Both Adrian and I slept really, really well. Adrian didn’t wake until eight o’clock, which is about an hour later than he normally gets up at home. He said the hammock was great. I think we might need to get another one so that he and Ingrid won’t have to argue about who gets to sleep in it.

I always wake several times per night when I am not in my own bed. That’s normal and expected by now. I’m happy, though, when we’ve been camping and I don’t wake up all stiff and sore. The combination of inflatable mattress, extra wide sleeping bag, and nobody poking me with their elbows (which often tends to happen in tents) made for a good night’s sleep.

Breakfast was pancakes of sorts, fried in plenty of butter. They were more delicious than they look in the photo. Why did I photograph them before flipping them?

After breakfast we had a swim in the lake. Or rather, I swam while Adrian just sort of was in the water. He likes bathing but not swimming, and very much prefers to do it in shallow water, with predictable footing and in the company of friends.

Then we walked back to the car.

Walking home was apparently not much more fun than walking out. We took several breaks again. At the last one, Adrian borrowed my camera.

I’ve been thinking for a while about starting to write down some memories of my childhood here.

Some random memories keep circling in my head, resurfacing again and again. Writing things down tends to get them out of my head.

I generally have a pretty lousy long-term memory. Other people – friends, family – ask me if I remember this or that event or detail, and usually I don’t. Sometimes I have a factual memory that the trip they talk about did happen, but have no personal recollections of it. Sometimes I don’t even have a clue of what they’re talking about.

An old classmate recently linked to his blog posts with memories from school. He remembers teachers’ names and can link events to particular school years. I mostly have no memories of all the things he writes about. But I can remember the “feeling” of the new, young maths teacher we got some time in middle school, and the feeling of the dank basement canteen.

I remember random tidbits, loose fragments, what a particular place or moment or activity felt like. Out of nowhere I can sometimes recall the experience and feeling of cycling down a particular street in London, or what it felt like to be standing on a crowded bus in Tartu.

I wish I had more photos from my childhood; photos tend to jog my memory best. I wish people had smartphones back then and took endless photos of ordinary school days.

Maybe writing down the things I do remember will also jog other memories.

There is a possibility that this mini-project will fade away soon after my vacation ends and I will have to start focusing on work again. We’ll see.

Happy birthday to me! It turns out I’m now forty-three years old. I have learned by now that I’m forty-something. I still can’t keep track of the exact number of years, though, and have to do some mental arithmetics whenever someone asks. Funny thing, that. Eric could probably recall my age better than I do. Even Adrian can, I think, but he on the other hand cannot remember my date of birth. For him the age is more interesting than the date.

Forty-three is a great age. I’ve had about twenty-five years of adult life and I expect at least as many more, before I might start thinking of myself as “getting old”.

Eric made the lovely cake. It’s raspberry mousse and lemon frosting on a brownie base. Just the kind of cake I love best: light and moist and with a fresh, tangy, fruity flavour.

The Gotland trip is over and we’re home again.

I like travelling. I like being at home again (sleeping in my own bed!). But I don’t like coming home from a trip. The end of a trip always puts me out of sorts. Somehow the transition makes me feel out of balance and disoriented. I feel irritable and down.

A night’s sleep generally cures me. And sleeping in my own bed feels so nice after a week on bad mattresses. We stayed in hostels this time; the one in Visby really had pretty crappy beds. It was nice otherwise, though, and very centrally located.

When I’m booking a package holiday, like the one on Mallorca last year, the cost of the hotels is all mixed up with other costs and becomes almost invisible. Now that I was booking three nights here and two nights there, the cost of each night became very tangible. Do I really want to pay two thousand SEK extra per night for a fancier place? Not really.

We economized a bit on the living arrangements, but not on meals. It’s a vacation; I don’t want to spend my evenings in the kitchen. And we found some really nice restaurants! Some of my favourites were:

• Krusmyntagården north of Visby. The vegetarian option (lentils with oven-baked cauliflower) was an actual vegetarian dish, rather than something where the chef has tried to replace the meat. Juicy and full of flavour.
• Magasinet in Fårösund. Looks like nothing on the outside and doesn’t have a web site (only a Facebook page) but serves great fish dishes and Thai food, with an real live Thai chef in the kitchen I believe.
• Mille Lire and Isola Bella, two Italian pizzerias in Visby.
• Last but definitely not least, Cafe Amalia in Visby. They don’t seem to have a Facebook page even. It’s a small cafe in the middle of Visby that serves breakfast all day. Porridge, overnight oats, omelettes, sandwiches, all vegetarian, hand made and utterly delicious. (Overnight oats with rhubarb compote and golden roasted coconut chips; toast with nut butter and sliced banana; sandwiches on moist sourdough bread.) The prices are steep; our breakfasts here cost as much a normal lunch. But so good!

Also, the best ice cream we had was at Visby Glass. This place is worth a detour! Glassmagasinet near the harbour is the most visible ice cream place and boasts that they serve hundreds of flavours, but the ice cream they have is mostly the standard, mass-produced stuff. Visby Glass on the other hand makes their own ice cream and the difference is huge. They had lots of interesting flavours – apple sorbet, dark chocolate, pomegranate sorbet, and so on – and I wish we could have tried more of them.

I’m editing my photos from Saturday, which we spent on Fårö. There are a ton of horizons in those photos and a lot of them need straightening. It’s funny how sensitive the human eye (or at least my eye) is to crooked horizons! Some are less than a quarter degree off, and that’s enough for me to notice.

Quarantine head vs vacation head:

It’s been months and months since I had a haircut. The hair salons around here are all open, but I don’t trust them with my hair. I went to a local hairdresser once and regretted it. For the last ten years or so, I only ever go to “my” hairdresser off Odenplan. But taking the train (!) to town (!) to go to a hairdresser (!) seems quite frivolous in these times of social distancing. So I’ve been putting it off. Instead I’ve been toying with the idea of just getting rid of my hair. Vague thoughts of “what if it doesn’t look professional enough” have been keeping me from doing it.

Now I’m on vacation and don’t need to look professional, and the hair is off.

It feels so liberating, so clean and light! My hair had fortunately already passed that worst stage when it makes my neck itch, but this is even better. It has no itching potential anywhere at all. And it is so very practical.

However any time I happen to look in the mirror, I feel like I’m looking at a stranger. And I don’t look in the mirror very often so it will probably take days before I get used to the new look (as opposed to the new feel).

Eric did the trimming and Adrian held the camera.

Looking through yesterday’s photos, I realized that I was barely present in them, and then only as a small white figure in the distance.

Today I put on my Midsummer dress and my summer hat and took some self-portraits under the cherry tree.

I met my colleagues face to face for the first time in months. We had a retrospective meeting and then lunch at Urban Deli’s rooftop restaurant. And since I was going to the office for this anyway, I worked there before and after the meeting as well.

Meeting the team was lovely, but working in the office was much less so. There were interruptions all the time – and while it’s nice that people stop by my desk to say hi and chit-chat, it really kills my productivity. Add the time spent on commuting, and by the end of the day I felt like I barely got anything meaningful done (and I do count the lunch as meaningful and time well spent) even though I was away for eight hours.

And for the first time in months I felt stressed. I had to look at the clock to start heading home at a reasonable time, and I felt the pressure to hurry home to the kids. Not pleasant at all.

Back in March, it took time for me to get used to working from home. But now that I’ve settled in, it really works very well for me, and I haven’t felt this relaxed and productive at work since… forever.

I’ve been having twinges of soreness in my throat since last Tuesday. Just a tiny bit, just a few times a day. In normal times I might not even have noticed it. But now, like most people, I’m hyper-aware of any cold-like symptoms.

The soreness never got any worse, and I think it has now passed. I felt nothing today. If no new symptoms have appeared after ten days, then this was probably nothing. No more self-quarantine, I can hug my family again!

Meanwhile, Sweden’s handling of covid-19 looks more and more like a failure, with three thousand deaths and counting. Our neighbouring countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark) count their deaths in the low hundreds. They’re all half the size of Sweden, but even counting deaths per million, Sweden has three to six times more deaths than them.

The experts and politicians say that it’s too early to evaluate. Or they question the choice of countries to compare to – “well but what about Belgium?”. Maybe they’re right – who knows? Maybe two years from now we’ll pat ourselves on our shoulders and say that we did a good job anyway.

But one thing that is clear is that I hope I never end up in a Swedish elder care home, or as a recipient of care at home (hemtjänst). Most of the deaths in Sweden have been in care homes. And when I read and hear news reports describing the situation there, it’s no wonder.

The care homes are short of staff, of equipment, of training. Nurses who go back and forth between sick and healthy people. Staff who go to work despite cold-like symptoms.. 40% of staff do not follow basic hygiene rules.

Elderly people who get municipal at-home care meet on average 15 staff in 14 days. And that’s an average, not a maximum! It’s a constant flow of random strangers in your home, helping you with your private, personal needs. Dehumanizing, is what it is.

Working from home, I’ve cut out well over an hour of commuting time from every day. I “go to work” the same time as usual, but since there is no commute, I actually get to work earlier. So I’ve been racking up overtime daily. Now I’m close to hitting the overtime limit, so I’m going to have to make changes. I could go up in working time, but I really don’t feel like it.

So: more breaks, and more days off.

I already take proper lunch breaks, with half an hour for exercise and half an hour for lunch itself. Breakfast I usually have at my desk while reading emails or doing some other semi-passive task. I’ll be taking proper breakfast breaks from now on. Especially when the weather is as lovely as it is, and I can have breakfast outside.

This is the most relaxed, stress-free daily routine I’ve ever had during my working life. I have no schedule and no deadlines. I have time to sit in the sofa and read the morning paper. I work when I feel like it. I don’t need to hurry home in the afternoon – I’m already at home when Adrian comes home. I don’t even need to plan or cook dinner, because Ingrid cooks nearly every day now, to earn money.