Neon red markings have appeared on the asphalt on our street. It looks like someone might be planning to fill in some of the potholes and worn-out places in the road. But it also looks like they are for some reason planning to do so with some of the holes, while leaving others. They also seem to be quite intent on making the patches as small as possible. I’m a bit baffled.

Adrian is doing his homework. There’s a chapter from a book to read out loud, and a handful of questions about that chapter to answer in writing.

This is not his favourite pastime. He’s already halfway somewhere else, mentally as well as bodily.

Cleaning day at Spånga scout group. I had signed up some time ago but didn’t have much energy for the more interesting tasks so I cleaned and defrosted the fridge and freezer, and hacked away weeds in the front yard.

Cinnamon bun day is one of those made-up holidays introduced by some marketing firm or industry body that I find rather ridiculous. But whatever, home made cinnamon buns are delicious!

Ingrid has gone from cooking dinner once a week to cooking dinner two or three times every week, plus occasionally baking. She’s passed that threshold beyond which cooking feels easy rather than scary. She can feel confident about picking up a new recipe and following it, or even just making something up without a recipe.

It’s October, and it’s getting cold both outside and inside. We’re stingy with the heating and just wear more socks and fleece jackets to keep warm.

And slippers. I just took down the box with slippers from the top shelf. It’s time.

Three-legged man meeting a cow.

I also made a velvet worm (having recently watched the jungle episode of Our Planet) and something that might have been an ammonia molecule.

Adrian loves chestnuts. He often walks around with all his jacket pockets full of chestnuts. Literally dozens of them so the jacket is heavy to lift.

It’s peak chestnut season right now, and on top of that today was very windy, so there were extra many chestnuts to be picked. Adrian emptied his pockets into a bowl and we made chestnut animals.

P.S.
I managed to stab myself in the hand with an awl when I was trying to make a hole in a chestnut. The darn thing split in two and the awl just went right through. It made just a small hole that barely bled. But the day after I could barely move my finger. I must have caused bleeding or swelling in some tendon sheath or something. From time to thime I had to use my other hand to move the finger into a suitable position. Once it was in position, though, it worked as well as ever – I had no trouble holding on to heavy objects in the gym. I kept exercising it, assuming that the usual advice applies – gentle exercise is a better cure than rest – and it worked normally again in another day or so.

It’s Monday, which means it’s me and Adrian cooking dinner together, and him setting the direction.

One thing that Adrian likes in his food, and that I’m gradually also coming to like, is not peeling the root vegetables. I think part of it might be convenience, but he says he prefers the taste of potatoes cooked in their skins, and of unpeeled carrots. Even when he isn’t the one doing the peeling, he asks me if I could not peel the potatoes. He also says that broccoli stems taste better than the florets.

I can’t feel much of a difference in flavour, to be honest, but it definitely saves time, so I rarely peel carrots or potatoes nowadays. Roast potatoes are great with skins on. I even tried making rårakor – they’re sort of like flat, thin hash browns or rösti – without peeling the potatoes before grating them and it worked surprisingly well.

Something that felt so natural and obvious for so many years, even decades – of course one peels one’s potatoes! – was just an arbitrary habit, that I did just because I was taught to do it.

Sorting through all those boxes of books we brought up yesterday.

Quite a lot of them we will shelve because we expect to read or browse them some time in the future.

Many more books we will give away, because realistically – given how many books there are in the world – we do not think we will read them again. They may be good, I may have enjoyed and valued them at one point, but if I wanted to read something, I wouldn’t choose to read any of these again.

A very few books we will put back in a box in the basement, such as one phone catalogue, just to show that these things used to exist.

And some books are actually so outdated and useless that there is no point trying to give them away. Old programming books, for example. Those will go straight into recycling.

The book in the photo, about Visual Basic 6.0, was one of my first programming books. It was a big purchase at the time, and I remember working through it. I came to programming from the scripting world, from Excel macros and VBA scripts. I remember struggling with the concept of “objects” in object-oriented programming and trying to understand what the meaning and the point of them was. I remember a friend (an online friend) describing a “stopwatch” object for me, and a lightbulb moment when I got his point.

I considered keeping this book, out of pure nostalgia. But what would I ever do with it? Who would open it, who would want to look inside?

When I was a child, I spent hours reading old science magazines, and old books about explorers and natural wonders and so on. Today’s children don’t do that, and never will. There is so much else to entertain them and keep them busy. And myself as well.

We packed away most of our books when we moved around the rooms and refinished the floors this summer. Now we’re bringing them out again. And also boxes and more boxes of more books that have been in the basement for about ten years, since we last went through a similar exercise. In total I counted 47 boxes of books.

At that time I thought we gave away a lot of books. But we still chose to keep many that we valued and liked but didn’t actively read or use. Dictionaries, reference works, coffee table books, books we had read and didn’t plan to read again soon.

During these past ten years, many of those books have been made entirely obsolete by the internet. Short of an apocalypse that permanently takes down the whole internet, I cannot imagine a situation where I would go to a physical dictionary to look up the meaning of a word, or an art lexicon to look up a term. If I want to get a quick biography of a composer, I use Wikipedia and not a book. If I want to see an example of Monet’s work, I find it on the internet. If I want to better understand a mathematical formula, I google for a graphical explanation.

Many of these books we will cull and try to give away. But I suspect they may end up in the trash instead. Who in this day and age would be interested in buying them?

Adrian carving stick figures. (There’s a tiny face carved into that stick.)