Look at me totally adulting the heck out of this day with a hot cooked meal and everything, even though I’m still all by my lonesome. (Carrot pancakes.)

Eric and Adrian are away staying with friends; Ingrid is away staying with other friends. I’m on my own for a few days.

I can enjoy the peace and quiet during the days, but I’m really not cut out for living on my own. My sleep schedule starts slipping immediately – I kind of don’t see the point of going to bed, so I stay up way too late and only finally go to sleep when I really have to. I wake up as usual in the morning, but around midday I can’t keep awake anymore so I end up sleeping on the sofa.

I’ve never had a home that was only mine. When I moved out of home, I moved straight in with Eric. My only longer stretch of living on my own was a term as an exchange student and it was the most miserably lonely half-year of my life.

Even on days when the rest of the family are all doing their own things most of the time, I like the feeling of just knowing that they are here.

Just like always at this time of the year, we have an infestation of fruit flies in the kitchen.

The red wine vinegar fruit fly trap is still my go-to solution and works pretty well. Except when the flies forego the actual vinegar and congregate on the walls and edges of the glass instead… Are they just sitting there getting high on the fumes or something?

Schoolteachers here like giving kids reading challenges for the longer school breaks. Both Ingrid and Adrian have them for this summer break.

Adrian’s challenge is twofold: read 10 minutes every day, plus a bingo card with specific challenges. I think it’s the same one he’s had before; probably something the teacher found on the internet and now keeps reusing for every single school break. At least the “read in your swimming clothes” square makes a bit more sense now that it is summer.

Except swimming clothes are actually not that comfortable when you’re not swimming, you know? So Adrian used the same workaround as he’s done in the past. Put his arm through his swimming trunks, read for 10 minutes, and crossed of that square.

He really takes this thing seriously, even though there are squares there that he really doesn’t look forward to. It’s more of a compulsion than something to enjoy. And he is quite uncomfortable with the idea of cheating, or even thinking outside the box, when it comes to this. Even when it is as innocent as the swimming clothes thing.

Least favourite square remaining: read in a car or a bus. I’m pretty sure he’s going to ask me to keep him company. And I think I’ve convinced him that it is perfectly valid to do this when the car is standing still and the doors are open.

When I was a child, I always got this one particular kind of redcurrant cake for my birthday. I don’t have the recipe so I thought I would just google for something similar. Shortcrust pastry, redcurrants, meringue topping – easy, right? Nope. The end result was good but nothing at all like I had imagined and hoped. The filling was too sweet and didn’t have enough redcurrants; the meringue was waaay to sweet. I really hope my mum still has that old hand-written recipe somewhere.

Birthday get-together for my nephews-in-law.

Speaking of shopping lists, here’s one of our best life hacks ever: a magnetic pen.

It started with a notepad for grocery lists with a magnetic backing that we got from somewhere or saw somewhere. We realized that we could easily make our own with magnetic tape. The original pad came with a (somewhat crappy) pen that was attached to it somehow. For our own magnetic notepad, we simply took a normal gel pen and glued a small rare earth magnet to it. The magnet fits between the body of the pen and the clip, so pulling it off the fridge never puts any real load on the glue, so it doesn’t come off by accident. But when the pen runs out, it’s easy to pry the magnet loose for reuse. Best thing ever.

… when the kids are old enough to cook their own meals when their meal times are out of sync with the rest of the family, and their cooking doesn’t stretch much farther than pasta with ketchup or pasta with canned tomato sauce or possibly mac and cheese, and they keep this up for weeks, and they somehow never learn to write things down on the shopping list when they empty the last package of something, and then I feel like making pasta for dinner, only to discover that the pasta shelf of the pantry is effectively empty.

I see deer passing through our garden almost daily. And when I was out walking this evening, I met this guy. They’re barely even shy. I guess there aren’t many people around right now, with vacations and everything, so they deer can be bolder than usual.

The hydrangeas I planted last year have both survived. One of them isn’t doing any more than that but the other one is bravely flowering, in an almost unreal, eye-wateringly blue colour.