From Svalboviken (ish) in the beginning of stage 24, to Myr-Gryten in the middle of stage 25. 20 km.

Birdsong woke me at five, but with earplugs I could get another hour or two of sleep. I get pretty decent sleep in my tent these days: maybe not a full night of deep sleep, because I wake up every time I want to change position, but I feel rested in the morning.

If the challenge for day 1 is to get my mind into proper hiking mode, then the challenge for day 2 is accepting and overcoming bodily hurts. My muscles are sore. I’ve got bruises on my hips from the rucksack’s hip belt, to the point where it hurts to pull the waistband of my trousers over them. There’s nothing for it other than gritting my teeth and putting the pack on and getting going.

The sky started threatening rain shortly after breakfast. I stopped to take this photo, and a minute later, it was raining. It was a rather pleasant rain, with sparse drops, not the kind of drizzle that gets everywhere. I could even stop to take photos without worrying about the camera.

It’s not always easy to find a suitable place to stop for a snack. This part of Sörmlandsleden mostly goes through rocky forest, and often there’s not enough flat ground next to the path to put down my pack. I like to be able to not just put my pack down, but also sit down myself and stretch my legs.

The trail keeps passing clear-cut areas. They’re so depressing to look at. Churned-up ground, rocks sticking up every which way, trees thrown down criss-cross. It looks like a battleground. Destroyed. I still can’t understand how this can be an acceptable way of doing forestry.

The forest today was less dominated by pine and spruce than yesterday. Deciduous forests in their most beautiful fresh leaf buds, and flowering anemones.

The afternoon was sunny but windy. I stopped in a woodland pasture, thinking I could lie down and read and enjoy the sun for a while. The sun was hot, but the air was cold, and I couldn’t manage to find a way to balance these. So I walked onwards.

I met a slow worm on the path. It was just laying there, looking like a pine root and being equally motionless. I thought that maybe it is named “slow worm” because it is slow, but apparently that is not the case.

It did the tongue-flicking thing that snakes and lizards do in the movies, but I didn’t manage to capture that in a photo.

I’ve been sharing the trail with a young guy who started stage 23 at the same time with me, and has been walking roughly the same distance as me both days. I walked past him during his lunch break; then half an hour later he walked past me on mine.

I’m an asocial hiker. I’m not out there to meet people and share stories. I’d rather not share my camping site with others, if possible. There are only so many places where you can stop for the night, though – even with a tent you do need some flat ground at least. He didn’t have one, as far as I could see, so I could guess where he’d end up for the night, and made sure to stop some ways away from the hut (yesterday) and shelter (today) where he was staying.

Sörmlandsleden. Hälleforsnäs train station to Svalboviken, 18 km.

After a few kilometres skirting the edges of Hälleforsnäs I got to where I left off last time, by the pretty wetlands of Bruksdammen.

From there on it was pretty typical Sörmland. Rocky pine forests, mossy spruce forests, small lakes.

The first day of a hike, I’m usually not all the way present. I can’t help thinking about kilometres and hours, and kilometres per hour. Am I taking too many breaks? Am I walking fast enough? Am I eating enough? It takes time for the mind to switch over to proper hiking mode.

Some awareness of where I am on the map is good, though, and a rough estimate of how fast I walk on average. It’s nice to be able to know that I’ll be reaching a lake in less than an hour, so I can snack on some dried fruit for now and keep walking, and stop for a proper break in a place with a nice view.

Forestry operations were going on near the trail. There was noise of heavy machinery very close to where I walked, even though today is a public holiday. They’d utilized the clear spaces of the trail itself to put down their loads, which I found rather annoying. But I guess it’s very temporary.

When I felt that it was time to stop for the night, I struggled to find a good stopping place. There was this grassy lakeside beach, looked rather nice, but there was a large road right behind me. I carry earplugs (always!) so I’m sure I could have slept here nevertheless, but it just didn’t feel right. I don’t want to start my day with the noise of cars. So I walked onwards.

The last kilometre or two were not fun. I was tired, and more hungry than I realized. If there had been forest around me, I would have found some flattish spot, but instead I walked past large clear-cut areas, and there’s nowhere to put up a tent in this.

I got past them, back into normal forest again, and put up my tent absolutely in the middle of nowhere. No other people, no noise other than night birds. Geese are loud.

All packed for a four-day hike for the long weekend. Rucksack, clothes for tomorrow, water, breakfast rolls, camera, sunglasses.

I don’t enjoy packing or preparing for a trip. It feels like such a chore. Sometimes I end up not going out because the actual getting started takes so much energy. But now I have arranged for my brother to come cat-sit, so I’m officially committed and have to make it happen.

I was originally going to go for Kinnekulleleden, but couldn’t find a train. I don’t know if they’ve really sold out all tickets for tomorrow, or if there’s something else going on, but there was nothing. Instead it’ll be Sörmlandsleden. I’ve now come all the way to Hälleforsnäs, which is reachable by train, and three or four days of hiking from there will take me to Katrineholm, which also has a train station, so for once I can go forward only instead of doing a there-and-back.

Ingrid and I saw 1984 at Stadsteatern.

During much of the performance, sound was provided through headphones. It felt odd and kind of gimmicky at first, but it also worked. Winston’s quiet musings and diary entries could be delivered quietly, intimately. And the subtle hints of there being someone else there, prompting him and asking questions, also worked because these sounds could be subtle, barely there. A whisper is no longer a whisper if it is delivered through a loudspeaker, or by an actor projecting his voice through a hall.

Otherwise: intense, minimal, true to the original. (To the extent that I remember the original, which I last read, oh, thirty years ago?)

I originally made this sign for marking my locker at the tretton37 office. After ripping off the self-adhesive magnet strips, I have now pinned it to my chair at Sortera.

The older I get, the more picky I get about all kinds of things. Office chairs are definitely near the top of that list. I can deal with soft seats and hard seats and I am mostly not too bothered about the back rest, but I have very firm opinions about the armrests (no thank you), headrests (no thank you again), seat position and angle.

One of the best office chairs I’ve ever had was at ReQtest, where I sat on a large, inflatable exercise ball. Guaranteed no slouching. tretton37 had a variety of chairs so everyone could pick and choose, and when I could, I picked a saddle-style chair from Backapp.

Sortera doesn’t have anything as fancy as that, but they do have pretty good chairs. I’ve found one extra firm variety, on which it was also easy to remove the armrests and headrest. I’m not there every day, though, and sometimes the chairs move around on my WFH days. Now I’ve branded my favourite chair as mine, so I can find it again when I am in the office.

This past weekend was the last weekend of March and brought with it the turning of the clocks, i.e. the switch to summer time.

The Sunday I usually don’t notice it much. The Monday is still OK, I’ve got reserves and I don’t notice using them. But then on the Tuesday I’m tired and sluggish and everything feels off. Wednesday is often no better, and only towards the end of the week do I feel back to normal. How I wish we could stop this madness.

This evening I was too tired to cook and too tired to have much of an appetite, so it was breakfast for dinner. (Toast, smashed avocado, egg mayo, and my favourite juice – cucumber, kiwi and apple.) Complete with the morning paper that I didn’t have time to read this weekend. And with a little vase with the first spring flowers, that Ingrid surprised me with.

From paper archives to digital ones, I’m clearing out decades-old junk.

It’s junk now, but definitely wasn’t back then. Now all our data is online, but there was a time when all of it was on CDs. Everything from installation files for operating systems, important applications, and games. These days, the application might be an online service and not even have a presence on your computer. If there is a local installation, then you download it. Back then you bought a physical CD in a shop, or ordered it online and got it in the mail.

Backups of your important documents – online today, CDs back then. Photo sharing likewise.

Under and behind the piles of nostalgia-inducing CDs was a pile of 3½-inch floppy disks. Why? Who knows.

There’s a fair amount of memories tied to these CDs, and all the others in the same drawer. I’m feeling a tiny temptation to keep them. But what would I even do with them? If it was old photos or documents or books, I could imagine bringing them out decades from now and showing them to my grandchildren or something. But CDs? You can’t gather around them because you can’t even see what’s on them. They’re just pieces of plastic.

I forgot my glasses at home today. It wasn’t too bad at work – I can see the monitor well enough, it’s just a bit tiring. What was unfortunate was that this happened on an embroidery club day, and I’m in the middle of a section of dark grey thread on dark grey fabric, which is rather hard to work on when you can’t see it well.

One of the other ladies there had an extra pair that I could borrow. I was most sceptical, because they were more than twice as strong as my own reading glasses. I tried them out anyway, and it was like wearing a pair of magnifying glasses – as long as I held the embroidery work at exactly the right distance. They were totally useless for seeing anything else, especially the rest of the room. But with their slim design, I could push them down on my nose, grandma style, and look over them for everything else.

Maybe I should buy extra strong embroidery glasses for myself as well. Or maybe I should get an actual eye exam done and not just buy off-the-shelf glasses that seem good enough. On the other hand, I have a whole list of things to buy that seem more urgent than slightly better glasses, so maybe not.

I am trying out a pattern for felted double slippers. You knit two conjoined slippers, which results in a shape that initially makes no sense and couldn’t possibly be anything, and then you turn half of it inside out, inside the other half, and boom, an actual slipper.

They look huge, which is as it should be, because the next step will be to felt them by machine washing them using a non-wool programme. That will be interesting. I’m using the exact yarn that the pattern recommended, but even with larger needles than they suggested, mine came out a few centimetres smaller than they should. I hope that they will nevertheless shrink to a suitable size when felted.

The socks I knit are all anatomically shaped and asymmetric, and I saw no reason to do anything differently with the slippers. Why would I want a rounded toe when my feet are not rounded? I’m not a cat. The shape is not too different from the original so it will hopefully felt equally well.

I’m curious why the pattern makes the two halves of each slipper exactly the same size. If you want one half to fit well inside the other, shouldn’t it then be slightly smaller? Maybe they wanted to keep the pattern as simple as possible.

I’ve been putting off the actual felting, always with some excuse. The electricity price is too high. I don’t have time today to invest several hours in this. But really I believe I’m a bit nervous about the felting not turning out well and then this will all feel like a lot of wasted work.

I need two clothes rails for my IKEA PAX wardrobes. They’ve been general storage closets for many years, but now I want to get rid of the large free-standing wardrobe in the middle of my bedroom and move all my clothes into the built-in wardrobes.

Choose a standard product from IKEA and you’ll have no trouble getting spare parts and replacements later, right? PAX wardrobes have existed for decades and they’re still there. But for some reason IKEA decided to abandon the standard 60 cm width at some point and left me somewhat stranded after all.

At least the fixtures and fittings and the holes for them are all still the same. I bought two clothes rails meant for the 75 cm wardrobe, and hopefully I can adapt them to the narrower width. Sawing off the rail is not too tricky, just tedious and noisy, but then there’s a small hole on one side of the rail that needs to fit a pin in the fastening mechanism, and that might be more challenging. I’m not there yet, though – first I need to borrow a drill somewhere.

I grew up with no particular skills in the DIY department. Wood shop and metalworking was for boys only, in 1980s Estonia. Girls got sewing, knitting and cooking classes instead. I can assemble furniture and re-upholster chairs, and maybe hack together some simple bookends or tool storage. But I don’t really know what I’m doing.

What’s the difference between all the wood saws in my basement? How do I make sure the holes I drill are straight? How do I get precision in my cuts and angles? Should I screw or glue? What kind of file do I want for this? Can I use this screw in this type of wall?

It’s been easy to leave most of the DIY work to Eric all these years – but it feels good to be forced out of my comfort zone now.