Monday is strength training day.

I’ve gotten some good recommendations for workout videos, so now I have a whole queue to pick from. That’s working quite well.

My slim but carefully selected set of weights is also working well. If I was at a gym, I might use a wider range, but it’s not a bad thing to be forced to use weights that are slightly too heavy. And I have not yet run into any situations where the 18 lb weights would be too light. My shoulder muscles are puny.

Ingrid cooks dinner at least twice a week, to earn extra money that she saves for the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea in 2023. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, open for scouts from ages 14 to 17. And an expensive one. Ingrid has been planning and looking forward to it and saving up money for it since last summer. We even have an Excel chart where we follow up her savings and compare the total to a target line. She was going to try and get a summer job as well, but covid-19 put an end to those plans.

20 km and six hours of walking counts as a workout in my books. I didn’t keep a close eye on my heart rate but I definitely walked fast enough to get hot.

Sörmlandsleden stage 16, there and back, 10 + 10 km.

Walking the same stretch of the trail there and back again feels somewhat boring. But even though I considered all sorts of variations, I couldn’t come up with any better alternatives. With all the restrictions in place I can’t use public transport to get to and from the hike. I could ask Eric to drop me off and pick me up again, but so much driving for just a one-day hike would feel like wasting his time. I could do a longer hike with an overnight stay but with the short daylight hours I would spend way too much of the day in my tent in the dark. So I just made the most use of those daylight hours: got up at 6:30, left the house at 7 and was out walking shortly after 8. By the time I started driving home at 16 it was near dark.


The day was fine and sunny and pleasant for walking, even though the sun barely got high enough to reach me. I knew it was there, though, and I could see it gild the treetops here and there. And the mere presence of bright daylight and a blue sky did a lot to cheer me up.

The ground was sodden and muddy everywhere after the recent rains and the footbridges (which are many on this part of the trail) were incredibly slippery. I fell down once quite painfully and decided to be more careful. There’s a certain way to walk on slippery surfaces with some reasonable speed still, rolling from heel to toe, never pushing away. But as soon as I don’t think about it, I forget and revert to a normal brisk walk. After falling again for a second time, hurting my bum and unpleasantly jarring my whole spine and head, I crossed them very, very carefully.

For some reason that made sense yesterday when I was packing, I left my macro lens at home. I think I didn’t expect anything photo-worthy at this time of the year. It’s all mostly rotting leaves and brown grass.

That was a mistake. I walked past some really odd-looking funguses thriving on all that rotting vegetation. I know I could have taken better photos with the right lens.



I also spotted the remains of a dead animal right next to the path. I first noticed the tufts of coarse gray hairs spread out a few paces. Then a vertebra, then another, and then many more bits and pieces, including both halves of the lower jaw. All were clearly old and thoroughly cleaned by scavengers big and small, so the ick factor was very low.

A cervid of some kind, clearly, with a jaw like that. Moose? Deer? The jawbones were quite large, as long as from my fingertips to my elbow, so perhaps a moose?



Bones remaining intact after a long time are no surprise, but I hadn’t expected hair to last so long. It makes sense, though. Hair is tough, made to last for a long time on your body, and it’s not digestible (other than by fungi and bacteria).

Now I had to go google about the decomposition of hair. I found out that human hair can take two years to decompose, and is considered a problematic type of waste. I also found an article specifically about microbial decomposition of keratine which was mostly too technical to be interesting to me, but I did learn from it that:

• the word for “hard to break down” proteins is “recalcitrant”,
• keratin is the third most abundant polymer in nature after cellulose and chitin, and
• it is a component of not just hair and nails and horns but also fish teeth.

Another late night walk.

My knitting basket is overflowing with nearly-finished socks. First I knitted one pair, to give away. Figuring out the sizing took a few attempts, but the second sock went fast because I now had the pattern worked out for this exact size and this exact yarn.

Well. If the first sock is the time-consuming one and the next one goes fast, why not make more of those fast ones? I have the pattern now, and I have one more skein of the exact same yarn, so let’s be efficient and make use of this! I know more than one person with size 42/43 feet who might benefit from a pair of sturdy woollen socks. Actually, most people in this part of the world probably would.

The second pair will be for a secret Santa gift exchange at work. They’ll have some nice tretton37 styling in duplicate stitch, i.e. embroidery that looks like knitting (maskstygn/can’t find the Estonian name). I’m excited about doing the embroidery so I’m all focused on finishing the second sock in this pair and getting started on the decorations, and putting off the much more boring work of weaving in the yarn ends on all the finished socks. 3 socks 99% done, 1 sock 90% done, not one 100% done.

Weight training with yet another video. No photo because I forgot.

The windy front has blown past with its sleet and clouds, and the sky was blue almost all day today.

This also brought colder temperatures. I’ve gotten used to the +10°C November we’ve had and the cold took me by surprise. I should have worn a warmer hat.

I don’t understand how some people can walk around in freezing temperatures with no hat. If I ever go out without a hat, it’s not just cold I feel, but that my ears hurt and feel as if they are about to fall off. Those other people’s ears must be fundamentally physiologically different somehow.

The fifteenth anniversary of this blog came and went without me noticing it.

What I did notice, though, was this post from 15 years ago, about why I blog. All of my reasons from back then still hold true. I could have written it today, if I wrote such long posts these days.

If I were to write it today, I would add a fourth reason. I write because I enjoy writing. I enjoy finding the right words and phrases to express my thoughts and feelings as well as possible.

I enjoy writing text the same way that I enjoy writing code. Done well, the two are very similar. Programming as a field is often lumped together with maths and technical subjects, but coding in high-level languages has as much to do with writing skills as with engineering. You want to express certain ideas or concepts as clearly, correctly, and elegantly as possible. You want to be concise but not too concise; consistent but not repetitive.

I was feeling lazy today and didn’t want to go out cycling in this wind, so I went for a walk instead. Several layers of clouds went scudding across the sky and the weather changed all the time. I had clouds, I had sparse but heavy rain drops, and I had brief, bright flashes of sun.