The kids like Lego and we now have constant shortages of certain kinds of pieces (especially flat plates of all sizes, for use as airplane wings, roofs, etc) so I’ve been shopping for Lego pieces at Tradera, a Swedish auction site. An interesting experience.

6531 hits in the Toys category.

You can buy any kind of Lego you can imagine. Figures of all sorts and kits of all kinds. Selections like propellers, or windows, or mixed wheels from the 80s. Very specific listings like “10 blue transparent round 1×1 pieces”, or “10 1×3 dark gray plates”, and at the other extreme, mixed pieces sold by the kilo. How about 8.3 kg of mixed Lego?

A wooden cooking fork

I am not a luddite. I like my modern technology. I like computers and digital cameras, with their silicon and long-life rechargeable batteries and scratch-resistant screens.

But in more physical everyday activities I notice that old-school natural materials are still far superior to anything that two hundred years of industrialisation and modern chemistry and technological progress can produce.

Fabric shopping bags are better than plastic bags. Quite apart from any environmental concerns, they are just much more comfortable. The handles are soft and don’t cut into my fingers. They are strong. They have and hold a shape so they are easier to pack.

For cooking, nothing compares to a wooden spoon, and wooden cooking forks are awesome too. Wood is sturdier and more heat tolerant than plastic, softer and warmer than metal. For stirring cake batter, mashed potatoes or a bean casserole – anything that requires serious stirring – only a wooden spoon will do.

Wicker baskets are irreplaceable. My small basket for gardening tools is soft and warm and pleasant to hold. A bit of moisture and soil will not make it rust; years of exposure to sunlight will not weaken it. Dust and crumbs of earth fall through the cracks at the bottom.

Wooden chairs. Straw hats. Terracotta flower pots.

Yesterday evening one of the killer slugs somehow found its way into our house. How, is a mystery. I doubt it came all the way up the stairs and in through the door. I also cannot see it grabbing hold of a shoe or a bag and hitching a ride, and then letting go just in time.

What this gave me was a nice opportunity to observe the slug in motion. It moved faster than I expected – not at a snail’s pace. Now I wish I had measured it but it was several millimetres per second at least. Fast enough to cause blurry photos in low-light conditions.

I threw it out and sincerely hope that they haven’t decided to invade the house as a response to my extermination war. I imagine marching ranks of slugs all converging on the house…

Remember those stones that I was stacking back in May? And that I didn’t break any fingers?

Well, I didn’t break any fingers but I did damage a fingernail. It wasn’t even noticeable at the time but as it grew out, it had a big crack across. And even that was not a problem – it slowly grew out and behind the crack the nail was healthy.

But then the edges of the crack got more and more worn, until one day that ragged barely-attached bit of nail accidentally got torn off.

It turns out that torn-off fingernails don’t always heal very well on their own. Two weeks on, it was still not healed. I ended up having to go to the local clinic today so they could cut/scrape off a bit that was growing all wrong. (I learned a new word in the process; I now know what svallkött is.) Note to self: take better care of damaged fingernails in the future.

In addition to the new word I also got a very impressive bandage from the nurse, really out of proportion with the actual damage (but in proportion to the expected amount of bleeding according to the nurse). A great conversation starter at work, and with the kids at home.

And thirdly I gained a new appreciation for the importance of the middle finger. It turns out to be useful for much more than sticking up in the air. Adjusting my typing for the lack of middle finger was surprisingly easy. On the other hand, it was quite tricky to peel an onion or a clove of garlic, or do any other task that requires precision with a small knife. I don’t usually think of using my middle finger to hold the knife, but it makes a big difference to stability. Likewise, holding a pen or a toothbrush is much, much easier if all the fingers are present and work properly.

On our way from Tallinn to Tartu the day before yesterday, the alternator belt in our car broke. I am completely uninterested and thus clueless about automotive technology, so I could not diagnose the problem and just hoped that it was a battery problem (which we’ve had before) and that the car would keep running for the 30 km we had left to our accommodation in Tartu.

It almost did. When we were almost there, as I was pulling away in first gear after stopping at a crossroads, the engine stalled and wouldn’t start again. I waved our jumper cables at passing cars; the first one passed by but the second one stopped and the friendly driver got us going again.

At this point it was pretty obvious that the car was really teetering on the edge. I had lost all the niceties that we take for granted in modern cars, including power steering and speedometer functionality. Luckily there were no more traffic lights and no more driving at low speed, and the car got us all the way “home” and didn’t die until I was halfway through parking it.

It actually felt kind of cool to drive this way, old school, but parking without power steering was not easy. Air conditioning is a pretty nice thing, too. The whole incident gave me a new appreciation for all the mod cons we have in our car. At 16 years it is far from new so I wonder what it might be like to drive a really modern car.

I wish I could say that this also made me realize the value of some basic knowledge of troubleshooting engine problems. It didn’t. It did make me realize the value of (1) having jumper cables in the car, and (2) friendly strangers and well-connected acquaintances.

When we arrived the landlady came out to meet us, and some guy who was with her immediately volunteered to look under the hood. He immediately diagnosed the problem and then proceeded to call “a guy I know” who came by with a trailer and took the car away. We got it back the next day with a new alternator belt and a freshly charged battery. And that was that, problem solved.

Ingrid’s top wish for this summer was to go camping. She had already slept in a tent that we put up in the garden and obviously really liked something about that experience, so now we did it for real.

Well… sort of. Since it’s Adrian’s first time and Ingrid’s second (and the first was so long ago that she doesn’t even remember it), we went for a very civilised camping experience rather than anything resembling real wilderness. We camped at a nature park in Ängsjö, just outside Stockholm. One of its major benefits is that there’s stuff for the kids to do: the nature park has a beach, a wooden fort and an adventure trail, etc.

It actually turned out even more civilised than I’d planned for, almost park-like in places. We’d been there with Ingrid’s scout group once, last autumn, but now in summer there was a nice café, the grass had been mown, etc. It wasn’t exactly what I normally picture when I think of camping, but nobody complained about the opportunity to eat cake at the café.

Ingrid got her wish: we did sleep in a tent. We also cooked dinner in foil packets over coals in a fire pit, and breakfast on an alcohol stove, and washed up in the lake. During the day went swimming in the lake several times, and rented a boat.

I hadn’t been out in a rowboat for many years. I was surprised at what an incredibly efficient means of transport this is: Ingrid rowed us all for a good bit without any major effort. It really made me understand how important shipping and good waterways must have been in earlier times.

I realised yet again that my body really isn’t made for sleeping on hard ground: I was so stiff and sore in the morning. Cramming four people in a tent made for three adults didn’t help. I like having lots of space when I sleep.

Ingrid, diving in

Adrian enjoyed the wet sand

Dinner

I do. I stare at women’s legs. You see, I’ve become really curious about leg shaving.

I refuse to shave my legs. I hate it in so many ways that I don’t even want to count them all. I am lucky to be married to a man who isn’t bothered by leg hair, and therefore I let it grow. I haven’t shaved my legs since university, I believe.

Society in general doesn’t share my views, I know, so I keep my deviance to myself. (Although now that I think about it, isn’t it really bizarre that something so natural can be so provocative…) I cover up at work and wear trousers or tights or leggings. But now I’m on vacation and it’s hot, and I care very little about the opinion of strangers, so I walk around unashamedly baring my hairy legs.

Meanwhile, I surreptitiously look at other women’s summer legs. Trains, train stations and playgrounds in particular are full of more or less immobile easily observable legs.

And I am truly surprised to see that every single pair of legs is shaved. I have not seen a single hairy shin. Young legs and old legs; skinny, flabby, athletic and plump legs; legs in trendy shoes, strappy sandals or worn-out sneakers. All of them shaved. Possibly I’ve missed some with invisible downy hair but those wouldn’t really count anyway.

Well, all except Lady Dahmer’s legs, I guess, but I haven’t seen those first hand.

All these years I’ve believed that leg shaving fell somewhere around “mascara” and “nice hairdo” on the primping scale: things most women spend time on because it makes them look prettier, but really optional. That seems to have been a misapprehension. Leg shaving appears to be viewed more like showering or brushing your hair: basic hygienic procedures that you just have to do if they want to fit into normal society.

So leg hair is somehow unhygienic. But only on women; men’s hair is not. I guess men just have a different kind of hair: teflon-coated and self-cleaning.

Yesterday Ingrid found another eggshell, on our way home from school. (Here’s the previous one.) This one was a neat half-egg so it had definitely hatched.

There are no good resources for identifying birds’ eggs on the internet that I could find, but some guesswork based on egg size and local bird populations, backed up by Google image search, leads me to conclude that it’s the work of either a blackbird or a fieldfare.

Even though I know that there are millions of blackbirds in Sweden, and probably thousands in Spånga alone, it is still exciting to know that another little creature has been born. The miracle of life, happening every day.

It’s always Ingrid who finds this kind of things. She has her attention on the ground and notices small treasures. I’m too far from the ground when I’m cycling to even see them – and too busy worrying that Adrian will cycle into the street or into Ingrid etc etc.

Making the most of the season’s last remaining crumbs of snow, we went sledding today at a ski slope nearby, together with Ingrid’s classmates. Some actual sledding took place but also just general hanging around, eating grilled hot dogs, and a trek up and down the slope. It felt quite weird to be sledding dressed in rubber boots and rain pants, but those were absolutely necessary because the snow was rather wet.

It is still almost spring here, but not quite, and every day is gray.

But on the plus side, it is almost spring.