I did 30 minutes of yoga today, for the first time in about 15 years. I used to go to yoga class regularly before Ingrid was born but haven’t done any since then.

Some parts of me are quite flexible still but my back is much stiffer now. I don’t think I can do a proper shoulder stand, and poses that involve lower back twists are hard.

Textile crafts class at school has progressed from weaving friendship bracelets to actual real sewing. Adrian has taken a “sewing machine license” which allows him to use the sewing machines at school without supervision. He loves it, and has already sewn a fleece hat that he is very pleased with.

The hardest part about sewing is finding a suitable project. Adrian wants to make a Pokemon plushie, but most of the photos he finds on the internet have no pattern, and they’re too full of complicated 3d shapes for him to wing it. Like Snom with all its spikes, for example. But Centiskorch, another of his favourite Pokemon, is fundamentally a relatively simple centipede shape that we thought we could figure out.

This is the first time Adrian’s sewing project is actually Adrian’s sewing project, rather than him designing and me executing the design. I provided some construction advice and helped him pin the design to the fabric, but he has been doing all the real work: designing, measuring, drawing, cutting, and sewing.

Today’s video had me trying to touch my toes with a dumbbell.

Had I been on my feet, it wouldn’t even be a challenge. But with my feet pointing towards the ceiling I only succeeded once or twice.

A while ago I moved my workouts from the living room to the bedroom. There are fewer things here that I might knock down or stumble into. Not that I ever did, but it’s even better to not even have to worry about it.

The wool rug feels nice, both when I’m standing up and when I’m down on the floor. Soft but not too soft, and not slippery either. I’ve always liked being barefoot for my workouts – even at Friskis where I was always surrounded entirely by shoe-wearers.

It’s a good thing I don’t drip with sweat like some people. Then I’d need a separate gym area at home.

A crisp, frosty day. I went out in the garden during my lunch break, hoping to find something interestingly frosty, but came back mostly disappointed.

The human eye can see the whole and the details at the same time, and not see distractions. I can see the frosty lawn and the little tips of moss with their spiky coverings of frost, and see their beauty – and not even notice the dead stalks of grass in the moss, for example.

But when I look at the same scene with the camera, I have to choose between the whole and the details. On its own, neither of them is captivating. And when the viewfinder focuses a small part of the lawn, it mercilessly also focuses on the distractions.

Cycled to Sundbyberg yet again to donate yet another pile of outgrown clothes to Myrorna. (That’s a very covid-friendly errand to run: I spend less than a minute inside a warehouse, only a few steps from the door.)

There seems to be no end to outgrown children’s clothes in this house. Ingrid at least might soon be done growing; she’s just a hand’s breadth shorter than me now.

Four socks 100% finished now, after I wove in all the ends. Feels good.

I was going to take photos of the whole finished thing and show off my embroidery but forgot to do it while I had daylight, and these really do deserve daylight. It’s a good thing my colleagues don’t read this blog or otherwise I’d have to keep these under the wraps until after Christmas! (Like I will do with the other pair which I knitted for a family member. He might not even mind, but I still think a Christmas present ought to be at least a little bit of a surprise.)

It feels unfair that the last step of a knitting project would be the least enjoyable one. I don’t enjoy the weaving in of ends. It’s like cooking a meal, seasoning it, tasting it – and then having to end it with peeling potatoes. I even like peeling better than weaving in ends, because you can’t really get the peeling wrong, whereas with the yarn ends I can never get them quite as invisible as I would like.

More strength training, following a video from FitnessBlender. (That was a good tip!)

I’m getting used to the idea of following a video instead of a live instructor. It has its benefits. The flexible timing, of course. And I can take a break to run to the loo when I need to without missing out. I can skip back 20 seconds to re-watch the instructions so I can get that angle right.

Photos I took earlier today, when I had daylight, are nowhere to be found. The SD card is empty, the “Unprocessed” folder on the computer is empty, and I know I haven’t worked on them. Mysterious and worrying.

I’ll retake the photos tomorrow. No big deal. There was only a handful of them.

But this incident serves as a reminder for me to appreciate the habit of emptying the SD card every few days, and the importance of a robust backup system. I don’t want to be one of those people whose phone dies or computer crashes or Google locks them out of their account, and they lose all their digital memories.

I have three copies of my original RAW files: on a hard drive that sits on my desk, in the cloud, and on a separate hard drive stored elsewhere. That separate hard drive used to live in the tretton37 office, but now that I never go there, it’s moved to Eric’s workplace. It comes home once a month or so, gets that month’s photos, and then goes back to the office. If the house were to burn down together with the primary hard drive, and the external backup service somehow were to not deliver, then I’d still have this hard drive.

In addition I have JPG exports of every photo on yet another separate hard drive. I have them to make it easy to browse photos together with the kids, but they do provide a kind of backup as well. And the blog is a fifth backup in a way. It doesn’t have all my photos but if all the other sources were lost somehow, the blog would still have thousands of my photos.

I have the same three backups of the database for this blog – local, off-site, cloud. I have no idea how easy it would be to restore the blog starting from zero, so I hope I never need to use these backups, but it is good to have them.

My photos and my blog are important to me, and I would be devastated to lose them all.

Tuesday is rest day. I went out for a brisk walk. Rain was hanging in the air but it never started raining for real.

I aim for at least a half-hour, but when I’ve walked fifteen minutes I tend to feel like I’ve barely started and I’m just getting my steam up, so I usually keep going for another while before I turn back towards home.

I went out for a lunchtime walk and came back to find an unexpected window cleaning in progress. We do have an agreement with a company for general cleaning every other Tuesday, so I wasn’t entirely shocked to find people there. And when I took a closer look, I recognized the guy hanging halfway out through the window, so they were actually cleaners and not burglars.

Usually the extras are planned and announced in advance, which would have given me some time to clear the windowsills of plants and to move my mini-office. Now I ended up working in the kitchen. In the cold kitchen, because half the windows in the house were wide open. At least I had no important meetings scheduled for this afternoon. Trying to hold a technical interview surrounded by people with buckets would have been awkward.