25°C outside. I tried doing my workout on the deck but it was so hot I felt near fainting. Moved inside again and aimed the fan right at me and stripped down to my sporty underwear (no, you’re not getting photos of that) and survived the workout. But if it gets any hotter than this, I’m going to have to stop my exercise sessions.

Five months after starting this assignment, I finally met (most of) my colleagues at a team picnic. It felt so normal and somehow also very strange.

In video meetings, you only see the front of people’s upper bodies. Of course you make up a mental picture of the rest of them, but seeing them in person nevertheless came with surprises.

The big thing is that on screen you can’t see how tall people are. Some of my teammates were taller than I had thought; some not. Some just didn’t move or sit or stand the way I had expected.

But there were also small surprises that never would have been surprises in a normal year. One turned out to have a tattoo that I hadn’t seen. One had graying hair at the back of their neck.

Continuing with the badly-posed, awkwardly-angled vaccine selfie theme. My shoulder is slightly sore but no worse than after a workout. But the spot where I got the shot also itches, which is kind of annoying.

Even more annoying is the fact that apparently there’s a new virus strain against which the vaccines are less effective. Just as I was starting to feel optimistic that seven weeks from now life could maybe start becoming slightly more normal again. It feels like this will never end.

I just saw that ten years ago I was happy about having found Pinterest. How things change. Nowadays I mostly associate Pinterest with polluting my Google results with links to annoying influencer-y pictures and ads. And any time I click one of them by accident, it won’t let me look without logging in. I actually installed a browser extension specifically so that I could block all its gazillion domains from turning up in my search results. How I wish the internet could have stayed its early, innocent, un-monetized self.

Getting my first covid shot in Kistamässan.

The process was incredibly smooth and fast. Large info signs, hand sanitizer stations, wide queueing areas, etc. There were 30 or 40 vaccination booths lining the edges of one of the congress hall, with nurses who were probably quite tired of repeating the same five sentences to everybody… The other hall was all set up with carefully spaced chairs for the mandatory 15-minute post-shot observation period, with nurses at hand and a large digital clock in the front.

No photos allowed inside, unfortunately but understandably, so I had to make do with a badly posed selfie.

Eric made stracciatella ice cream.

Lots and lots of rain all day. On the plus side: no need to water the new bushes.

It is summer and it sometimes rains a bit and people walk in and out with their bare feet.

This year’s summer party at work took place remotely on Google Meet. I enjoyed it more than I had expected.

First a tretton37 mixologist led us through making fizzy summer cocktails. I replaced this with bubbly pink lemonade even though there was a non-alcoholic option because it sounded like more work than it was worth, just with buying all the ingredients, but this was a lot of fun just to watch, as TV or something. I have some hilariously funny and entertaining colleagues.

Then we had a quiz on Kahoot while chit-chatting in the Google Meet. I made it into top 5 (out of 80+) for a while and for a moment even reached second place, but the last 10 questions for double points were all music-related and by the end I wasn’t even in the top 10.

The party ended with a live streamed concert of covers of rock classics with song and two acoustic guitars. Live streamed concerts are not like the real thing, but when I’ve met the people in real life before, it’s almost like the real thing. And yet again I was super impressed with what talented colleagues I have.

Every time I make shakshouka, I struggle with getting all the eggs to the right degree of doneness. Very often I end up with some eggs almost hard-boiled while others still have runny whites. I guess it’s the time it takes to get them all into the stew. By the time I crack the last one into its place, the first one has probably had a full minute to cook.

Today I thought I would do something clever. I cracked all six eggs in advance into six cups so that I could then get them all into the tomato sauce really quickly. This way, I thought, they would all start cooking at almost the same time and be done at the same time.

And it made no bloody difference whatsoever. Again two of the eggs were well done while two others were still completely runny! I have no idea why they behave so annoyingly or what to do about it. It’s not like some are closer to the middle and get more heat.