Ingrid’s graduation day.

We got to the school yard in good time, we thought, 45 minutes before the actual event, but there was already a big crowd there.

When the graduates came out, the crowd became a sea of signs. We ended up towards the back, so Adrian as the tallest of us got the task of holding up our sign.

Here’s our proud high school graduate!

And here’s us, proud of our high school graduate.

Once more, with feeling:

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There was some time for friends and family to congratulate and take photos and what not. Then the graduates went back into the school building to change out of their nice dresses and suits and into their coveralls for the studentflak ride.

One last moment of showing off their shiny selves…

… and then the mood switched boom boxes, plastic whistles, and copious sprayed drinks.

The flak trucks for all the graduating classes took off as a convoy towards the city centre, and the rest of us went home. Ingrid came home a few hours later, completely drenched.

We celebrated the end of the school year – today for Adrian, tomorrow for Ingrid – with a dinner at Sushi Sukai. Both of them finish their years with excellent grades.

Sushi Sukai was also excellent, with interesting and delicious food. Everything from crab tacos to spicy fried popcorn shrimp, salmon tartar to tuna tataki.

Do I need more socks? Most definitely not.

Do I need to knit more socks? I sort of do. Socks are the best background knitting project I’ve found, for meetings, commuting, waiting for the code to build and deploy, etc. Small, portable, simple. And the end result is useful – I’ll have more use for more socks than I will for hats or scarves.

I’ve got lots of sock yarn left over from socks I’ve already knitted. Most sock yarn is sold in hanks of 100 grams. That’s should be roughly enough for two pairs of socks, with my sizing.

Knitting two pairs of identical socks does not feel ideal. I’d have to be mindful of which one goes with which, to ensure that each pair fades and wears evenly. No: either all socks are the same and you just pick two at random, like I did with my old black cotton socks, or all pairs are unique and pairing up socks after a wash becomes trivial.

I’ll just do simple combinations of two colours at a time, I thought.

Surprisingly, even though each of these yarns individually resulted in lovely socks, pairing them up two and two led to more bad combinations than good ones. They all tended to be just slightly off. The reds don’t go well together; the light grey is too warm to fit with the slightly blue-toned dark grey. The muted green, which I thought would balance and complement the light candy, instead just made it muddy. It becomes obvious that they’re all sourced from different dyers and don’t belong to the same palette.

Buy some neutrals to combine them with? Do I really want to be adding to this pile, though?

The studentflak tradition involves a lot of spilled and sprayed beer and other beverages these days. At some point the students realized that this is no good for party clothes, or even ordinary clothes, and now there are special coveralls for wearing on the flak. These aren’t traditional student coveralls (which are actual pieces of clothing) – they’re more like plastic protective gear.

White is boring, of course, so another tradition that has emerges is spray painting the coveralls. Ingrid and her friends had a coverall painting party in our back garden.

A mama deer with her two babies was in the neighbourhood. I first saw them in the garden next to ours. Mama deer jumped over the fence and didn’t quite seem to understand that the babies wouldn’t be able to do that. One of the babies found the opening under the fence that the cats use; the other one stayed on the other side. Mama deer just went on with the one baby and didn’t seem too concerned about the other one. Hopefully they’ll catch up later.

I planted a peony in 2021. It’s been failing to thrive since then. Every season I’ve been mildly surprised to see it come up again. I bought a backup peony last year because I’d mostly given up hope of the first one ever properly taking off.

This year it gave me a flower! Maybe it was doing better under the surface than I thought.

National day cake by Ingrid.

Now that the old planting boxes are gone, and the flat section of the garden is presentable enough to host Ingrid’s graduation party, I’m back working on the planting towards the street. The steel edging has been waiting for me since November. Today I got it in place.

I’ve got a cubic metre of new soil waiting for me, to replace the grass sod I cut away.

Nysse was obsessed with trying to get in under the pallet that the bag of soil was delivered on. Some small creature must be hiding under it.

Gymnasium graduation season is upon us. Truck bed parties (studentflak) which involve lots of beer and screaming and squealing passed by the Active Solution office yesterday, and the Sortera office today.

There must be some school very close to us – we went out to eat our lunch on the quay, and there were clumps of students with their families everywhere. And traces of inebriated celebration.

I was afraid I’d have to carry my bicycle across this field of broken bottles in the evening, but by then, someone had cleared away all traces of the party.

Got the last pieces of the planting boxes removed. Found another layer of geotextile under one of them. All grown through with roots, difficult to detach, but the material has not degraded at all.