A beautiful misty morning. (View from the tram bridge towards Stora Essingen.)

The mornings are cold now, just barely above zero. I’m taking these chances to cycle to work because I feel very conscious of the fact that the end of the cycling season is near. Yeah, it’s technically possible to cycle all winter, but I don’t have the equipment for it and I don’t enjoy cycling in the dark.

Still traipsing through Stockholm for job interviews.

Even though I don’t have anything signed yet, today I gave notice to quit my job at tretton37. Three months’ notice period means I will leave by the end of the year.

I have lost all trust in tretton37 management and given up on the company. Which is sad, but it’s also such a huge relief to step away from the drama and be able to observe it from the sidelines without feeling that it really affects me. Not my problem any more.

So now I’m job-hunting. Having lunch with one consultancy and afternoon fika with another, trying to find one that I feel fits me.

At its best, tretton37 was such a wonderful place to work. Amazing colleagues, great culture. Now there’s nothing left of that. But I can’t help comparing all other companies to what it was like – and they all fall short in some way.

OK, so maybe it is still summer. Today was all blue skies and sunshine, and when we went out for a lunch outside on the quay at Liljeholmen, it felt like high summer again.

The vegetable stand at Spånga Torg is my source for fun fruit and vegetables. Right now the best thing is plums and mangoes. They have five or six kinds of plums, where ICA might at best have two. And some are clearly relatively local, and sourced from a small-scale grower: they are so tender when ripe that they can’t have been grown with long transport in mind.

Ingrid at her summer job.

Does it look like she’s working? No.

Does she feel like she’s working? Barely.

But she is employed and is getting paid and can put it on her resume.

The city of Stockholm offers summer jobs to young people living in the city. The summer is chopped up into three three-week periods, and Ingrid got a job for the last three weeks of her summer break. Her job is to (together with a team) host activities for children at Spånga Torg.

Unfortunately they barely get any children visiting their tent.

I don’t know who did the planning, but they can’t have had much local knowledge. There are no children just randomly hanging around Spånga Torg in the summer. Spånga is an affluent suburb of large-ish detached houses, not an inner-city area. Kids here are either at home with their parents, or more likely out of town.

The team leaders (who are actual adults) work all three periods, and according to them, the group was in other parts of Spånga-Tensta before, where they had a lot more visitors. Yeah, because those areas are densely populated areas of apartment blocks.

The “employees” are making their own fun. Braiding bracelets, painting posters to advertise the tent’s existence, etc. The highlights of Ingrid’s day are when she gets to do face painting on some kids.

We all hope that word will spread, and people will come back from their vacations, and they’ll get more visitors next week.

Back to everyday life, and work. Two weeks to go before I take a longer vacation. The week in Italy was by necessity as early as possible in the summer, and the timing of our Estonia trip was also determined by external factors, and the gap between them too long for me to take the whole time off.

There’s a bit of a heat wave going on; the weather here is as hot as what we had in Italy. We went out for lunch to the (temporary?) food-court-slash-park on the quay in Marievik.

Voting in the EU election. Election day is tomorrow, but I see no point in waiting another day just to queue more.

The participation rate in these tends to be lower than in the national ones. The media do their best to improve turnout. If it’s sounds like too much work to figure out who to vote for, they say, it’s not a bad idea to just choose the same party you’d vote for nationally.

I’m not going down that route. The national questions I prioritize are not the same as one the EU level. In this vote, it doesn’t matter to me what their opinion is on education, healthcare, crime, or most social questions. I only really care what they will do about climate change, because that’s the area where national decisions matter little, and continental or global action is needed to make a real difference.

The various online guides tell me my opinions match up most closely with the Environmental party, the Left party, and the Centre party. No matter how much we agree on the environment, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to vote for the Left party. They no longer describe themselves as communists, but their communist past still permeates their ideology, and I just cannot.

Lunch out in the sun on the quay at Liljeholmen.

Blogging about the hidden woods in the neighbourhood made me curious. I looked at a map and spotted another green area, less than ten minutes’ walk away, that I didn’t know anything about. It’s nestled among residential quarters just like ours, but there’s a slightly larger road between here and there, so I never end up there if I just go out for a walk.

It’s right across the street from a small park with a playground where I know for sure that I’ve been with the kids at some point, but even then I didn’t even notice the woods.

Now I went there to explore. It turned out to be a designated area for off-leash dog walking. There wasn’t a single dog there, at nine o’clock at night, nor any humans. But there were some paths and hills and rocks, as usual. The hills ended in a cliff, tall and steep enough to be fenced at the top, with a view out over old residential quarters towards the new student housing next to the railway line. I should go back there in proper daylight and with a proper camera some day.

The woods were mostly pine on the hilly bits and the cliff, but deciduous trees lower down, which was rather nice, because songbirds like them a lot better. Pine forests are much quieter than leafy ones.