Packing for a long weekend of hiking. Adrian and Eric will be on a scout hike, so I thought I’d take the opportunity and go on a hike as well.

This will be the inaugural hike for my new high-tech lightweight rucksack. It felt a bit strange to pack nearly everything in one giant compartment, but wasn’t as awkward as I had feared. The pockets on the hip belt turned out to be larger than they looked and swallowed a lot of the small stuff, as did the top pocket. And the camera, as always, goes in my not-at-all-stylish but very practical waist bag.

I had vaguely thought I’d go back to the fells again this year, but the Knowabunga threw those plans out of whack by occupying a long weekend in the middle of September, and after that the mountain huts were all closed. Looks like they had a shorter season than usual for some reason.

So it’ll be a lowland hike again. The Kinnekulle trail two years ago was stunning; Kuststigen last year was rather a disappointment. This year I’ll be walking a chunk of Bruksleden. It’s within easy reach (less than 2 hours by car) but far enough to feel like “not home” I hope.

Adrian finished building the massive Lego set he got as a birthday present. Sanctum Sanctorum is from the Marvel cinematic universe and is the location many an important scene and battle.

This was Adrian’s first 18+ build. It had a more intricate construction than the models he’s built in the past, and was less stable and robust than the models for younger builders. If you’re not careful, you can knock things off.

It’s also modular – you can lift off the top floor, and the second floor, and parts of the interior, to access other parts. There are chunks that can be moved from one floor to another, or from the inside to the outside and vice versa (notably a large tentacle monster, which I see I didn’t capture on any of the photos.)

Another aspect that Adrian really liked was the large number of attachment points that allows for the staging of elaborate fight scenes.

The embroidery course I signed up for as one of my habits and commitments started today. The theme of the course is “free-form embroidery”, i.e. embroidery without a pre-prepared design. Making things up as you go.

For this first session (out of five) our teacher threw us in at the deep end and tasked us with embroidering a self-portrait. Take a selfie with your phone and then translate it into embroidery – as if we were drawing a picture with needle and thread instead of a pencil. The task felt very challenging beforehand, since I don’t think of myself as particularly good at drawing even with a pencil. But we were there to have fun and, as the teacher kept reminding us, it’s not like middle school where we will be graded on our work. Nobody will check the tidiness of the rear of our embroidered piece; nobody will comment if the stitches are uneven.

We had just over an hour of stitching time and by the end of it I just had a few contours. No eyes, no mouth, no hair. But it’s clearly the beginnings of a face, and a reasonable likeness – if a stranger had to pick the model out of the whole class, they would likely pick me. So I’m pretty pleased with it. I had expected to get much further in the time we had. I’ll have to finish it at home.

I volunteered to help at the Spånga scout group’s annual “autumn fixer day” where parents and other engaged folks help out with various maintenance tasks. This time around the task list included everything from deep cleaning the freezer and disassembling old desks so that they can be transported to the recycling centre, to removing thistles from the yard and mending tents.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that I signed up for mending tents. However the notes about tents needing attention were hard to interpret, and much time and attention went to figuring out what the problem even was. That task required a fair amount of expertise and experience with the tents themselves, so the mending crew spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting. Whenever an actual rip was found, there was almost a queue of us waiting.

Looking back at my blog post about the scouts’ mending day two years ago, the situation was the same. Maybe someone could learn something from this experience. Who knows.

All in all I felt that I contributed much less than I had hoped. When I came home, dissatisfied with my morning, I picked up my own pile of mending and fixed up six pairs of tights. And felt much better about the day afterwards.

All this mending reminded Adrian that he had a list of homework tasks from his home economics class, one of which was to mend a small hole or sew on a button. My backlog of mending was now empty – except for a shirt waiting for a sleeve button to be re-sewn! He came just in time; had he mentioned the homework an hour later, I wouldn’t have had anything for him. I guess we could always cut off a button and reattach it, but it would have felt like a waste.

Adrian, being of the age of frequently outgrowing things, has outgrown his rain jacket. He’s also outgrown all of Ingrid’s past rain jackets that I had hoped he could inherit. So I now have 4 kids’ rain jackets in sizes 140 to 158 in various colours, but not a single one that Adrian can use. (Honestly the one that he says he last used, in size 140, is ridiculously small for him – it’s a wonder he hasn’t complained earlier.) He has a scout hike coming up in a week, and it’s very unlikely we’ll get an entire weekend in September/October with no rain, so we’re emergency shopping for a new rain jacket.

This season’s colour is clearly dark yellow. All the three brands that had rain jackets for active use in “junior” sizes had all chosen to make theirs dark yellow or orange. Black and gray were also available, as usual, but Adrian doesn’t even look at those. (Helly Hansen also had some eye-wateringly garish neon colour combinations, which were too loud even for Adrian’s tastes.) So I guess we’ll take a yellow one, then.

Sometimes I test stuff at work by making things up. Right now at Urb-it, this means pretending to deliver imaginary parcels to made-up addresses, and taking proof-of-delivery photos. Or pretending to fail at delivering them and making up reasons for why I failed.

At my previous assignment at a specialist insurance company, I was making up details insurance cases for mobile phones – imaginary scenarios detailing exactly how my imaginary phone happened to get run over by a car, or damaged by water, or stolen.

I could just do the minimum necessary – always use the same options, or always point my phone’s camera at whatever is in front of me – but after 20 rounds or so it gets rather boring. It’s more fun to have fun with it. So I take photos of random objects around my home office.

If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.

The weather is getting colder and wetter and Nysse is spending more time indoors, even entire nights. During the warm season his usual routine was to go out late in the evening, and whichever human in the house woke up first would start their day by opening the doors towards the wooden deck just wide enough to let him in – and within 5 minutes he’d come galloping.

He’s warm and dry in the house, but apparently also a wee bit bored. For the first time ever he’s shown interest in my balls of yarn. I’ve been knitting right in front of him for months and as long as I don’t dangle something in his face, he just ignores it. Today, all of a sudden, he was attacking my yarn. I confiscated my hand-dyed merino wool very quickly, but he could borrow the cheap orange acrylic that I use for miscellaneous stuff (like tying things together, or lifelines).

When the first ball of dark red ran out and I had switched to the second one and knitted a few rows with it, it became obvious that the two balls of dark red were from different dye lots. I really should have checked and noticed this earlier – this was pure noob sloppiness. And the sharp line between them really didn’t look good, and the one I used first was slightly darker so I really should have taken the other one first, so to make a long story short, I ripped up the whole red-to-dark-red fade and started over with it. I’m back where I was in early to mid-August. But the journey is the destination and all that, so I don’t even mind too much. I do mind the dangling yarn balls I now have everywhere – weaving in all the ends at the yoke is proving to be a minor nightmare, so now I don’t want to cut the yarn if I don’t have to.

Autumn is coming, and the weather is getting colder.

Electricity prices are crazy this year in southern Sweden (nuclear power plants being shut down due to political decisions in the 1980s, limited transmission capacity between the north and the south, high energy prices in the rest of Europe, etc) and I’m not looking forward to our electricity bills for this cold season.

That top line, double and triple historical prices, that’s this year.