I volunteered to help at the Spånga scout group’s annual “autumn fixer day” where parents and other engaged folks help out with various maintenance tasks. This time around the task list included everything from deep cleaning the freezer and disassembling old desks so that they can be transported to the recycling centre, to removing thistles from the yard and mending tents.

It won’t surprise any of you to hear that I signed up for mending tents. However the notes about tents needing attention were hard to interpret, and much time and attention went to figuring out what the problem even was. That task required a fair amount of expertise and experience with the tents themselves, so the mending crew spent a lot of time just sitting and waiting. Whenever an actual rip was found, there was almost a queue of us waiting.

Looking back at my blog post about the scouts’ mending day two years ago, the situation was the same. Maybe someone could learn something from this experience. Who knows.

All in all I felt that I contributed much less than I had hoped. When I came home, dissatisfied with my morning, I picked up my own pile of mending and fixed up six pairs of tights. And felt much better about the day afterwards.

All this mending reminded Adrian that he had a list of homework tasks from his home economics class, one of which was to mend a small hole or sew on a button. My backlog of mending was now empty – except for a shirt waiting for a sleeve button to be re-sewn! He came just in time; had he mentioned the homework an hour later, I wouldn’t have had anything for him. I guess we could always cut off a button and reattach it, but it would have felt like a waste.

Adrian, being of the age of frequently outgrowing things, has outgrown his rain jacket. He’s also outgrown all of Ingrid’s past rain jackets that I had hoped he could inherit. So I now have 4 kids’ rain jackets in sizes 140 to 158 in various colours, but not a single one that Adrian can use. (Honestly the one that he says he last used, in size 140, is ridiculously small for him – it’s a wonder he hasn’t complained earlier.) He has a scout hike coming up in a week, and it’s very unlikely we’ll get an entire weekend in September/October with no rain, so we’re emergency shopping for a new rain jacket.

This season’s colour is clearly dark yellow. All the three brands that had rain jackets for active use in “junior” sizes had all chosen to make theirs dark yellow or orange. Black and gray were also available, as usual, but Adrian doesn’t even look at those. (Helly Hansen also had some eye-wateringly garish neon colour combinations, which were too loud even for Adrian’s tastes.) So I guess we’ll take a yellow one, then.

Sometimes I test stuff at work by making things up. Right now at Urb-it, this means pretending to deliver imaginary parcels to made-up addresses, and taking proof-of-delivery photos. Or pretending to fail at delivering them and making up reasons for why I failed.

At my previous assignment at a specialist insurance company, I was making up details insurance cases for mobile phones – imaginary scenarios detailing exactly how my imaginary phone happened to get run over by a car, or damaged by water, or stolen.

I could just do the minimum necessary – always use the same options, or always point my phone’s camera at whatever is in front of me – but after 20 rounds or so it gets rather boring. It’s more fun to have fun with it. So I take photos of random objects around my home office.

If I get no other exercise in, I do my daily half-hour of brisk walking. I almost always follow the same route, with some nice steepish hills here and there, and a decent-sized park at the far end that I take a big loop through.

The part that goes along streets is not very exciting. I’m not interested in other people’s houses and gardens. I usually read while walking and treat it as pure exercise. But the park is strikingly nice to look at, in almost any season and any weather. Swedish parks are – unlike English ones – generally devoid of flowers or anything else requiring more maintenance than the occasional mowing. They’re all just grass and trees and large bushes. But the large open space and the mostly uninterrupted greenery still feels very good.

The weather is getting colder and wetter and Nysse is spending more time indoors, even entire nights. During the warm season his usual routine was to go out late in the evening, and whichever human in the house woke up first would start their day by opening the doors towards the wooden deck just wide enough to let him in – and within 5 minutes he’d come galloping.

He’s warm and dry in the house, but apparently also a wee bit bored. For the first time ever he’s shown interest in my balls of yarn. I’ve been knitting right in front of him for months and as long as I don’t dangle something in his face, he just ignores it. Today, all of a sudden, he was attacking my yarn. I confiscated my hand-dyed merino wool very quickly, but he could borrow the cheap orange acrylic that I use for miscellaneous stuff (like tying things together, or lifelines).

When the first ball of dark red ran out and I had switched to the second one and knitted a few rows with it, it became obvious that the two balls of dark red were from different dye lots. I really should have checked and noticed this earlier – this was pure noob sloppiness. And the sharp line between them really didn’t look good, and the one I used first was slightly darker so I really should have taken the other one first, so to make a long story short, I ripped up the whole red-to-dark-red fade and started over with it. I’m back where I was in early to mid-August. But the journey is the destination and all that, so I don’t even mind too much. I do mind the dangling yarn balls I now have everywhere – weaving in all the ends at the yoke is proving to be a minor nightmare, so now I don’t want to cut the yarn if I don’t have to.

Autumn is coming, and the weather is getting colder.

Electricity prices are crazy this year in southern Sweden (nuclear power plants being shut down due to political decisions in the 1980s, limited transmission capacity between the north and the south, high energy prices in the rest of Europe, etc) and I’m not looking forward to our electricity bills for this cold season.

That top line, double and triple historical prices, that’s this year.

Adrian turned 12 yesterday. He wanted all of us to be there for his celebration, so he waited with the presents and the cake until I got home from Ljubljana.

That large box is a giant Lego set. The Sanctum Sanctorum, for the record. For ages 18+ according to the box; not because of any adult content but because of lots and lots of small fiddly bits.

To pad the gift-giving a bit, he also got the next book in the series he’s reading (Percy Jackson) and some colourful Happy Socks. But it was really the Lego set that captured all his attention.

The cake flavours are chocolate and raspberry this year again – Adrian’s favourites.

After yesterday’s knowledge day, we had an activity day today. We started with a team treasure hunt, with very varied tasks – obscure facts about Slovenia, themed photo challenges (a photo of a license plate with “13” in it; a photo of a stranger wearing something 13|37-branded) and teamed photo challenges (at least 8 people of the team jumping and actually in the air at the same time), visiting odd spots of the city and solving maths puzzles.

I was all peopled out after yesterday so I went off on my own and bagged a few of the far-off walking challenges for our team. It was rainy and sweaty. Especially walking up the castle hill afterwards to rejoin my team. I barely took any photos, both because the rain made it difficult and because I had a tight deadline to meet.

For the afternoon we had a choice between a city tour, a boat tour on the river (which was cancelled for safety reasons due to the rain and flooding), a culinary tour (which I assumed would involve lots of meat and wine) and a hike. Even though we spent a full day walking around Ljubljana just a month ago, I guessed that the city tour would show me new sides of the city, so that’s what I went for.

Our group had barely left the castle when our guide showed us the first hidden detail. Ljubljana was built near the site of an abandoned Roman settlement, and they reused chunks of the old ruins to build the castle. A stone is a stone!

Having walked down to the bottom of the castle hill, the guide took us on a tour of the air raid shelters under the hill. Fully maintained still, and ready to be used at 24 hours’ notice, he told us – and actually used for real during the Ten-Day War with Yugoslavia in 1991.

Along one of the main shopping streets, our guide showed us the narrow ventilation corridors between the medieval houses. The buildings all back up onto the hill, and the corridors help air out the moisture. Most of them were either bricked up or shut behind gates, but at least one was open. The far end was narrow enough that I could barely turn around.

The guide also pointed out that all the medieval houses are exactly three windows wide. Apparently this was a rule in medieval times. I walked down this street last time I was here, and paid attention to the views, but never noticed this detail – nor the ventilation corridors.

The river, when we passed it, was seriously flooded and I totally understand why the boat tour had to be cancelled.

This lovely little street with all its greenery and flowers was as beautiful today as it was in August.

Naturally Ljubljana’s city architect Jože Plečnik was a recurring topic during our tour. I learned, among other things, that he was heavily inspired by classical Roman and Greek architecture and really, really loved pillars. An ongoing joke during our tour was that if you see any pillars anywhere, then Plečnik was probably the one who put them there. And indeed we saw pillars in the oddest of places – such as “on the outside of a wall, three meters above ground”. Go figure.

The grounds of the Ljubljana Festival, inhabiting what used to be a monastery, were my favourite place in the city. The juxtaposition of baroque statues of saints with Soviet imagery of red five-pointed stars, hammers and pickaxes, is pretty unique.

Towards the end of our tour the rain had more or less let up. I had come prepared for a lot more rain than we actually got (a pair of rubber boots took up a quarter of the space in my baggage) so I was dry and toasty all the way. But drier weather made photography easier.

We capped off the day with a gala dinner in the hotel’s grand hall. More festive and glamorous than most events in the software industry! I quite enjoyed dressing up for once.

Knowabunga knowledge day, with talks and workshops and such. One about the API Gateway pattern, and one about the Tailwind CSS framework, and one about business people taking over Scrum from developers and making it theirs, and some more.

The 13|37 Ljubljana office has some cool decorations.

Did you know that you can still by 3.5-inch floppy disks?