Eric trying out a new pillow.

Eric came back from visiting friends in Hälsingland, with lots of fresh redcurrants.

I love redcurrants, but they are impossible to find in shops. So now I will gorge myself on them for the next few days. Redcurrants for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

The house is a total mess, and I am heartily tired of it.

The kitchen floor is waiting to be finished, and we’ll give the living room floor a new finish at the same time. (It’s yellowed and scratched and scruffy, who knows how old the varnish is.) We’ll need to empty the kitchen and the living room for that. We’ve known that this is coming up “soon” for a while now, so some things that we packed away to make space back in May (such as most of Adrian’s things) are in boxes that are stacked in various places around the house. For three months now.

And all the rooms are swapping places – our bedroom moves, Ingrid moves, Adrian gets a room of his own – which means more boxes. And furniture and rolled-up carpets and paper bags of stuff, piled up here and there.

The floor guy has been on vacation so this has dragged on. But early next week the floor will finally get done and then we’ll have turned the corner and we can finally start putting things in order instead of making the mess worse.

We’re moving things around in the house, making space for Adrian to have his own room. While we’re at it, we’re also sorting through our library and getting rid of some of it.

I still love reading actual paper books, and I like to have lots of books easily accessible so that I can walk up to a bookshelf and pick something that I feel like reading or browsing. But there are books that, realistically, I will never read again.

Some I simply didn’t like at all, and maybe didn’t even finish. Those are easy to get rid of. I am very sure I will never want to read Sarah J. Maas again!

Others I enjoyed once, but not enough to read them again. Life is short and the world is full of books that I haven’t read yet. For me to re-read a book, it has to compete against all the possible new books I could read.

Still others I have re-read already and discovered that they didn’t age well – they were better in my memory than they turned out to be when I picked them up again.

Eric and Adrian are away, at a friend’s country house. It’s just me and Ingrid at home. The house feels unusually calm.

It’s good for all of us to get away from the rest of the family at times. Four people doesn’t sound like much of a crowd, but it sometimes feels like one to me.

Now we’ve had quiet meals, and we’ve played Minecraft together, and we can just hang around and read in peace and quiet.

Several red admirals fluttered by, as I sat in the garden this afternoon. They kept landing in a bucket we keep around for gathering up the fallen, overripe, bird-pecked cherries – just after I thought that maybe I should empty that bucket. Then I read that adult admirals drink from flowering plants and from overripe fruit, and left those cherries right where they were. I also read that their primary host plant is the stinging nettle, and felt better about all the nettles that keep coming up along the edges of the garden.

Fresh strawberries and Swedish plums. This will be a delicious breakfast.

Day 8. Camp is over and we’ll soon be home.

I have actually stood on that little skerry with a lone tree growing on it. I swam to it on one of the really hot days earlier this week.

I can’t remember exactly which pier I started from, but I know for sure that it wasn’t the one in the foreground here – it must have been somewhere near those boat sheds on the left. That islet didn’t seem very far when I saw it from the shore, but seen from here it looks a bit longer. It’s hard to judge the distance across emptiness. I wish I had walked up to that tree to measure myself against it, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

Today was a hot day. Ingrid and I took an ice cream break in the afternoon.

In the evening, after making a gazillion packed lunches for tomorrow’s trip home, and packing up box after box of kitchen gear, I took another long walk. I haven’t quite walked full circle around the island, mostly because some parts of the coastline are not walkable. But today I filled in some gaps in the central and northern part of it.

Nice, but that rocky coast I saw on my first walk here was still the best.

Back at the camp one of the leaders had baked fresh bread from the morning’s leftover porridge. Yum.

I had a free afternoon and I used it to get myself clean.

My hike around the western end of Husarö a few days ago showed me that that part of the island was effectively deserted. So today I walked back to a nice little cove that I discovered then, got naked and washed myself clean.

And then had a nice long swim, still naked. That feeling of freedom was delicious. I haven’t done this in donkey’s years but it was so nice that I may have to find a nude beach next summer.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the history of nude swimming, by the way.

In the evening I walked away from the camp again to get a self-portrait. Here I am, complete with puffy face (I get that when I’m outdoors and I don’t know why), a scout shirt, a spork in my breast pocket, and a mosquito on my temple.