I’m waiting for the yarn for my cardigan. Meanwhile I gave my restless hands a pair of socks to knit for Christmas.

I didn’t take a photo today, apart from the phone selfie for the workout challenge. Just forgot.

This photo is from when I was preparing for my hike a few weeks ago. These are my dinner baggies. I measured and packed the ingredients for each meal separately in advance to make things as easy as possible. When I was out walking and wanted a meal, all I needed to do was to pick a baggie and cook its contents. The kitchen looked a bit like a drug lab, with rows of little plastic bags on the table…

Breakfast is easy. Always porridge for breakfast on a hike. I make my own grain mix for porridge – about half rolled oats and the other half is a mixture of spelt, rye, flax seeds, and wheat bran. There’s a big box of it in the pantry; for the hike all I did was measure and bag it.

Now I think I’ve found the perfect hiking dinner recipe, so dinner will be almost as easy going forward.

0.75 dl of grains
0.75 dl of lentils
~30 g of dried vegetables

Pick any kind of grain that cooks in about 10 to 20 minutes, and combine it with any kind of lentils that cooks in about the same time. It doesn’t matter too much if one of them ends up slightly overcooked. Add vegetables. I prioritized convenience this time and used a ready-made mix of dried “Swedish vegetables” from Friluftsmat.

I made three dinners, all following the same basic recipe but with different details. Cous cous, wheat grain, oat grain; red lentils, puy lentils, black (beluga) lentils. And when it was time to cook them, I added curry powder to one but used bouillon powder to season another, so they ended up tasting like completely different dishes.

I’m very happy with this solution. Great results with very little effort!

A friend/neighbour found out about our woeful lack of pumpkin carving and generously gave us one of their pumpkins. It had done its Halloween duty already, but been painted rather than carved. So Adrian turned the other side and gave it a second life.

Usually I also carve, but this time with my hands free I could focus on photography.

Another swatch ahead of the planned new cardigan. I’ve decided on a yarn combination as well as a pattern. Now comes the hardest part: calculating gauge and adjusting all the stitch counts. I’m mentally already prepared for having to start, then rip it up and start over because the sizing will be off. Probably more than once. No matter how much I measure and calculate, reality always turns out different.

It’s leaf raking season.

Our three cherry trees dominate the garden in all ways, including in leaf production.

When we moved in I thought of them as two trees and a young one. In the 10+ years we’ve been here, the young one has doubled in height and can no longer be discounted. Initially I found it superfluous – how many cherry trees does one need in a garden, anyway? But when the old one in front of the house lost several large roots and branches (when we had to replace the incoming water pipe) I realized that it won’t last forever, and it’s not a bad thing to have another tree in reserve. Especially when it’s there for free, and all we have to do is rake the leaves away.

I’ve always suspected that the young one has grown from a root sucker from the other tree in front of the house. I’m pretty sure the previous folks living here didn’t intentionally plant it; they didn’t plant anything, apart from a badly planned hedge. But now the large tree has dropped all of its leaves, while the young one still has nearly all of its leaves, so they seem quite independent of each other after all. I would have expected them to be more co-ordinated if they shared part of the root system. But that’s just my naïve intuition, thinking of their roots as akin to a network of blood vessels. They could of course be connected anyway but just not signal each other that much.

The amount of leaves these trees produce is astounding. The tree is still full of leaves, but somehow it’s already managed to cover all the ground beneath it.

Trying to decide on the right yarn or yarns for my cardigan.

Left to right: Rauma Inca Alpakka (100% alpaca), Rauma Finull (100% wool), Sandnes Tynn Silk Mohair (57% mohair, 15% wool, 28% silk).

I made a swatch with the wool and mohair together, with a few different needle sizes. Then another with the wool on its own. I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of them. The wool and mohair combo was a bit too thick. The wool on its own – too scratchy. (At first when knitting with the wool and mohair together, I started wondering if the mohair made any difference at all. It’s so thin, doesn’t it get lost among all the wool? Feeling the two side by side removed all doubt.)

Maybe I should have tried some merino wool after all… When I felt the merino yarns in the shop, they all felt too smooth and bland, so I didn’t buy any. But perhaps it would have worked out together with the mohair?

Today I went and bought a ball of alpaca yarn and knitted yet another swatch with alpaca + mohair, and then one more with some leftover alpaca yarn from the green cardigan, again together with the mohair.

The alpaca/mohair combination is a clear winner. Softer than lambswool, fluffier than merino – so lovely to touch!

And in the photo it all just looks black.

I woke up to a picturesque foggy morning.

That’s nothing uncommon, especially this time of the year. I’ve got numerous photos of foggy mornings.

What’s less common is the fact that the fog never lifted or even thinned. Even in the middle of the day, I could barely see the houses closest to us, and nothing at all of the houses behind them.

In the afternoon the fog got even thicker. I cycled to Vällingby and back for some errands, and kept stopping to take photos. In some places it was like the world ended a hundred metres from me.

When it got dark and street lights turned on, the more distant parts of the world became visible again, but in a rather spooky manner.

How fitting it would have been if today was tomorrow and Halloween.

Today I forced myself to get out of the house and cycle to a yarn shop on Söder. (I have enough flex hours accumulated that I can easily take half a day off when I want to.)

I want to knit another cardigan, so I need yarn. Sock yarn I can buy on the internet but a cardigan is a larger investment. I want to see the yarn up close and touch it before buying.

I’m planning to knit a black cardigan. Black. Unimaginative and perhaps a bit boring, yes. When I’m wearing a colourful skirt or a patterned dress, the rest of the outfit sometimes has to take a step back.

The yarn shop Litet Nystan was full of lovely yarns. The ones that my eyes and hands kept returning to were the colourful, variegated, hand-dyed ones. I will have to find a project for these, after the black cardigan.

Among the black yarns I couldn’t find any that quite felt like what I had in mind. The merino wools were too smooth and bland; the plain Swedish and Norwegian wools too thick and not soft enough. I came home with a wool yarn and a mohair blend that, when combined, will hopefully work out. The wool will provide thickness and body and the mohair will soften it.

I had a restaurant lunch (somewhat disappointing) and bought some mini Sarah Bernhardt cakes for myself, before spending almost an hour in the yarn shop and then cycling back home. By the time I was unlocking my bike again to head home, it was twilight.

It felt good to get out of the house and see and do something new. I needed this.

For the past two weeks – or maybe more like three – I’ve been feeling tired and dull and joyless. I don’t feel like doing any of the tasks I normally enjoy. Not reading, not working, not going out, not exercising. I don’t know if it’s due to the shortening, darkening days, or the lack of anything actually happening in my life, or something else.

I can push myself to do the low-effort tasks: work, buy groceries, cook dinner. But workouts are more of a struggle. The smallest excuse is enough to not do it. “I’m in the middle of this coding task… and oh look, now it’s too late.” Last week I only worked out once.

It didn’t take long before I started feeling the results. Less than a week, in fact. My back gets stiff and achy. My hip joints pop and crack. Sitting in the sofa became uncomfortable; I sit on the floor in front of the sofa and lean on it instead.

This week I’ve pushed myself to work out every day, even though it still feels 100% a chore. I’ve set 20 minutes of strength training as the absolute minimum. After every single exercise I think: “Are we done yet? Can I go back to doing nothing now?” but the clock says no.

But the effect was immediate. I can lie down in bed comfortably again without tossing and turning to find a good position for my back. Well worth 20 minutes of daily effort.

The whitebeam and the cherry in front of the house are both clad in the most brilliant, luminous autumn colours.