This Week in Wijnjewoude 2024

  Week 30 Kid's weekend again - a bit extended because of school holidays. I read a lot of Dutch History, mostly boating/naval stuff, I suppose... This photo caught my attention because Robin, Lyall and I had been there on Jacoba in 2018. Ter Apel was also  the registration centre when we had our Golden Years of refugees. It is still the registration centre for refugees and has been much in the news lately due to overcrowding. ...and we go to or through Blokzijl quite a lot - usually eating at the pub by the lock. This story is about a statue that we have seen there - it stands next to a Michelin Star restaurant - which we have never been to! In the picturesque Overijssel town of Blokzijl, a small statue of a woman can be found. The statue is located near the Blokzijl lock. According to legend, a woman named Kaatje ran her own inn there in the early eighteenth century. Things went well for Kaatje for a long time, but things eventually turned out badly for her… After her mother...

Week 29 Really not much this week. The weather is very variable - we hit 30 on Saturday but expecting rain again - we're always expecting rain, as it turns out :-). Janny and I both hopped on the mowers at the end of a dry day on Tuesday - trying to get it done before the next rain comes - it does seem different this year. I heard a term " Renovation Tetris " referring to moving stuff from one place to another just to get things done before moving on to the next thing. Over the years, I've always called it the merry-go-round - making room for stuff by moving other stuff - the step that was always missing was the load to the tip to try to break the cycle. We're not far away from moving in to the house again - the shower basin and at least one toilet have to be placed - and a circuit breaker for the new ovens... A new young woman has moved into the smallest apartment - when we move out of ours (it still has to be painted) - the people in #3 will move into it - much ...

  Week 28 How many boats? For the first time, all recreational vessels visible from the air in the Netherlands have been counted using a computer program. Researchers analyzed hundreds of satellite photos using artificial intelligence. The first analysis came to 250,000 vessels. The errors by the AI ​​model were manually checked and removed. Any missed boats were manually added. The final total number of boats counted is 211,237, of which 181,734 on the water and 29,503 on land. The developed AI model identified both vessels on land and in the water on photos taken in the summer period of June, July and August 2023. Vessels that were covered, such as in a hall, a storage facility or under a canopy, could not be counted via the satellite images. The accuracy of the model on the water is 95%. However, on land the accuracy is only 25%, due to the amount of objects on the land. This has been corrected by the researchers. This number surprises me _ I would have thought that there are ma...