My mum asked if I could share photos that I have of her.

Hello, 40 000 untagged photos.

The task seemed overwhelming so I put it off for many months. Today I thought I’d have a go at skimming through a subset at least. In the end I scrolled through all twelve and a half years of photos that I have in Lightroom in a couple of hours. After a while I found patterns that made the work easier – I could easily spot longer trips that I could quickly skim past because I knew she wasn’t there, etc. (And then had to do it all over again because I misunderstood a Lightroom sync setting and lost all my choices and this specific action, of all things, did not have an Undo possibility. The second time was even faster.)

I could definitely prune some of that. In the early years, when I was new to photography, and the kids were squirmy and wiggly, I often took many photos in the hope that some would be OK, and then kept more than I really needed. I wasn’t even photographing daily, then, so the output of each “session” must have been even larger. The kids sit still these days, so I don’t need to spray and pray any more. On the other hand, now I can take ten or twenty shots of the same flower, with only minor variations. I try to be better at culling them afterwards, but sometimes I don’t have the energy for that effort.

2021 was clearly a bad year for photography. And for life. I’m still not living like I was before the pandemic; I go out less and undertake fewer projects of any kind. It takes an effort now, where I could just make things happen before. I’m improving, though.

The Olympic Games are happening in Paris. I’m sort of vaguely interested, but not enough to pay for access, so I’m not watching any of it, apart from short clips of highlights.

Except today! We had an Olympic day at the office, since it was just the four of us on the third floor, and nobody could complain. A teammate who is more into sports has a paid Eurosport account, and we have a big screen on the wall that normally shows graphs and statistics about new customer signups and take-up of the new customer portal and other such inspiring things, that he could Chromecast the stream to.

We saw various branches of gymnastics (always super impressive), table tennis doubles (all Asian teams at the top), swimming, men’s volleyball, and probably more. Not continuously, but whenever I was waiting for a build to complete, or was switching tasks, etc.

The technical setup itself was interesting enough. 360 degree cameras around the table tennis setup, so they could freeze the scene and pan around, Matrix-style. Visualizations of all the spots where ball had hit the table during the game. Miles beyond the blurry slow-motion cameras of yesteryear.

It’s World Embroidery Day today, which I discovered only by chance on Instagram. I just picked up my Stockholm embroidery again a few days ago – I need to make progress before the embroidery club starts up again to avoid endless shame – and continued today. I feel done with all the houses so I finally started on the trees now.

The best light was out on the deck, so that’s where I sat.

First day back at work. The same for four out of our five-person team, so we congregated at the Sortera office.

I tried to remember how this office work thing works, and mostly managed to pack all the necessities (computer, mouse plus pad, change of clothes, lunch box) except for my knitting. Missed it several times during the day. When I got home, the first thing I did (after unpacking my used lunch box) was to put the bag with my sock knitting in my backpack for tomorrow.

I’ve only used 3 out of my 5 weeks of vacation. But Adrian is away at scout camp all week, and Ingrid will be working, so we won’t be doing anything as a family anyway. I think I’ll use another week to go for a full-week hike some time in September, instead of the long weekends I’ve been doing in the past. And the last week is for Christmas.

The super thick, super woolly sweater is done. Has been for several weeks already, but I didn’t get around to taking photos of it before we went to Estonia.

Looks stylish, doesn’t it? Too bad that I probably won’t get to wear it much outside the home, because I suspect it’ll be too bulky to fit under my (usually relatively form-fitting) coats and jackets.

The design and especially the construction of the triangular wedges comes from the Tell It Slant pattern, but I wanted a different fit and used a different yarn so I did the shaping myself, based on this tutorial for a basic top-down raglan sweater.

Overall it went smoothly. I had to make several attempts before I got the sleeve sizing right, but that’s par for the course. The only bit I struggled with was the neckline. I bound it off one way and it was too tight; I bound it off in a stretchier way and it was all floppy. I ended up using a weird hybrid of the two, where I alternated between the methods for every other stitch.

Ingrid is away with her boyfriend, Adrian is away at scout camp, and the weather is dry but not hot. Eric and I seized the opportunity to scrub the living room floor. It’s been several years since we last did it. The floor always looks and feels so nice afterwards.

You can see quite clearly where the big rug usually is, where the floor is smoother and more yellow.

The room looks both oddly large and kind of small like this.

I realized I had forgotten to post photos that Ingrid took of me at the climbing park in Otepää. She got some great angles, especially of the Tarzan jump, since she was ahead of me. I’m always the one holding the camera, it’s nice to get some memories of me also being there.

These two are from the first obstacle on the last course:

And this is the Tarzan jump:

Just some climbing.

Celebrating my birthday a day early because Adrian is leaving for scout camp tomorrow, and Ingrid is also looking forward to spending tomorrow with her boyfriend since they’ve been apart for over two weeks. Since I am mostly celebrating for my family’s sake and not mine, I don’t care at all what day we do it.

Happy birthday, I am now 47 years minus 1 day!

That’s my factual age. In my own head, I don’t even know what age I am.

When I see people in the street, I instinctively think of roughly 25-to-30-year-olds as “like me”. Like, I see a person walking by in the street and subconsciously identify as belonging to the same group. Whereas people of my own age often start to get a bit of a paunch, or lightly bad posture, and looking “matronly”. I was at a second-hand clothes shop in Tartu just the other week and vaguely noticed a woman next to me who was holding up some shirt or something, without paying any real attention to her, and subconsciously thought of her as “old”. Like, “oh, there’s an older lady here, too”. And a second later I realized that she was no older than me, and could well be a bit younger. Ouch. Maybe I’m just desperately clinging on to my lost youth, but I am absolutely going to keep on clinging, by exercising and eating healthily and not dressing in baggy clothes in navy and beige. Absolutely embracing the grey hair, though!

But when I talk to people, then 25-to-30-year-olds seem really young, and I feel my calendar age. They’re all full of bouncy energy, somehow naive and fresh. They care so much about all sorts of things, whereas I am becoming jaded and can’t work up much energy about any of the big questions. Giving up on humanity, kind of. I’m an optimist on a small scale, when it comes to individual people and relationships, but a pessimist on a larger scale.

Last week of vacation, great weather, no plans – I’m going for a nice long walk. The next stage of Sörmlandsleden is 16 km so it would be an overnight there-and-back hike, which I can’t fit in this week. Instead I went to Tyresta. The best hiking I’ve done near Stockholm is in Tyresta, and that was a while ago.

Tyrestarundan combined with Fornborgsrundan for a total of 19 km.

The initial kilometre or two went through farmland, complete with cackling hens and baa-ing sheep. After that, it was the usual granite and bilberry bushes and pine and spruce.

The trail network in Tyresta has been upgraded to the new marking standard that I’ve seen used in other national parks, coloured hexagons with different numbers of dots.

One of the draws of this hiking trail for me was that it goes through a wide swathe of forest that burned down in 1999. It’s clearly marked in the national park maps and rather distinct in real life as well: the forest is evenly young there, like a lake of lighter green amidst the otherwise darker, older trees.

The reasons for the youth of the forest are barely detectable now, twenty-five years on. I remember a brief visit maybe ten years ago, and I think I recall seeing actual dead, burnt skeletons of trees still sticking up. Now there is none of that. If you look really carefully, you can find a carbonized root or stump somewhere.

And perhaps some rocks are darker than normal? Or maybe that’s just lichens.

The shorter trail that I added to my walk took me all the way around Stensjön. I love lakes – and rivers and waterfalls and all other kinds of water.

As an unexpected benefit, that side of the park was very empty. I don’t think I saw or heard a single person on the east side of the lake, not even at a distance.

I therefore took the chance and went for a naked swim. Wonderful feeling, especially on a hot and sweaty day like today. (Last time was on Husarö five years ago.)

I decided to swim around the two little islets that I could see nearby (in the middle at the back in the photo). At first just around the larger, closer one, but the water between the islets was full of large, slippery rocks hiding just below the surface, barely tall enough to eddy the water when I looked carefully. I gave up on trying to find a way through and swam around both, only to find more rocks on the other side of them, so my circle kept growing. The lake deserves its name (“stone lake”).

Of wildlife, nothing but a few small frogs, and the calls of crows and finches. Most birds have stopped their singing for this season. Some insects, but luckily no mosquitoes.

The current ever-recurring discussion topic: the new EU regulations about bottle caps that came into effect this year. My friends in Estonia didn’t need to say more than “bottle caps” for everyone to know *exactly* what they were talking about.

If you’re not living in Europe, or if you’re future me and have forgotten, EU law now requires plastic bottle caps to be attached to the bottle (or milk carton, or other packaging). The bottle on the left is of the old type with a detached cap; the one on the right is of the new type.

Environmentally-conscious and recycling-oriented as I am, I have never in conscious memory thrown a bottle cap on the ground. Or even dropped one and not picked it up. (Heck, I pick up other people’s litter when I’m out walking.) But I guess enough people do for this initiative to be worth the cost and effort of changing all production lines. I assume someone’s done the maths.

Out of curiosity, I went looking for statistics. I found this report of a Dutch study of garbage found on beaches which mentioned that “bottle caps are among the top 5 items found during beach cleaning and beach litter monitoring around the world”, and “research […] on beach litter over the last 12 years shows that on average, 19 bottle caps are found every 100 metres”. They also report numbers from other countries: “On average, the highest number of caps were found in Sweden (170/100m)” – not because people litter more here, but because of sea currents converging here.

But the new caps are annoying. Most are well-designed: you can twist them out of the way and they stay there while you pour or drink. But they are in my face when I drink. And turning a bottle upside down while drinking also turns the attached cap upside down, which sometimes leads to drips from the lid. Which matters little in the case of water, but I don’t want smoothie dribbles on my face. So now I have to inspect and possibly lick the cap before drinking my smoothie – or detach the cap after all, which is of course intentionally not easy.

Drinks companies complained loudly of course, arguing that the new caps will require more material so the net effect will be negative. Innocent (who makes several of our favourite juices and smoothies) on the other hand managed to make their new bottle caps smaller than the old ones, so clearly it can be done if someone’s willing to make the effort.