All three four of my hobby projects were blocked due to lack of tools or materials.

The white knit dress: blocked because I ran out of mohair yarn.

The multicolour sweater (which I haven’t even posted about): blocked because I need a longer 2 mm cable needle.

The loose pocket: blocked because I need ribbon for the straps.

The yet-unstarted project of making stitch markers: blocked because I need flat pliers and plastic-coated jewellery wire. I knew I had some kind of jewellery wire in one of the hobby drawers, but it turned out to be not the right kind.

I found the situation almost stressful. Today’s shopping trip solved the first three (the needles were not photogenic enough to make it into the picture) and I’ve ordered jewellery wire as well.

The ribbon was a lucky find. I wandered into a fabric shop that I’ve only been to once before, and they had random spools of vintage ribbons on a shelf. This feels much nicer than the shiny polyester stuff that is mostly produced these days.

With the Rudebrant embroidery no longer at the front of the queue, I went back to my paused project of embellishing the brown cardigan. There were some conflicts of interest when I brought it out this morning, but Nysse agreed to be shuffled to the end that was already finished, so I could work on the incomplete parts.

The cardigan now has a simple design of red and green circles in a broad belt around the waist.

The embroidery isn’t there for adornment so much as it is for distraction and catching the eye – pulling attention away from the width of the hips, distracting from the awkward length, focusing on the waist instead. And it does a bang-up job of that. It’s amazing what a different immediate impression the cardigan leaves now. The value for effort ratio is awesome. I wish I had taken before and after photos of me wearing it.

Embroidering on very stretchy knitted fabric was a fun challenge. You can of course use a piece of stabilizer and then embroider on that as if the knit wasn’t a knit – like any industrial embroidered design on a t-shirt, for example. That’s what most sources seem to advise. I had no interest in smothering the fabric and pretending this isn’t a knit, especially with such a large design. I wanted stitching that would seem as if it belonged there.

The yarn is wool yarn in roughly the same weight that I used for the knitting. Stem stitch helped make it reasonably stretchy. I stitched in and between the knit stitches, making sure to not split the yarn, to further make the embroidery feel like a natural part of the cardigan.

I spent a fair amount of effort fastening the ends – I hope this holds up in washing.

A thing got messed up at work, through nobody’s fault. Or perhaps through the fault of Google and their crappy communication about their services. Anyway, it was broken and it needed to be fixed, and it was going to be several hours of tedious work of cloning and configuring databases, and manually recreating stuff that we already had in our original database but that Google wouldn’t let us move to the new database. And while that work was underway, nobody could use the test environment for anything, so doing this on Monday morning when people had demos scheduled and whatnot would have sucked even more. So here I am, working well past my normal hours on a Friday evening.

At least I have my knitting – the big one that I can no longer easily bring on my commute. And snacks. And a cat, although he is not visible here.

I will never voluntarily choose to use Google’s cloud service offering ever again.

The Rudebrant-inspired piece of embroidery is done. It came out roughly like I had imagined it. But I can also picture other ways I could have made it, and now I’m thinking of making another version of the same design.

It felt freeing to make something low-stakes like this. It won’t be framed and hung on a wall; it is not “for” anything. The only reason it exists is that I enjoyed making it.

(St. Johannes cemetery)

Adrian and Ingrid, playing Cuphead together on one of their Switches.

They speak Estonian to each other these days, when they’re here in the house. Not all the time, but a lot. Even when I’m not in the room; even in situations and about topics that take me by surprise. Like, how did they even get the vocabulary for that?

It makes me feel very warm and fuzzy feelings inside.

I found a lost card wallet in the street when I was on my way from the office to the tube station, right in the middle of the pavement. Bank card, driver’s license, everything. With a name and a date of birth, and the help of Sweden’s lax regulations about people’s personal information, I was able to find the person’s address online. It was roughly in the direction I would be going anyway, so I changed my travel plans slightly and headed that way. Meanwhile I tried to get hold of the person on social media. Found them on Facebook, sent a message, and got one back within ten minutes. They hadn’t even noticed the loss of the wallet. We agreed to meet up at the tube station nearest them, so that I could hand it back to them. I sent them this selfie so that they’d be able to find me. (I, of course, already had a photo of them, on their driver’s license.)

While I was away in London, the cherry trees dropped all their remaining leaves. Really, I could have raked them last weekend, if I had had time, but there was the crafts fair and then trip prep and a concert.

The leaves are well past the crisp and colourful stage, now all brown and wet and sticky. Still reasonably easy to rake together.

I missed my chance to mow the grass one last time when summer was over – the weather got wet before I got around to it – so now it lies flat. Other people may have manicured lawns; I have well-combed grass.

Had breakfast at Grounded again, even though a breakfast buffet was included in our hotel stay. The buffet was just like the hotel itself: clean, tidy, nothing wrong with it, but very much on the budget end of the scale. For a hotel room, I don’t mind that at all. All I want is a clean room in a safe building, with decent beds. The beds and pillows here were actually really good – many more expensive hotels opt for too-soft everything, and this place had nice, firm ones. But a low-budget breakfast, with the cheapest possible sliced bread and sandwich stuff, and only water and coffee to drink, no juice, is not for me. Even the boiled eggs somehow managed to taste really cheap. If the food isn’t appetizing, I struggle to make myself eat.

The rest of the morning we spent at the British Museum.

This time we hadn’t booked any tickets in advance, but had no trouble getting in.

There were quite a lot of people, but they were unevenly distributed. There might be a dense crowd in front of a popular exhibit one moment, only for them all to somehow disappear minutes later and leave us mostly on our own.

Just like at the NHM, we wandered wherever our fancy took us, and looked at whatever we felt like at that moment, without any particular focus. This meant a lot of old Egypt, but also the Parthenon marbles, Mesoamerica, Iron Age Britain, and China.

I have mixed feelings about the collections at the British Museum. On the one hand – amazement and gratefulness that we have all these unique, priceless artefacts from thousands of years ago. That they have been excavated and preserved and exhibited, and that we have learned so much from them. It’s mind-boggling, when I stop to think about it, that we have detailed records about an individual dead person from thousands of years ago, and we know who they where, what they did, how they died, what they were buried with, and why.

That we have examples of writing from five thousand years ago, and that we have been able to decipher it, and we know how much this merchant owed to that one, or what a mother was writing to their son. That the Rosetta stone was created, and survived, and could be used to decode Egyptian hieroglyphs.

On the other hand… the imperialism and ruthless plundering and the complete disregard for the wishes of the people whose history this is, that enabled this collection.

One could stay here for days and keep discovering more amazing things about the history of human civilization. We could only stay a few hours, though, since we had a flight to catch in the afternoon.

Harrods, V&A, Natural History Museum, food.

We started the day by checking off another food-related wish: an English breakfast, with hash browns, baked beans, mushrooms, sausages, etc., at Grounded. No black pudding, though. I wondered why that was, and realized later that it’s because the food at the café was all halal, and I don’t think you can make black pudding without pork blood.

I am not interested in any part of an English breakfast, really, so I had Eggs Florentine – I like poached eggs but never quite managed to get the hang of making, so whenever we have brunch at a restaurant (which happens maybe once or twice a year) I let them make me poached eggs.

The forecast promised more rain today than yesterday, even though the forecast has been much downgraded from the 18 mm that was promised for today just a week ago, so we had mostly indoors plans. First: a circuit of Harrods, for Adrian.

We had a bit of an awkward time to fill between Harrods and our early-afternoon slot at the Natural History Museum. (Timed tickets, again.) I took us to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Partly because of convenience – it’s right next door to the NHM – but also because it’s a lovely museum. There’s something for everyone there.

I’d be happy to wander through any and all parts of it, so I let Adrian’s interests guide us, while stopping to look whenever we ran into anything interesting on our way. We ambled past British decorative arts 1760–1900, then a bit of ironwork, to architecture. Down, a brief tour through the Cast Courts, and on to lunch.

Museum restaurants these days usually serve great food, having to compete for visitors’ attention against all sorts of other attractions. The lunch at the V&A café was surprisingly disappointing. The food in and of itself wasn’t bad, but nothing exciting either. The process of getting it was awkward, with flows of people crossing checkout queues, nowhere to rest your tray while queueing, and truly horribly noisy dining rooms. Sumptuous, yes, stylish, yes – but not at all pleasant. I guess it may have been nice a hundred and fifty years ago with half the number of tables, or something.

Adrian needed a top-up because his lunch portion wasn’t large enough, so he bought a cinnamon bun – which must have been the world’s worst cinnamon bun ever, for seven pounds – and we went out into the courtyard to rest our senses.

After a browse through the museum shop, we crossed the street to the Natural History Museum. Started with a tour through their garden, with a bronze cast of their famed Diplodocus skeleton (which was apparently technically challenging to make), surrounded with plants similar to what was around during the era of the Diplodocus.

Passed the impressive skeleton of a blue whale inside.

Instead we went to see the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, which had opened just two weeks earlier. It’s an annual exhibition, but I haven’t seen it since 2007.

I would have expected Adrian to want to see more skeletons and such, but he opted for geology. I don’t know if I’ve ever visited the crystals and minerals hall of the NHM. It was astoundingly expansive. Several metres of sulphur in various shapes, case after case of copper-base minerals… Crystals, gemstones, natural chunks of pure metallic gold, you name it.

For dinner today we made our way to Chinatown for dim sum. I was too tired to spend much time and energy on choosing a restaurant, so we just picked the first one that looked decent. It turned out to be, indeed, decent.