I’m cycling to work almost every day, because current conditions at work rarely leave any room for lunchtime gym sessions. Our number one focus right now is knowledge transfer to a team in India, and with their office hours and our office hours being as they are, our meetings often end up being scheduled just before lunch.

I’ve only been to the gym once in the two weeks since I started working, which is a bit disappointing. But on the plus side, the cycling is very pleasant at this time of the year – the mornings are cool, bright and dry, and the afternoons are not too hot.

There probably won’t be many more summer-warm, sunny days this year. We grabbed this one like the last chance that it probably is, and cycled to the beach at Kanaanbadet. Well, I mostly thought we would cycle to the garden café and eat there, and only packed swimming clothes just in case. But the kids went straight into the water. Ingrid tried out the diving platform and later even convinced me to jump from it together with her. At about 3 metres it’s near the limit of what I’m comfortable with, but having just convinced her that she could do it, I couldn’t really say no.

Adrian meanwhile cannot really swim yet and doesn’t like even semi-deep water so he climbed around on the cliffs.

The lunch and cakes at the garden café were excellent but the wait for getting our food felt like an eternity.

I am not fond of shopping for shoes or clothes. When it comes to shoes, I’m not especially interested in how they look, or at least much less than I am with clothes, but I am very particular about how they fit and feel. (Which is why I stopped buying and wearing normal summer sandals years ago, and now wear hiking/walking sandals the entire summer.) The vast majority of shoes I try on are just plain uncomfortable.

The bothersome thing about buying shoes (or other things that I want to be “just so”) is that fashion never stands still. I find a great make and model, and then they wear out, and there is no way to buy the same thing again, because it’s out of fashion and the producer now has totally new and different designs.

So imagine my happiness when I discovered that Teva still makes the exact same sandals that I bought in 2013. That old pair is really, really worn, and is about to start falling in pieces because the outer sole is nearly worn through in places. I have been putting off buying a new pair because of the hassle of finding something that fits. And now it turns out I don’t need to!

I had forgotten that the sandals once had a layer of nice, comfy microfibre on top. That fiber-y softness has all been worn away a long time ago. And I had forgotten that the soles used to have a bit of bounce to them – the arches of the old ones are much flatter and the soles noticeably thinner than on the new ones. They old sandals are actually about half a centimetre longer than the new ones, because of the way the arch has flattened out. But even as worn out as the were, they felt great. The new pair feels even better.

They feel so good and I am so pleased that I didn’t have to do any shoe shopping, that I actually bought a third pair as well. I will now put them away in the basement, and when this current pair wears out, I can get a new pair of sandals with no shopping. What a luxury!

Evening light on a fern.

• Adrian likes doing things together with me. Some things, at least. When I started solving crossword puzzles, he also rediscovered crosswords. When I go out to work in the garden, he puts on his rubber boots and climbs around in the trenches and heaps of earth.
• Household chores such as cooking and laundry, on the other hand, are not among those activities.
• He is seriously learning English. During our week in Cornwall he read all kinds of signs, with sort of random Swenglish pronunciation, and made sense of many of them. Texts that come up in iPad games are no longer random gibberish to him. He used to say no to watching movies in English, because he couldn’t understand anything, but now doesn’t mind because it seems he understands more and more.
• Adrian now eats eggs, which until recently he wouldn’t do. Boiled or scrambled or fried, any kind goes.
• He likes adventurous climbing. The rope bridge at the Lost Gardens of Heligan was truly disappointing. It barely swayed. He’s suggested that we plant more trees so that he can climb from one tree to another, and then we can hang up rope bridges between them, too.
• He is looking forward to the start of swim school, and to our winter skiing trip.
• He can stay up much later in the evening than he used to. Bedtime now happens some time around eight, or even half past. He used to get cranky and hyperactive when he stayed up too late. Now he just sits quietly in the reading nook and reads one Bamse after another, until someone tells him to go to bed. Which we sometimes forget. The only effect is that he’s a bit tired the morning after.
• He likes to play all kinds of role-playing games on the iPad. Anything with fighters, goblins and wizards, equipment and special attacks and power-ups and so on. But Kingdom Rush remains his favourite.

During my summer vacation, I picked up crosswords as a new pastime. After all the pressure at work in June, I needed/wanted something that occupied my brain but at the same time wasn’t useful or productive in any way. It mustn’t feel like work.

I quite like the crosswords that Dagens Nyheter publish during the weekend.

They grade their puzzles on a four-step scale. By now, after weeks of practice, I can mostly finish level three crosswords on my own, only using a thesaurus or a crossword helper site for the last few weird words. The level four puzzles are super hard, and I wouldn’t get anywhere with those using just my own brain – I use every tool I can find, short of asking someone else to solve the clues for me. (Which you can actually do – I discovered there are forums on the Internet where you can ask for help with specific crossword clues.) And still it takes me several days to finish one, off and on, if I succeed at all.

Now I’m back at work. This week, two of the remaining 5 developers joined me in quitting (and two more are clearly heading towards the exit door as well). So the work we are now focusing on is transferring our knowledge about everything to the team in India who will be taking over after us, which means lots of meetings and lots of documentation. This is incredibly boring and I’m finding it hard to remain motivated. In the afternoon, having already spent hours on writing documents, I’m just sitting there, yawning.

To keep awake, I have actually started doing crosswords during work hours. Five minutes here and there, when I feel that I just cannot concentrate on yet another bullet list, makes a difference.

Girly and tough.

The staghorn sumac that I thought was dead (after it was badly mauled by wildlife, probably deer) has put out new shoots. I’m glad I haven’t had time to dig it up and throw it out yet.

• The centrepiece and highlight of this month was scout camp. And it wasn’t just any old camp this time – this year’s camp was a giant week-long jamboree with scouts from all across the country, and even many groups from abroad. Eleven thousand scouts in total! Ingrid was, from what I can understand, totally unfazed by the crowds and the scale of the event.
• She has a knife permit and was therefore allowed to take a knife to camp. She last used her knife in Cornwall to pry off seashells from a rock, and forgot to dry and clean it afterwards. So when she took it out after the Cornwall trip, the blade had dark marks from corrosion. That was unacceptable for Ingrid, so she hurried to do all kinds of chores to earn enough money for a new knife before leaving for camp.
• Ingrid is enjoying Pokemon Go. She isn’t pokemon-obsessed like Adrian: she doesn’t walk around talking about what evolves to what and which one has which attack, but she does enjoy catching new ones and perfecting her throwing technique.
• She is still reading and enjoying the Warriors books. It’s the first time in a long while that she has found books to really, really enjoy, books that she devours and can’t get enough of.
• Last month’s Harry Potter posters are out; white walls and clutter-free surfaces are in. And a new charcoal carpet. Ingrid spent almost two full days sorting through all her stuff and packing away things and toys she no longer uses, so we could put them down in the basement.
• She still eats like a little bird. It’s hard to believe that she can survive on the portions she’s eating. They’re like a third or a fourth of what the rest of us eat. In restaurants she is now occasionally more interested in the adult menu than the kids’ one, but whatever she orders from it, she’ll eat no more than half of it, and then feel bad about throwing so much food away.
• This summer’s must-have clothing item is super short shorts.
• During our very windy Cornwall stay she put up her hair in plaits or a ponytail every day, with my help. Back at home, it’s back to loose and lank. She likes the way she looks in plaits but probably just doesn’t remember to ask me. Or maybe it’s just not important enough for her.
• She’s quite looking forward to going back to school and meeting all her friends again.

I really, really want to finish the hedges this season, and I’m starting to feel a bit of time pressure. I intend to get the digging done by end of September, so I can plant in October.

This third and last section of the hedge has the hardest soil of them all. The first 20 centimetres is soft and light, partly because of the digging that was done last year for the wall. Below that, it’s all heavy clay. It’s slow going. Some parts feel like concrete, especially where it’s really dry. I aim to dig for about an hour every evening. This corner has been so hard that I’ve barely made any progress in the first days.

Almost every evening, Adrian is there to keep me company. Digging in this hard soil is no fun for him, so instead he just plays nearby. Currently he is building a small army from some plastic flowerpots. Each size is a different creature, strongly inspired by Kingdom Rush. There are goblins, and orcs, and some other thing… it may have been trolls; I forget the details. Some monster or other, in any case.

They all climb around on the wall and the mounds of earth and occasionally chase or attack each other. But their fighting appears to be good-natured: when a goblin fell off the bridge into the ravine, an orc quickly came to the rescue.