It feels like autumn. The oak leaves are getting their shades of gold and yellow, the temperatures have fallen to around +12 °C. The weather has been an unpredictable mixture of sunshine, rainshowers, winds, starry nights and a day of heavy rainfall.

As I have been tearing down old materials on the inner side of the walls, I realized that the windows need to be relocated. The last time this house was renovated, they added a two inch layer of mineral wool on the inner side of the log walls. So, nailed onto the wall there were vertical 2" by 2"'s, a layer of wool in between them, and then some sort of laminate board on top of them. I dislike mineral wool as a material, so I wanted to get rid of it. And tearing down all the old materials exposes the old log wall, allowing me to check that the logs are in good enough condition. Well, both of the windows were installed on the same level as the wool, and when I removed the wool, I effectively created some empty space in between the log wall and the window frame. But the windows together with their frames are too big for me to safely move alone, so I needed a pair of helping hands.

Couple of weeks ago one of my friends was visiting, and he helped me with the other window. We uninstalled the window frame, tore down the old supporting structure, and reinstalled the window on the same level with the log wall. The hole in the wall is always a bit bigger than the window frame - that makes installing a window easier, but it also means that there is 5mm of empty space between the window frame and the rest of the wall. We used long screws and wooden wedges to secure the window to its desired place, and then stuffed the gaps full of linen fibre wool. But we only had time to work with the smaller window, and the bigger window has been waiting to be relocated. Which means that the smaller window sits tightly on its place, but there still was an inch wide gap between the bigger window and the remaining log wall. It was not a problem while the weather was still warm, but now it started to feel slightly uncomfortable, as all that damp autumn air has been freely flowing into the room.

Well, this weekend my son came for a visit. Friday night we took a look at his school assignment (it was about data handling in c++). With enough blankets we survived sleeping the night, and Saturday morning we started working with the bigger window. The procedure was again the same - removing some of the old materials, uninstalling the window, removing the rest of the old materials, reinstalling the window, securing it with wedges and screws, and filling all the remaining gaps with linen fibre. Success! Now, cooking food with the stove actually makes the room warm and comfortable.

But, since it happened to be a sunny day we decided to cook and to eat outdoors. While I was cooking, my son collected trash wood and torn pieces of old materials we had thrown out. He dumped the trash into an old oil barrel and set it ablaze. And I used some of the trash as firewood for cooking. After eating we decided to have pancakes for dessert. My son made the dough while I cleaned the big frying pan. The recipe said that the dough needs to sit for an hour, so we went to the nearby forest to pick up blueberries. Usually all the blueberries are gone at this time of the year, but now there were still plenty of them left. Some of the blueberries were already over-ripe, and some had a watery taste after days of rain. But we added some sugar to the berries, kind of a making "fresh jam". Sure, together with ice-cream and blueberries, the pancakes were delicious.

Today it is Sunday. After my son left for Tampere I continued working with my house renovation. Ah, and what comes to Tarupaja - I've been somewhat busy with my main work, but I've started coding the browser based web-reader. I try to get a demo version done in the next week. After that my plan is to improve the story editor, and to write a second, improved version of the example story.