Returning from my daily walk, pleased to be welcomed by all this greenery. Almost every day I’m reminded of how much I love having a garden – even in a year I haven’t had any energy to plant anything new, the investments of time and effort from past years are paying off.

I’ve reached middle age, or something. Some time earlier this year, there was a step change in my caloric needs. All of a sudden I couldn’t finish what used to be normal portions. In the end I had to switch to a smaller serving bowl, because I kept serving myself more food than I could eat.

That’s my bowl of salad on the left, and Adrian’s on the right. It’s Friday movie night, so dinner is served on the chest that does double duty as a sofa table in front of the TV.

I’ve also stopped eating breakfast on weekdays, because I realized I no longer need all that food. I still haven’t quite learned to manage restaurant meals yet, and keep ordering as if nothing had changed. I made the mistake of ordering an entire pizza in Slovenia and had to send half of it back.

My work laptop is starting to show its age. I got it after the house was burgled, in early 2018, so it’s almost 5 years old. The battery is becoming unreliable, and after the last round of Windows updates, some parts of the dock stopped working. Which is bizarre, to my mind – the dock is a box which translates signals from many cables into one, and its functionality should have nothing whatsoever to do with the OS version of the computer listening to its signals, but it is what it is.

I put in a request for a new computer, and today I picked up my replacement laptop at the 13|37 office. And then realized I’d have to bring it home somehow. It came in an ordinary cardboard shipping box, and at first I thought I’d just tuck the box under my arm. Then I realized that I’d surely be tempted to put it down at some point during all the standing and waiting of my commute, and last time I did that with an extra piece of luggage that I don’t usually have to keep track of, I forgot it on the train… It would be quite unfortunate to lose my computer on the first day. So I repacked my backpack until I could fit both my usual equipment and the new stuff inside. Had to leave some other things in the office, but I managed to fit all the essentials.

Walking around with it in public was uncomfortable for body and mind, given that its contents weighed a tonne and were worth about 40,000 SEK or thereabouts. I imagined walking around with 40,000 SEK of cash on me, and kept anxiously hugging the backpack to myself when I sat on the train. It was a relief to get home and put down the weight, literal and figurative.

Wednesday is office day, which also means a restaurant lunch. I had a vegan burger for my lunch. And I don’t know what they put in there, but it gave me so much gas that I was basically laid up for the rest of the day. I managed to get through the afternoon’s work, tottered home, and then stayed horizontal as much as I could in the evening. I haven’t felt this awful since I went lactose-free. If the burger hadn’t been vegan, I’d maybe have suspected milk – but you can’t even squeeze that much milk products into a simple burger, so I’ve no idea what was in there. I won’t be going back to that place any time soon, in any case.

I got a notification yesterday that Alewalds, an outdoor gear shop right next to the 13|37 office, would start their annual end-of-summer sale today.

I’ve been thinking for a while (literally years, by now, I believe) that I could do with a better rucksack for longer trips. The Lundhags rucksack I have is a solid workhorse, robust and reliable, but it’s also quite heavy. It’s an older model so I can’t find the exact specs online any more, and I’m not curious enough to go down to the basement to actually weigh it, but a similar but newer Lundhags rucksack weighs 2.7 kg. That’s a fair lot of weight to carry before I even start packing. But rucksacks are expensive, especially lightweight ones, and the Lundhags works, so I’ve been hemming and hawing. Do I really need another rucksack?

Logically knowing that I would probably find it very useful if I could make myself splurge and overcome my underbuyer tendencies, this time I decided in advance that I would go there and buy one, and not let myself postpone it because I can do without. Walked in there, tried some out, and walked home with a new rucksack from Osprey that is a whole kilogram lighter than the Lundhags, despite being the same size.

The light weight is due to a fancy (and expensive) lightweight materials, but also to the absence of everything extraneous. There are no side pockets, no inside pockets, no rain cover pockets, no dividers, no front opening. Basically it’s one large top-loaded compartment, plus a pocket in the top lid and hip pockets on the hip belt. And both the lid and the hip pockets are removable, if I want to slim it down even more.

Using this bag is going to require an entirely different approach to packing than what I’m used to. I always have a plan and a purpose for all the pockets, for things I may want to reach in a hurry – water bottle in the side pocket, knife and first aid kit in the front outside pocket, gloves and hats and sunglasses in the top lid, rain suit in the bottom compartment. Now I’m going to have to relearn.

Time to start planning for an autumn hike!

Still energized after my vacation, I’m making a new effort to get my energy levels up and improve my mental health. The quarantine years messed me up, and the end of quarantine didn’t magically fix things.

Some good habits come easily to me. I go to bed before midnight, and I get up before 8, even without an alarm, even on weekends. I eat regular, healthy meals. I keep up my hobbies: I read and I knit more or less daily.

What I’ve lost is the ability/energy/habit to do things that require planning and preparation. I have barely been out walking since last autumn. I’ve hardly been to any cultural events. I haven’t been to the gym even once since quarantine rules were lifted.

I know what I need for my well-being: exposure to nature, exposure to culture, exercise, creativity, novelty. (Not in equal amounts or with equal frequency.)

Commitments do the trick for me. The public commitment to work from the Urb-it office on Wednesdays has been entirely voluntary but has gotten me there every single week. The daily workout challenge at 13|37 did the same for exercise. So I’m going to commit a lot more now.

I’ve bought tickets to a concert series for myself and Eric.

I’ve signed up for a short embroidery course and a short crochet course. (Without Eric.)

I’ve installed a habit tracking app to make sure I get at least 15 minutes of exercise every day. 15 minutes a day is ridiculously little but since there have been days when I haven’t even set foot outside the house, it’s going to be an improvement. Start small. Something is better than nothing.

The other habit I’m already tracking is daily blogging. I know I want to do it, and I know I can do it because I’ve done it in the past, and it isn’t even hard, but sometimes I just don’t, for no particular reason at all. Thus far it looks like the nudging is working very well. I don’t even need the app’s notifications to remind me – the mere knowledge that it’s there and I can say “Done” at the end of the day is enough to make me do it.

I still need some kind of commitment to nudge me to get out in nature regularly. Still figuring out what and how I can commit to, to make that happen. I dislike hiking with strangers, so signing up for any kind of group hikes would be counterproductive. And I enjoy nature a lot more when it’s “proper” nature, not just a small nature reserve in the city, but longer outings require some advance planning. Maybe the new habit I need to get into is not “go out and walk every Saturday” but “sit down every Thursday and plan a walk for the weekend”.

I was reflecting in Slovenia that the locals there probably stop noticing the stunning mountains around them after a while. Just like I was so charmed by the greenery in Spånga when I first saw it, but now rarely think about it. So here’s me paying attention to it again.

Also, taking an evening walk to get my daily exercise in.

No photo today, because we were too busy packing for our upcoming 10-day trip to Slovenia. Adrian got his new passport just a few days ago, so we won’t need to queue for another temporary one. But we are expecting potentially a lot of queueing at Arlanda airport. And our flight leaves at 8 in the morning, so we’ll be getting up at 4 to make sure we don’t miss the flight.

This photo is from our stay in Estonia. Adrian is eating reheated one-pot pasta straight from the pot.

My father and his wife kindly made their apartment available to us during our stay there. It’s always interesting in a way to live somewhere that is not at home, because it makes so obvious the things that I take for granted. The things that I miss when I don’t have them – and the things that I realize aren’t that important after all.

This apartment has a much smaller kitchen than our own home, so there is no dishwasher, and the microwave was on the blink. With just the three of us, and nobody cooking any fancy meals, we didn’t really miss the dishwasher. It just made some of us sometimes (like Adrian in the photo) prioritize differently, so there would be less washing up.

We did miss the microwave. I’m so used to having leftovers from dinner for lunch the day after, or for a snack if someone suddenly gets hungry. A microwave oven makes that so much easier.

And then there are the things that I know I would miss so badly that I don’t even want to try – sharp knives being the prime example. I bring two newly sharpened kitchen knives (one small, one large) with me to every trip where I know I’ll be preparing food, but I don’t know for sure what knives I will find there.

On long drives along straight roads with nothing interesting to look at, I like listening to music to avoid zoning out. Radio is the first, obvious solution, and I’m willing to listen to boring pop music while driving that I wouldn’t choose at home, but the long ad breaks get really annoying. So now it’s Spotify through a Bluetooth speaker that we bought especially for the car. (And that lives in the car and stays in the car and doesn’t get borrowed for any reason, because that’s how its predecessor vanished.)

There’s plenty of music that sounds good at home but doesn’t work in the car. Some frequencies become inaudible, while others sound unpleasantly sharp. Guitar-dominated rock music is right out. Drums and vocals work well, so sometimes I’ve picked some random Latino or afro playlist from Spotify. On this trip I realized that musicals and Disney movie soundtracks work great. We got through the entirety of the original Broadway recording of Hamilton on our way from Tartu to Tallinn to Stockholm. (Followed by the soundtracks for Moana and Encanto on the back and forth trip to Uppsala to drop off my brother.)

Hamilton is still as awesome as ever. Seeing it live in London was an incredible experience, but even hearing it through a pint-sized Bluetooth speaker while driving sends shivers down my spine. Ingenious rhymes, catchy melodies, great voices, punchy delivery. I’m starting to think of maybe going back to see it live again.

We visited my father and his wife, and made sushi together. I was mostly too busy talking to take any photos, so most of these are not mine. Ingrid photographed some of the sushi materials; Adrian photographed me from various angles.

The book I’m enjoying is Estonia’s most famous and well-known cookbook – the wonderful Raamat maitsvast ja tervislikust toidust (“The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food”) from 1955 which contains everything from very traditional Estonian recipes, to lots of Russian baked goods, to instructions for using all sorts of fish that I’ve never even heard of. It was strange and exotic already in the 1980s.