The house is like a flower shop with Ingrid’s graduation bouquets. She herself is away in Budapest with her friends, but I get to enjoy them.

We overestimated how much people would eat at the party, by a factor of three for some bits, so now the fridge is stuffed with leftovers. My meals are sorted for the next several days, and I’ve got champagne for several New Years’ celebrations.

On the other hand, some platters were completely emptied. In the warm weather, strawberries and grapes disappeared quickly, and so did non-alcoholic cider.

Best snack (apart from devilled eggs): flatbread canapés with smoked salmon, cream cheese, apple and a touch of horseradish.

Ingrid’s graduation party.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather. A week ago the forecast was promising 28°C and sunshine, which would have had all of us sweating and gasping for air. Now we just had a beautiful summer day, warm rather than hot, sunny but with a bit of a breeze.

I put the camera to the side for a while. A friendly soul picked it up, so now I have photos of me and Ingrid, too!

The “kids’ table” with Ingrid and some of her best friends.

There was cake – from the bakery where Ingrid works, of course.

Ingrid’s baby cousin was incredibly interested in the cakes, to the point where I felt I had to keep watch to make sure Ingrid could actually be the first one to cut a slice.

We had a quiz with 20 questions about Ingrid, and I presented the correct answers with the cake. Ingrid’s boyfriend won; I guess any other outcome would have been slightly concerning.

Took the day off from work to prepare for Ingrid’s graduation party tomorrow.

I bought most of the food and drinks earlier this week, but there’s still a ton that couldn’t be done in advance. It was a full day today. Buying the fresh stuff such as bread and fruit, making space in the fridge and freezer, prepping the food as far as possible, setting up the party tent, buying and setting up flowers, etc etc.

Tomorrow will be equally busy. Ingrid, Adrian and Eric will be here for a few hours before party to help set up the furniture and decorations, and fetch the cakes, but I’ve got 25 people to prepare food for.

Congratulations to Ingrid, who graduated from high school today!

Ingrid’s graduation day.

We got to the school yard in good time, we thought, 45 minutes before the actual event, but there was already a big crowd there.

When the graduates came out, the crowd became a sea of signs. We ended up towards the back, so Adrian as the tallest of us got the task of holding up our sign.

Here’s our proud high school graduate!

And here’s us, proud of our high school graduate.

Once more, with feeling:

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There was some time for friends and family to congratulate and take photos and what not. Then the graduates went back into the school building to change out of their nice dresses and suits and into their coveralls for the studentflak ride.

One last moment of showing off their shiny selves…

… and then the mood switched boom boxes, plastic whistles, and copious sprayed drinks.

The flak trucks for all the graduating classes took off as a convoy towards the city centre, and the rest of us went home. Ingrid came home a few hours later, completely drenched.

We celebrated the end of the school year – today for Adrian, tomorrow for Ingrid – with a dinner at Sushi Sukai. Both of them finish their years with excellent grades.

Sushi Sukai was also excellent, with interesting and delicious food. Everything from crab tacos to spicy fried popcorn shrimp, salmon tartar to tuna tataki.

Do I need more socks? Most definitely not.

Do I need to knit more socks? I sort of do. Socks are the best background knitting project I’ve found, for meetings, commuting, waiting for the code to build and deploy, etc. Small, portable, simple. And the end result is useful – I’ll have more use for more socks than I will for hats or scarves.

I’ve got lots of sock yarn left over from socks I’ve already knitted. Most sock yarn is sold in hanks of 100 grams. That’s should be roughly enough for two pairs of socks, with my sizing.

Knitting two pairs of identical socks does not feel ideal. I’d have to be mindful of which one goes with which, to ensure that each pair fades and wears evenly. No: either all socks are the same and you just pick two at random, like I did with my old black cotton socks, or all pairs are unique and pairing up socks after a wash becomes trivial.

I’ll just do simple combinations of two colours at a time, I thought.

Surprisingly, even though each of these yarns individually resulted in lovely socks, pairing them up two and two led to more bad combinations than good ones. They all tended to be just slightly off. The reds don’t go well together; the light grey is too warm to fit with the slightly blue-toned dark grey. The muted green, which I thought would balance and complement the light candy, instead just made it muddy. It becomes obvious that they’re all sourced from different dyers and don’t belong to the same palette.

Buy some neutrals to combine them with? Do I really want to be adding to this pile, though?

The studentflak tradition involves a lot of spilled and sprayed beer and other beverages these days. At some point the students realized that this is no good for party clothes, or even ordinary clothes, and now there are special coveralls for wearing on the flak. These aren’t traditional student coveralls (which are actual pieces of clothing) – they’re more like plastic protective gear.

White is boring, of course, so another tradition that has emerges is spray painting the coveralls. Ingrid and her friends had a coverall painting party in our back garden.

A mama deer with her two babies was in the neighbourhood. I first saw them in the garden next to ours. Mama deer jumped over the fence and didn’t quite seem to understand that the babies wouldn’t be able to do that. One of the babies found the opening under the fence that the cats use; the other one stayed on the other side. Mama deer just went on with the one baby and didn’t seem too concerned about the other one. Hopefully they’ll catch up later.