Ingrid came down crying because of a sudden sharp pain in her foot. A minute later, clear signs of an insect bite appeared.

“Oh right, I’ve been having a lot of wasps in my room for the past few weeks, maybe it was one of those.”

Apparently this hadn’t struck Ingrid as significant enough to bring up, so she’s just been taking the wasps out as and when she spots them.

When Eric opened the side attic behind Ingrid’s desk, he was met by a whole bunch of wasps there. It seems we have a nest somewhere in the walls. Not for the first time – but them coming inside rather than going outside is a first.

The side attic is now closed off and all the gaps hopefully wasp-proofed. We’ll have to wait until the wasps all die for winter and then we can clean them out.

It’s peak chestnut season, and all of Adrian’s pockets and half of his school rucksack are filled with newly picked chestnuts. He just has to pick them all.

I have no more scarf to knit, so I picked up a long-paused crocheting project to fill the gap.

This started out as a travelling project because it’s small and lightweight and easily transportable. If I left it as such, it would take years to finish, now that there is nearly no travelling going on…

It goes fast because there’s so much air in it. It’s mostly holes, after all. I guess it’s time to start planning the next project right away.

We went to see her, one last time, even though we knew she was asleep much of the time and might not even wake up to notice our presence.

It felt oddly intimate to visit someone who is asleep.

She was there, and yet it was almost not her any more. She has always been alive and warm-hearted and vivacious, and this person here is so emphatically not, so how can it be her? This person was closer to being dead than to being her.

When we thought she had months to live, it was only weeks. When we thought it was days, it was just hours.

She died a few hours after we left. It does not seem real.

A raindrop, on a sweet pea tendril.

The scarf is finished, and it came out just as lovely as I had hoped and expected. This is one of my most successful knitting projects ever.

Now to wait for winter – and to look for a new project.

The cyclamen amazes me again with its ability to survive.

We have two that we keep in the kitchen window. They’re fussy plants and ideally want to be watered every day. As soon as we forget about them, their flowers wilt – I guess they sacrifice non-essential parts and prioritize survival. The kitchen window is the only place where we can be sure to pay frequent attention to them.

That window faces south, and in the summer it gets way too hot for cyclamens, so we have to move them to a shadier place. And there we promptly forget to water them, and they wilt and almost dry out and drop most of their leaves and flowers.

Autumn comes, the kitchen goes back to its shady self because the sun hides behind the neighbouring trees, and we bring the cyclamens back again. No matter how dead they look at that point, they always come back to life.

I haven’t been making much progress on digging for the planned plum tree. Somehow there’s always something else that I’d rather do. But today I did some digging instead of my lunchtime workout.

“Deadlift” in Swedish is called marklyft, “ground lift”. There was plenty of that here.

Next time I’ll have to start removing all those big rocks.

I’ve hit bedrock at the bottom. Again. But this time the hole is at least knee-deep, which should be enough for a plum tree.

I cycled to Solna and the pompously named Mall of Scandinavia.

All I needed was a few pairs of brown tights. In a normal year I would have stopped by a store near the office and it would have taken me ten minutes. Now it took over an hour.

But that hour of cycling was worth more than the tights themselves. The surroundings here are not so inspiring that I would go out to just cycle for an hour. Any excuse, any small errand that takes me away from Spånga, is a welcome one. Plus the route to Solna passes two lovely lakes.

Mid-afternoon on a Thursday is an excellent time for visiting a shopping mall. I saw a surprising number of people there, but MoS was still emptier than usual, which I liked very much quite apart from avoiding contagion.

Autumn colours are starting to come in. Some maples in the neighbourhood are fully red; others still green. The cherry trees are green, but the aronia and weigela bushes are bright red. These birchleaf spiraea are just on the cusp.