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.

One of our neighbours, two houses away, is a builder. He and his family moved in a couple of years ago and since then he’s transformed his house and garden so that it is barely recognizable. The facade of the house, which used to be dark brick, is now white plaster. Most of the ground in front of the house, which used to be grass, is now paved. I don’t know what he’s been doing behind the house, but there’s nearly always something going on.

His latest project involves removing a lot of rock. I guess he’s probably flattening out some part of the garden – the area around here is all rocky and hilly, and quite a lot of people seem to prefer flat gardens. (The garden of another of our neighbours is effectively a sunken den: a lot of earth and rock has been removed to make it as flat as possible, but of course they cannot do anything about the plots next to them, so part of their garden is now surrounded by steep rock walls.)

Last week he was blowing things up. Well, possibly not he himself, but there were explosions going on in the direction of his yard. When construction workers blow things up in Sweden, there’s a warning signal first (a series of short beeps for a minute or two), then a big bang, and then a longer beep to signal that they’re done. Those signals are a pretty good idea because otherwise I would probably have called the police upon hearing explosions in my neighbourhood.

This week he is removing the rock he blew up last week. He scoops up a pile of rock in a wheel loader, drives it to a large skip that stands in the crossing between us, and dumps it in the skip.

And it makes the most god-awful racket you can imagine. Picture a literal tonne of rock, if not more, hitting the metal bottom of a skip, and the sound then resonating through that skip, right outside the window of my bedroom-cum-office.

It’s not so much the loudness of it that bothers me – passing a jackhammer working in a street can be much louder – but the way it comes with no warning and just booms through the house, almost making me jump in my seat.

He’s been at it all day, at intervals. Sometimes an hour passes between two dumps, sometimes five or ten minutes. I hope he doesn’t have much more left.

After a frosty night, most of the summer flowers on the deck have died. A few hardy ones are still green and even flowering, especially the snapdragon, but most look bedraggled and sad.

Today I threw them out, not only to remove the dead brown plants from my view, but also to clear the deck. One autumn I left a flowerpot out for too long in late autumn and it left a pot-shaped patch of rot in the deck boards. You’d think that it would all be equally wet anyway, but apparently not. Or maybe it is all equally wet but the bottom of the pot made for a good, protected growing ground for microorganisms. Now I’m careful to move the pots occasionally in wet weather, and to remove them completely when the season is definitely over.

The thick tangle of roots filling most of the pots is pleasing to the eye, because it means they’ve grown well. Most pots looked like this. But there were a few where I could pull out a plant with no effort, leaving much of the soil still in the pot – their roots had barely grown since I planted them. It didn’t really come as a surprise, because the lack of growth in some of the plants was very obvious above ground as well.

Adrian had a small birthday party.

He’s been pondering for awhile now whether to have a party or not, and if yes, what kind? Now he decided to have a sleepover and Minecraft party with a few of his classmates.

He really is very undemanding when it comes to parties these days. All he asked for from us was pancakes for dinner. The rest he took care of himself, including messaging his friends to agree on times and get RSVPs.

They spent all afternoon playing Minecraft together. After the pancake dinner they went up to his room where they did I don’t know what.

For some reason they barely slept all night. A couple of his friends “couldn’t sleep” and also couldn’t shut up and let the others sleep. Still, they were surprisingly perky in the morning. After breakfast and some more gaming, they baked a mud cake together – Adrian’s favourite kind of cake.

In the evening he fell asleep on the sofa shortly after dinner. After I prodded him to move to his own bed, he slept like a log for nearly twelve hours.

I finished a jigsaw puzzle, only to find that I am missing a piece. Annoying. And it’s most probably my own fault, for not covering up the puzzle while the room was used for packing, unpacking and drying hiking equipment.

Apparently pétanque is the go-to solution for corporate team activities in Stockholm.

This time we were at Boulebar Rådhuset, and we got the craziest pétanque court I’ve ever played on. The gravel layer was thin, and there was a hill in the middle of the court. So all our balls rolled off the hill in crazy, unpredictable directions. And when a ball landed on the hill, it was not with a thud but with a sharp crack, sometimes accompanied by sparks, and flew off in a random direction – as if it hit a large rock instead of gravel.

It was frustrating at first, but then we gave up all pretensions to skill and serious play, rechristened our activity to chaos pétanque and just went with the flow.

Spånga scout group has an “education week” every October, with nightly sessions on a variety of topics. I’ve never participated in the past, but this year – starved for experiences outside the home – I signed up for three sessions. (Hence also the slower pace of posting here.)

Two of the sessions were about wood carving. On Monday we went through the basics and practised a few techniques. Today we were handed fresh birch logs, axes and knives and let loose to carve anything we wanted.

You can’t do much in two hours, but it’s enough for a basic wooden spoon, which is what several other participants made. Or a butter knife, which is what I chose. A butter knife is a perfect first project because you can do it with just a simple carving knife, without any special tools.

The entire process was a lot of fun. Splitting the log again and again until I was left with thin enough pieces; picking a piece that fit the image in my head; using the axe to cut it roughly to shape. But the best part was the finest, slowest carving, carefully guiding the back of the knife with my thumb to cut off a small sliver to make the shape just so. I haven’t carved any actual object before, but I grew up with sharpening pencils “by hand”, using a knife rather than a sharpener. Having done that for decades, that basic carving grip is very familiar to my hands.

The timing was perfect, because I had just been thinking that we could do with one or two new butter knives in our kitchen. Butter knives actually wear out with time. One thinks of wood as a durable material, especially if it is only used on such soft things as butter and bread. But the blades do get smaller and smaller until the knives come to resemble sticks more than butter knives.

I’ll leave this one in its rustic state, with all the cuts visible, rather than sanding and polishing it. I like seeing the traces of my work.