Overwatch, I believe.

Ingrid tells me that playing (computer) games together is the main way for her and her friends to spend time together. Each one in their own home, but nevertheless together through voice chat.

There’s a whole group of them and someone is nearly always online, so Ingrid is struggling with her FOMO and isn’t entirely happy with her screen time limits. (I’m very glad there are built-in controls for this in Windows so I don’t have to be the bad guy every night.) “Some of them are only online before dinner, and some of them are only online after dinner, so if I want to talk to them all, I need to play before and after dinner” – not quite making the connection there.

Our friendly neighbourhood wasp likes scrambled eggs, and butter. Butter it seemed to eat straight from the butter knife, but with scrambled eggs it cut off a bit and flew back home with it. You can see it holding that piece of eggs between its front legs.

The wasp obviously has a good sense of smell if it can smell our breakfast from wherever it otherwise spends its time. But once it arrives here, it struggles to find the exact source of the smell. It circles around the table and lands on nearly everything before it finally figures out which bowl the eggs are in. I guess it is better at picking up the presence of a faint smell than at sensing its exact direction. And I get the impression that it is quite near-sighted.

We’re getting used to its presence. Even Adrian, who was initially quite bothered by it, is now cheering it on in its search.

One of my birthday presents this year was a ticket to see Bortbytingen (“The changeling”) at Dramaten with Ingrid.

The play was based on a short story by Selma Lagerlöf, who is one of my favourite non-sci-fi writers, and one of a very few Swedish writers I like.

A human child was taken by trolls and a troll child left in its place. The troll has grown up with humans, hated and despised by all of them. The mother, too, hates and despises it and longs for her own baby, soft and pink and beautiful, but still feels some responsibility for the ugly thing and cannot bring herself to stop taking care of it, much less kill it. It’s breaking her and her husband and their marriage.

The troll meanwhile is as unhappy as its “parents”. How much should it suppress its nature to fit in? How much of an effort should it make to drink the nauseating milk and eat the disgusting bread? Would it be better to leave the “mother” he loves and see if he fits in better with the trolls in the dark, scary forest?

I loved all parts of this play. The story, the small venue, the minimalist stage design, the simple acting, the folk songs woven into it. I’ve often found Swedish theatre performances overly dramatic and been disappointed in the quality of the acting. This play was truly a pleasant surprise.

Notes for the future:
Written by Sara Bergmark Elfgren, directed by Tobias Theorell. Actors I liked: Maia Hansson Bergqvist, Maria Salomaa.

Another trip to the recycling centre in Bromma with various old junk, cheap old plastic toys that not even a charity shop would want, worn-out clothes and broken electronics. Adrian always comes with me here and loves every part of the experience: from pushing the cart around (or sitting on the cart and being pushed around) to throwing our junk in the giant containers with a big clang, and especially watching our trash getting crushed.

tretton37 treats us to a buffet lunch once a month. Today was one of those days, so we walked to a hotel restaurant nearby, just on the other side of Sergels Torg.

Even though I work right in the middle of Stockholm, I barely see any of it. Either I cycle to work and then I see mostly suburbs and cycle paths and half of Kungsgatan. Or I take the train and the metro and then I see nothing but stations, because our office is right on top of a metro station. I don’t go out for lunch normally since I bring a packed lunch, and I rarely have time to just go out for a walk.

The two things that stand out are the construction works just off of Sergels Torg, which have been going on forever, and the electric scooters, which have been around for a much shorter time but are now everywhere. First there was one brand and then two and now I think there are at least five competing scooter firms in town.

And scooter riders, of course. Nearly always helmetless, usually quite uninterested in traffic rules and in the traffic around them. I always feel anxious when I see one of them near me because I feel I cannot predict what they will do, not even what speed they will move at. When the rider is a tourist, they sometimes even try to read a map on their phone while continuing to drive.

Electric bikes meanwhile are so common now that I am getting used to their patterns now.

Right now I should be doing my weekly review and getting on top of my to do list, because I know there are important things I should be doing. But I don’t even want to look at my to do list so instead I am procrastinating very productively by knitting on a poncho for Adrian. It’s nice, easy, soothing stocking stitch in a soft woolen yarn, and this early in the project there’s no fitting or adjusting to be done, so it’s all pure pleasure.

Hot day, hot night, dinner outside. Wasps are almost a given when we eat on the deck at this time of the year. They turn up when we’re halfway through the meal, then buzz around and find nothing to their liking (too many veggies and too little meat) but the smell is enough to keep them circling for as long as the plates are there.

This summer we have more earwigs than I’ve ever seen. They seem to be everywhere! They crawl out from under the edge of the door, from under the garbage containers and the flowerpots, from inside the mailbox.

Photographing Ingrid’s old doll for selling it.

Monday is Adrian’s day to cook with me. Most other days, Ingrid wants to cook dinner both to earn money and because she is coming to enjoy it. Some days they actually argue about who gets to cook.

I have spent much of today helping Ingrid sort through all her old stuff. She enjoys buying things, but then generally discovers that owning them is not that much fun because she doesn’t end up using them as much as she thought. She’s also a bit of a nostalgia hoarder – instead of giving away old toys and such, she just stores them. Now that she is moving into a new room, she needs to find a place for all those things. And she is discovering that actually she can part with quite a lot of them.

A few favourites stay in her room or go into a storage box in the basement. Some things can be sold. But a fair amount of it is basically junk.

Old crafts projects are the hardest ones. There are so many, and most were made with a lot of work and care. But how many can we possibly keep?