEN Lite E-PL7 and spent some quality time with it in our garden.
Our new main window and house door have arrived! \o/ Should be installed tomorrow.
Current status: The partition wall surface is ready for further work.
I baked oat banana bites this morning. They are delicious and super easy to make. Recipe (in Danish): https://gastrofun.dk/opskrift/sundere-bananhapsere-med-chokolade-og-havregryn/
After all the hard work done by others, we decided to reward ourselves with a non-alcoholic IPA. It's the best non-alcoholic beer I've ever tried.
Up until now, we've been removing, tearing down, and scraping off. Today, for a change, we started with remodeling. The first task was installing new Fermacell plasterboards on the partition wall in the bedroom. We decided to outsource this job to the professionals, and judging by the amount of hardware they used, it was a smart move.
Awwww, our Norwegian neighbors invited us to grill with them. The hand-made invitation they left in our mailbox is both adorable and slightly disturbing.
It may look like an iPad connected to a water tank, but it's most definitely not. It's a wallpaper steamer which, honestly, is pretty fucking great. What it does is simple: it blasts steam onto the wallpaper until it practically begs you to scrape it off. It's still hard work, but infinitely more enjoyable and efficient than scraping manually. Considering we have what feels like 10 square kilometers of wallpaper waiting to be removed -- and how cheap the contraption is -- it was the best ~300 DKK we've ever spent on tooling.
This is what I'd call our testbed. The plan is to make our entire garden to be like this. For comparison, this what it looked like in the beginning of May: https://buen8.tavuk.xyz/post.php?id=1777985428_d9ea765d
Another day, another beer. IPA with rose nips and rosemary notes. I can definitely taste rosemary. Interesting...
TIL: Removing old wallpaper manually using a wallpaper scraper fucking sucks. On the bright side, I can skip today's workout session.
Belgian IPA brewed in Denmark? Of course, I had to try it. It's... not bad for the price.
Some of our sunflower seedlings are now almost a meter high.
Anarkist Pink Grapefruit unfiltered IPA. I was skeptical, but it proved me wrong. It's really good.
The genius (me) strikes again. One part Chinotto liquore + three parts of tonic = summer perfection.
Although we live only a few kilometers away from the sea, it was the first time since we moved here, I visited the beach. So much water feels slightly depressing, but it was a nice walk nevertheless.
Our neighbors hosted a midsummer get-together. It was wonderful to meet people from the neighborhood, grill food, enjoy a few drinks, and cap off the evening with a proper bonfire.
Now that we have a bunch of wood from the dismantled wall frame, I’ve decided to reuse it to build a simple fence for our compost pile.
Almost there -- I just need to take down the wooden frame.
Another snapshot of a rose, because it's Friday.
I'm too lazy to find the English name of this tree in our garden, but it's beautiful and smells amazing. Bumblebees seem to love it, too.
Roses in our garden are blossoming.
And now onto the wooden wall.
Food! \o/
I had to remove a surprising number of nails and screws.
Two hours later.This one was a bit tough because the plasterboard was applied directly to the wall and not to a wooden frame.
Demolition Derby, Day 2 is about to commence.
One hour later.
Tabula rasa.
And so it begins. Finally, after weeks (if not months) of researching, planning, and procrastinating, we've started working on our first room in the house. (The snapshot is terrible, I know).
Tree: 1 Robot: 0 (Not our garden)
It took a while, but I've finally finished clearing up the yet-unused patch of our garden. Much more rewarding than increasing productivity with AI tools, sitting through all-hands snoozefests, and listening to pseudo-intellectual bullshit about growth mindset.
A new grill and the related paraphernalia have arrived. Our transformation into petit bourgeois house owners is complete. Side note: if we've learned anything from the Germans, it's that you must be properly equipped for the task at hand -- hence all the accessories.
Traffic today was insane: cars were zipping by every 5 minutes or so. Crazy!
Monday is a new Friday.
This is "The Old Power Plant". Every local tourist brochure mentions it as something you should see in Bindslev. There is absolutely nothing special about it, which tells you everything you need to know about how exciting our new hometown is.
Life is unstoppable. I mowed the grass less than a week ago, and the garden is already teeming with tiny, cute flowers and insects.
Local charity shop never disappoints. This is my recent acquisition. Wikipedia article about the book (in English): https://is.gd/oVW5ly Sounds like a wonderfully weird mystery novel.
WARNING: Rant ahead From the "what's the fucking point?" department. Here's a bus shed. In a country of wind and rain. Apart from the fact that it's godawful ugly and gray (gray!), it doesn't serve its purpose in the least. What kind of bad trip must the designer have been on when they decided that metal mesh is the best protection against rain and wind? I hope they will be reborn as a toilet brush.
Der Fresser has been successfully deployed.
Good luck, tiny friends!
Big day for our sunflower seedlings! Some of them are strong enough to leave the family nest and discover the world outside.
Our lawnmower has arrived, and I've promptly named it Der Fresser.
Lilacs in our garden and all over the neighborhood are starting to blossom, and the air is filled with a wonderful bittersweet smell.
It appears that our first attempt at planting flowers hasn't been the success we hoped for. But by a happy coincidence, our local supermarket has flower seeds on offer, so we're ready for the second round. This time, we'll wait until the temperatures are well above +15°C before sowing the seeds.
But before we dove into IKEA, we paid a visit to Billig Blomst (a discount flower and plant store). I couldn't help snapping all the beautiful flowers they had.
We made it to our place of worship.
We decided it's time to make a pilgrimage to the Church of IKEA. So we left the bubble of our house and traveled all the way to Aalborg. After more than two months of staying put, it feels like a major undertaking.
Yay! But... 4 out of 12? That's pretty crappy seed quality.
This is what Northern Jutland looks like on a good day. Bonus: tail wind when biking back home. It's like winning the lottery.
You know what? I think I'm a genius. Why? Because I've managed to improve upon the perfection that is the Negroni. It's a regular Negroni topped with -- wait for it -- tonic. I call it Negrontone. That is my gift to the world. I can retire now.
Påske kyllinger (Easter chickens)! I totally forgot about that very Danish treat until I spotted them in our mini supermarket. They taste kind of like sugar-covered marshmallows. I like them, but as the name implies, you can only get them during Easter.
Postcard Denmark.
The simplest way to improve Shin Ramyun Being mildly obsessed with instant ramen, I was thrilled to discover Korean Shin Ramyun. Of course, there are plenty of ways to trick out Shin Ramyun to make it taste even better. After watching countless YouTube videos on the subject, I've settled on a recipe that strikes a perfect balance between simplicity and taste. - Whisk two eggs in a bowl. - Chop a spring onion into large pieces. - Put the noodles and the contents of the supplied packets into a pot with boiling water and cook for 2 minutes. - Slowly pour the eggs into the pot while gently stirring the noodles. Add the chopped spring onion. - Cook for another minute. - Heaven!
And the bird-friendly flower seeds went here.
The bee-friendly flower seeds went here.
This is where the meadow flower seeds went.
Today is The Big Sowing Day.
This evening, we planted sunflowers in a tiny greenhouse to let them germinate. On a related note, I'm almost done digging soil in our garden.
New life, new small pleasures: Friday's aperitivo in our sunroom with Aperol Tonic, cheese, olives, and crackers.
Spring has finally arrived.
I didn't quit my job per se — we moved to another country with higher living costs, and the company was unable (or unwilling, depending on how you look at it) to give me the required salary increase. It was a relief, really, because pretty much everything in https://ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout resonates with me. > Organization leadership has mandated that each person adopt new AI tools to "uplevel" themselves and their team. It hits so close to home it almost physically hurts. > I am, as it stands, without a job. Recovering from burnout will take time. Thankfully, I have savings that afford me the privilege to take that time. I’m distancing myself from social media and news, at least for a little while. At some point, I will need to decide if I want to remain in this industry, and if so, where to go next. Same here. I've taken up baking and tweaking my bread roll recipe, and I'm getting into gardening. I do feel slightly guilty for relying on agentic coding for my spare-time projects, though.
We made it to lidl, and they had this! Not as good as those in Bavaria, but it's better than nothing.
This is my favorite ice cream, and one of the very few things I missed in Germany. This ice cream is usually hard to come by, so I was surprised to discover it in our mini supermarket
I moved all my self-hosted applications (including this one) to my own server, so here's another snapshot of pretty flowers in our garden.
Tulips in our garden decided it's time to blossom.
It's a long, long way till we have a bird- and insect-friendly garden. But this simple and cheap bird feeder is a modest first step towards this noble goal.
Malene brought me these socks from London, and they sum up how I'm feeling about work pretty nicely.
I've been feeling a bit down, but thankfully the weather improved and I could do some gardening — the best way to lift my spirits.
ME: I can't imagine it can get any worse than the 12m/s winds we had today. /checks forecast for tomorrow FUCKING HELL!
Ahhh, the joy of being a freelancer. You get up in the morning, and spend hours researching, compiling, 3D printing... what exactly? A Bongo Cat (https://makerworld.com/en/models/1654522-bongo-cat-mini-monitor-animated-esp32-display#profileId-1749680). Why? Because why the heck not?
That was actually a pretty convincing attempt at Bock beer. Then again, it was brewed with German hops, so no surprises there.
Immortal Pizza Alas, it didn't live up to its name. The business is very much dead, and the sign says "TO LET".
I spent this morning working on the cabinet. It turned out that wood filler is all but impossible to apply evenly. But the result is good enough for me (no one would see it anyway). The most important thing it stops further damage. Also, the wood filler tube says "Brown color". Some needs to have their eyes checked.
From the "I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat" department: Naively, I thought I could simply replace regular flour with whole-corn flour. I set out to bake another batch of bread rolls, but this time with whole-corn flour. I mixed everything, but to my horror, the mixture looked more like soggy porridge than sticky dough. To solve the problem, I added two handfuls of regular flour, hoping this would make the mixture more dough-like. Surprisingly, it worked! Next time, I should probably use a 50/50 mix, though.
This cabinet is a perfect metaphor for our house. We found the cabinet in our local charity shop. It was old, relatively cheap, and it looked decent. There were a few issues, but nothing that required too much work. Or so we thought. When I started cleaning it, I discovered that the rear panel was loose because, apparently, someone had tried to pry it open using brute force (vandals!) and torn it from the attaching clips. The veneer on the right side of the cabinet is chipping away at an alarming rate, and I need to get wood filler to fix that before the problem gets worse. One of the shelves has visible stains that I’d like to mask. So now I also need to get special oil for that. In other words, as with our house, I need to put some work into the cabinet before I can use it. On the bright side, I felt unexpected pleasure working on the cabinet. I guess I can see myself in it: we’re both old and worse for wear. But with a little bit of TLC, there is still useful life left in us.
Bumblebees are already hard at work in our garden.
Today I've discovered that there is no better way to start the day than baking bread. I used [this recipe](https://www.leckerschmecker.me/daenische-haferflockenbroetchen-a-d-kneten/63743511508212) to bake bread rolls this morning.
My first ever loaf of bread. It's actually better than I was expecting from my first attempt at baking bread.
Oxfam in Frankfurt am Main was where we stocked up on books. We didn't expect to find a similar -- let alone better -- alternative to it in Denmark, and definitely not in Bindslev. But the local _Blå Kors_ surprised us in the most positive way. Not only do they have shelves upon shelves of books, but the books there are also way cheaper. To wit: the books in the attached photo cost us around €13.
First signs of spring in our garden.
Today, we biked 6km to the nearest place worthy of being called a town. A bike tour through a desolate landscape, gray weather, and strong gusty headwind -- I hated every fucking second of it. On the bright side, I'd like to revise my previous statement regarding finding good bread in DK. We've found a bakery that has really good bread at reasonable (by Danish standards, that is) prices. (OK, it's still not quite as good as German bread, but beggars can't be choosers).
One of the first things we did when we moved in was to order a washing machine, a dryer, and an induction stove. All Bosch, because we want to support the German economy. I'm quite fascinated by the washing machine: it has so many genuinely useful features, and its display appeals to my inner geek.
First modest success It's hard to describe how filthy and disgusting a ventilation hatch in the bathroom was. I thought I could easily replace it with a newer one, but it turned out that the modern standard-size hatch doesn't fit the older frame. After wasting hours trying to figure out how to fit the hatch into the frame, I decided to just 3D print my own design. As my 3D printer can't handle larger prints, I had to split the design into several parts, and then glue them together. Not the most elegant solution, but it will do for now.
The moving company was way behind the schedule, so instead of afternoon, they arrived at 22:10. Chatty and super friendly movers unloaded our entire household in 75 minutes flat. Welcome to our chaos!
Our household is still somewhere around Hamburg, but we already have internet and red wine in our new house. Priorities!
Welcome to Northern Jutland!
Arrived to Aalborg Airport. This house is jumping.
I swear we're not trying to dispose of a body. It's our cactus. That's the story we're sticking to, anyway.
Current progress
It's still not a foodie blog... ... but we stumbled upon a Korean street food joint, and we had to try Korean corn dogs. They taste exactly how they look--totally over the top.