My night in the forest was a wet one, and now so is the tent.

Drying hiking gear is tricky with a cat in the house. Dangling straps and lines look like toys. Draping fabric and interesting surfaces are tempting for little cat claws. We’ve lost one inflatable sleeping pad to Nysse’s claws already. It took less than a minute from the pad landing on the floor to him feeling it out.

I’m airing out my sleeping pad in the bedroom behind a closed door, and the tent in the bathroom where Nysse never goes. The sleeping bag is living dangerously over the backs of our dining room chairs, but on the far side of the table, less visible to Nysse. Worst case, I can mend a sleeping bag, and it doesn’t need to be air- or watertight.

The view from my tent was quite different today, with yesterday’s golden sunset replaced by a rainy night and morning. I woke up at six, nipped out for a quick pee, but before I could do anything more it started raining again, so I was forced to laze around in the tent for an hour. At seven there was a break in the rain so I could pack standing up (instead of curled up in the tent) and get on my way.

There were a few brief, light showers later, but most of the time was rain-free. I just got water from below. After a night of off-and-on rain, the forest was all wet, which was especially noticeable on the more overgrown sections of the trail. The undergrowth doesn’t even need to be tall, it just needs to be right next to the path to soak you. It felt like I wiped off and redistributed all the water on all the blueberry bushes in the whole forest. My trousers legs were absolutely dripping.

What can there be to photograph when I am walking the exact same route as yesterday, with nothing new? (Apart from the weather, that is.) What’s new is my eyes and my attention.

The first anthill of the day is nothing special. But when the day is over and I realize just how many they were, and how many stretches of the trail were so covered with ants that I couldn’t stop, I see those anthills with different eyes. They were truly many, and large, and frankly a bit annoying.

Stands of raspberries were also everywhere, and rather more pleasant than the anthills. Truly this section of the trail seems to get very few visitors, because the raspberry bushes were chock full of ripe raspberries, with nobody eating or picking them. I ate my fill, and then some – because how can I just pass such bounty without partaking? – and I barely made a dent. The first two kilometres or so (starting from the stage-19 end of the stage) were especially good raspberry picking grounds. If I ever want to drive an hour and a half and then walk another half-hour in order to get all-you-can-eat wild raspberries, then this is the place to be.

Some views just look better coming from the other direction. I know that as a photographer I should stop and turn around when I pass some interesting landscape feature, but I usually forget. But today I get another chance.

For the last hour of my hike, I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, and then not very distant at all. Ten minutes before I reached the car, the heavens opened. I was all ready for it, with my backpack rain cover in place and my rain jacket literally in my hand, so it didn’t actually bother me much. Apart from my trouser legs – which I had long since given up on – I was still mostly dry when I got there.

At that point it was absolutely pouring down, and the thunder was right over my head. Instead of trying to pack myself into the car in the downpour, I took shelter in an archway of the farm building behind which I had parked. It got wetter and wetter as time went by, until I had to make a little channel in the gravel to guide the water out at the other end of the archway, instead of letting it spread out sideways towards the walls.

It reminded me of playing in the mud when I was a child. Back then the street where I lived was surfaced with gravel, not asphalt, so it got a bit muddy when it rained. It also sloped slightly, so we got these lovely streams of water along the sides of the street. With a sturdy stick, we could drag new channels to make the streams join up or go the way we wanted. We had no fancy boats, but I remember sending small twigs rafting downstream.

Anyway, the sides of the archway remained dry, so I could sit down and have a leisurely lunch while I waited for the thunderstorm to abate. The good thing about summer rains is that there are usually breaks in them. I could get into the car all dry and nice. There was much more rain later while I was driving home, to the point where the rain hit the windscreen in splats rather than drops and I could barely see the car ahead of me, but I got home safely.

Picking up the Sörmlandsleden project again, after a break of more than two years. I hope it won’t take me two years until the next stage. I have been getting my life back on track after a post-covid slump, so there is hope.

I did make an attempt to get here earlier this summer, but ended up elsewhere due to complications.

Stage 18 is one of those hard-to-reach ones. The beginning is on a road, yes, but that’s about it when it comes to accessibility. There is no parking, even. There is parking at the other end, though, so I walked this stage backwards. (I’ll be walking it forward tomorrow.) Which actually worked out really well – this beautiful lake at the beginning was for me the grand finale at the end of my day, where I put up my tent for the night.

There were several more lakes along the route, almost as pretty. But also a lot of the usual pine-blueberry-mossy-rock landscape, as well as patches of deciduous forests here and there. And clearcuts, but those bring no joy, so they don’t get any photo space here.

Stage 18 is, according to the signs, also one of the very earliest stages of Sörmlandsleden, from 1973. These days it seems to be a less frequented one, possibly because of that lack of accessibility. It was well signposted and the shelters were in great shape, but some parts of the trail itself were rather overgrown.

Had it not been for the orange arrow clearly pointing the way, I’d have struggled to find the continuation of the path here. (It goes right into the greenery, at the slightly larger dark patch.)

Here’s me having a snack break, with a view over another lovely lake.

Happy 46th birthday to me! I got cake. Eric made a variation on the redcurrant cake from my childhood, this time with gooseberries.

I’ve more or less managed to learn my age, so that I know what to answer when people ask instead of calculating every time, and then they yank it away again and I have to learn a new number!

Ingrid suggested a mnemonic for this year’s number. 4 and 6 make 10, or as it’s called in Swedish, 4 and 6 are “ten buddies”. That’s easier to remember than a random ones number.

Things you can do on office days, part 2: go shopping for chocolate. I’m all out of fancy chocolate, both filled pralines and plain bars. Chokladfabriken is on summer break but the little hole-in-the-wall shop in Hötorgshallen had what I needed. I found both the Tobago Cocoa dark milk bars that I loved at the chocolate tasting earlier this year, and also another brand of dark milk chocolate that I want to try. The Tobago Cocoa one was delicious, a perfect balance between chocolate intensity and creaminess and sweetness, but maybe there is something even more delicious out there?

Things you can do when you’re in the office: meet an office dog.

Sometimes I wish I could have Nysse as an office cat to cuddle with, but he is so unsuited to that role that it’s barely even funny. Mostly because he would hate to be leashed like this dog, and he’d never ever come if you called for him. So the day would end with me searching every nook and cranny of the office to find him. And he’d probably be under the lockers or on top of the kitchen cupboards or something.

This cardigan is going on to its third or fourth life. We got it from my sister-in-law when her kids outgrew it. Neither Ingrid nor Adrian were too fond of knitted cardigans, so we passed it on to a friend. Now it came back, far outgrown again, and unfortunately with a moth-eaten hole on one side.

I like colourful mends, but sometimes a discreet approach works better. I’ve been watching Instagram reels about mending knitwear and learned how to basically recreate the knit fabric. Now I got to try it out for real. It starts out as duplicate stitch around the edges of the hole, where the original material is still whole, and then just continues out into the nothingness with pins for temporary support. The gray wool I had at home was a near-perfect match so the end result is almost indistinguishable from the original fabric (although just a bit thicker, so you can feel it more than you can see it).

Now the cardigan can be passed along to the next baby cousin.

I forgot to take a “before” picture so here’s one from mid-mend and one of the finished result.

Picked up the embroidery project again after a pause due to travelling and such. It’s coming along nicely. The initial lack of plan has now gelled into at least a sense of direction. Shape-wise mostly following the contours of the shapes. Combining most if not all colours on each piece to tie them together. That one latticework piece will need a companion to make sure it doesn’t look out of place.

I like the look and feel of the couched lines with the thick purple yarn, but I don’t want it to take over. Perhaps I need another project that focuses on couching stitch.

I finished the shawl I’ve been knitting – since January, apparently. But really it’s been mostly finished for well over a month, if not more. I just needed to add the last bit of edging, bind off, weave in the ends and block. Which, in a burst of productivity, I finally finished today. Feels good.

Sprayed and pinned to towel-covered sofa cushions for blocking. Naturally Nysse saw this as a chance to appropriate the whole thing as yet another cat bed.

The shawl is based on the Early Blossoms pattern on Ravelry. I liked the pattern. It was easy to follow, perfect as background knitting, and easy to adjust – I think I added one extra red patch and made another one slightly larger. And the result is pretty stylish.

Even with blocking, mine didn’t come out strictly triangular, which I think may have been the original intent. Perhaps I could force it into shape but I don’t want to be too forceful with the alpaca yarn. And it really won’t matter since I’m going to be draping it over my shoulders anyway.

We picked cherries, and pitted them for baking, jamming and freezing.

The area around us always looks like a bloodbath when we’re done pitting them.

I made a large sheet cake that went straight into the freezer, and my favourite crumble that went straight to our plates.