Our off-and-on-traditional midsummer outing with the Lennakatten museum railway to Marielund.

The weather was hot and the inside of the train like an oven, despite the open windows. The carriage filled up later, but wasn’t as crowded as it’s sometimes been in the past. I think they may have added more carriages to the train.

The train ride took longer than scheduled for some reason, so by the time we arrived and had unpacked the picnic, we attacked the food like a horde of locusts. I barely managed to get a photo of the cake.

Cats. Naturally graceful and elegant.

I made such a beautiful salad for dinner that I just have to show it off.

30°C is maybe not objectively hot in most parts of the world, but for us it’s hot enough that nobody wants any hot meals for dinner, so it’s been salad for dinner several days in a row now. Today’s salad is roast fresh potatoes, lentils, sugar snaps, nectarines and strawberries.

Office day. Sunshine, lunch with colleagues. Flags waving.

The Ukrainian flag and the Swedish ones go nicely together.

It’s hard to imagine that just a few countries away there is a war going on, in the middle of modern, civilized Europe.

Adrian is rediscovering the joys of building Legos and bought himself a giant Millennium Falcon set.

After the explodey work was done, the neighbours poured a foundation. Now the house is being delivered in big chunks, and lifted in place. Lots of progress very fast.

Maybe, just maybe, it would have been easier to mow the grass if I’d done it a bit earlier.

On the other hand, better late than never, and a half-assed mowing of half the garden is much better than none. My new principles for my new energy levels.

Adrian and Eric are off to scout camp. (Ingrid gave up scouting about a year ago.)

Team lunch at Kagges Sillcafé in Gamla stan. So much herring and other good food! Half the team are newly relocated to Sweden and I think some of them found the herring and the gravlax rather weird, but were too polite to say anything about it.

Now that it’s summer and the days are hot and the nights are light, Nysse is like a teenager. Often gone all night, out doing cat things. Comes running in through the door a minute after I open it in the morning, goes straight to the food bowl, eats his fill, and then sleeps, until it’s time to wander off again. We’re getting rather fewer cuddles than we did in the winter.

But this life seems to suit him well. We’ve stopped rationing his food now that he’s so active, and even switched to a more energy-dense kind, because he was always hungry. Less stress for both us and him.