The neighbours’ house is still a half-finished eyesore. They started clearing the ground in April and the house already looked pretty house-shaped in June. Since then they’ve finished the facade but then not made any visible progress for some while. I’m getting tired of having to see heaps of building materials and construction waste every single day.

I’m also not very happy with the house itself. It’s boxy and bulky, clearly focusing on optimising for volume given the maximum permissible size, and makes no real effort to fit in. And did it really have to be black, to make the house look even larger and dominant? I wonder how that could seem like a good idea to anyone.

The glory of cherry trees in autumn colours.

This year is a good one, with the right kind of weather – the trees are blazing in reds and oranges and yellows.

If I have all these options to choose from, I don’t need to limit myself to just one, do I?

Also, Adrian asked for tentacles. Because obviously.

So this second one will have tentacles, and use colours that match the cool tones of the original fabric.

Another Monday, another embroidery.

Today’s theme: embroidering on a patterned fabric. I had so many ideas that it was difficult to choose. Do I embellish what’s there? Add more of the same? Fill in the background? Add something entirely different and divergent? Matching colours, or new colours of similar coolness, or black and white?

I settled on simple embellishment, with the colours same-ish but all warmed up.

We have tickets for a chamber music concert series at Konserthuset and the first one was today. Piano, cello, violin and percussion.

Pejacevic’ piano trio was music of the romantic kind, definitely impressive but not to my taste. The kind of music where everything blends together and it’s a mass of notes rather than a melody. I find it difficult to keep my focus on this kind of music, to the point that I begin dreaming while awake. My brain has nothing to hold on to, so it starts making things up.

Shostakovich’ symphony No. 15 arranged for a chamber ensemble. I liked this a lot better, with the dialogue between the cello and the violin. It’s an interesting piece of music, with its quotes from other famous works. It was almost bizarre to suddenly get a burst of the Willam Tell Overture in the middle of the piece. It was also clearly a technically challenging piece, especially for the strings, veering into atonality.

We had front row seats, which I particularly like for small-scale classical music, because it allows me to see the musicians’ craft up close. Which is particularly nice when I find myself zoning out.

One thing I noticed this time was a digital sheet music stand that the violinist used, with a foot pedal for turning pages. I wish I could have gotten a closer look – sometimes it seemed to only redraw the bottom of the page, and I wonder what that was about.

The cellist and the percussion section used traditional sheet music. The pianist did so as well, with the help of a page turner. That seems like it might be a challenging task – it’s not just about reading the music but also keeping track of dal segno “navigations”, being unobtrusive while waiting… and not getting distracted.

I saw an ungodly amount of mushrooms in the forest during my walk last weekend. I didn’t want to overwhelm the hiking story with pictures of mushrooms, so here they are, on a scene of their own.

Amanita mushrooms are always the prettiest ones.

Ordinary mushrooms often looked more interesting when they had started ageing and even decomposing.

The warted puffball (vårtig röksvamp) is edible, according to sources. It doesn’t look like it.

This one was the most bizarre. Bright orange mushrooms the size of my fingertip, growing in the middle of a gravel road with no other vegetation nearby. I wonder how it manages to access any nutrition at all. Wikipedia tells me it’s called “orange peel fungus” in English and I can see why. (Mönjeskål in Swedish.)

Our homework for the embroidery course this week was to take a stitch and play around with it – explore and experiment. The teacher set very low expectations because many in the group are beginners, and I knew I wanted to do more than that.

I had bought the book that she based the course on and found a nice idea there. Take a square of fabric, divide it into smaller squares, and fill each one with a different variation of the stitch. The book suggested 3×3 squares and that seems very reasonable. But at the same time… if I only do nine variations on the same stitch, I’m not going to get any really interesting results. I need to get the obvious ones out of the way and get to the point where I need to push myself. 4×4 would be much better. But I decided to go all in and do 5×5 squares. Kind of going overboard, I know, but I think it’ll be good.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on it every evening this week. It’s a fair amount of work, but it’s also very relaxing. There are no expectations. I won’t be hanging it on the wall or on a piece of clothing or anything else. Nobody is going to look at it for more than a minute except for myself. Nobody will care how tidy the rear side is. (It totally isn’t. I wasted no time on fastening the ends at all. It’s all loose bits of yarn all over.)

Long stitches. Short stitches. Stitches of even lengths and of uneven ones. Lined up and offset. Thin yarn and thick yarn and even thicker yarn. Smooth cotton and fuzzy wool. Straight lines and curves. One colour, two colours, a gradient.

The wind has blown down a lot of cherry leaves and carpeted much of the lawn with them.

The wind also kept blowing away my pretty arrangement. I had both a more greenish-yellow on the far left and a more purple-red leaf on the far right, but lost them to a gust and couldn’t find them again.

The dev team at Urb-it celebrates major achievements with cake, and also mourns major losses (due to people leaving the team) with cake. Cake goes fell with all kinds of feelings.