Let’s get the dust biting stuff out of the way first. First, another member of the extended family passed away pretty unexpectedly — we just posted a get-well-card, but she never got to see it.
Sjaak Voorn
And then, on October 29, after having suffered from cancer since forever ago, Sjaak Voorn finally turned off the lights. He wanted to be around up to and including that day, because October 29 was General Election Day, and he insisted on casting his vote. He had opted for MAID (Medical Aid in Dying), but he went downhill fast enough to draw his last breath when the sedative was being applied.
But he did fight the downhill battle as well as he had promised: he did get to cast his vote. By proxy, but because he was still alive, it counted.
Sjaak was known to anyone who did any volunteer work in our village… and pretty much to all inhabitants. He was told to be singlehandedly responsible for the successful settlement of the barn owl in the western parts of this country, by hanging up lots of barn owl-specific nesting boxes in the region. He also did a lot of volunteer work for Vluchtelingenwerk (a government-sponsored volunteer organisation that helps refugees get their life sorted), he was a member of the village team that I joined recently… there’s too many things to list. For all his tireless efforts, he was (deservedly) knighted in April.
We got to see a lot more of him when, in December, his wife passed away very suddenly from a brain haemorrhage. My wife was friends with her; they met at least weekly for their shared hobby (painting), and the pair of them would drop by regularly to enjoy the afternoon or evening sun in our garden.
Sjaak had already been ill for a long time then, and after the passing of his wife, we visited him quite often, and he also dropped by regularly, especially in the weekends, because he knew that the red wine bottle would come out in the weekends.
He will be sorely missed.
Our all-new shiny supermarket opened!
After having done without a local “buurtsuper” for two weeks, Dick Hoogendoorn opened his shiny, huge new store! It’s a miracle! So much space, so much stuff, it’s amazing!
It is, in fact, so big thatone might argue it’s a bit over the top for a 1600-inhabitants village, but it also services a couple surrounding villages. I have yet to come there to see that it’s not at least reasonably busy there.
For us, it’s even closer than the old one — it’s now a 200m walk rather than a 300m one. It’s at least four times as big as the old opne, which now enables them to have a much better assortment, and there’s also a separate liquor store and even a store for smoking goods (operated separately), so there’s no reason to leave the village anymore if you need that. There’s ample parking space, and plenty of space for bikes. It also hosts the weekly fish stand on Wednesday, and the entrance “square” (pedestrians only) has kind of a social function as well.
Stuff I forgot about in the September update
If you’ve been following along a bit, you may have noticed that I’m a bit apprehensive about my one remaining kidney, especially since July 2023, retroperitoneal fibrosis had tried to kill that one too, and I was hospitalised with a blood kalium level that should have killed me, but didn’t. The kidney recovered from that incident miraculously well, but I’m a bit nervous about how easily this could have gone wrong.
So, after having consulted a few folks in the know, I decided to keep tabs on my heart (BP changes, pulse rate changes, and especially cardiac rhythm irregularities) with a smart watch. So, all my nice stupid watches are now staring at me from within my watch box. It makes me feel a bit guilty…
Another thing I did in December was update my virtual server to Windows Server 2025, and install MailEnabler as an IMAP/SMTP server to replace HMailServer, which had been abandoned by its developer.
I also wanted to use that to automate some tasks, and took up the challenge to configure it to be an acceptable sender for Gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Mail, just to mention a few mail platforms that are very strict when it comes to preventing spam, So I had to learn about SPF, DKIM and DMARC, while I was also working on the worker service mentioned in the September update.
But I did get it sorted in the end.
Did I need to do this? No.
Then why did I do this?
Well… because I can. 😎
Most of October was spent working on some stuff for the “chat pals” stuff, documenting the code I wrote to automate the email subscription stuff, and the email and DNS configuration stuff I mentioned earlier, doing another portrait session for my Polish author friend/neighbour, and generally being retired.
And… I have had a Sigma wide-angle zoom (a 12-24/f4.5-5.6) which is generally considered decent, but I found myself avoiding to use it, as I apparently disagreed with that general opinion.
So, I bit the bullet, and got myself a Sony/Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* 2.8/16-35, which is generally considered the Dog’s Whatsits for the Sony A-mount. Together with the Tamron 15-30/f2.8, but I’ve grown to be a bit weary of Tamron gear — most people who repair stuff aren’t really fond of Tamron, and they do seem to have a larger-than-average percentage of AF failures.
Anyway: the difference between the Sigma and the Zeiss is stunning.
Consider the following examples: a downsized sample of a 100% crop of the upper right-hand corner of the image, one taken with the Sigma, the other one with the Vario-Sonnar, at 16mm/f8.
I’ll leave it up to you to guess which one is which.
This means that, by now, for the first time in my life since I quite being a paid photographer, I have access to top-grade optics all the way from 16 to 560mm.
And a 42mp full-frame camera to back them up. And the same optics will also work on my favourite film camera, since the Dynax 7 is happy to work with SSM optics.
To loosely paraphrase Donald Fagen: there’s a special satisfaction when a retirement plan works out just right. Next item on the roll this year: replace the 2012 Octavia Combi, which is closing in on 200.000 on the odometer, with a new car.
And then, as I was typing this update, a recent run of influenza that’s apparently been raging in the region, decided to stop at my place as well. It’s now November 9, and I’m on my way back up. Not there yet, and I’m going to get a blood test done to see whether or not this has flared up an underlying problem.
The smart watch got a run for its money — it told me I actually had a temperature slightly above average (which is good news, because that indicates a real bacterial or viral infection, rather than an auto-immune trigger), and while it did register a cardiac rhythm issue, it also told me that, a few hours later, that issue had disappeared. It also correctly registered that I was apparently short-of-breath, but that didn’t come as a surprise.
So, all in all, it did put my mind at ease a bit.
But I’m not there yet, and I’m going to get a blood test done to see whether or not this has flared up an underlying problem. Let’s see if the smart watch was right in putting my mind at ease.
My wife, on the other hand, seems to be going down that same route as we speak, but she’s still in denial.
In the next instalment: how my 6 month battle with Adobe support ended in tears.
This is going to be a long story, so I’d better start typing…