Ingrid’s new room has a new sofa. The poor girl was forced to get up at 10 so we could pick up the rental trailer at 11 and then go buy the sofa from a lady in Duvbo shortly after that.

The sofa was an utter pain to get down and up narrow stairs, and some parts felt like they weren’t very strongly attached and might fall off when carrying the sofa, but there were no other parts to hold on to either. I was quite relieved when we got it in place with all parts still in place.

Ingrid reports that the sofa feels great to sit in and lie on.

There are cooking wines that you cook dinner with, and then there are cooking wines that you drink while cooking dinner. I very rarely drink any alcohol at all, but the fruit wines that Eric has made are all delicious. I usually don’t remember them, again because I don’t have a habit of drinking. But sometimes when I go to the pantry to fetch vinegar or olive oil or some other bottle, I notice that lovely bottle of wine next to it. So that’s when I pour myself a splash of it.

Ingrid preparing to make beetroot risotto for dinner.

August has been cool and rather rainy. Not raining all the time, but rain showers – sometimes heavy, sometimes light – have been frequent. Today we had a heavy one and a beautiful double rainbow afterwards.

I am of two minds about this weather: I wish the evenings were warmer, but the temperature is perfect for cycling, and it’s definitely good for the garden. The Viburnum that kept nearly-dying in June and July if I didn’t water it every week is now doing pretty well.

Adrian and I cooked dinner. We made his favourite dish: pasta with pureed peas and goat’s cheese. It’s a Linas matkasse recipe originally and we keep coming back to it because Adrian loves it so much.

Adrian likes to cook but he is so distractible that he can barely do one task at a time, and let’s not even speak of having two tasks going on in parallel. When we cook together, he does a small fraction of the actual work. Today I cooked the pasta and the peas and grated the goat’s cheese and pureed the peas, while he toasted nuts and melted butter and sauteed garlic. But he learns the basic skills at least – and we enjoy it.

Weighing things is one of his favourite tasks. (And tasting!) If the recipe says 70 grams of pine nuts, and I suggest taking a 60-gram bag and then a bit more, he insists on weighing them, and being precise about it. 70 should be 70 and not 68!

Adrian wants a knitted poncho. He had one, which he outgrew, and then another one which he also outgrew, and now I can’t find anything remotely suitable in his size. So I’ll try and knit one. I haven’t had great success with my more advanced knitting projects but a simple poncho, with a simple shape, should be the right kind of project for me.

He asked for green and blue and maybe some more colours and a snowflake pattern. I’m thinking green for the bottom half and blue for the top, and a pixelated gradient between the two, and white snowflakes on the blue.

Challenge 1: all the snowflake patterns I find are for eight-armed snowflakes, which are easy to design but not what snowflakes look like. I want anatomically correct snowflakes, more or less. Finally I found a second-hand sweater for sale on an auction site, that had six-armed snowflakes on it. The photos were sharp enough for me to copy the pattern from them. Yay!

Challenge 2: none of the pixelated gradient patterns I found look like what I want. They have a bit of a gradient but the actual transition from one colour to another is too sudden. I want something softer. I may have to make my own pattern for that.

We’ve spent most of today moving furniture and stuff in and out of Adrian’s and Ingrid’s rooms.

Adrian gets Ingrid’s old room, and with the room comes a small side attic. Initially used for storage, Ingrid at some point discovered that it was just large enough to fit a standard sized mattress, and made her bed in it. Her fancy loft bed was apparently nowhere near as cozy.

Adrian thinks the same. The loft bed stays, but mostly for its desk and armchair parts. For sleeping, Adrian chose the side attic.

He likes being on floor level. He likes sitting on the floor, and crawling and generally “worming” around on it, especially when he is bored. He’s now looking for a carpet for his floor, and his two criteria are that it needs to be a nice green colour, and soft and not scratchy so it works well for worming around on.

During late summer, whenever we eat our meals outside on the deck, a wasp usually comes to check out the offering. Usually they inspect our food and then leave. The food doesn’t seem to be to their taste. They’re never aggressive and we’ve never been stung by any.

Wasps get infinitely more aggressive when they panic. Yesterday as I was cycling home, I accidentally met a wasp head on and the wind blew it into my tank top. My minimal cleavage still had enough room for it to get in. Trapped in a very tight space, the wasp immediately stung me, and then did it again on its way back out. The pain was so sudden and sharp that my first instinctive reaction was to start pulling my top off, just get it out! Before I was completely topless in the streets, I found the wasp and let it out.

Twenty-four hours later and the spot where it stung me is still itching nearly all the time, and hurting whenever I rub it to ease the itch. It doesn’t hurt badly but it’s really distracting and I kept half-waking because of it. Damn that wasp and its panic reaction.

I used to be the first one in the ladies’ changing room at work in the mornings, but now someone uses them even earlier than me: the floor is when when I get there. That someone likes their showers really hot.

We celebrated “peak mess” with cake. Now we can start moving all furniture into its proper place, and will no longer have to walk sideways to get through the living room.