Yesterday was really hot. The wooden deck gets so hot in the sun that it hurts my soles.

Cleaning the basement is an excellent activity for overly hot days! Our basement is pleasantly cool even on the hottest days – and it really needs some cleaning. Stuff just magically accumulates until it fills all available space.

Eric and I sorted through some of that stuff yesterday, throwing out all kinds of unused junk and organizing the things that we kept.

Among other things we rediscovered this pair of wooden stilts that haven’t been used for some years. They’re much more use out in the garden than in a corner of the basement.

Looking through yesterday’s photos, I realized that I was barely present in them, and then only as a small white figure in the distance.

Today I put on my Midsummer dress and my summer hat and took some self-portraits under the cherry tree.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

Ingrid wanted to recreate the pose of the lady on the packaging of this inflatable donut. It looked quite uncomfortable at first – the lady chose a pose where the donut’s hard plastic handles, invisible in the photo, end up right behind her back and under her legs. It turned out to be not quite that bad, but not particularly comfortable either – that top arm has no support at all.

A few close-ups of the mossy ex-roof of the playhouse.

The magenta playhouse has done its job. Ingrid and Adrian have outgrown it and some parts are starting to rot.

I notice that I haven’t mentioned it much here on the blog, but here’s the playhouse being painted and here is Adrian serving me coffee and cake in the playhouse.

It’s not exactly in the way where it stands, but kind of, still. I’m thinking of maybe using that spot for a plum tree instead. A plum tree has been on my wish list for years; this summer I’m determined to plant one.

As a first step in making the plum tree happen, today we pushed down the playhouse and took it to pieces, with crowbar and saw.



Look at the difference between the north and south sides of the roof! The north face is covered with mosses and lichens, while the south side is completely clean.

Heavy rain all day. The poppy flowers, which had just barely opened, were beaten down almost to the ground.

The peas are growing nicely and getting tall enough to need support.

I finally bought summer flowers! Summer is well underway, after all.

As usual, I came home with more flowers than I had planned – I kind of have difficulty reining myself in on these shopping trips. But how can I not buy dahlias, for example?

A mouse has decided that it really, really wants to move into our house. It’s made at least three attempts already. (Or is it four? I’m losing count.)

The first time Eric saw it when it was nosing around the French doors. We shooed it away. The other times it’s come all the way inside, and suddenly one of us humans has noticed small movement on the floor. We’ve managed to chase it out each time, until now.

Initially we hoped that scaring it away once would be enough. It wasn’t. After the mouse came, inside we googled a bit. The internet said to spray peppermint oil. We did that; it had no effect, other than making parts of the house smell like a dentist’s practice. We’ll try the ultrasonic thingies next, even though they’re reported to not have much of an effect. It’s either that, or give up on prevention and start trapping instead. Because living with closed doors all summer is not going to happen.

Oh, and I guess I’ll be more welcoming to all the neighbourhood cats who wander around here. I’ve generally been shooing those out of the house as well, not wanting them to make themselves too much at home here and start scratching our sofas. But I guess I’ll let them be from now on, as long as they behave.

On the positive side, the mouse’s presence has been really obvious, so it’s unlikely that it or its cousins have been spending time here before today.