Friday night is movie night.

All the covid restrictions will be lifted on September 29th and it’s time to start getting rehabituated to office life again. At least a little bit. Show my face, get to know all the new colleagues who have joined and whom I’ve never seen – and the all ones I’ve interviewed but not met in real life.

I’m thinking Fridays at the tretton37 office to begin with, and adding some other day at the Urb-it office later.

It’s going to be good, I know, but the idea of getting up early and then having to commute there and back still doesn’t makes me happy. But tretton37 treats us all to lunch once a month and tomorrow is one of those days so that’ll give me that extra push to get me out the door.

Since I have no permanent desk at the office any more, I’m going to have to carry an awful lot of stuff with me if I want to work comfortably. There will be a desk and a chair and a monitor, and I’m sure I’ll find an OK keyboard. I’m actually not too fussed about keyboards these days, as long as they provide a minimum of tactile feedback and aren’t completely flat.

But I’m going to want my wireless mouse, and my mouse mat with wrist support. And since I’m sure I’ll spend a few hours in meetings, I’ll want a proper webcam (because the built-in one in the Dell laptops is, unfathomably, situated under the screen for a truly horrible camera angle) and a proper microphone (because the built-in one sucks, and I’ve never become friends with tiny in-ear headphones, and a large headset is even bulkier than my microphone/speaker puck). Plus the computer, and a pair of indoor shoes, and my rucksack is going to be full and heavy.

It turns out that my webcam fits perfectly inside the lens bags for my old Nikon lenses. The bags are just the right size and shape, and soft and padded of course. I lost the camera and its lenses in the burglary four years ago but I still have the lens bags. They’re well-made so I didn’t have the heart to throw them out. Now they come in very handy.

The sun is low enough in the mornings for candlelit breakfasts to make sense.

It’s been weeks and weeks since I had a proper workout. I’ve been going out for brisk walks every day during my lunch break, but actually working out hasn’t happened. I just haven’t been able to make myself do it. The dumbbells were literally covered by a layer of dust.

I did work out today, though! It doesn’t feel like much, but one workout is better than none.

To my great disappointment I discovered that the workout videos I used to watch on YouTube are now all full of ads. I guess they tried to get me hooked during the pandemic and hoped that I’d start paying for premium access to keep watching now. I’m really not fond of YouTube as a platform so that’s a total no. And the ads are so annoying – how the heck am I supposed to work out if the workout gets interrupted by an ad in the middle of my set of lunges?! – that the whole thing makes me like YouTube less than ever.

Luckily I can watch HASfit workout videos on their own site. And in fact I’m much more willing to support them on Patreon than pay for YouTube.

I’m going to miss my PopSugar workouts with Raneir, though…

The cake is delicious and moist and flavourful but also very filling. The first time, we all served ourselves too large slices. We’ve learned now to cut what seem like slivers only. The recipe says the cake will serve 6 to 8, but in reality it’s more like double that. A sixth of that cake is like a whole dinner.

Adrian loves chocolate cake, and he loves raspberries, so for his birthday he wished for a chocolate and raspberry cake. We found a recipe for a fancy multi-layered chocolate cake with raspberry mousse. It took Eric and Adrian half the day to make it. Totally worth it, in my opinion: it was delicious.

Cyclamens are like magic.

I give up on watering them during summer. Even in winter they are thirsty things, needing near-daily watering. In the hot sun and the dry air of the summer, it’s hopeless to try and keep them watered and alive. So they wither down to dead-looking lumps.

And then suddenly they decide that the world is now in a liveable state again and send out new shoots. That’s when I bring them back to the kitchen from their exile on the living room’s shadiest windowsill, and start watering them again.

The air fryer; Happy Socks with food motifs; a scout knife; Japanese sweets.

Birthday coming up tomorrow.

That giant, IKEA-wrapped gift at the bottom is an air fryer. Adrian and Eric both like kitchen machines – pasta maker, ice cream machine, dough kneader… Adrian has been talking about an air fryer for months now. I think it’s due to all the ads on YouTube. It’s a bit of an odd birthday present for an 11-year-old, and really a present to the whole family rather than just him, but I know for sure that he’s the one who’s going to be most excited about it.

1.

I am amazed at how close these three yellow things are in hue. The tights and the sock yarn and the shoes could have clashed – one slightly warmer, the other slightly cooler, the third one shifting towards green – but they don’t. I once heard or read somewhere that the fashion industry “agrees” on current colours to some extent, so that consumers can match the clothes you buy from one store with accessories from another. I wonder how true that is. It sure looks like it.

Except I very much doubt that lady who made my hand-dyed sock yarn has any kind of connection to the fashion industry. Although of course she has to buy her dyes from somewhere, and the textile dye manufacturers might of course adapt their offerings to fashion industry standards.

My tights are several years old by now, far from the peak of this year’s fashion. But perhaps these colour standards are more stable than fashion in general. The industry standard for “mustard yellow” could be more or less set in stone, who knows.

2.

The new shoes are so close to perfection. Soft leather in a beautiful colour, great fit, flexible soles with a good grip. After trying them on, I went ahead and ordered two more pairs of them. If you find a good pair of shoes, hold on to them, because fashion is fickle and you can be very sure you can’t buy the same thing two years from now!

Then I wore them for a slightly longer walk and found out that the perfect shoes were not perfect after all. They turned out to have a lining that doesn’t breathe well and makes my feet hot and sweaty. So those two extra pairs will go right back as soon as they arrive. Sad.