I have a cold and I’m sneezing all the time, so I worked from home today to try and not infect everyone else in the office.

Having a cold isn’t much fun, and I don’t really enjoy working from home either. The laptop keyboard and monitor are inconveniently small. And I miss the company of my colleagues.

But it is rather nice to sit and work at the kitchen table, with plenty of daylight. And even though it isn’t green outside, the garden is still much less gray and much nicer to look at than the office building across the street from the office.

Eric and Adrian are away on an overnight scout hike. Ingrid is busy with her own stuff. For the first time in a long time, I had a day of complete peace and quiet at home.

I spent all of today doing nothing. I read, mostly. I played some silly computer game for half an hour. Ate when I was hungry. Read more. Knitted.

I wish I could regularly kick the rest of the family out of the house for an entire weekend. Because as long as I am at home and they are at home, I don’t get much rest.

I’m off to Lund for a full day workshop tomorrow.

The train from Stockholm to Lund is an X2000 which sounds fast and was high tech some time before 2000 (when everything really modern was named either “2000” or “millennium”) but now feels rather dated. During half of this trip, the train’s tilting function was out of order which made the ride somewhat nauseating. It was just barely possible to walk to the bistro car and back, with food, without dropping any.

Long train rides and flights confuse my brain. First I have my normal day. The train ride is so distinct from normal life, and so disorientating, that it seems like a separate day. By the time I arrive, it feels like I’ve lived two days in the space of one, with a disconnect in between.

Back in my student days, at the Stockholm School of Economics, I was active in the student union and a member of its board. (Which sounds way fancier than it was.) Student life follows an annual cycle; I was a member of the board of 1998/99.

This year, in honour of the school’s 110th anniversary, the student union threw a grand party for all past board members. Tails and ball gowns, here we come! (Ball gown also means high heels, though, which is less yay.)

Half of our year’s board members turned up, and the seating was by year, so I got to catch up with them and hear what they’re all up to. Two children each, mostly. Most had spent some years spent abroad, and some were based abroad still.

As for careers, most were now CEO of this or director of that. Which is as expected. The SSE educates future managers and leaders for the world of business. I’ve done some leading and managing, and can do a decent job of it, but I don’t really want to. I don’t enjoy it. I’ve never sought out leadership positions. (On the board of the student union I had the one technical role, as treasurer, rather than leading any of the clubs.) I’d much rather build things than lead other people who build things.

It’s unlikely that I would have attended the SSE if I had had a free choice. But back in the mid-1990s Estonia was not part of the EU, and my right to live here in Sweden was granted as an annual boon in the form of a residence permit. Being an immigrant like that, I had no right to work (although I did work anyway, and was paid under the table) and no right to financial support as a student. I was lucky enough to get a grant to study – but that grant was tied to the SSE. Given a choice between free money for a business education, and no money but some other education of my preference, I took the money.

I don’t exactly regret that choice. I met Eric, I had fun, I got an education, and it led to a job. But it was a job that I never loved and at times was really miserable in. It took me years to get back to doing what I really enjoyed.

Meanwhile, here’s me in my ball gown in super weird green light.

We had the extended families here today to celebrate the kids’ birthdays. Lots of people, cakes, balloons, presents… the lot.

Did I take any pictures of any of this? Not a single one.

Photos help me build memories. I like going back to old blog posts, and both Ingrid and Adrian like looking at photos. Of themselves as babies, of Christmases and parties and hikes and trips.

The trouble is, the events that I would most like to have photos of are the ones where I am too busy being to even remember to pick up the camera.

I have a bracelet with a little camera pendant to remind me to take photos. It works, in that it reminds me to take photos, but sometimes I feel it so much that it becomes annoying and so I leave it. And then I get no photos. :(

Sorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday.

Quite a lot of them we will shelve because we expect to read or browse them some time in the future.

Many more books we will give away, because realistically – given how many books there are in the world – we do not think we will read them again. They may be good, I may have enjoyed and valued them at one point, but if I wanted to read something, I wouldn’t choose to read any of these again.

A very few books we will put back in a box in the basement, such as one phone catalogue, just to show that these things used to exist.

And some books are actually so outdated and useless that there is no point trying to give them away. Old programming books, for example. Those will go straight into recycling.

The book in the photo, about Visual Basic 6.0, was one of my first programming books. It was a big purchase at the time, and I remember working through it. I came to programming from the scripting world, from Excel macros and VBA scripts. I remember struggling with the concept of “objects” in object-oriented programming and trying to understand what the meaning and the point of them was. I remember a friend (an online friend) describing a “stopwatch” object for me, and a lightbulb moment when I got his point.

I considered keeping this book, out of pure nostalgia. But what would I ever do with it? Who would open it, who would want to look inside?

When I was a child, I spent hours reading old science magazines, and old books about explorers and natural wonders and so on. Today’s children don’t do that, and never will. There is so much else to entertain them and keep them busy. And myself as well.

It was very windy today.

Adrian has been going out cycling with his friends a few times. They gather and take their bikes and go looking for more friends to gather and then they sort of just cycle around. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with them cycling in actual traffic, but the small neighbourhood streets around here are quiet and safe. And the boys (because they are all boys) are so many that they will be very visible for drivers. I just hope they are sensible when crossing the few larger roads nearby.

Anyway, today the gang of friends with bikes didn’t come by, and I guess Adrian missed them and was feeling restless. Usually when he’s been indoors most of the day I invite him to join me for a walk to the supermarket and back. Today he invited me out to cycle with him. The wind was fierce but other than that the weather was good, warm and dry, so we cycled first to Nälsta and then on to Vällingby, and back. Near Vällingby we saw this fallen tree blocking our road.

I heard a couple of women passing comment with shock on how scary this was. I can of course understand that it would be bad to be hit by a falling tree, and quite obviously this one has fallen in a place where it could have hit someone. But still it seems so unlikely. The thought of Adrian crossing busy roads scares me a lot more. But I don’t let it show.

By my nature, I worry. I do my best to quash the worrying when I notice it. And when I do worry, I do my best not to let it affect my actions and especially not to show it and spread it to others. Ingrid is also a worrier – probably I’ve infected her already. But Adrian is much more carefree and I hope he can stay that way.

I went to the gym today for the first time since before midsummer. During vacation I’m way too busy with other things to even think about workouts. Since I went back to work I’ve been cycling to and from work about three days a week – the weather has been perfect for cycling – and that’s been enough for me. But the cycling season is going to end pretty soon: in October the mornings will be wetter and colder and most definitely darker. So it’s time to get used to indoor workouts again.

I had somehow thought that, even if the rest of me has gotten weaker over summer, perhaps my legs would still be strong from all the cycling. Nope.

There are cooking wines that you cook dinner with, and then there are cooking wines that you drink while cooking dinner. I very rarely drink any alcohol at all, but the fruit wines that Eric has made are all delicious. I usually don’t remember them, again because I don’t have a habit of drinking. But sometimes when I go to the pantry to fetch vinegar or olive oil or some other bottle, I notice that lovely bottle of wine next to it. So that’s when I pour myself a splash of it.

During late summer, whenever we eat our meals outside on the deck, a wasp usually comes to check out the offering. Usually they inspect our food and then leave. The food doesn’t seem to be to their taste. They’re never aggressive and we’ve never been stung by any.

Wasps get infinitely more aggressive when they panic. Yesterday as I was cycling home, I accidentally met a wasp head on and the wind blew it into my tank top. My minimal cleavage still had enough room for it to get in. Trapped in a very tight space, the wasp immediately stung me, and then did it again on its way back out. The pain was so sudden and sharp that my first instinctive reaction was to start pulling my top off, just get it out! Before I was completely topless in the streets, I found the wasp and let it out.

Twenty-four hours later and the spot where it stung me is still itching nearly all the time, and hurting whenever I rub it to ease the itch. It doesn’t hurt badly but it’s really distracting and I kept half-waking because of it. Damn that wasp and its panic reaction.