Making progress on the trees. I’m not entirely happy with how they’re coming out because they look all flat, but I also don’t know what else to do, so I will keep going. Either it will all come together, or it won’t.

I bought a shirt this summer. Second-hand, nothing special, just to have at home, because it was nice and soft. It had a nice faintly orientally-inspired pattern, white on blue, and sparkly bits.

I washed it a single time, and the pattern disappeared. There are traces of it, but I really can’t call it a pattern any more. And the sparkly bits started falling off. Some were gone (probably down the drain with the washing water) and some were only barely hanging on, and others were loose enough to be poked off with a finger.

Now it’s all asymmetrical and weird and I want the remaining sparkles off. Most are still sticking quite strongly to the shirt, but not all, so I keep poking at them to see which ones are ready to come off. Like picking a scab on my knee. Can’t help it.

Morris, who used to come into our home and be friendly and take naps and cuddle, now only comes here looking for food. He peeks in, walks to Nysse’s food station in the kitchen, eats Nysse’s kibble if he finds any, and walks out. All the while avoiding contact with all of us.

We’ve taken to covering Nysse’s food bowl whenever he leaves some food for later, so Morris can’t steal it. Nysse always “asks” when he wants food, so we just take the cover off then.

First we used an upside-down plate, but the smell of kibble was enough for Morris to try and scrape that plate away. Then we switched to an upside-down bowl that not as easy to slide to the side. I got the impression that Morris actually got angry with the cover when he couldn’t remove it – he dug his claws into the rubber mat quite aggressively.

He’s not at all interested in the cat tuna in the bowl next to it. Nysse also clearly prefers the kibble, but does eat the tuna when he gets hungry for real between meals and not just “hey, wouldn’t some kibble taste lovely right now”.

I miss the friendly, cuddly version of Morris.

Dishcloths start out pretty and square and even. Somehow they always shrink with time, no matter how much I stretch them after washing, and elongate, and skew.

Ingrid made this one for me. It’s wearing out, which gives us an opportunity to make new ones.

For years, we had the perfect lemon press. Stable, good grip, efficient at pressing, easy to pour. Tilted top surface, large drainage openings. Separate tops for lemons and oranges, one small, one larger. Perfect in all ways – except it was made of plastic and started cracking due to all the pressure we’ve put on it.

It’s from our time in London and we probably had it for years before moving, so it gave us a good twenty years of freshly pressed lemon juice. But its days are numbered so it was time to look for a new one.

Two years later, I have trialled some decent ones. Each of them is an improvement over the OG lemon press in some ways, but falls short in others.

This single-piece one in green melamine is nice and pointy on the top, very stable, super easy to clean. But: the side ridges are barely there, so you’re pressing the lemon against a mostlyl flat surface by brute force instead of scraping it open with the ridges.

This metal press from Exxent has better ridges, and is probably more or less unbreakable. But the top is a bit too rounded which makes it a bit harder to start pressing, and the holes are just a bit too small so they clog up and the juice all sits on top instead of draining into the lower part. Still, it’s the one that stays in use for now.

Does the ultimate lemon press exist? One that combines the best of both of these? I have email notifications set up on Tradera but haven’t found anything better than what we have. People sell flimsy plastic stuff, or the long-legged Alessi press that is more sculpture than utensil, or bird-shaped squeezers that also look more decorative than useful. And vintage glass lemon presses from the 1950s that look like they would be hard to clean, but who knows, maybe they’re not? Why is this so hard.

Progress on Sörmlandsleden is still blocked by a long stage that requires a whole weekend, and I wanted to be at home most of this weekend to see Adrian between his travels, so I walked the “adventure trail” at Lida. 9km.

Stigen är på vissa ställen tekniskt utmanande med kuperade passager, glest markerad och inte röjd.

The trail is technically challenging in places with hilly sections, sparsely marked and not cleared.

Sounded like fun! (Except… how hard would it be to actually paint some more blue markers on a few trees here and there? Especially since the Lida activity centre suggests you buy a map of the trail from them for 30 kr.)

Parts of the trail were indeed just as the website described.

But there were also many stretches of pretty boring gravel road, and the last section was a particularly dull one. Yes, we’re technically in nature, but it didn’t feel like it.

The trail is a circular one and goes around a small lake, and I had hoped for nice views of the lake, but those were few and far between. Overall this trail did not impress me much and won’t be on any kind of list of favourites.

It started raining towards the end of my walk. It had been rather hot before, so I didn’t mind, and found the cooling effect quite pleasant.

It rained a bit more and then a bit less, and then, during my drive home, it rained more and more and then even more. At times I was driving at half the speed limit. And then I’d drive through a dip in the road and it was like running into mud. And then some idiot in a giant SUV would overtake me in the left lane and spray me with so much water that it was like being in a car wash. I could literally see nothing but a sheet of water. I wished I could stop at that point but there were cars behind me so I just carefully continued straight at an even pace for the 5 seconds it took for the water to flow down and some visibility to be restored. The 40-minute drive home was more exhausting than the three-hour walk.

Back from a week at scout camp. Tired and hoarse and happy.

Ingrid drove us to the pickup point and then back again, and helped carry the packs.

Knackered. He only has a day and a half for recovery, and on Monday morning he’s off to Göteborg to spend time at a friend’s summer cottage.

I put on my glasses for reading the newspaper today. I’ve been wearing them regularly for embroidery and for some mending, but haven’t felt the need in other situations. But after seven hours of screen time at work today, with very fiddly tasks for the last couple of hours, my eyes were so tired that I couldn’t focus on the newspaper.

At first I thought this was the first time ever, but my “related posts” plugin tells me that I did it once last autumn. It felt like the first time.

Now that I think about it, the text on this blog is also kind of tiny. Smaller than many other sites. A larger font size might be a kindness to more readers than just me.

Ingrid at her summer job.

Does it look like she’s working? No.

Does she feel like she’s working? Barely.

But she is employed and is getting paid and can put it on her resume.

The city of Stockholm offers summer jobs to young people living in the city. The summer is chopped up into three three-week periods, and Ingrid got a job for the last three weeks of her summer break. Her job is to (together with a team) host activities for children at Spånga Torg.

Unfortunately they barely get any children visiting their tent.

I don’t know who did the planning, but they can’t have had much local knowledge. There are no children just randomly hanging around Spånga Torg in the summer. Spånga is an affluent suburb of large-ish detached houses, not an inner-city area. Kids here are either at home with their parents, or more likely out of town.

The team leaders (who are actual adults) work all three periods, and according to them, the group was in other parts of Spånga-Tensta before, where they had a lot more visitors. Yeah, because those areas are densely populated areas of apartment blocks.

The “employees” are making their own fun. Braiding bracelets, painting posters to advertise the tent’s existence, etc. The highlights of Ingrid’s day are when she gets to do face painting on some kids.

We all hope that word will spread, and people will come back from their vacations, and they’ll get more visitors next week.

My mum asked if I could share photos that I have of her.

Hello, 40 000 untagged photos.

The task seemed overwhelming so I put it off for many months. Today I thought I’d have a go at skimming through a subset at least. In the end I scrolled through all twelve and a half years of photos that I have in Lightroom in a couple of hours. After a while I found patterns that made the work easier – I could easily spot longer trips that I could quickly skim past because I knew she wasn’t there, etc. (And then had to do it all over again because I misunderstood a Lightroom sync setting and lost all my choices and this specific action, of all things, did not have an Undo possibility. The second time was even faster.)

I could definitely prune some of that. In the early years, when I was new to photography, and the kids were squirmy and wiggly, I often took many photos in the hope that some would be OK, and then kept more than I really needed. I wasn’t even photographing daily, then, so the output of each “session” must have been even larger. The kids sit still these days, so I don’t need to spray and pray any more. On the other hand, now I can take ten or twenty shots of the same flower, with only minor variations. I try to be better at culling them afterwards, but sometimes I don’t have the energy for that effort.

2021 was clearly a bad year for photography. And for life. I’m still not living like I was before the pandemic; I go out less and undertake fewer projects of any kind. It takes an effort now, where I could just make things happen before. I’m improving, though.