Our nearest large park, which my daily haven’t-done-an-actual-workout evening walk loops through, has been fenced off since April, because the ground was found to be contaminated with heavy metals. The paths are open but all access to the grassy areas is blocked. The city hasn’t been cutting the grass, either, to make it less tempting for people to sneak or force their way through the fences.

It feels prison-like and spooky like this.

Art installation in the Tensta underground station.

Commuter trains past Spånga have been suspended since the beginning of July, just like past summers, for engineering works. I’ve been doing a mixture of working from home, cycling to the office, and getting there by bus and metro. The weather forecast for today included a lot of rain from the storm named Hans, and I’m a wimp when it comes to cycling in bad weather, so the metro it was.

It takes quite a bit longer this way but it’s not too bad, now that I’ve found a good route. Spånga is surrounded by metro lines in several directions but not actually served by any one directly. If I ask the SL app, it usually has at least three alternatives for me. I could take the bus to the metro station at Brommaplan, or Tensta, or Rissne. The app mostly cares about how fast each alternative will get me there, but not so much about my comfort. I’ve realized that Tensta is the ideal one for me, even if it’s not always fastest with bus timings and whatnot. It’s one stop from the start/end of the line, so I can always get a seat on the metro.

From Friday. Adrian and his fellow scouts, back from scout camp, doing the “Spånga shout” before all going home.

Bought and planted ground cover to fill in between and under the sad-looking aronia bushes.

The weather forecast promised rain for today, which was quite perfect. Ulriksdal garden centre is always busy on beautiful days, but during this gray morning there were no queues and no crowds, and I got my shopping done in record time.

A few light drops fell while I was planting, but I got everything in the ground before the real rain arrived. And then it did, and watered all my planting. Perfect!

As for the bushes themselves, the current approach clearly isn’t working. I’m going to start over and prune them heavily, and hopefully that will make them branch.

Five years on, the mixed flowering hedge is delivering mixed results.

Some parts, such as the spireas (on the right in both photos), are bushy and voluminous and looking like a proper hedge should.

Others are thin and scraggly. The aronias (on the left in the first photo) are looking almost as small as they were five years ago, not at all like aronia hedges are looking on the internet. You can barely even see them in front of the flowering quinces in the background. The Dasiphora/Potentilla (on the left in the 2nd photo) have gained a bit of volume but didn’t do well under the weight of the snow this winter. Neither is bushy enough after all this time to overpower weeds under them.

Today I did yet another round of weeding under the weakest sections of the hedge. Tomorrow I’ll fill in with ground cover.

On the one hand – some of these bushes have been disappointing. On the other hand – three cheers for a mixed hedge! I’d be so much more disappointed if I’d gone for Dasiphora all the way, and all of my hedge was looking like this.

Office day today. One of my colleagues spotted a Sortera truck doing a pickup right across the street. We had a good view from six floors up!

The trucks have been abstract concepts until now. But now we could look up the pickup order in the ordering system that my team works on, and then in the driver’s app, and the customer’s live tracking page, and correlate the physical activity we could see happening to the data. Here are the large bags of cardboard, and the small bags of metal, and here’s the driver marking them, etc. Here is the extra pickup time because there was no room to line up all the bags in advance. Trivial, in a way, but still a bit of a highlight of today.

Seventeen years ago I was looking hopefully at the possibility of space tourism. Too bad the prices haven’t come down much since then – it’s still from a quarter to half a million USD even for brief suborbital flights. And unsurprisingly I haven’t gotten any million-dollar windfalls in the meantime.

When you’re having movie night and both of you leave the sofa for a minute to take away the pasta bowls and bring yourself a piece of cake, and your cat seizes the opportunity.

Eight weeks of summer, five weeks of vacation, and I’ve barely touched anything in the garden. There’s always something else to do. I’ve got too many hobbies and interests I’m trying to keep up with, and something inevitably gets neglected.

As a result, parts of the garden are looking rather weedy. But here the weeds are all pretty, self-seeded perennials from the planting spreading to the cracks between the paving stones. And some actual weeds as well, to be fair.

I just noticed I’ve made over five thousand posts on this blog. Here’s to five thousand more!

These first five thousand took almost eighteen years. If I keep up my daily posting – which I haven’t even considered giving up – the next five thousand should go faster, in less than fourteen years. I should reach ten thousand around April 2037, at which point I will be approaching my sixtieth birthday. And probably be one of very few bloggers still active, because blogging has been going out of fashion for years already.