Eric made stracciatella ice cream.

Lots and lots of rain all day. On the plus side: no need to water the new bushes.

It is summer and it sometimes rains a bit and people walk in and out with their bare feet.

This year’s summer party at work took place remotely on Google Meet. I enjoyed it more than I had expected.

First a tretton37 mixologist led us through making fizzy summer cocktails. I replaced this with bubbly pink lemonade even though there was a non-alcoholic option because it sounded like more work than it was worth, just with buying all the ingredients, but this was a lot of fun just to watch, as TV or something. I have some hilariously funny and entertaining colleagues.

Then we had a quiz on Kahoot while chit-chatting in the Google Meet. I made it into top 5 (out of 80+) for a while and for a moment even reached second place, but the last 10 questions for double points were all music-related and by the end I wasn’t even in the top 10.

The party ended with a live streamed concert of covers of rock classics with song and two acoustic guitars. Live streamed concerts are not like the real thing, but when I’ve met the people in real life before, it’s almost like the real thing. And yet again I was super impressed with what talented colleagues I have.

Every time I make shakshouka, I struggle with getting all the eggs to the right degree of doneness. Very often I end up with some eggs almost hard-boiled while others still have runny whites. I guess it’s the time it takes to get them all into the stew. By the time I crack the last one into its place, the first one has probably had a full minute to cook.

Today I thought I would do something clever. I cracked all six eggs in advance into six cups so that I could then get them all into the tomato sauce really quickly. This way, I thought, they would all start cooking at almost the same time and be done at the same time.

And it made no bloody difference whatsoever. Again two of the eggs were well done while two others were still completely runny! I have no idea why they behave so annoyingly or what to do about it. It’s not like some are closer to the middle and get more heat.

For barely a week of magnificently blossoming cherry trees, we get weeks and weeks of mess afterwards. First there are the petals. Then the husks and stalks of the blossoms themselves. It literally takes weeks for the trees to shed them all. On the stairs they don’t matter so much, but the trees also shed this chaff on the deck and the furniture there. Every time I go out to sit on the deck, I keep having to brush the chair seat first. (And next we’ll have the green failed berries falling – and then of course the fallen cherries themselves.)

Still totally worth it, though. And better than pine needles.

I love sitting in the living room with the door open towards the garden early in the morning, when the air is still cool and the grass is still wet with dew, hearing the birds sing and smelling the fresh, green smell of morning.

The presentation I promised to do is happening on Wednesday. I did start preparing in good time and actually have most of it figured out. As I was working on it, I came to realize that for this topic it would make most sense to just skip all the usual Powerpoint slides and just write code, live, on screen, during the session. Which I have never done before, so I can’t just wing it the way I normally tend to do with presentations. I can’t even really estimate how much coding I can fit into one hour. So here I am, spending my Sunday afternoon talking to myself while writing the same code for the third time now.

If you want to see me do this live on Wednesday, here’s the link: Massaging MongoDB data.

Adrian and one of his friends, each with a phone in their hands. Well, they are outdoors…

I really should mow the lawn, I guess. I don’t mind the way it looks, but it’s not very inviting to walk on like this.

But I can mostly manage to make myself do two or maybe three chores per day on weekends (apart from the basics like making sure everyone is fed) and nothing at all on weekdays, and the lawn has not made it into the top three, so I guess that’s not happening yet.