Adrian has rediscovered Pokemon Go – I think it’s because some of his friends are playing. I quit a while ago (a year? one and a half?) and don’t intend to pick it up again; it turned out to be one of those things that I have difficulty doing in moderation so it was easier to just quit. Eric still plays some, too. Adrian doesn’t care enough to go out specifically for Pokemons on his own, but the game is enough to make him come with me when I go grocery shopping in the afternoon.

It was too hot to even go swimming during the day, other than a few dips in the kids’ inflatable pool. Ingrid and I went swimming at night instead, some time past 10 pm. The grassy field at Maltesholmsbadet was far from empty, but there were only a very few people in the water.

It’s hot outside and inside. The mornings are OK but from lunchtime onwards the heat becomes unpleasant. It’s 28°C in the shade.

Working is difficult; my brain turns into porridge in this heat and I just have no energy.

I actually took a break after a few hours of working for a trip to Kyrksjön with Ingrid.

One more day to survive and then I’ll go on vacation and can just hang around and do nothing during the hottest hours.

One of the neighbourhood cats is thirsty, and has discovered that there is water in our pool. Several times now I’ve seen it jump up on the pool edge to drink. Its thirst has got to be pretty bad if the pool water – which is clean for a pool, but chlorinated and not sparkling fresh – is the best it can get.

I don’t like this much. I worry that the cat will slip and fall in and won’t be able to get out. At first I also worried that its claws would puncture the pool edge, which is made of rubber and already has a few (non-cat-related) leaks that we’ve patched. But if it hasn’t done so yet, it’s probably not going to, and in any case, we could probably patch those holes, too.

I’m also impressed that it found the water. It must have smelled the water with enough precision to realize that jumping up on that blue/gray thing would help it reach the invisible water.

Anyway, I bought a bowl for the cat – and for any other thirsty cats or creatures. I forgot to fill it up since the weekend, though, and it was mostly empty today, so I found the cat back at the pool. Now I’ve filled up the bowl again.

If you have an outdoors cat, make sure you provide it with water during the day, and preferably in a shaded place!

We played Cluedo.

The first round went quickly so we played a second round. In this round, all of us realized at about the same time that something was wrong. Just as Ingrid was saying “hm, that doesn’t add up” and Eric commented that he must have made a mistake in his note-taking, I was realizing that my notes didn’t allow for anyone to be the murderer. Somehow we had put two place cards and one murder weapon in the envelope (instead of one place, one murderer and one weapon).

Yesterday was really hot. The wooden deck gets so hot in the sun that it hurts my soles.

Cleaning the basement is an excellent activity for overly hot days! Our basement is pleasantly cool even on the hottest days – and it really needs some cleaning. Stuff just magically accumulates until it fills all available space.

Eric and I sorted through some of that stuff yesterday, throwing out all kinds of unused junk and organizing the things that we kept.

Among other things we rediscovered this pair of wooden stilts that haven’t been used for some years. They’re much more use out in the garden than in a corner of the basement.

Looking through yesterday’s photos, I realized that I was barely present in them, and then only as a small white figure in the distance.

Today I put on my Midsummer dress and my summer hat and took some self-portraits under the cherry tree.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

Ingrid wanted to recreate the pose of the lady on the packaging of this inflatable donut. It looked quite uncomfortable at first – the lady chose a pose where the donut’s hard plastic handles, invisible in the photo, end up right behind her back and under her legs. It turned out to be not quite that bad, but not particularly comfortable either – that top arm has no support at all.

A few close-ups of the mossy ex-roof of the playhouse.