Scouternas natt, “Scouts’ night”, is a district-wide weekend event for older scouts (such as Adrian). Hiking, walking, some sort of competition thing.

Each participating scout group had to rustle up volunteers to make the thing happened – especially the competition elements required a lot of staff. I volunteered to help out with some evening/night activities. (Almost got roped into helping with night orienteering which would have ended at 2 o’clock at night, but managed do side-step that and only work until 23.)

Our activity (a memory challenge) could easily have been done with half the number of volunteers we had. There was plenty of standing around and waiting between the arrival of each competing scout group.

Even though I was there all evening, I never saw Adrian’s group pass through, and he never saw me, either. Then again, it was pitch black by the end of it, and if you weren’t within the same pool of lamplight, there was no chance of seeing who is who.

The local Facebook group had a post offering plums. Almost discreetly begging people to come and pick more. So I went and picked some. The plums were small, but juicy and flavourful.

When I saw the tree in question, I understood the near-begging. The tree was overloaded with plums – and of course anything that doesn’t get picked ends up falling on the lawn and then rotting there. Cherries, like we have in our garden, are small and can almost disappear into the ground, whereas squished overripe plums make the whole lawn rather slimy.

Stuff is broken at work. Stuff that impacts our work immensely but is entirely outside of my circle of control; there is nothing I can do to fix it. I can only watch the alerts go off constantly and the graphs all point in the wrong direction. And I can turn things off and back on again at regular intervals to minimise the damage. I’m like a data administrator from the previous century, pressing buttons to refresh my numbers and then manually twiddling knobs in response.

It’s simultaneously stressful and boring. There’s no way I can focus on any of my actual work while this is going on, but I can absolutely make pancakes in between clicking stuff, so that’s what I’m doing to add some cheer to my day.

A cat path has appeared between our deck and the gap under the wire fence, where it’s easiest to cross from our yard to the neighbours’.

Fifteen years on I am still on the lookout for green bowls from the M-L Hellgren collection by Höganäs, and sometimes I get a hit. The medium bowls are still the hardest to find.

We may have broken one or two, but also we just want/need more of these. The bowls are the perfect size for a dinner portion for me or Ingrid, and for serving, and for yoghurt and granola, and just very useful in general. We use the small plates even more, but those are easy to get hold of – I think we might have twice the original number by now.

I didn’t think that glazed stoneware got worn with use, but clearly it does. The bowl I just got today from Tradera looks luxuriously glossy compared to our well-used one. Were all of them as shiny at one point? I don’t remember.

Conference day with Active Solution on Gistholmen.

Theme of the day: workshop techniques. So we workshopped about workshopping.

In the afternoon we took a ferry back to the city. Much noisier than sailing, but also quite a lot faster.

Two-day company conference with Active Solution en route to and on Gistholmen. The company is really spoiling us.

We spent half of today sailing to Gistholmen.

Met up at the harbour at Strandvägen and got on the four boats that would be ours for the day.

None of the people on our boat were particularly familiar with sailing, but luckily the boats came with skippers who actually knew what they were doing. We got put to work pretty soon, though, pulling on ropes and sometimes not pulling on ropes and manning the wheel.

Sailing boats are high-tech equipment these days, with all sorts of sensors and meters. Speed, depth, the angle at which the wind hits the sails…

We left the city behind.

When we got into roomier waters, we raced the other three boats. Really the skipper did all the racing and we just did our best to follow his instructions as quickly as we could, without misunderstanding him. Which we didn’t always succeed at.

It wasn’t very windy at all, but when we caught as much wind as we could, the boat leaned quite impressively. For a non-sailor like me, at least.

I don’t know what looks weirder: the below-deck room at the angle that it actually was, or seeing everything hanging crooked because I’ve straightened out the room.

We passed some narrower bits around Vaxholm, had lunch on board, then raced the others again.

Arrived at Gistholmen and did a bit of actual conferencing.

The island is a small one. A cabin village with 21 small cabins, one larger central building with a reception, a kitchen and a great hall, and that’s about it.

I was all peopled out after the day and took a walk around the island in the early evening. Circled about 80% of the perimeter of the island.

Somehow it has become tradition for us to go for fika at Spånga Konditori on the weekends the kids are with me.

Their fancy pastries are delicious, beautiful, interesting, and come in new flavours every week.

The red cardigan is done and I am starting to think of the next knitting project. (I’ve got to remember to take a proper picture of it when worn – it looks better on a body than on a table.)

Money is rather tighter this year than it has been in the past, and I’m looking for more budget-friendly yarns. There are tons and tons (almost literal tons, I think) of yarn on Tradera. I’ve been keeping an eye on the stuff that turns up there. A lot of it is nice, but not right for me; finding something that I know I will use requires patience.

This lot was interesting enough for me to bid immediately. Marks & Kattens Recycled is 100% recycled wool, and with a slightly hand-dyed feel to it – semi-solid colours rather than that perfectly even colour that is common in yarn from large-scale production. And with this purchase I get a palette of colours that I like, but might not have chosen on my own. I’ve been thinking that I want to knit more colourful designs going forward; this is a nice nudge in that direction. Plus it’s an established Swedish brand that I can buy more from. That’s a concern that has held me back from bidding on some of the yarns at Tradera: if the yarn isn’t quite enough for whatever I end up knitting, and the brand is an odd one, it might be hard to get more.

Our usual room at the community centre was locked for some reason, and no staff were around at this time of the day to let us in. We made do with a smaller room, which didn’t feel as cramped as it could have, since we were fewer than usual.

We’ve got everybody’s works in progress to fit on the table. Boxes or bags with threads and yarns and notions. Snacks, teas, water bottles. Phones and glasses. Embroidery-related books that someone has bought to show to the others.

Some of us make small projects with small stitches. My recent projects have been on the larger side, and I do like to spread my stuff out so that I can work comfortably.