Adrian discovered a dead thrush in the garden. He found it a bit icky. My first thought was “I must get the camera”.

I’ve seen dead birds before; they’ve all looked very clean, soft and lovely – quite the opposite of icky. I often wish I could touch them, but with all the diseases they can spread, I’m going to follow recommendations and use gloves to put it in a plastic bag for disposal.

I didn’t see any flies around the bird, but wasps seemed to like it.

This scarf I’m knitting is very pleasant to knit, but I’m also discovering that it is entirely unforgiving. I make one teensy little mistake, and there is just no way to recover without the mistake being glaringly obvious. The pattern is so large, so regular, and so distinct that any deviation really stands out, like a streaker in the middle of a marching band. Sometimes I even notice the mistake nearly immediately but when I try to correct it, I make things worse instead, so I end up unravelling entire rows after all.

I picked cherries in July, and Eric picked more a few weeks later. A storm recently blew down most of what was left, up in the topmost branches that we cannot reach even with ladder and tools. (A rake can be very helpful for pulling down high branches.)

The tree had looked empty but still dropped enough berries to cover the lawn. Though they do no harm, walking on overripe cherries with bare feet is unpleasant. I like walking barefoot, so now I’ve picked the lawn clean.

Many of the cherries on the ground were mushy or had been pecked by birds, but others felt firm and smelled like raisins. Apparently the tree can yield sun-dried cherries, given sufficiently dry and sunny weather at this time of the year. I tried a few and they tasted great. I ended up eating quite a lot of them.

The main bread factory of Polarbröd burned down to the ground during the night between Sunday and Monday. They have another, smaller factory elsewhere, but that’s unlikely to produce enough for all of Sweden. Today in Coop the flatbread shelves were empty, save for one last package, which I bought.

We normally eat a lot of flatbread. Eric bakes most of our loaves and rolls, so the only kinds of bread we regularly buy are white bread for toasting (which I don’t care for but the rest of the family likes) and Polarbröd flatbreads of various kinds. The thin ones for wraps; the thicker, round ones for making sandwiches and mini-pizzas; Havretrippel because they’re the only bread with oats that I’ve found. Without all of these, life will be duller and less tasty. I hope Polarbröd gets started building a new factory very soon!

I had an hour of free time between finishing work and the start of a recruitment interview. I was going to just read, but fell asleep instead. And my throat feels scratchy. I guess I’ve caught some virus.

It’s disconcerting, to have to think about deathly pandemics and all sorts of potential long-term health damage for every little cough and sniffle.

I had bought a wonderful yarn at some point – a variegated Viking Nordlys. It is sold as a sock yarn, and that’s what I bought it for. But when I touched it, the yarn felt so soft and thin that I thought I’d wear right through it if I made it into socks. So I went looking for a new project for it.

There is a wonderful knitting site called Ravelry. Everything on Ravelry is indexed and linked to everything else – yarns to projects to patterns, and so on. Each pattern links to actual projects that actual people have made following that pattern – often you can see many varieties of a cardigan, which really helps to see what it could look like. And there are thousands upon thousands of patterns. It’s my first point of call when I am looking for ideas for knitting projects.

I looked for projects using the Nordlys yarn, found some, which sparked new ideas, and finally decided on this Icicle scarf.

Ordered the book (Nancy Marchant’s Knitting Fresh Brioche). Waited nearly two weeks for it to arrive. Opened it, and nearly gave up. The patterns looked very intimidating. The written instructions for this scarf cover over two full pages!

Still, I tried it out with some scrap yarn, and it turned out to be quite doable, as long as I paid close attention to what I was doing. As soon as I didn’t, I started making mistakes, and the only way to recover from a mistake in two-colour brioche is to rip up everything you did since the mistake, one stitch at a time.

After the first 20 rows or so, I started getting the hang of it. I put away the swatch and started on the real thing with my beautiful yarn. With some practice, the pattern doesn’t require quite that single-minded focus any more. I can see the pattern in the pattern, so to say, and understand it rather than just follow it mechanically. It’s actually quite fun to knit.

And just look at how beautifully the scarf is turning out! On the front, the orange/yellow/green yarn is like autumn leaves, with the light gray like a cloudy autumn sky peeking through the leaves, providing depth and contrast. The rear side is like the first day of winter, with the autumn leaves covered in hoarfrost.

Adrian, tired of all the washing and combing, decided to cut his hair short again. He looks equally sweet with or without the hair, perhaps a bit younger without? It took him a week to get used to seeing me without my hair, he says, so perhaps in a week’s time he will no longer look strange to me.

Restless yet not at all in the mood for working out, I went out and cycled during my lunch break instead. I had some minor errands on my list that I thought I could get done.

To Sundbyberg where I can buy fabric for a bag I want to sew? Or to Vällingby, where there is a variety of shops for my other errands?

I aimed for Vällingby, mentally complaining about the frustrating lack of fabric shops nearby. There is only the one in Sundbyberg, unless I want to go all the way to central Stockholm.

And then I realized – there is a Stadsmissionen thrift shop in Vällingby, which can totally count as a fabric shop, and even be better than the real thing. Every thrift shop in Stockholm has piles of curtains, pillowcases and tablecloths. More eco-friendly than buying new fabric, and a more varied choice, too. The tablecloth I bought is 100% linen, thick and soft – a much more luxurious fabric than I would otherwise have bought for this.

I can feel a twinge of reluctance to cut up a perfectly functional tablecloth. Maybe someone would have bought and used it as a tablecloth? But then again, I’m pretty sure that Stadsmissionen can’t sell all the donations they get and some of it ends up recycled. So if I cut up that tablecloth to make it into a bag, it’s still getting a good new life.

Last week, my first week back at work after vacation, was dull and slow. Half the team was still on vacation, and one of the two other developers was off sick, so I felt alone and isolated. I had to make a real effort to keep myself focused on work.

This week has been better. The team is back, we’re working together, talking to each other again.

And having meetings.

Remote meetings work very well when they’re small and tightly focused. But when we are six people in a meeting then inevitably some parts are more relevant to a part of the group and less so for others. In a face-to-face meeting, when others are talking about something that I am only peripherally involved in, I don’t lose focus much: I feel like I’m a part of the discussion just by being in the same room and looking at whoever is talking. But in a remote meeting, especially if I’m looking at a screen share rather than whoever is talking, my focus starts slipping and before long I am quite distracted, looking at code or browsing reddit or reading the news.

Giving myself something to do when I am passively listening helps a lot. A small distraction keeps worse distraction away. Crocheting works, and colouring. I keep my colouring books and pencils close at hand, in my desk drawer.

Adrian, ready to leave for the first day of the new school year.

Both the kids enjoyed their summer break but in the last few days they’ve been getting impatient to get back to school. The in-between time between summer and school that is neither one nor the other has made them restless.