A rather large, seven-legged spider.

The office plants – two somewhat scraggly ones – have somehow survived the summer. I thought I was the only one watering them, but they’d be dead if that was the case, with me having been away for five weeks. Interesting.

There’s no end to the cherry fall. The ground under the cherry trees is unwalkable. There isn’t enough room to set down your foot anywhere without stepping on a whole bunch of them. You definitely don’t want to go there barefoot, and even with shoes, it’s kind of unpleasantly squishy and sticky. I want/need to pick them at least at the back of the house but I just don’t have the time.

First day of high school (gymnasium) for Adrian. I think I might be more excited about it than he is.

I don’t miss walking Adrian (or Ingrid) to school every day. But I do kind of miss at least going there for the first day of the new year. Well, at least there’s a meeting coming up for all the parents in a few weeks’ time.

I am growing somewhat tired of knitting socks during meetings and dead time at the office. Now I’m trying origami as an alternative.

I bought a thick pad of origami paper in Estonia, because it caught my eye and looked pretty. It came with instructions for a small handful of models. The instructions were mostly crap (apart from the very classical models, like the crane and the butterfly) and I only figured out the correct final fold for the box mostly by accident. When I did, I made three, to hopefully cement it in my memory.

Pro: something new for the fingers to do.
Con: a little bit noisy. Although I’m probably the only one to notice the noise.
Pro: the result is pretty.
Con: the result takes up space and is not the least bit useful.

Sörmlandsleden stage 5, Paradiset to Handen.

We passed an area that had burned some years ago. The smaller vegetation bears no signs of the fire, but the bottoms of the tree trunks are black.

It’s a gray and windy day today. My friend is an avid bather; I considered joining him, but only very briefly, and instead huddled in a depression among the rocks.

The only significant wildlife we saw or heard today was this clean-eaten foot of a dead boar.

At Handen. The hike ends here, and so does my vacation. I have no wish to go home, or to go to the office tomorrow.

Here’s our borrowed tent. Luxuriously large, as you can see, but it weighs more than 3 times my own small one.

Today we left the tent where it was, together with most of our stuff, and went off for an amble along the nearby hiking paths.

I’m usually not a leisurely hiker. I walk, I stop to eat and to take photos. Once that is done, just sitting around is not much fun, so I just keep going. Same in the evenings: instead of spending hours and hours at a campsite, I might as well walk some more.

Today, with good company, I walked much less and I lazed around a lot more. Somehow, weirdly, lying on a carpet of moss and just staring at the clouds and listening to the rooks call to each other felt nicer when there was someone next to me, even if we weren’t actually talking to each other.

There’s really only one sight to see around here, and that’s Tornberget, the highest point in the Stockholm region, at all of 111 metres. (I believed it to be the highest point in Sörmland, but that turned out to be wrong. The highest point in Sörmland is all of 132 metres.)

I’ve been here before, once or twice, but apparently never taken a photo of the tower that’s here.

The views are wide but unexciting. A flat carpet of pine forest.

The railing around the top of the tower has a panoramic image of buildings and neighbourhoods that you can kind of sort of see from here. It was rather difficult to figure out the angles, though – exactly where am I suppose to be standing to look at each marked spot on the image?

Walking back.

There’s our tent in the distance, around the corner of lake Trekanten. We’ve got a nice bathing rock right next to it.

After dinner, a group of ducks came by our camping spot. Five of them, all looking a bit smaller to my eyes than mallards usually do, so maybe they were a sibling group, all born this year? They came looking for food, as intrusive as a bunch of city pigeons. Almost but not quite close enough for me to have to shoo them away.

I still have a couple of days of vacation left, and I’m utilizing them to the max with a three-day hike of Sörmlandsleden. Stages 6 and 5, in that order because of transportation limitations (a recurring theme with the trail). I’ve done them once before, in the winter. The section end is in Paradiset nature reserve, which I’ve visited several times.

For the first time ever I’m on this trail with a friend. We’re taking it slow. Last time I did both stages in one day, but that was with only a light day pack. This time we’re carrying a pretty heavy two-person tent (because that’s the only one we have access to), and my friend is not a very experienced hiker.

It’s also quite hot, somewhere around 25°C. Most of my hikes are in spring or autumn, this kind of high summer hike is not the norm. There is very little birdsong compared to, say, May, and a lot more butterflies.

After weeks and weeks of drought, everything is dry as a bone. The ground is dust. The mosses are crisp and crumbly instead of soft. The only spring on stage 6 was completely dried out – the bottom wasn’t even muddy. I was drinking a lot of water due to the heat and would have worried about refilling, if I didn’t know that the stage ends at a sort of vaguely-purposed cottage and a parking lot, where there’s sure to be water.

We took a midday dip in a lake. It wasn’t a great lake for bathing at all – the bottom was very muddy, and the lake itself quite shallow, and full of weeds. I’ve always thought that the lakes in Sörmland look deep, with their rocky shores. Now I’m wondering just how deceptive that impression is. To be fair, the water lily leaves were a pretty obvious clue in this case.

Weedy and muddy the lake may have been, but it did a great job of cooling us down.

(At the end of the day, the water pump at the entrance to Paradiset nature reserve was present and functional, which was quite a relief.)

Ingrid has finished her basic military training and basic leadership training, and done all her tests. She now has the rank of Corporal and can wear the stylish beret.

Nysse is a hunter. Sometimes more effective, sometimes less.

This evening he brought home a live mouse again. And, of course, kept playing with it until he lost it – again. This time it was in the open-plan part of the house so there were endless places for the mouse to hide. I lost track of both the mouse and the cat a few times, as I was closing doors where possible, opening the French doors as wide as possible, and removing things it could hide in/behind/under.

I never saw him catch it, and I never saw it leave the house. However, half an hour later, Nysse came back in and threw up what looked like most of a mouse. On my living room carpet. Well, I guess at least I can be reasonably sure that I don’t have a mouse in the house. (Assuming it was the same one.)