A sign of a change of seasons: the glass-and-paper combo in an easily reachable spot in the living room.

When the weather turns warm, we keep the French doors ajar to let in the fresh air and the birdsong.

When the weather turns warm, the wasps and bees and bumblebees awake.

Add those two together and what you get is large insects who fly in through the gap in the doors only to get lost in here and then bump against the windows again and again. Until I get my glass and my piece of paper and put them out again.

Plasters are magical. I don’t know if it is a physical thing or purely psychological, but Adrian tells me that putting a plaster on a scraped finger makes it hurt less. Perhaps the feeling of the plaster itself is distracting, or maybe it’s because the hurt is no longer exposed to air. Or maybe it’s just a purely psychological effect. Plastcebo?

When the kids were small, they used to come to me to get the plaster magic. But already many years ago I moved our stash of plasters from the medicine box on the highest shelf to an easily-reachable floor-level spot, so the kids can serve themselves as needed.

I wish they could also learn to notice when they take the last one and note it down on the grocery list. But no. Several times I’ve needed a plaster (usually because I’ve cut my finger in the kitchen) only to see that the box is empty. (Still there, not thrown in the bin, despite being empty. Sigh.) Now I’ve learned to inspect the stores occasionally and stock up in good time.

I wanted to knit more fun socks, so I bought some fun hand-dyed yarn.

That’s what I thought I did. But since I haven’t used hand-dyed yarn before, I actually bought hand-dyed yarn that looked lovely before I started using it but that I could only turn into ugly socks.

I’m peeved that I didn’t think to take any photos of the hanks of yarn before I wound them into a ball. But if you run an image search for hand dyed yarn then you can see what they generally look like. Imagine one of those in dark brown with blobs of white, dark yellow and violet. Like crocuses and spring earth.

Rolled into a ball, the large splashes of yellow and purple turned into a speckled mess.

I was somehow hoping that the colours would magically align themselves when I knit the yarn into socks, so I would get distinct splodges of yellow and violet again. An evenly speckled result would also have been nice. But instead the colours only kind of pooled, and I got these awkward, sharp-edged spirals of colour instead. Maybe it doesn’t look too bad in a photo but in real life I found them quite garish and ugly.

All right, what if I mix it up with a solid colour so that the repeats get smaller and mixed up? That might tone down the sharp edges and maybe give me a smoother speckled result.

Nope. Now I ended up with a cross between a Swedish tiger and a diseased leopard. Even more garish than the previous ones.

Maybe the yellow was too bright. How about replacing it with more brown, and doing stripes instead of spots? Not bad, actually. At least this looks more like crocuses and earth, instead of a diseased leopard.

Not bad, until I straightened out the socks to start knitting the toes, and realized that almost all the coloured parts ended up on the sole of the foot, and the yellows and violets only reached the front of the foot at the very end. So the crocuses would all be on the sole of the foot, and I would actually mostly see muddy earth.

Time for my fourth attempt. I went back to yellow instead of brown. And I tried brioche knitting, hoping that this would mix up the colours more and get me that speckled look.

These socks actually turned out pretty OK. Somewhat loud. Not the prettiest. Definitely not what I had hoped for. But at least something that I would choose to wear, rather than leaving them in the back of my drawer.

However since more than half of each sock is yellow yarn (half the brioche plus the entire heel), this pair barely used up a quarter of the variegated yarn. What the heck am I going to do with the rest of it? I don’t need four pairs of these!

Our street got repaved today. It’s been in poor shape for years but apparently not poor enough to be prioritized until now. Actual potholes got filled in, but the whole thing was an uneven patchwork of mends on mends on mends. Kind of OK to walk or cycle or drive on, but not pleasant – and almost unusable for kids on kick scooters or skateboards.

Now the surface is so smooth and even – especially since the winter gravel also disappeared overnight – that my feet feel lost. It doesn’t feel like my street any more. Bizarre.

The contractors working here did a great job. The seams around the manholes and other access pipes are impressively even. That turned out to be a very manual and very precise task. The big machine ran an even layer of asphalt over everything. As soon as it passed over a manhole, a bunch of guys immediately swarmed over the spot, dug it out before the asphalt cooled, raised up some ring or collar just enough to shovel hot asphalt under and around it, and then packed it all down with a plate compactor. Within minutes. And with just the right amount of loose asphalt to make the end result be completely flat and even.

They took equal care with the joins between the road surface and all the driveways. I was fully prepared for them to just lay down a straight strip of asphalt and leave all the gaps to homeowners – “your driveway, your problem” – but they joined each individual driveway to the road and made the joins look super tidy. If this is where my taxes go, it’s money well spent.

Setting the table for this family is complicated. It’s Adrian’s job, and whenever I try, I struggle a bit to get all the details right.

Eric and I want adult-sized glasses; Adrian prefers a smaller glass; Ingrid wants a mug but not the large mug.

Everybody likes adult-sized forks and knives. Adrian and Ingrid prefer smaller spoons.

Eric, Adrian and I use plates but Ingrid wants a bowl instead unless the food is something that really, really requires a plate, like pizza or a pancake.

And it’s not like it has to be done like that, nobody will get angry if it isn’t, but then they will swap things out until they’re just right, so we might as well get it right from the start.

And then there’s the drinks buffet. Literally with 4 people we have 5 or 6 bottles and jugs on the table. Water with lemon slices for myself; carbonated water flavoured with ginger shots for Eric; carbonated water with blackcurrant cordial for Ingrid; apple water (= much-diluted apple juice) for Adrian.

It seems kind of silly when I look at it. But on the other hand – if everybody can get what they want, why not? Why force everybody to accept some least common denominator?

The ivy I had in my home office window nearly died because I forgot to up the watering frequency to compensate for the strong spring sun. And the reason I forgot it is because I barely see it these days – I have to keep the curtains drawn almost all day. An east-facing window with no shade gets very bright indeed. So now the ivy has moved to new summer quarters in the (west-facing) bathroom.

Adrian really enjoys making pasta. I make the dough, he rolls it into pasta. He’s got the process down pat and turns out pasta for four hungry eaters in about 20 minutes. The pasta maker was a great buy.

We’ve been cutting our pasta dough into tagliatelle until now, but Adrian wanted fettuccine today. Cooking it was a surprise – it was done faster than I expected. The water had just come back to boil after I added the pasta and then cooked for maybe 2 minutes, and already the pasta was softer than I like it.

Ingrid is now about as tall as me, and hasn’t stopped growing yet.

She just culled a basketful of clothes from her wardrobe. Some she has outgrown, some she simply doesn’t like any more. And I almost think some of the latter might fit me. Would it be weird for me to inherit clothes from her?

That feeling when you’ve had a day full of meetings and finish working at 17:30 and hurry to the kitchen to check whether we have any dinner materials because you really need to start cooking something quite urgently, only to find out that your teenage daughter is way ahead of you and is already halfway done with dinner.

Ingrid decided she wanted to join a gym. They all have minimum age limits for unaccompanied kids (teens) and mostly those limits are too high for Ingrid to pass, but there is one chain with a 14-year limit and a gym relatively close to us. A parent needs to be there for signing up, though, so Ingrid and I cycled to that gym this evening.

I enjoyed the cycle ride. I haven’t been able to fit in much cycling recently. My current team does so much pair programming that I am nearly always in an online session with someone. I feel guilty about my long workout-plus-lunch breaks already because then the other person has to wait for me to come back before we can continue. Sure, they fill their time with something, but they still have to wait for me.

Those birches look like they are in autumn colours, don’t they? But it’s just the yellow leaf buds in the evening sun.