After preschool Adrian often needs a snack so he can make it all the way to dinner without a meltdown. One of his favourite snacks is gurksnittar: cucumber sandwiches made with flatbread that is buttered, folded around cucumber slices and then cut into smaller slices or triangles. Sometimes we do the same sandwiches with apple instead of cucumber. Adrian, being the food sceptic that he is, doesn’t put anything else on his sandwiches, ever.

We had an OK cherry harvest this year but zero apples. Well, maybe there were two or three apples on the tree but nothing worth picking or eating.

Right across the street from the apple tree, the neighbours have a plum tree. This year they had a fabulous harvest. And they were doing nothing with it! They ate some but the rest was just falling on the ground and rotting.

We could not stand by idly and let that happen! We picked some for a large plum cake, and then picked some more to make plum wine, and finally when my mum heard that there were plums to be had we picked half a bucket for her as well. (With the neighbours’ invitation of course.) Now we have lots of plum cake in the freezer and two demijohns of plum wine bubbling like crazy in the laundry room.

Plum wine is a new one for us, but Eric has made apple wine several times. I’m not a wine drinker; in fact I rarely touch any alcohol at all unless it’s in a cake. But our apple wine, especially the 2013 vintage, is awesome: rich, strong and sweet. I hope the plum wine turns out equally well.

I went to the theatre with Ingrid and my mum. We had coffee and croissants during the break. My mum was less amused than I was by Ingrid’s attempts to sneak eat sugar cubes.

We made corn fritters.

Beautiful maples mutilated in central Spånga.

We have some work to be done in the garden that requires a professional, with some professional machinery. I’ve been looking for contractors so that I can request bids from them. I searched at tradgardsanlaggarna.se, made a shortlist of about 8 contractors, and then looked at their web sites to confirm that they can do what we need.

Some companies have modern web sites. The tone ranges from corporate to personal, the design from boxy to modern, but they all look like they belong in the 21st century.

Other companies’ web sites inspire less confidence. One of the contractors had no web site at all and only a swipnet email address, which is sort of like a Swedish hotmail equivalent. One had a web site consisting of a single page which had been saved from Photoshop and contained their logo and an email address and nothing more.

I work with the web; I cannot help but be prejudiced against companies who in this day and age still have not understood its importance as a marketing channel. If the company’s web site is not professional, how professional are they going to be in other aspects? So there is a strong temptation to let the surface appearance affect my judgement of the company.

But I suspect that the web site is probably not at all a good predictor of a company’s ability to do a good job in the garden. I have no difficulty imagining a bunch of 50-year-old guys, in the business for 30+ years, who simply prioritise doing their job ahead of marketing the firm.

And in a way, maybe my logic should be the opposite. If a firm has a butt-ugly web site but they’re still in business after a decade or two, then obviously they’re doing something right.

We’ve been on a furniture buying splurge: some storage for the living room, to replace the messy-looking bookshelf; an armchair; doors for the cabinets in the office.

The cardboard boxes that the furniture was delivered in were quickly turned into play houses/caves, furnished with cushions. There have even been fights about who gets to be in which box.

I have cut down on browsing Facebook. I never did spend much time there but now days can pass without a single visit.

And poor Facebook immediately felt so desperately lonely. I get SOOO many emails from it now. Come back! Talk to me! Your friend posted a photo! Someone said something! And now they said something again! Please please please come back!

I am tempted to quit just to get rid of that annoying pleading.

About a year ago I bought a set of recycling bags: four colour-coded bags in some kind of heavy-duty plastic weave. We found a good place for them in the laundry room, easily accessible, just next to the kitchen, which is where most of our garbage is generated. Recycling is now almost no extra effort compared to just throwing it in the trash, so I recycle almost all packaging (cardboard, plastic, glass and metal) and paper.

Our part of town also has a food waste composting scheme. We have two bins outside the house, one for mixed trash and one for food waste.

As a result of the recycling and composting, we generate almost no ordinary trash. I can’t remember when I last took out the trash. A cleaning lady cleans our house every other Tuesday and, among other things, takes out the trash – and in the two weeks between cleanings, the trash can does not fill up enough for us to empty it.

I have a Coop MedMera membership card, which I use to pay for all my daily shopping at Coop Konsum, one of our two local supermarkets. I use my Visa card for everything else, and only rarely use cash.

MedMera means roughly “and more”, so it can also be used at other shops in the Coop group, for example at the Akademibokhandeln chain of book shops. But I use almost exclusively at Coop.

So much so, in fact, that my brain has apparently decided that the MedMera card is for Coop only, and refuses to process it at other locations. It has happened me on two occasions already that I have tried to pay with it at Akademibokhandeln and been totally and completely unable to recall the PIN code, which I use daily at Coop without ever having to even think about it. The card terminal looks different and that is apparently enough to throw my brain off.

And what’s worse, not being able to remember the PIN at Akademibokhandeln also erased it from the memory slot that I use at Coop. So: I use the PIN daily for years at Coop, then tried and failed (just once!) to remember the pin at Akademibokhandeln, and the next day I could not recall it at Coop either!

(Luckily muscle memory kicked in again the day after, so I can now use the card again.)