There will be no more opportunities to wear summer dresses this season.

I like to drink flavoured water with my meals. Sometimes I drink Adrian’s apple juice water. Sometimes that’s too sweet for me, so I make lemon-flavoured water for myself.

Observations:

One lemon can power a whole lot of water. Almost like perpetual stew: when the water runs low, I fill the carafe up with more, on top of the existing lemon slices. After a while the lemon starts dissolving, with individual cells floating around in the water, and that just makes it taste even better. It doesn’t last forever, though – after a while it loses its flavour.

Lemon slices make better drinking water than lime. Lime can initially taste nice but becomes bitter quite soon.

The peel also makes the water bitter. I cut off the peel and the pith from my lemons before using them for this. With luck I run across a recipe that calls for lemon peel but no lemon juice, so the peel goes in the food and then I only need to throw out the pith.

Busy days at work again, but I can’t skip lunch every day, so now lunch is something that I can prepare in 5 minutes and eat at my desk while barely looking at it.

The view from my home office is making me think of autumn.

Not for the first time, I wonder how people with larger and/or hungrier families manage to cook dinner. 500 g of pasta just barely fits in a standard strainer. I can just about fit noodle stir fry for four in our largest cast-iron pan if I’m really, really careful when stirring. It’s a good thing I no longer need to eat quite as much as I used to – I balance out Adrian’s and Ingrid’s appetites (Adrian growing, Ingrid going to the gym).

Årsjön and Bylsjön both had gangs of ducks who were all very used to being near people. They were pretty obviously expecting to be fed. After we washed up our breakfast dishes in the lake, some snacked on our porridge scrapings.

Adrian and I went on an overnight mini hike to Tyresta (Årsjön). This late in the season, the camping area wasn’t crowded at all. The trails on the other hand were full of people, 80% of whom seemed to be carrying baskets for picking mushrooms. Seems to be this year’s hot thing.

Busy times at work lead to unhealthy eating habits. Whatever I can eat at the computer with little to no prep.

Possibly my last lunch out on the deck for this season. With a jacket and a blanket. If I put the bench at the very far end of the deck, I get a little bit of sun on part of me at least.

I keep forgetting my lactose intolerance. I do remember it when I’m doing my grocery shopping. But for some things there are no lactose-free alternatives, and then I just buy the normal stuff and plan to take a lactase tablet when I eat it. Yogurts, for example. There are very few lactose-free alternatives and none of them taste well. Or anything with ricotta cheese.

The problem is that when I get to actually eating these things I forget about the tablets. I’ve been eating normal yogurt for decades so I just do it on autopilot. And a few hours later my stomach feels like a balloon and my clothes literally don’t fit me any more.

Knowing that my waist circumference at this point is 4 cm larger than normal, I wonder if could you calculate the volume of intestinal gas from that, and then the amount of lactose that was digested by bacteria instead of myself.