Because of the coronavirus situation, our annual Estonia trip and our equally-annual hiking trip both get added to the long list of “things we were looking forward to but had to cancel”.

Non-essential travel in Sweden is now allowed, though, and I’ve been vacillating about whether and where and how we should travel.

On the one hand, we don’t need to travel. But on the other hand, if we’re careful and avoid crowds and travel by car and don’t go too far (so we can get home if anyone falls ill despite everything) then it should be OK.

On the one hand, this might be the best time ever to travel to e.g. Gotland. No crowds, hopefully, which would be really nice. (Adrian’s and my trip to the empty Old Town in Stockholm was my best time there, ever.) And the hospitality industry could do with some support or the whole bunch will go bankrupt. But on the other hand, what if everyone thinks like that, and we’ll be one of a gazillion annoying Stockholmers there?

We took the chance, in the end, and here we are on Gotland. We arrived in mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the day simply walking around the town, following the city wall.

The wall is pretty amazing. It’s worn and dilapidated and none of the towers are standing (unlike some of the medieval towers in Tallinn for example). But the wall itself is still standing along its entire length, and you can follow it all the way around the centre of Visby, which is pretty darn impressive.

I am surprised at how much vegetation I see growing on the wall everywhere. It looks pretty, but roots generally tend to weaken walls, so I would have expected it all to be cleaned away.

Quarantine head vs vacation head:

It’s been months and months since I had a haircut. The hair salons around here are all open, but I don’t trust them with my hair. I went to a local hairdresser once and regretted it. For the last ten years or so, I only ever go to “my” hairdresser off Odenplan. But taking the train (!) to town (!) to go to a hairdresser (!) seems quite frivolous in these times of social distancing. So I’ve been putting it off. Instead I’ve been toying with the idea of just getting rid of my hair. Vague thoughts of “what if it doesn’t look professional enough” have been keeping me from doing it.

Now I’m on vacation and don’t need to look professional, and the hair is off.

It feels so liberating, so clean and light! My hair had fortunately already passed that worst stage when it makes my neck itch, but this is even better. It has no itching potential anywhere at all. And it is so very practical.

However any time I happen to look in the mirror, I feel like I’m looking at a stranger. And I don’t look in the mirror very often so it will probably take days before I get used to the new look (as opposed to the new feel).

Eric did the trimming and Adrian held the camera.

This night finally brought some rain and a change of weather. I’m glad the garden got a proper soaking – I’ve been watering every other day to keep things alive. Temperatures are back to more normal levels, just above 20, instead of nearly 30.

The summer flowers on the deck attract bumblebees. I tried to photograph them but they don’t stay still for long.

Adrian has rediscovered Pokemon Go – I think it’s because some of his friends are playing. I quit a while ago (a year? one and a half?) and don’t intend to pick it up again; it turned out to be one of those things that I have difficulty doing in moderation so it was easier to just quit. Eric still plays some, too. Adrian doesn’t care enough to go out specifically for Pokemons on his own, but the game is enough to make him come with me when I go grocery shopping in the afternoon.

It was too hot to even go swimming during the day, other than a few dips in the kids’ inflatable pool. Ingrid and I went swimming at night instead, some time past 10 pm. The grassy field at Maltesholmsbadet was far from empty, but there were only a very few people in the water.

It’s hot outside and inside. The mornings are OK but from lunchtime onwards the heat becomes unpleasant. It’s 28°C in the shade.

Working is difficult; my brain turns into porridge in this heat and I just have no energy.

I actually took a break after a few hours of working for a trip to Kyrksjön with Ingrid.

One more day to survive and then I’ll go on vacation and can just hang around and do nothing during the hottest hours.

One of the neighbourhood cats is thirsty, and has discovered that there is water in our pool. Several times now I’ve seen it jump up on the pool edge to drink. Its thirst has got to be pretty bad if the pool water – which is clean for a pool, but chlorinated and not sparkling fresh – is the best it can get.

I don’t like this much. I worry that the cat will slip and fall in and won’t be able to get out. At first I also worried that its claws would puncture the pool edge, which is made of rubber and already has a few (non-cat-related) leaks that we’ve patched. But if it hasn’t done so yet, it’s probably not going to, and in any case, we could probably patch those holes, too.

I’m also impressed that it found the water. It must have smelled the water with enough precision to realize that jumping up on that blue/gray thing would help it reach the invisible water.

Anyway, I bought a bowl for the cat – and for any other thirsty cats or creatures. I forgot to fill it up since the weekend, though, and it was mostly empty today, so I found the cat back at the pool. Now I’ve filled up the bowl again.

If you have an outdoors cat, make sure you provide it with water during the day, and preferably in a shaded place!

A mostly unorganized list of Adrian’s current favourites based on my interview with him.

• Book: Kalle Anka, both Pockets and the thin magazines
• Good night stories: Supilinna salaselts with me, His Dark Materials with Eric (although in Swedish and not English)
• Music: no absolute favourite, though he does like Queen, especially after we watched Bohemian Rhapsody
• Movies: Shaun the Sheep, and The Lord of the Rings
• Movie character: Legolas, because no matter what he does, he does it in a cool way
• TV series: Mandalorian, His Dark Materials
• YouTuber: CaptainSauce
• Video games: Subnautica. Blazing Beaks together with Eric. Horizon Zero Dawn he enjoys but paused because he arrived at a boss that looks hard to beat. Mostly he likes trying out new games and then loses interest after a week or two.
• Board games: Catan, Small World, Bondespelet
• Food to cook: making pasta
• Food to eat: pasta with a pea sauce; spring rolls and dumplings.
• Drink: Innocent’s apple and raspberry juice
• Fruit: raspberries, strawberries and paraguayo peaches
• Sweet: chocolate, mud cake and brownies
• Ice cream flavour: Adrian hasn’t eaten enough ice cream yet this year to have a favourite
• Friends: Elvira and Hanna. The best thing to do together with them is “just hanging out”.
• Subject at school: art, and woodworking. He likes building random things without instructions, and enjoys the wide range of materials and tools available at school.
• Activity at after-school care: building Legos, playing in the sandbox, drawing, and Ubongo, and “me and Elvira chase Silas”.
• Clothes: oversized t-shirts, soft socks with food patterns, and fluffy fleeces. He also loves the banana t-shirt we recently bought, and misses the cinnamon bun t-shirts he had as a baby.
• Body part: his big toes, “because they are big”
• Color: green
• Job when grown up: none. Adrian would instead like to be a pig when he grows up – one of those mini pigs who are kept as pets and don’t get eaten.
• Superpower: take out things from pictures and movies and make them real; and to be stretchy, because “I can’t reach and I don’t have the energy to walk”
• Season: summer, autumn, winter, spring
• Place in the house: sofas
• Animal: koalas and narwhals, like last year
• Coolest things, if only they existed: aliens with cool gadgets and zappers och UFOs and universal translators
• Thing he wishes we could do this summer: visit Estonia and go to Otepää adventure park
• Looking forward to in 4th grade: “the club” (which is the bigger kid version of after-school care) and meeting Kristian, his favourite after-school teacher
• Shoe size: 36
• Clothes size: 140

Here is last year’s list.

We played Cluedo.

The first round went quickly so we played a second round. In this round, all of us realized at about the same time that something was wrong. Just as Ingrid was saying “hm, that doesn’t add up” and Eric commented that he must have made a mistake in his note-taking, I was realizing that my notes didn’t allow for anyone to be the murderer. Somehow we had put two place cards and one murder weapon in the envelope (instead of one place, one murderer and one weapon).