Monday was a rainy day in the Netherlands, at least in the area where I live (sometimes it is hard to believe that even in a small country as ours we do have considerable changes in weather conditions over a few kilometers).
I used the morning to migrate my wordpress archive to the new .com domain I started to host here at micro.blog while at the same time reading the book by Op de Beeck on the French Revolution. Only after fixing an export file for a corrupt or wrong character I could finish the migration around lunch time.
While having lunch at our kitchen table we saw some red-spotted woodpeckers eating from the ground what you usually don’t see that often. Mostly it is the green woodpecker who does this (I have pictures in the archive). My wife was thinking that maybe they found an ant colony or something.
In the afternoon I had to prepare for the one meeting I couldn’t decline during my vacation, but I was relieved to see it being cancelled just an hour before it was supposed to start. The annual stock count scheduled for this week in the Cluj-Napoca (Romania) factory was considered as being more important, and I totally agreed with this change in priority 😉
So that gave me time for some errands I had on my to-do list. At the garden centre I spotted this fancy-looking red-white tape swimsuit, although I don’t think it was for sale. But who knows, I have seen stranger things.
Because the weather cleared up a bit I could do a bit of work in the garden before I started preparing dinner. Pasta non-con carne, but with a lot of vegetables.
In the evening my wife had to work in her study on a paper, so I had plenty of time for myself to watch another episode of Outlander (episode 3; season 1) and finish the book I was reading on the French Revolution.
📚 Finished reading: De Franse Revolutie 1 – van revolte tot republiek by Johan Op de Beeck.
I was looking for an easy read on the history of the French Revolution and by coincidence found a podcast by Belgian journalist and writer Johan Op de Beeck on this topic. After listening to his podcast I bought the two volumes which he wrote and just finished volume 1 on the origins of the revolution and the years following after the storming of the Bastille till mid 1793 with the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday.
Although the book is non-fiction the story is told from the perspective of François Robert, an advocate from Belgium who took the French nationality and played an important role during the revolutionary years. It is sometimes hard to understand who actually is speaking, 18th-century François or Johan Op de Beeck himself. Especially the observations from François Robert on propaganda, hate speech and disinformation feels like the writer himself is sharing his opinion on how during the covid and lockdown period online communication did escalate. It is hard not to notice these analogies in the book.
But all in all it a very complete book with a lot of anecdotes and gives you a good overview of this chaotic period.
In our local garden centre they have a sales discount on summer clothing. Take two for the price of one. Not sure if this ‘swimsuit’ on the mannequin was for sale as well… 🤣
We have already for a long time 1 or 2 red-spotted woodpeckers visiting our garden, but recently they come with more. Sometimes we count 3 till 5 at the same time. Probably a couple with kids. At lunch today we saw them all in the trees but also at the ground in the grass. Maybe they are looking for small worms or ants. Anyway, it was fun watching them while eating a sandwich at our kitchen table while they were searching for food.
I’m trying to import my wordpress archive but without success until I figured out there was 1 (one!) wrong character in the 7000trillion character file which stopped everything. Once I deleted it I could continue, but doing it now year by year by year by …