A sunny and lovely day today. I did my workout out on the deck, and had lunch there afterwards as well, with a thick cardigan on.

This time of the year, the sun doesn’t clear the cherry tree even in the middle of the day. Only small patches of sunshine peeking through its branches reach the deck, and the shadows are long.

That rain I avoided? Ingrid, poor girl, had a scout hike this weekend and got all of it dumped on her. She said it had rained non-stop from eight o’clock on Friday night, to twelve noon on Saturday. Ingrid is a third-year “adventurer” (as her age group is called) and she and her friends had managed it reasonably well, but the first-yearers had been quite dejected. Fortunately they got sunshine on Sunday, so the hike ended on a better note.

Now our deck is full of drying camping gear, because just about everything she used was soaked.

Ingrid says she herself was dry and warm and got a reasonable amount of sleep. But she was completely exhausted after the hike, to the point of sickness. Her head aches. Her entire body aches. She’s flushed and hot and cold at the same time. I can see from just looking at her that she is not well. Had I not known about the hike, I would have been certain that she’s coming down with something.

I valued my creature comforts too much to go to the photo meetup yesterday, but I made up for it today. One of the most valuable parts of a meetup is that someone has scouted out a great location – and I don’t need to be there on the day in order to use that! So I just drove to the same place today on my own.

Stendörren turned out to be a popular and much-photographed nature reserve right on the sea coast. A very civilized kind of nature reserve, with amenities everywhere – from bridges and walkways to loos and benches and picnic tables. The bridges and walkways are one of the main draws of this place: they take you to small islets just off the mainland, so you can get that archipelago experience without a boat.

Adrian would have liked this place, I think. It’s the kind of place where walking feels more like exploring. Any time you turn a corner, there’s something new. Even the largest islets are so small you can circle them in half an hour.

Off the rocky coast in one spot I found a whole bunch of jellyfish of all sizes. The smallest would have fit in the palm of my hand; the largest ones were like dinner plates.

They were hard to photograph – the water was anything but clear, and a wobbly, semi-transparent jellyfish is hard to focus on.


The forest was full of large mushrooms, especially some kind of boletus-like ones. The largest ones were often lying in pieces – I guess their size and shape invites kicks. But I also found this lovely family of fly amanitas. With actual flies on them (in the last photo)!

I did not go to the photo meetup. Too unappealing.

Instead I picked the Japanese quince bush clean from all fruit. There was more than ever on the largest of the three bushes; some branches were chock-full. The others barely had any. I guess they are still young.

Not that we need much more quince than the 4 litres I picked! I spent two hours chopping and de-seeding and cleaning them. They’re small, and hard. And there are so. Many. Seeds. Everywhere. I actually gave up before I’d cleaned all the fruit and threw the smallest ones away.

Eric will be turning some of the fruit into marmalade. I love quince marmalade – it has been my favourite since I was a child (along with cherry jam).

The rest I asked him to candy. I bought some candied quince at the airport in Riga some years ago and both Adrian and I swooned over them until we ran out. Hopefully now we can recreate that treat.

Met some colleagues for banh mi and pétanque. It was nice to see some people.

Four teams met each other, two and two, and then swapped. Our team won the first round and was then annihilated in the second one, 13 to 1.

I cycled there and back. An hour each way – a good workout. I like cycling fast enough to work up a sweat, so I turned up in sporty trousers and a tank top. Thought I might feel underdressed, but with all the dust from the gravel, and the wiping of hands, the others in their somewhat dressier black trousers were soon looking far grimier than me.

Sometimes a day goes by and fades into evening and I realize I haven’t done a single photo-worthy thing. I have sat at my desk, behind my computer. I have worked out (yes!) and read a bit of the Economist while eating lunch. I have cooked and eaten dinner. That’s it.

In the evening it is dark outside and I cannot take photos of anything in the garden. It is dark inside as well, and the rest of the family are all sitting in their dim corners of the house.

Occasionally this is enough to give me a gentle kick and make me do something physical that I can take a photo of. Which is backwards in a way – doing things just so I get a photo – but since these are things that I’ve been wanting to do anyway and simply procrastinating about, it’s not so backwards after all. The photo is just an odd kind of motivational carrot.

So this evening I darned a hole in a sock that has been waiting for my attention for a week or so.

It is sock darning season, because it is sock wearing season. The house usually starts getting cold enough for socks in the middle of the day around mid-September.

This fresh darning looks crisp and smart compared to the ones I did half a year ago. Almost too crisp, in fact: it doesn’t blend in. The older ones have become slightly felted by wear (even though the darning yarn is a wool mix rather than pure wool) and look a lot more cosy and natural.

It’s nearly always the spot under the big toe that wears out first on my indoor socks.

The hydrangeas are going purple all over now – not just the flowers but the leaves as well. It looks quite cool. I’m not sure if they’re normally supposed to do that, but they look healthy otherwise so I assume all is well.

I have been on a reading binge, neglecting just about everything I can neglect without feeling really, really bad about it – including workouts, blogging and laundry.

I still like paper books – old dog, new tricks, all that – but I am gradually getting more comfortable with the Kindle reader. It no longer feels like second best. Binge reading, for example, is an area where the Kindle beats paper books hands down. I saw a book recommendation, downloaded a sample, and bought the book within an hour. When I finished that book and wanted more, a few taps got me the next one, and then the next one after that. No searching, no waiting for days for a delivery.

The Kindle also handles better with one hand, for example when I’m reading lying down and need the other hand to support my head. Or with no hands at all, when I balance the book on my thighs because my hands are busy knitting. Some books don’t deserve my full attention but I still want to finish them. Can’t do that with a paper book. (Am I still “handling” the book when no hands are involved?)

I read differently with the Kindle.

It’s harder to skim backwards and forwards. With a paper book I can easily flip back a few chapters to look up some detail. I can usually remember roughly how far back that part was – how many centimetres back in the book. With the Kindle I have much less context about where I am. The e-reader can show some metrics for this – how many percent I’ve read, for example. But I would never have an intuitive feeling for how many percent or pages I’d have to scroll backwards to get back to something I’ve already read. So I’m less likely to do so.

Recently I turned those percentages off, anyway, so that they wouldn’t constantly remind me how much I have left of the book. You can’t do that with a physical book. The constantly diminishing amount of pages to read is always visible and tangible.

I’m more likely to re-read a page with the Kindle. Sometimes when the action is exciting and I just want to see what happens next, I only skim parts of the page. With the Kindle, I am more likely to notice this and read the page one more time, more slowly and carefully, before flipping to the next page. There’s nothing stopping me from doing the same with a paper book, but it just doesn’t happen. I think it might be because the Kindle page is less dense and contains less text, so one page is just the right amount of text to re-read. Paper book pages are denser and have too much text – re-reading an entire page would be too much.

When I’m a week behind with my blogging, as I am right now, catching up looks hard and blogging becomes a slightly icky task. I want blogging to be fun rather than icky, so I’ll leave the gap for now and catch up later. You’ll have to check below this post to see if and when I succeed.

Plus I now have a whole virtual pile of books that I want to review. The binge was most enjoyable but it’s a good thing that I ran out of books because otherwise I’d never get anything else done.

Spent my morning volunteering for the Spånga scout group, mending tents after the summer camp. There were more people than there was work so I spent more time waiting for something to do than actually doing something – which made the brief moments of mending that much more enjoyable.

It was a lovely sunny day so we went for a walk – from Maltesholm beach along the walkway to Kanaanbadet, then a break for some fika there, and back to Maltesholm through the forest.

The beach at Maltesholm used to be a pleasant one. Today the grassy slope was so full geese that there was barely room for any humans. They numbered in the hundreds. Bird poop everywhere.