The old pine floor has gone the way of the cupboards. A trip to the laundry room (for e.g. water) now involves either balancing on the floor joists or walking through peat dust. Balancing is definitely both more fun and more comfortable.

Peat dust is rather icky. It’s very light and spreads everywhere and sticks to everything. Half the laundry room/pantry is covered in a thin layer of brown dust – I guess the door has been open while the builders worked.

But as “compensation” we’re getting new floor joists, which – unlike the old ones – are actually level.

I have three flowering quince bushes in the front quarter of the garden. One is seven years old, full and bushy, strong and well established. The two others have been here for five years according to my notes, so not that much less, but compared to their older brother, they’re scraggly and weak.

This year those two decided to flower before putting out any leaves. Now they are covered so densely with flowers that they’re like bonfires.

I wonder if it is a stress reaction of some sort. Aspens are flowering incredibly intensely this year and spreading their fluff everywhere in amounts that I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been told it’s a reaction to last summer’s heat and drought. Who knows, maybe the quinces do the same?

The builders have arrived and gotten to work. And already the kitchen is basically gone. The wonky cupboards and the cheap plastic countertops have all been thrown out. They’ve also already removed the two layers of flooring on top of the original pine (one layer of cork board and one of imitation wood). Only the shell of the room is left.

Since we have no kitchen, we’re now doing all our meal prep, cooking and eating in the dining room. Washing up happens in the laundry room, which also houses such things as the kettle and the microwave.

I can barely imagine living without cooking proper food. Living for however many weeks completely without a stove was not an option. We bought a portable hob with two hot plates that’s going to have to serve for this period.

It kind of works… but it is already frustrating. The plates do kind of get hot, but not proper hot. And it takes them half an eternity. We have to get used to the old school way of cooking again: whatever the meal you’re about to cook, start by turning on the hob. By the time I’m done chopping onions, the pan might be almost hot enough. Cooking on this thing is an exercise in patience

Today we flew back from Prague. But the flight for Stockholm didn’t leave until mid-afternoon, so I had a whole free morning to spend in Prague.

I considered the Alphonse Mucha museum, which was just a stone’s throw from our hotel, but wasn’t in the mood for Mucha. Instead I visited the Jewish sights of Prague. The synagogues, just like the churches, all charged for entrance, but at least here I could pay once and get a single ticket for all the sights.

The old Jewish cemetery was beautiful but also sad in its abandonment, in a way that I haven’t felt about any other cemetery I’ve been to.

The Pinkas Synagogue, a memorial to the tens of thousands of Jews from Czechoslovakia who were killed in the Holocaust, was serene and peaceful but even sadder.

The Spanish Synagogue on the other hand was strikingly beautiful, and if I hadn’t had a flight to catch, I would have stayed there a lot longer.

Today was a sightseeing day in Prague. First we all went on a boat cruise together, up and down the Vltava. The afternoon was free time, which I spent together with some other 1337 ninjas walking around the city centre, visiting the castle and cathedral and other such obvious sights.

The boat trip was not particularly exciting. There was no guide to tell us anything about what we saw. And the Vltava is so wide that you don’t really get a very good view of the city this way. The clear highlight of the cruise was a yachting event that we passed. Half a dozen little yachts were going up and down the river between colourful buoys. The wind was brisk to say the least, and they were going at great speed, very close to each other. There were several near crashes and we saw one sailor go overboard. Compared to this, the rest of the trip was bland.

The city was chock full of tourists, especially Chinese ones. Literally busload after busload of them, everywhere. I was going to go see the old town square and the old astronomical clock but the square and even the streets leading to it were so full that I gave up before getting there, and turned away and walked in another direction. The Charles bridge likewise could barely be seen between all the selfie-takers and souvenir vendors.

The city has adapted to the tourists and their preferences more than I would wish. Every single place charges an entrance fee – even churches! I like churches and when I am in a strange city I like to look into them, both the splendid cathedrals and the small, simple back street churches. Here, I couldn’t do that, because paying for every single one would get expensive fast. In the St. Vitus cathedral, where I peeked in but decided against paying, visitors couldn’t even walk around freely – there was a narrow path that you had to follow, at the same pace as everyone before and after you, which rather takes away the whole point of visiting a church.

Instead I admired it from the outside. And as an added bonus, a choir was visiting the cathedral square at the same time and sang beautifully – mostly for themselves, I guess, but since they were outside and not behind an entrance fee, the rest of us could also enjoy it.

All of the city centre is full of dozens of soulless shops hoping to sell luxury brands to the Chinese. And every café and street vendor sells identical trdelník cakes, which have no flavour and no obvious redeeming qualities. They’ve obviously been cooked up for tourists only, because they definitely aren’t traditional to Czechia – I never saw anything like them during my previous two trips to Prague.

Once you get away from the most famous parts of the city, it is nice. But on the whole, it wasn’t what I had hoped for or what it used to be.

This was a very busy day with talks and presentations and workshops and so on, and I barely remembered I owned a camera, which is a pity. This is the only photo I have from today – from my walk back to the hotel after dinner.

My own presentation was very well received and – if you’ll excuse me for boasting – I’ve already been asked if I can do it again for other audiences.

For the technically minded among you, the title of my session was “Fumbling towards multi-tenancy” and I talked about how we took the application that I’m currently working with from “what’s a tenant” to multi-tenancy. I spoke about the choice between multi-instance and multi-tenant apps, and then multi-database vs shared database for the data layer. And some technical details about implementing our chosen path (multi-tenant with a shared database) using .NET Core and Entity Framework: query filters, defensive saving and row-level security.

In Prague for this year’s 1337 conference, which starts tomorrow. I’ll be holding a talk tomorrow afternoon and I had hoped to prepare earlier but somehow kept not finding time, so I spent most of my flight here working on my presentation. I’m looking forward to the conference weekend as a whole and I’m feeling pretty confident about the talk – I hope the audience will find it interesting.

When Adrian makes things, they all tend to turn into weapons. Today he made at least two swords, two guns, and some random shapes that he then also decided were guns.

Can’t get enough of them. The way the whole large tree is softly white, all covered in blossoms – this magnificent burst of energy to procreate!

Ingrid is giving Adrian a master class in skipping rope technique.