Adrian finished building the massive Lego set he got as a birthday present. Sanctum Sanctorum is from the Marvel cinematic universe and is the location many an important scene and battle.

This was Adrian’s first 18+ build. It had a more intricate construction than the models he’s built in the past, and was less stable and robust than the models for younger builders. If you’re not careful, you can knock things off.

It’s also modular – you can lift off the top floor, and the second floor, and parts of the interior, to access other parts. There are chunks that can be moved from one floor to another, or from the inside to the outside and vice versa (notably a large tentacle monster, which I see I didn’t capture on any of the photos.)

Another aspect that Adrian really liked was the large number of attachment points that allows for the staging of elaborate fight scenes.

I volunteered to help at the Spånga scout group’s annual “autumn fixer day” where parents and other engaged folks help out with various maintenance tasks. This time around the task list included everything from deep cleaning the freezer and disassembling old desks so that they can be transported to the recycling centre, to removing thistles from the yard and mending tents.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that I signed up for mending tents. However the notes about tents needing attention were hard to interpret, and much time and attention went to figuring out what the problem even was. That task required a fair amount of expertise and experience with the tents themselves, so the mending crew spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting. Whenever an actual rip was found, there was almost a queue of us waiting.

Looking back at my blog post about the scouts’ mending day two years ago, the situation was the same. Maybe someone could learn something from this experience. Who knows.

All in all I felt that I contributed much less than I had hoped. When I came home, dissatisfied with my morning, I picked up my own pile of mending and fixed up six pairs of tights. And felt much better about the day afterwards.

All this mending reminded Adrian that he had a list of homework tasks from his home economics class, one of which was to mend a small hole or sew on a button. My backlog of mending was now empty – except for a shirt waiting for a sleeve button to be re-sewn! He came just in time; had he mentioned the homework an hour later, I wouldn’t have had anything for him. I guess we could always cut off a button and reattach it, but it would have felt like a waste.

Adrian, being of the age of frequently outgrowing things, has outgrown his rain jacket. He’s also outgrown all of Ingrid’s past rain jackets that I had hoped he could inherit. So I now have 4 kids’ rain jackets in sizes 140 to 158 in various colours, but not a single one that Adrian can use. (Honestly the one that he says he last used, in size 140, is ridiculously small for him – it’s a wonder he hasn’t complained earlier.) He has a scout hike coming up in a week, and it’s very unlikely we’ll get an entire weekend in September/October with no rain, so we’re emergency shopping for a new rain jacket.

This season’s colour is clearly dark yellow. All the three brands that had rain jackets for active use in “junior” sizes had all chosen to make theirs dark yellow or orange. Black and gray were also available, as usual, but Adrian doesn’t even look at those. (Helly Hansen also had some eye-wateringly garish neon colour combinations, which were too loud even for Adrian’s tastes.) So I guess we’ll take a yellow one, then.

Adrian turned 12 yesterday. He wanted all of us to be there for his celebration, so he waited with the presents and the cake until I got home from Ljubljana.

That large box is a giant Lego set. The Sanctum Sanctorum, for the record. For ages 18+ according to the box; not because of any adult content but because of lots and lots of small fiddly bits.

To pad the gift-giving a bit, he also got the next book in the series he’s reading (Percy Jackson) and some colourful Happy Socks. But it was really the Lego set that captured all his attention.

The cake flavours are chocolate and raspberry this year again – Adrian’s favourites.

Adrian & Eric in front of Adrian’s school.

Ingrid, caught in a random moment at her new school.

There were parent/teacher meetings at both schools yesterday and today. Adrian wants to work on his writing skills, especially when it comes to writing longer texts – being more descriptive and structuring his texts better. (He has a bit of a habit, both in writing and in speech, of just jumping right into the middle of things and forgetting to set the scene.) Ingrid, being in a completely new school, isn’t setting any goals at this time, but needs to decide whether to skip the maths course that she’s scheduled to take because she’s done it all in secondary school already and move on to the next one – which would mean not being with the rest of her class during maths.

Adrian and I went out walking. I wanted someplace new, so we picked a walk from a book I recently bought, and walked around lake Albysjön, about 10 km. There are two lakes by this name, both just south of Stockholm but in different counties. This was the one in Tyresö.

Following the guidance of a route description in a book feels very different from simply following signposts or markings on trees. It takes more attention from the walking itself – having to keep the book at hand, trying to figure out where we are in relation to the landmarks described, how far we’ve gotten, have we missed the turn they described… I liked seeing a new place, but I do like following a single well-marked trail better.

The walk itself was nice. The first kilometre or so went along asphalt roads among houses, which we (especially Adrian) didn’t particularly enjoy, but thereafter it was mostly forest paths and some narrow gravel trails through a lot of greenery.

We found a nice clifftop spot for our lunch, with wide views over Albysjön. Halfway through our meal we got a tiny bit of rain – just enough to make Adrian seek shelter under a pine tree, and to get everything slightly wet, but luckily no more than that.

With just the two of us, we could take breaks whenever we wanted for whatever reason – such as finding a small jetty in the middle of a profusion of water lily leaves, which Adrian could throw pine cones at.

At the rapids at Nyfors, we saw a small, dark, furry animal run away across the stones. I can’t keep all the weasel-otter-marten-mink-polecat species straight: there are so many and they’re all so similar, small and slim and dark and furry. This one was on the larger side, and I couldn’t see any light-coloured markings at all, so afterwards, with the help of the internet, I tentatively identified it as maybe a mink.

At the end of our circular walk there was a little café where we had a lovely blueberry pie.

We saw the Hallwyl House Museum’s exhibition of Lego houses. It was smallish, and very much a mixed bag. The houses ranged from a construction of (literally) 15 Duplo blocks plus a propeller, done by a 5-year-old in 5 minutes, to intricate artistic creations and meticulously crafted large-scale community builds.

We were somewhat disappointed in how the constructions were presented. Almost all were surprisingly badly lit – either not lit at all, or only lit by a large light from above. Without Eric’s little pocket LED torch we would have missed out on a lot of detail, especially on the inside of the buildings. The one exception was a model of a museum, built by someone who (unsurprisingly) worked a day job as a museum photographer.

It was interesting to see the different scales used by different builds. There’s the minifigure scale, whereby a standard Lego minifigure is the size of a human. But there were also builds using much smaller scales (which I now know are called microscale), and one of the churches was scaled specifically to 1:100.

I’m always struck by the creative uses that Lego model constructors find for bricks, especially for architectural details. Scorpions become gargoyles; the butt of a Lego poodle looks like a marble bust; croissants get to play the role of baroque curlicues; fences become lattices for stained glass windows.

Adrian managed to scrape up half his shin in a kickbike accident and got an impressive bandage. He could feel the edges of the adhesive tape more than the (superficial) wound itself, so now he limps.

We only had half a day at our disposal before it’s time for queueing at the airport, and a forecast of rainy weather, and a forecast of traffic jams on the A1. With all of that constraining our options, we went to the Ljubljana Technical Museum, which is in fact not very near Ljubljana at all.

It turned out to be a wonderfully eclectic agglomeration of exhibits. Housed in an old convent, the site itself was quirky and fun to explore.

Inside and outside, the museum’s collections ranged from old pieces of machinery with no labelling whatsoever, through collection of items with minimal labelling in Slovenian only, to very detailed and pedagogical exhibitions about the history of a particular branch of technology.

Our time here was limited so we didn’t have time for more than some cursory browsing and the occasional deep dive into a random area. We enjoyed an exhibition about the history of cars and other means of motorized personal transportation. I naturally spent a fair bit of time in the exhibition about the textile industry. There was also a surprisingly interesting and well-presented one about the history of forestry, where we learned about different methods for “first mile” timber transportation, including rafting, sledding, wooden timber chutes, and simply shoving the timber down the side of the mountain.