August has been cool and rather rainy. Not raining all the time, but rain showers – sometimes heavy, sometimes light – have been frequent. Today we had a heavy one and a beautiful double rainbow afterwards.

I am of two minds about this weather: I wish the evenings were warmer, but the temperature is perfect for cycling, and it’s definitely good for the garden. The Viburnum that kept nearly-dying in June and July if I didn’t water it every week is now doing pretty well.

Adrian and I cooked dinner. We made his favourite dish: pasta with pureed peas and goat’s cheese. It’s a Linas matkasse recipe originally and we keep coming back to it because Adrian loves it so much.

Adrian likes to cook but he is so distractible that he can barely do one task at a time, and let’s not even speak of having two tasks going on in parallel. When we cook together, he does a small fraction of the actual work. Today I cooked the pasta and the peas and grated the goat’s cheese and pureed the peas, while he toasted nuts and melted butter and sauteed garlic. But he learns the basic skills at least – and we enjoy it.

Weighing things is one of his favourite tasks. (And tasting!) If the recipe says 70 grams of pine nuts, and I suggest taking a 60-gram bag and then a bit more, he insists on weighing them, and being precise about it. 70 should be 70 and not 68!

Adrian wants a knitted poncho. He had one, which he outgrew, and then another one which he also outgrew, and now I can’t find anything remotely suitable in his size. So I’ll try and knit one. I haven’t had great success with my more advanced knitting projects but a simple poncho, with a simple shape, should be the right kind of project for me.

He asked for green and blue and maybe some more colours and a snowflake pattern. I’m thinking green for the bottom half and blue for the top, and a pixelated gradient between the two, and white snowflakes on the blue.

Challenge 1: all the snowflake patterns I find are for eight-armed snowflakes, which are easy to design but not what snowflakes look like. I want anatomically correct snowflakes, more or less. Finally I found a second-hand sweater for sale on an auction site, that had six-armed snowflakes on it. The photos were sharp enough for me to copy the pattern from them. Yay!

Challenge 2: none of the pixelated gradient patterns I found look like what I want. They have a bit of a gradient but the actual transition from one colour to another is too sudden. I want something softer. I may have to make my own pattern for that.

We’ve spent most of today moving furniture and stuff in and out of Adrian’s and Ingrid’s rooms.

Adrian gets Ingrid’s old room, and with the room comes a small side attic. Initially used for storage, Ingrid at some point discovered that it was just large enough to fit a standard sized mattress, and made her bed in it. Her fancy loft bed was apparently nowhere near as cozy.

Adrian thinks the same. The loft bed stays, but mostly for its desk and armchair parts. For sleeping, Adrian chose the side attic.

He likes being on floor level. He likes sitting on the floor, and crawling and generally “worming” around on it, especially when he is bored. He’s now looking for a carpet for his floor, and his two criteria are that it needs to be a nice green colour, and soft and not scratchy so it works well for worming around on.

During late summer, whenever we eat our meals outside on the deck, a wasp usually comes to check out the offering. Usually they inspect our food and then leave. The food doesn’t seem to be to their taste. They’re never aggressive and we’ve never been stung by any.

Wasps get infinitely more aggressive when they panic. Yesterday as I was cycling home, I accidentally met a wasp head on and the wind blew it into my tank top. My minimal cleavage still had enough room for it to get in. Trapped in a very tight space, the wasp immediately stung me, and then did it again on its way back out. The pain was so sudden and sharp that my first instinctive reaction was to start pulling my top off, just get it out! Before I was completely topless in the streets, I found the wasp and let it out.

Twenty-four hours later and the spot where it stung me is still itching nearly all the time, and hurting whenever I rub it to ease the itch. It doesn’t hurt badly but it’s really distracting and I kept half-waking because of it. Damn that wasp and its panic reaction.

I used to be the first one in the ladies’ changing room at work in the mornings, but now someone uses them even earlier than me: the floor is when when I get there. That someone likes their showers really hot.

We celebrated “peak mess” with cake. Now we can start moving all furniture into its proper place, and will no longer have to walk sideways to get through the living room.

The floor guy has done his thing and left, and finally the building works here are done.

In the living room we opted for soap treatment only, like we have in the other rooms downstairs. I love the smell and feel of soap treated pine floors! The floor is getting its initial treatment here, with Adrian wetting the boards and Eric scrubbing in the soap. (I did the mopping up afterwards, when I wasn’t taking photos.)

The kitchen floor is going to get so many spills of all kinds that it needs more protection, so we went for a the most matte varnish available. The end result looks and feels much more pleasant than I had expected: very matte, quite different from all other varnished floors I have seen before. If varnished floors can be this discreet, maybe it wouldn’t have been too bad to varnish the floors in the other rooms as well? It will be really interesting to see how this ages.

I love the cute little ancient toolbox that the floor guy brought with him, along with his giant sander and whatevermajig in the background.

I feel like I’m living in a used furniture warehouse.