With my world so shrunken and small these days, I’m glad that Spånga looks so nice, with the young cherry trees and the seasonal tubs of flowers.

It’s been hot for a week at least, and it’s still hot, and not getting any cooler. 27°C in the shade in the middle of the day. Shades down, windows open, and still I’m hot and sticky.

I’m not a big fan of fans (ha). I don’t like the noise, and the constant breeze makes my eyes dry and itchy. But today I gave up and moved our big fan to my home office. It was the only way I could get any work done.

I haven’t done any proper hiking for almost a year. No ski tour in the spring, no summer hiking holiday with the family… and an autumn hike in the Swedish fells, like what I’ve done the past few years, is not going to happen either. Staying in small huts, cheek by jowl with strangers (and new strangers every night) does not sound like a good idea at all in the current coronavirus circumstances.

I guess I’ll have to figure out some other kind of hiking this year, without any huts and such. And for that I’ll need a tent. We have a tent but it’s a stonking big four-season tent for three people – robust, but weighs a ton, and there is no way I’ll be lugging it around on a solo hike.

I cycled to the city today (which felt just like the old days) and went shopping for something more suitable: a three-season one-person tent. I looked at a few and even put up two of them on the shop floor. They had a special area for that, which I hadn’t expected but it does rather make sense. Tents are expensive and you don’t want to buy a pig in a poke.

Well, I tried putting up two of them. With one of them my efforts failed, and so did the shop assistant’s, even after watching an instruction video. It was an easy decision at that point to give up on that tent and buy the other one – Hilleberg’s Enan – which had a very clear instruction manual and was very easy to figure out. And made in Estonia, as a bonus.

It also happened to be the most expensive tent I looked at. It wasn’t my plan, but it also wasn’t a surprise. Cost and quality don’t always go strictly hand in hand, but when it comes to camping equipment, there is a strong relationship. The tent we have already is also a Hilleberg. We’ve had it for a long time and it’s still going strong. With care and repairs, I expect the new tent to last the rest of my hiking years.

Summer break is nearing its end and Adrian’s friends are returning to town, and he is most happy to spend time together with them again.

His friend F has been hanging out in our house a lot. They play Minecraft together, build Legos, or go out playing Pokemon Go. When they run out of other activities, they bake. Both of them really like chocolatey things so they have baked a mud cake, chocolate muffins, and now chocolate cookies.

Friend F has nearly no experience of doing anything in the kitchen. Adrian, compared to him, is a pro baker. Adrian supervises, follows the recipe, weighs and measures, while F enjoys the more physical acts of breaking the eggs and stirring the batter.

The aftermath of their baking sessions is usually an astonishing mess. After the mud cake (or maybe it was the muffins) they cleaned the kitchen, then I cleaned the kitchen one more time, and still I kept finding small splodges of batter in various parts of the kitchen for more than a day.

This time the mess was more contained but still quite impressive. One step in the recipe suggested working the dough together with your hands. The boys did this using all four of their hands. Before long they had more dough on their hands than in the bowl. They were wise enough to call for help at that point, and I managed to scrape most of the dough back into the bowl.

The cookies came out delicious.

Since Adrian’s and my last camping trip was not entirely satisfactory, we went out again today. Eric and Ingrid were less interested and stayed at home.

(I heard afterwards that they had spent the evening watching a horror movie. Mother-son bonding: camping in the woods. Father-daughter bonding: watching a horror movie.)

This time I made a focused effort to avoid crowds. Firstly, we’re going on a Friday evening instead of Saturday. Hopefully most people will do their camping during the weekend itself.

We went to the Paradiset nature reserve instead of Tyresta – it’s less well known and generally less crowded (though no harder to reach). Plus the rules about where you can put up your tent are less strict in Paradiset, so we won’t be all crowded into a single small spot. And since we’re not actually putting up a tent nor making a fire, we could technically stop and sleep just about anywhere we like!

We got a late start and didn’t get to Paradiset until close to half past six in the evening, so we kept the walking to a minimum and aimed for the east side of lake Trehörningen. It’s a lovely little lake with pleasant views and evening sun. There were some tents there but, to my relief, no big crowds and no loud groups.

We picked a flattish spot off to one side and set up camp.

First things first. Bathing! The day was hot and even though we had walked no more than maybe a kilometre and a half, we needed cooling. The lake water was wonderful – cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough so that I could swim without getting cold. The surface layer was warmer than I remember swimming pools being. I swam a few turns back and forth while Adrian splashed near the shore.

When we were done bathing it was quite late already and we had a lot left to do. Get the hammock up for Adrian, cook dinner, eat… It still takes me a while to get the hammock properly adjusted. After dinner it was bedtime for Adrian, while I stayed up reading for a while.

Now that nearly two months have passed since midsummer, it actually gets properly dark at night so you can see the stars. I thought I’d lie there and look at them but I could only see a very small patch of the sky so it stopped being interesting quite quickly.

Ingrid has gotten her sleep patterns quite turned around during the summer. She regularly stays up until two in the morning (or something like that, I don’t really know, that’s well past my bedtime!) and then sleeps until two in the afternoon. Sometimes I go to check on her in the afternoon just to make sure she’s still alive and well, because I cannot imagine how it can be possible to sleep that late. Apparently it is quite possible.

I tried to photograph the bees and bumblebees in my summer flowers but they were uncooperative and wouldn’t stay still.

My second day back at work.

I realize now that I need to start thinking about lunches in advance again. During the summer someone has usually just ambled off to the supermarket when lunchtime approaches, and cooked something. But if I want to get a reasonable amount of work done during the day, I can’t take time for that every single day.

Today I fortunately found some odds and ends in the fridge. One half Mexican-inspired sweetcorn soup and one half Asian-inspired noodle soup plus a handful of roast cauliflower actually made a surprisingly good combination.

The workday was dull, both yesterday and today. The people on the business side of the team are still on vacation and one of the developers has been off sick so it felt rather lonely. And there is nothing interesting ahead of me in the backlog, only boring tasks. I had real trouble focusing and finding the energy to get anything done.

Vacation is over and I am back at work in my home office. And working on re-establishing a healthy, sustainable everyday routine.

Eric recently saw a kettlebell at a sports store! We seem to be past the worst of the quarantine shortage of weights. There was exactly one kettlebell in the whole store, and at 24 kg, it just happened to be the perfect weight for me. I’m not going to build up a whole home gym (no room for it) and I intend to make do with just the one weight for the foreseeable future. 24 kg is usable for squats and lifts as well as swings. I’m glad this one and only kettlebell was green and not pink, for example.

In this fine weather, I do my workout out on the grass. The grass feels nice, warm, firm without being hard like a floor, and wonderfully grippy for bare feet. I’ve always done my workouts barefoot and while bare feet are nicer than shoes in almost all ways, it can be harder to get a good grip on smooth gym floors for things like side plank variations. The slightly bumpy ground here in the garden is perfect.

On the flip side, grass is itchy to lie on with a bare neck and shoulders, or when I get my face too close to it. But this view during my hip lifts is pretty darn nice.

In parts of our garden, digging around in the soil is guaranteed lead to bits of old bricks, roofing tiles, crockery and glass. In fact in some parts that kind of junk wasn’t even hidden in the soil but lying right on the surface, but I cleared those areas as soon as possible to make the garden safe for bare feet. For years we made sure to always wear shoes on the slope of weeds. But there’s a lot of ground I haven’t touched, so there’s plenty more junk still buried here.

Out of curiosity, I saved some of the more interesting-looking pieces of junk I unearthed while I was planting bushes behind the house this summer. They’ve been lying in a bucket, waiting for my attention, which they got today.

I’m surprised at the sheer number of different designs I find. It’s not like someone has thrown out a single plate or a cup in their compost heap – there are pieces of dozens of different items.

Most are hard to date. I wish I knew an expert in vintage and antique ceramics!

The brown little bottle was easy to identify because it has a logo. Rulles is a maker of liquer essences, still exists, and their website has a small photo archive.

I found pieces of one or more plates with blue and white decorations in a Chinese style…

… as well as pieces of other blue and white crockery.

A lovely plate with a green design of flowering branches…

… and a strikingly ugly design that is apparently suppose to invoke an impression of China again.

Plenty of chunks of plain white plates – more than one because of differences in thickness and curvature.

An item in unglazed earthenware, perhaps a flowerpot.

Also the head and torso of a small plastic doll, a little bit larger than a matchbox, slightly creepy.