The scouts have their annual two-day spring camp this weekend. It’s taking place at Sandviks gård, like last year, and I’m managing the kitchen crew, like last year.

Doing it the 2nd time around is much easier: I have all my recipes and calculations and spreadsheets from last year, and just have to adjust for the new number of attendees (even higher than last year) and all the allergies.

One thing I learned from last year is that we need a bigger crew than I first thought. This year we have 12 people in the kitchen instead of last year’s 6, and it makes a world of difference. We all have time to take breaks and walk around the camp and see what the kids are doing. Last year I barely had time to eat.

The weather is very changeable – just a few days ago the forecast was for 2 centimetres of rain today, which would have been pretty horrible. We’ve had some showers but nothing as dramatic as that forecast. And in between it’s been sunny enough that some kids even went swimming in the Mälaren.

A new colleague at work is a serious foodie and worked as a chef in a previous life, so he is bringing all kinds of new food ideas to the office. He’s brought us home baked sourdough bread for breakfast, just because. And for today he arranged a potluck temaki lunch. Everyone brought an ingredient, and then we made temaki together.

The chef ninja explained temaki to us as “sushi tacos”. Take a piece of seaweed, spread some rice on it, then pile on whatever you like on top of the rice. Roll it up and you’re done. Restaurant temaki are elegantly cone-shaped, but apparently just sloppily rolling it up before biting into it is perfectly acceptable as well.

I’ve always thought that making sushi at home seems like a lot of bother, so I’ve never tried. All this rolling and shaping… and then someone wants this on their sushi and someone else definitely does NOT want this… But with this approach, sushi becomes quite doable: very flexible, and almost no prep work apart.

More cabinets have appeared. Turn around, though, and the other side of the kitchen still mostly looks like a construction site and doesn’t really have much of a kitchen vibe yet.

Every day after work, we take a look at the kitchen to see the day’s progress. Some days nothing much seems to happen at all. And today all of a sudden, cabinets appeared and the kitchen is visibly starting to turn into a kitchen again.

It took us several attempts before we managed to settle on the right shade of green for the cabinets. And the one we finally chose was none of the swatches but the colour we already had on the walls in the hall and the office. I was a bit worried that it would be too dark and intense for our relatively small kitchen, but it looks great.

The builders commented that the cabinets are all well made, “the right angles are right and the measurements are correct” which also bodes well.

Breathing extra deeply when walking down the street, to get more of that intoxicating lilac smell.

It’s such a pleasure to see fine plants spreading and thriving. Not all do, so I’m extra glad over the ones that do. Especially when they are as decorative as these Epimediums.

We played “Settlers of Catan”. Eric won with a mile-wide margin. Adrian followed his favourite strategy, which is to bet on development cards all the way.

I was more or less prepared for making do without a proper kitchen. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how hard it would be to not have access to running water in or even near the temporary kitchen-in-dining-room.

There is a temporary wall blocking off the dining room from the construction site. Which, given the sawdust and peat dust and other kinds of dust in there, is a good thing. But it means that getting to the laundry room and the sink there is now a bit of a hassle.

In the old kitchen, I had the stove and the sink right next to my small work area. Sink on the left, stove on the right. Now the sink is not even in the same room. Or in the next one. Or even in the room beyond that: I have to pass through three doorways and around two corners to get to the sink.

I’ve started using the bathroom sink for some tasks, but it is small, and really only works for small stuff. I can rinse veggies and drain pasta or fill a small pot halfway with water, but no more than that.

I’m almost considering buying a stainless steel bucket so that I can have water at hand in the “kitchen”. But then I’d also need another bucket for dirty water, and someplace to put them, and it’s not really worth it.

Running water is a pretty darn good thing to have.

I haven’t taken any self-portraits in a long time, and not now either, but I like this photo that Ingrid took of me.