I’m on vacation as of this weekend and the kids have summer break, but Eric is still working. Ingrid is busy with her group of friends, but Adrian and I are sort of on our own. And not so good at activating ourselves right now. Left to our own devices, we’d probably just laze the entire summer away on the sofa, doing nothing much. Especially with this heat.

So now we’ve made a pact between the two of us: every day, we will do at least one active thing. Going somewhere, making something, just something.

This whole covid isolation thing is really starting to drag me down. Nothing fun is happening. Things that should be fun aren’t. Everything takes such an effort, and most things don’t seem to be worth making one. It’s beginning to feel quite depressing.

And then I watched Bo Burnham’s Inside and realized how much worse it could be. I could be stuck in a small inner city apartment, but I live in a spacious house with a large garden. I could be living alone, but I have family around me. I could be stuck with no human contact, but I have colleagues whom I “meet” daily. I could have had my entire career aborted, but I have a job that I can still do more or less normally.

Continuing with the badly-posed, awkwardly-angled vaccine selfie theme. My shoulder is slightly sore but no worse than after a workout. But the spot where I got the shot also itches, which is kind of annoying.

Even more annoying is the fact that apparently there’s a new virus strain against which the vaccines are less effective. Just as I was starting to feel optimistic that seven weeks from now life could maybe start becoming slightly more normal again. It feels like this will never end.

Getting my first covid shot in Kistamässan.

The process was incredibly smooth and fast. Large info signs, hand sanitizer stations, wide queueing areas, etc. There were 30 or 40 vaccination booths lining the edges of one of the congress hall, with nurses who were probably quite tired of repeating the same five sentences to everybody… The other hall was all set up with carefully spaced chairs for the mandatory 15-minute post-shot observation period, with nurses at hand and a large digital clock in the front.

No photos allowed inside, unfortunately but understandably, so I had to make do with a badly posed selfie.

The presentation I promised to do is happening on Wednesday. I did start preparing in good time and actually have most of it figured out. As I was working on it, I came to realize that for this topic it would make most sense to just skip all the usual Powerpoint slides and just write code, live, on screen, during the session. Which I have never done before, so I can’t just wing it the way I normally tend to do with presentations. I can’t even really estimate how much coding I can fit into one hour. So here I am, spending my Sunday afternoon talking to myself while writing the same code for the third time now.

If you want to see me do this live on Wednesday, here’s the link: Massaging MongoDB data.

I really should mow the lawn, I guess. I don’t mind the way it looks, but it’s not very inviting to walk on like this.

But I can mostly manage to make myself do two or maybe three chores per day on weekends (apart from the basics like making sure everyone is fed) and nothing at all on weekdays, and the lawn has not made it into the top three, so I guess that’s not happening yet.

My latest pair of socks.

I was trying to think of a word to describe the colour. It’s sort of a muted brownish red.

In a book I recently read someone got a new coat, the brownish-red colour of which his fashion-conscious friend found incredibly offensive because

It was puce. There was no denying that. It was well fitted, well styled, with a most pleasing swing to the tails, and it was a deep tone that could not be explained away as brown, or red, or anything but puce.

The English language has no shortage of fancy words for colours where other languages make do, and I thought I’d come across most of them by now. I wasn’t familiar with puce, though, so I didn’t understand why it would be so objectionable.

It turns out that the colour is called “puce” (which is French for “flea”) because supposedly it is the colour of bloodstains on bedsheets after a crushed flea. Which is actually kind of icky.

Now I can’t get that idea out of my mind when I look at these socks. But I still like them.

I really have no energy or desire to do anything that I don’t have to, apart from reading. Everything feels like a chore, and actual chores I avoid even thinking about.

So I take baby steps to get things done. I want to plant more flowering currants. It took me weeks to gather the energy to find a place that sells them, and order a few. Then it took me two days before I picked up the parcel, and that was enough for that day. Today I unpacked them. And that was enough for today. Now they’re watered and in half-shade so they should stay alive until I get to the point of actually getting them in the ground.

I loved the evenings and mornings here. We had company from other walkers the first two nights, but last night it was just us. The evenings have been full of birdsong. They only stop around 21:30 and get going around 2:30 again. Thank god for earplugs.

I’m no expert on songbirds but I’m guessing blackbirds were responsible for much of the singing. I often see and hear blackbirds at home, and these sounded the same. We also heard cuckoos, which are such a nostalgic summer sound for me. We don’t get those at home.

The first night a pair of cranes flew past several times, honking so loudly that they woke Adrian. Or maybe multiple pairs who just happened to choose the same route.

There was another bird with a very distinct sound that I wasn’t familiar with. I had to Google for its sound to find out that it was a woodcock (morkulla, metskurvits). It came back every night and kept flying back and forth over the camping site, singing its odd song all the while. Crawk, crawk, crawk, tweet!

A combo of Oxögabergsrundan and Trollkyrkorundan, maybe 10 km or so, and Mellannäsrundan, 1.5 km.

We did the most obvious route yesterday. Today we headed into the wilder parts of the park. Yesterday we met plenty of people all day; today – especially on Oxögabergsrundan – barely any at all.

The elevation profiles for today’s trails were much more up-and-down than for the lake circuit yesterday. But in practice we found today’s walk less challenging. There may have been more hills, but the path itself was somewhat more even and easier to walk, with fewer roots to stumble over.

The weather report promised rain for today. A few days ago it promised pouring rain all day. Then the forecast gradually improved as the day got closer, and by this morning we were down to maybe the occasional shower. And in practice we got a few very, very light showers. Enough to put the rain covers on the rucksacks as a precaution, but not enough to get us really wet.

We managed to time both our mid-morning snack and our lunch break between the rain showers. Adrian of course found rocks to climb on top of for his snacks.

I love walking in really wild forests like this, with wild growth everywhere and dead trees left to rot where they fall. When a large tree falls right across the trail, the park staff cut out a big enough chunk of the trunk to allow hikers to pass through, but leave the rest untouched. And they don’t even bother doing anything about trees that you can easily step over or crawl under.

I walked the Trollkyrkorundan trail when I was here on my own a few years ago. It’s funny how my brain remembers places. I remembered the viewpoints on top of the rocky hills, the two “troll churches”. Most of the trail I didn’t recognize at all. But there were small things here and there that were immediately familiar. I knew I had walked past this particular cluster of rocks, these specific dead trees. I remembered stepping on these very roots to climb that rock with an absolute certainty.

After 10 km of walking it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon. No point in heading back to the camp yet, because all we’d do there is sit around and wait for dinnertime. Even Adrian thought more walking would be better. So we drove a few kilometres to the other end of the small park for another short circular walk. This one was so flat and easy that it felt like a bimble in the park.

Adrian loves walking and can easily keep going all day, as long as his pack is light. If it isn’t, he starts complaining. The kilometres don’t bother him, but the kilograms do.

I’m vaguely thinking of doing a longer walking holiday this summer, covid permitting. If we did day hikes, we could make them quite ambitious. But if it’s anything that requires us to carry all our stuff with us, then either Eric and I would have to carry most of his gear, or we’d have to keep the days quite short, or live with a fair bit of complaining. So maybe we need to stick to day hikes still.