It’s Monday, which means it’s me and Adrian cooking dinner together, and him setting the direction.

One thing that Adrian likes in his food, and that I’m gradually also coming to like, is not peeling the root vegetables. I think part of it might be convenience, but he says he prefers the taste of potatoes cooked in their skins, and of unpeeled carrots. Even when he isn’t the one doing the peeling, he asks me if I could not peel the potatoes. He also says that broccoli stems taste better than the florets.

I can’t feel much of a difference in flavour, to be honest, but it definitely saves time, so I rarely peel carrots or potatoes nowadays. Roast potatoes are great with skins on. I even tried making rårakor – they’re sort of like flat, thin hash browns or rösti – without peeling the potatoes before grating them and it worked surprisingly well.

Something that felt so natural and obvious for so many years, even decades – of course one peels one’s potatoes! – was just an arbitrary habit, that I did just because I was taught to do it.

Sorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday.

Quite a lot of them we will shelve because we expect to read or browse them some time in the future.

Many more books we will give away, because realistically – given how many books there are in the world – we do not think we will read them again. They may be good, I may have enjoyed and valued them at one point, but if I wanted to read something, I wouldn’t choose to read any of these again.

A very few books we will put back in a box in the basement, such as one phone catalogue, just to show that these things used to exist.

And some books are actually so outdated and useless that there is no point trying to give them away. Old programming books, for example. Those will go straight into recycling.

The book in the photo, about Visual Basic 6.0, was one of my first programming books. It was a big purchase at the time, and I remember working through it. I came to programming from the scripting world, from Excel macros and VBA scripts. I remember struggling with the concept of “objects” in object-oriented programming and trying to understand what the meaning and the point of them was. I remember a friend (an online friend) describing a “stopwatch” object for me, and a lightbulb moment when I got his point.

I considered keeping this book, out of pure nostalgia. But what would I ever do with it? Who would open it, who would want to look inside?

When I was a child, I spent hours reading old science magazines, and old books about explorers and natural wonders and so on. Today’s children don’t do that, and never will. There is so much else to entertain them and keep them busy. And myself as well.

We packed away most of our books when we moved around the rooms and refinished the floors this summer. Now we’re bringing them out again. And also boxes and more boxes of more books that have been in the basement for about ten years, since we last went through a similar exercise. In total I counted 47 boxes of books.

At that time I thought we gave away a lot of books. But we still chose to keep many that we valued and liked but didn’t actively read or use. Dictionaries, reference works, coffee table books, books we had read and didn’t plan to read again soon.

During these past ten years, many of those books have been made entirely obsolete by the internet. Short of an apocalypse that permanently takes down the whole internet, I cannot imagine a situation where I would go to a physical dictionary to look up the meaning of a word, or an art lexicon to look up a term. If I want to get a quick biography of a composer, I use Wikipedia and not a book. If I want to see an example of Monet’s work, I find it on the internet. If I want to better understand a mathematical formula, I google for a graphical explanation.

Many of these books we will cull and try to give away. But I suspect they may end up in the trash instead. Who in this day and age would be interested in buying them?

Adrian carving stick figures. (There’s a tiny face carved into that stick.)

The first in a series of five lunchtime organ concerts at Stockholm’s concert hall.

Organ and piano. One piece by Dupré, one by Bach/Gounod and one by Rachmaninov.

I’ve already forgotten the names of the other works (a ballade by Dupré, I believe, and something something variations by Rachmaninov). They were nice, but not really to my taste.

But music doesn’t get better than Bach. The Ave Maria with Gounod’s melody (on organ) wandering around a background of Bach (on piano) was magical.

Carl Milles’ statue of Orpheus, standing outside Stockholm’s concert hall.

I’ve bought a subscription to a series of lunchtime concerts, and the first one is tomorrow, so today I picked up my tickets.

We finally deployed code that we have been working on for just about forever. We’re all out of energy but found the energy to celebrate with some chocolate cake.

This was release 1.3.5.

I leave early and have breakfast at work when I get there. Eric and the kids eat breakfast at home. And they all like to read while eating their breakfast.

The knitting of Adrian’s poncho is proceeding, but slowly. I wonder if maybe I’ve come up with a slightly too ambitious design… Adrian would be happy with something simpler, and it would be done faster. But then I probably wouldn’t be so happy with the result.

Stensdalen to Vålådalen, 14 km.

I slept unusually well this night. Usually I go to bed early when I’m hiking because I’m tired in the evening and there’s nothing much to do in the hut, and then I wake at six. Today I slept all the way until seven.

As I stepped onto the terrace outside the Stensdalen hut in the morning, I noticed that a mountain had disappeared. Yesterday evening there was a mountain there. This morning the mountain was gone from view, hidden in a thick layer of mist. (This is the same view as in the last photo in yesterday’s post.)

Some of the hikers were grumbling about the mist and how there wouldn’t be any views from the trail today. Apparently the first half of the trail from here to Vålådalen, which is what I’ll be walking today, is supposed to have the most beautiful views in this area. Personally I’m just happy to not get rained upon all day! A bit of mist is fine with me. It isn’t even windy today.

I realized this morning that I never took a photo of the Tvärån yesterday at the spot where I couldn’t cross it. I was too busy not crossing it. As luck would have it, I crossed another river this morning that was very similar in size and character and overall feel. This one had a solid steel bridge across it. It rather makes sense when you look at that river, doesn’t it? This is not a river that makes you think that a bridge would be an unnecessary luxury and people can just wade across.

The weather was wet and cold and the morning mist hung around for along time. I could guess where those ordinarily beautiful views might be, but the visibility was really limited. But this was a very beautiful walk, despite and also because of the mist. Everything was muffled and quiet.

Here’s me enjoying a midmorning cup of hot blackcurrant cordial and a view of the mist, which was just beginning to lift at around this time, eleven o’clock or thereabouts. If you’re wondering why it looks like I’m walking without a rucksack, it’s because the rucksack was acting as camera support for this self-portrait.

Once the mist disappeared, the air was very crisp and clear and I could finally get some macro photos. The other days weren’t macro-friendly at all, with all the rain and wind.

This is bog blueberry or bog bilberry (odon) which is a common shrub in the mountains hereabouts. Bog bilberry is what gives the alpine heaths much of their soft red colour. Dwarf birch is more of a fiery orange-red while alpine bearberry (ripbär) adds purplish-red accents here and there.

The path today went steadily downhill. Around midday the open heaths and alpine birch forest ended and I was in spruce forest.

The paths were very muddy and wet nearly everywhere and there were wide boggy patches to either splash through, or to cross by hopping from tussock to tussock. The plank paths were again in very bad shape and missing entirely in places that really needed them.

As I walked further, I started recognizing familiar places – I was reaching parts of the trail that I’ve walked on my previous trips here but in the other direction. I was also nearing civilization and seeing more people on the trail than during the past few days.

I didn’t miss civilization at all yet. Since I had a margin of several hours before the bus would leave and only two more kilometres to walk, I stopped for a long lunch break next to a beautiful lake. It wasn’t exactly warm but at least not freezing cold. And there was still no rain!