The ceremonial smashing of the gingerbread house.

I’m cheating and using a picture I took yesterday, because there is little chance of getting a photo of Ingrid in daylight on a weekday.

She’s doing homework for their technology class – a technical drawing of a thing they constructed in class. The task was to build a structure to protect a raw egg that they then dropped from various heights. Now she’s doing the follow-up task of documenting their structure. The structure that Ingrid’s team built kept an egg intact when it was dropped from a window two floors up. (That’s third floor in the sensible parts of the world and second floor in Britain.)

Ingrid spends a lot of time drawing and handles ProCreate like a true pro, switching between layers faster than I can follow.

Ingrid cooks dinner at least twice a week, to earn extra money that she saves for the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea in 2023. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, open for scouts from ages 14 to 17. And an expensive one. Ingrid has been planning and looking forward to it and saving up money for it since last summer. We even have an Excel chart where we follow up her savings and compare the total to a target line. She was going to try and get a summer job as well, but covid-19 put an end to those plans.

The one thing Ingrid wished for her birthday and Christmas was a proper gaming computer. She has a laptop but it’s starting to show its age, and it’s just not enough for the games she plays these days.

She’s spent weeks on research, comparing different graphics cards and processors and other components. Now finally she’s made her choice and put in the order. The delivery arrived a few days ago. Ingrid made a brave attempt at putting it together on her own, but then had to ask for more expert help. Eric and Ingrid spent all of yesterday evening figuring it all out. After a good while they realized that some of cables that were already attached when the case arrived, had been attached incorrectly. That didn’t exactly help.

Finally around midnight I heard them exclaiming happily that all the fans were spinning and all the lights were lighting up and synchronized with each other. Yay!

Today we made chestnut creatures, as is our tradition. Adrian provided the chestnuts.

Intense concentration.

When we were poking around among the chestnuts in the bowl and commenting on the lack of choice, Adrian went off and came back with his school backpack, which contained at least another kilogram of chestnuts. Small, large, flattish or round – now we have lots of all sorts. They filled not just another bowl, but an entire large dish.

I was glad when Ingrid joined us. She’s been less interested in family activities recently. Teenagers, you know.

The naturalistic ones: camel, rabbit, hedgehog, pigeon, caterpillar.

The more fantastical ones: a sheep that can walk on water; a man with a triple jetpack.

And two space aliens.

That rain I avoided? Ingrid, poor girl, had a scout hike this weekend and got all of it dumped on her. She said it had rained non-stop from eight o’clock on Friday night, to twelve noon on Saturday. Ingrid is a third-year “adventurer” (as her age group is called) and she and her friends had managed it reasonably well, but the first-yearers had been quite dejected. Fortunately they got sunshine on Sunday, so the hike ended on a better note.

Now our deck is full of drying camping gear, because just about everything she used was soaked.

Ingrid says she herself was dry and warm and got a reasonable amount of sleep. But she was completely exhausted after the hike, to the point of sickness. Her head aches. Her entire body aches. She’s flushed and hot and cold at the same time. I can see from just looking at her that she is not well. Had I not known about the hike, I would have been certain that she’s coming down with something.

Ingrid has gotten her sleep patterns quite turned around during the summer. She regularly stays up until two in the morning (or something like that, I don’t really know, that’s well past my bedtime!) and then sleeps until two in the afternoon. Sometimes I go to check on her in the afternoon just to make sure she’s still alive and well, because I cannot imagine how it can be possible to sleep that late. Apparently it is quite possible.

A snapshot of Ingrid’s favourite and most-used things right now.

• Book: Classroom of the Elite, Loneliest girl in the universe
• Music: Not much, she doesn’t listen much to music.
• Unexpected music choice: Laurie Anderson’s “Only an expert”
• Movie: A Silent Voice
• TV series: Sherlock, and “A Study in Pink” is her favourite episode.
• Anime series: My Hero Academia, Kakegurui, The Promised Neverland. I haven’t seen any of these. I asked her if we could watch some together, but “it wouldn’t be the same thing” as watching them on her own.
• Movie character: Himiko Toga from My Hero Academia, Runa Yomozoki from Kakegurui. I have no idea who these are so this is mostly a record for Ingrid herself in the future.
• Game: Animal Crossing.
• Animal crossing villager: Ketchup (a duck who looks like a tomato) and Tangy (a cat who looks like an orange). I actually know who these are!
• Game: Cluedo
• Object: Nintendo Switch
• App: Procreate (a drawing app on iOS)
• Social media: Discord for talking to her friends while gaming, Snapchat for chatting to classmates
• Food to cook: burritos with a black bean filling
• Food to eat: sushi
• Drink: virgin mojitos; Mountain Dew. Favourite Festis flavour: pineapple guanabana
• Fruit: watermelon
• Ice cream: Triumfglass watermelon
• Restaurant: Ri Cora
• Activity/hobby: scouting, drawing, anime, gaming
• Subject at school: none in particular
• Clothes: stretchy tight jeans/leggings, sweatpants, hoodies
• Colour: dark turquoise
• Animal: beaver
• Season: autumn or spring
• Future job: “this is difficult, I don’t know!”
• Superpower: to create or materialize any object
• Place in the house: Her desk where she does everything. The sofa down here where she hangs out. The kitchen where she cooks. The sofa where we watch movies.
• Looking forward to this summer: scout camp (which is happening despite covid-19, but with adjustments)
• Looking forward to in 8th grade: not being the youngest ones at the school
• Word: exalterad
• Shoe size: 38
• Clothes size: Probably XS to S in tops; maybe 160 in trousers. She has outgrown most of her tops and trousers and urgently needs to buy new ones, but can’t find the energy to actually do it, so her actual size is unknown right now.

We went out geocaching/walking/picnicking. I tried to think of someplace new, and came up with Erstavik. I passed through there on my bike some years ago and walked there once on my own and really liked what I saw.


We started off with a geocache just a few hundred metres from the parking lot, and then headed towards the next nearest one, which sounded intriguing. (Floating islands!) Adrian took care of most of the navigation, with some expert help from Ingrid.

The cache description said lake Dammsjön has three floating islands. We only spotted one, and another clump of earth that could maybe have been one. It looked like a perfectly ordinary small island, with some shrubs and a few pines, and didn’t seem to be floating anywhere.

After getting the second cache, we had our picnic on a small rocky peninsula extending into the lake. (Cold falafel in flatbread, with a chutney and sour cream sauce.) It was a lovely spot and I’m glad nobody else had gotten there before us! There’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it feel like you’re really on your own.

There were flat shelves of rock leading from the peninsula into the water that really invited to bathing. The lake water felt quite warm, so we took a quick dip.

I decided to swim to that island to see whether it really floated. It did indeed! The edge of it had no support, just water below it, and it wobbled up and down when I pushed it. I didn’t try to get onto the island – it seemed like it would be tricky – but I’m curious what it would feel like to walk on it.

Afterwards I read that the islands float around so much that they sometimes reattach themselves to the shore and then depending on the weather maybe float free again. So perhaps that’s what the other islands have done this year as well. Or maybe they just floated into some corner of the lake where we couldn’t see them.


There were masses and masses of blueberries everywhere. The first ones we looked at weren’t quite ripe yet, but when we got to sunnier spots, it turned out that most of them were just ripe enough. They’ll probably be sweeter in a week or so, but we’re here now.

As we were heading back towards the car, we saw signs next to the path about a café at the beach of Erstavik. Ice cream sounded good, so we turned that way instead. After much walking, we found the café to be closed. But the beach wasn’t, so Ingrid and Adrian had another swim. Especially Adrian didn’t like the lake – it had steep, rocky sides, and he prefers smooth beaches where he can reach the bottom.

Some years there are lots of killer slugs in the garden. 2014 was the first year I noticed them in large amounts. 2015 was also a slug year. In the summers since then, we haven’t had very many.

This year is apparently a slug year again. The bounty is on, and Ingrid is hunting them.

We’ve given up on trying to collect and freeze them. Too much hassle – they tried to crawl out of the freezer bag all the time. Now we simply cut them in half and throw them somewhere where we won’t step on them. I have a special pair of slug scissors in my garden basket.

We also saw unusually many leopard slugs today. I’ve never seen more than two or three on the same day. Today I think we saw almost ten. Maybe they’re here to eat the Spanish slugs!