For a very brief moment around 11 o’clock, there was sunshine. By the time I had gotten my camera and put on shoes, it had disappeared, but there was still a thinner patch of clouds and the day felt light.

The brown things are hydrangea flowers. The round thing is a poppy seed pod. And the flowering thing is a flowering quince, confused by the unseasonably warm weather.

When I had come about halfway on the first sock, I ripped up all I’d done and started over. And then I did it again when I had done two thirds of a sock. Today I started on my third try and finally it feels right.

It’s just a pair of socks, how hard can it be! It’s not like I haven’t knitted any before. And it’s not like I don’t have a pattern to follow. But getting the fit right with a new yarn still takes some trial and error.

The first time the ribbing around the calf looked ugly when stretched out.

The second attempt with more stitches looked better but fit worse – it was way too loose around the heel and ankle. (The socks are not for me but my feet are the closest so I try them on my own feet anyway… The difference in width isn’t huge.)

For the third attempt I am using the lower stitch count again, like the first time, but 1×1 ribbing instead of 2×2 – and now I’m happy with both the fit and the looks.

With my previous attempts I kept guessing and trying it on and hesitating. I kept putting the knitting away because it didn’t feel quite right. Now that there is a feel of rightness about the whole thing, progress is fast. Although I started from zero today, after an evening of knitting I’m back where I was yesterday evening.

I ran across a suitable workout video after all. The best thing about it was that it had exercises that I never normally do. I used muscles that I normally don’t exercise much, or perhaps just used them in novel ways, and was surprised at how weak I felt.

The other best thing about it was the host, Raneir Pollard – funny, enthusiastic and heart-warmingly nice.

Another day of running errands by bike – to Sundbyberg and back. The route there is not very inspiring since it mostly runs parallel to large roads, but it’s easy to follow and never crowded. And it’s got some significant hills, which is good from the point of view of working out.

My favourite socks are ready for wear again. One hole and one very thin place are now properly darned. That thin place could have done with a slightly larger mend but as usual I underestimated how much yarn I would need and ran out a bit too early.

Following my tentative workout plan, Wednesday is strength day. I made up another circuit today, similar to Monday’s.

The circuits seem to work pretty well. I am sweaty and completely out of breath by the end of them and slightly sore the next day. The YouTube video I followed last week was too low intensity for my taste. They alternated 30 seconds of exercise with 30 seconds of rest, whereas my own circuit is 45/15. The rest should only be long enough to look at the list of exercises to see what’s up next, and pick up the weights or move into position. I’m not here to rest!

There is probably a YouTube channel with the perfect workout videos for me – 30 to 40 minutes, high intensity, low impact, doable with the weights and equipment I have – but right now I’m not interested in investing the time in finding one.

Photo here.

The workout action selfie series continues. There isn’t much else that is photo-worthy in my life just now. And even that’s setting the bar for “photo-worthy” quite low: someone is doing something in daylight.

I’m saving up errands so I have a reason to cycle somewhere as my daily workout. Today I cycled to Kista to buy a new microphone/speaker for the computer. The old one started acting up, but then again it was at least fifteen years old.

I like the route to Kista. It goes through a lot of large, open, green spaces. Many of them are mostly brown this time of the year but still.

Adrian needs to practise his times tables. He knows them, mostly, but not fast enough, and sometimes he still gets some of them wrong.

So we do some maths every day around dinnertime. At first we did it orally – I came up with problems one by one and he told me the answer. The talking slowed both of us down, though, so recently we switched to written practice. I fill a sheet of paper with problems and he then does them as fast as he can.

Initially I made up problems more or less randomly but with extra focus on the ones I knew he knew less well. But now he wants to see if he gets faster, so I need to make the exercises more consistent. I make sure to cover the entire table from 2×2 to 9×9 evenly. But I also want each day’s sheet to have a different order so he doesn’t just learn them by heart by order – “18, 24, 25, …”

My algorithm for making up his worksheet has evolved. The first iteration was a simple one. I drew up a 10×10 square on a piece of scrap paper, randomly picked an unused square (such as 4×5) and put a dot in it when I wrote down “4×5” on Adrian’s sheet.

This was time-consuming and fiddly. My second algorithm was to take the previous day’s sheet and shuffle it. Take three problems from the top of the first column, then three from the bottom, then from the top of the second column, etc. I was hoping this would be faster because I can just follow along, but it was easy to lose my place and forget which row I had just copied and where I should continue.

My third algorithm was the opposite of the first one. Instead of filling the sheet top to bottom with exercises in random order, I went through the table top to bottom (2×2, 2×3, …) and wrote each combination in a random place on Adrian’s sheet.

At this point I noticed that I must have made mistakes in my first algorithm. When I was done with a sheet using the third algorithm, I noticed that the finished sheet had fewer problems than the previous sheets. I double-checked, and apparently I had previously inadvertently included some duplicates. To keep the worksheets consistent in length, I now have to repeat my previous mistakes intentionally and add some random duplicates.

This task is of course just crying out for automation. But then the results would need to get from computer to paper somehow and I don’t have access to a printer. Perhaps at some point I’ll get sufficiently fed up to automate it anyway and cycle to the office and print out a few dozen variations.

If I’m going to keep up the daily workouts, then I’m going to need a bit of a plan. I need enough of a challenge and enough variety so it doesn’t get too boring, but I also don’t want to spend too much time thinking about it every day.

I’m thinking of doing strength training on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; cycling or something like that on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And on weekends – whatever I can fit in.

That means strength for today. I’ve been to enough circuit training classes that I feel I can make up my own. Lower body, upper body, pushes, pulls, core. And burpees, because it feels like they kill me, so they’re probably really good for me.

For the workout photo today I brought out my proper camera instead of taking a phone selfie, so it was also my daily photo here.