I had no time for a workout during the day, so I went for a late-night walk.

I rather liked the HIIT workout video I followed on Tuesday, so I did the same today.

I tried to get a more interesting photo today. Mid-workout action selfies are tricky, though. As a colleague commented, I look like I’m levitating.

I’m waiting for the yarn for my cardigan. Meanwhile I gave my restless hands a pair of socks to knit for Christmas.

Today’s workout was 40 minutes of vigorously raking leaves in the yard.

The smaller cherry tree finally dropped most of its leaves, and the tree behind the house is now also mostly done, so this may be last round of raking for this year.

I didn’t take a photo today, apart from the phone selfie for the workout challenge. Just forgot.

This photo is from when I was preparing for my hike a few weeks ago. These are my dinner baggies. I measured and packed the ingredients for each meal separately in advance to make things as easy as possible. When I was out walking and wanted a meal, all I needed to do was to pick a baggie and cook its contents. The kitchen looked a bit like a drug lab, with rows of little plastic bags on the table…

Breakfast is easy. Always porridge for breakfast on a hike. I make my own grain mix for porridge – about half rolled oats and the other half is a mixture of spelt, rye, flax seeds, and wheat bran. There’s a big box of it in the pantry; for the hike all I did was measure and bag it.

Now I think I’ve found the perfect hiking dinner recipe, so dinner will be almost as easy going forward.

0.75 dl of grains
0.75 dl of lentils
~30 g of dried vegetables

Pick any kind of grain that cooks in about 10 to 20 minutes, and combine it with any kind of lentils that cooks in about the same time. It doesn’t matter too much if one of them ends up slightly overcooked. Add vegetables. I prioritized convenience this time and used a ready-made mix of dried “Swedish vegetables” from Friluftsmat.

I made three dinners, all following the same basic recipe but with different details. Cous cous, wheat grain, oat grain; red lentils, puy lentils, black (beluga) lentils. And when it was time to cook them, I added curry powder to one but used bouillon powder to season another, so they ended up tasting like completely different dishes.

I’m very happy with this solution. Great results with very little effort!

I really didn’t feel like working out today. But the challenge, and especially the knowledge that my laziness would drag the team’s score down, got me off my backside anyway. The uninspired photo quite accurately reflects just how uninspired I was feeling about the whole thing.

When I don’t feel like it, then I have to make it really easy for myself. The less I have to think, the better. Today I just followed a thirty-minute workout video I found on Youtube. Someone told me exactly what to do, when to start, when to stop.

And of course afterwards I felt really good about it. I never, ever regret working out after I’ve done it.

A friend/neighbour found out about our woeful lack of pumpkin carving and generously gave us one of their pumpkins. It had done its Halloween duty already, but been painted rather than carved. So Adrian turned the other side and gave it a second life.

Usually I also carve, but this time with my hands free I could focus on photography.

We’re doing a daily workout challenge at work this month. It’s a team effort rather than an individual one, which is a lot stronger motivation for me. I probably wouldn’t care about my individual position in a leaderboard, but I can’t let the team down, so I’ll be doing daily workouts now.

And photographing them, because naturally it’s a social thing with photos and likes and comments and such.

And since I’m taking photos anyway, I might as well post them here, too. The new phone actually takes pretty decent photos. So: here’s today’s workout. I cycled to Sundbyberg and back to drop off outgrown children’s clothes at a second hand store, killing two birds with one stone. (What an unpleasant metaphor that is!)

It’s November, so you’d think it would be cold. But it was an incredible 15°C outside today, which would be a normal temperature for an evening ride home from work in August. I started out wearing layers (plural) but by the time I was halfway back, I’d shed all of them except the last one.

Another swatch ahead of the planned new cardigan. I’ve decided on a yarn combination as well as a pattern. Now comes the hardest part: calculating gauge and adjusting all the stitch counts. I’m mentally already prepared for having to start, then rip it up and start over because the sizing will be off. Probably more than once. No matter how much I measure and calculate, reality always turns out different.

The ten-day posting gap from October 10th to 19th is now filled with posts. If you missed any of them, you can find them all here:

Daily: 2105 – the house is cold
Daily: 2104 – Kinnekulleleden, day 4
Daily: 2103 – Kinnekulleleden, day 3
Daily: 2102 – Kinnekulleleden, day 2
Daily: 2101 – Kinnekulleleden, day 1
Daily: 2100 – making chestnut creatures
Daily: 2099 – gloomy
Daily: 2098 – hole in the ground
Daily: 2097 – steam coming off the deck
Daily: 2096 – we have wasps