Bought a few more houseplants, and pots for them. Plants from IKEA, which has turned out to be a surprisingly good source, and pots from Tradera.

I know you’re “supposed” to put your plants in a pot with drainage, but I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of the terracotta pot + saucer combo, especially with the build-up of minerals that always comes after a few years. That look works out in the garden, but indoors it’s too scruffy for my taste. And a plastic pot inside an outer pot is ugly in a different way.

I just plant the plants directly in what’s supposed to be an outer pot. You’re not supposed to do it that way, but it seems to work for me. I haven’t managed to water anything to death. Just pay attention when watering, and you’re good. In fact, I find it easier to control the amount of water that each plant gets this way. Several plants that I took over the care of and re-potted in the last year are doing better than ever. Actually growing and thriving instead of just surviving. So I’m going to go on doing it my way.

The embroidery I started on Thursday.

When my embroidery design has a solid-colour block with a relatively simple shape, my thoughts always go first to appliqué. I’m trying to break that habit and use stitches to fill the area instead. I get a more interesting surface this way, and I can challenge myself to learn new types of stitches.

This one is called “oriental stitch” in the few books where I’ve seen it, although most other sources use that name to mean something completely different.

Zeitgeist: The theme of this year is AI.

(Also: the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and the demented paedophile at the helm of the United States. But those are mostly too far away to directly affect me, or for me to affect them.)

Everyone is talking about AI, and AI is infesting everything. Especially the tech sector of course: AI tooling to assist coding, AI assistants in every other application, AI-generated images in every article and presentation and blog post.

Some of it is useful. Getting an AI assistant to review my code changes, or asking ChatGPT a technical question that I can’t get any solid hits for from Google – absolutely a win.

Some of it is annoying. Any time I see yet another bland, soulless AI-generated image in a Powerpoint presentation – because the speaker thought the slide looked dull without an image and couldn’t be bothered to do more than write a generic prompt – my respect for the speaker goes down several notches.

Some of it is worrying. Far too many people ascribe intelligence to something that is simply a statistical process for chaining together a likely-looking string of words. When your prime minister says that he uses chat bots as sounding boards for his ideas… yeah. Not good.

On the corporate side, everyone is scrambling to get on board the AI train. Very much putting the cart before the horse, in many cases, asking themselves “Where can we use AI in our business” rather than “These are the challenges ahead of us, what is the best solution?” Everyone has been given a shiny hammer and is now desperately looking for anything that even remotely resembles a nail, because god forbid the market believes that they’re not swinging their hammer as fast as everybody else.

Giant corporations burning billions of dollars, ever faster, on stealing everybody’s work, in order to create content that is sometimes useful and other times utterly destructive. What could go wrong?

The embroidery club has agreed on a theme for the autumn term – make something inspired by the books of Renée Rudebrant. I had been planning to not let myself be sucked into any kinds of themes again, but I do like Renée’s books, and her embroidery style, so I gave in. Put my cardigan decoration project aside and switched tracks. I still have a bunch of sketches from the workshop series with Renée Rudebrant that I attended a year ago. Back when I was in the middle of those workshops, I wished I had time to realize more of those sketches. Here’s my chance, I guess.

This design one was from the “shapes” exercise – one of the designs I really liked, but nevertheless discarded because it didn’t quite fulfil the requirements. Now there are no requirements (or, just a single, very loose one) and I can play with this again.

I bought this Philodendron back in January or February. I don’t think its changed in appearance at all since then. The same leaves in the same position, nothing growing, nothing unfurling. I’d almost suspect it was fake, if it wasn’t so un-artificially strange in its shape. It’s like it’s frozen in time.

The internet says it might do better in more humid air, so now it’s moving from the living room window to the bathroom. It remains to be seen if that makes a difference. I take short showers to begin with, and most of them take place at the office after I’ve cycled there. Maybe Ingrid’s and Adrian’s longer showers every other week are enough to matter.

Ingrid and I went to see an exhibition of Lars Jonsson’s drawings and paintings of birds at Liljevalchs.

Exceeded all expectations. We were truly blown away.

Lars Jonsson is an artist and an ornithologist who makes incredibly life-like pictures of birds. Not primarily photorealistic, although some are, but better: where the painting captures not just the typical physical appearance of a species, but also its character and behaviour, and the details of the individual specimen, and the atmosphere of the situation. Some birds in flight are intentionally blurred at the edges; some are captured at an odd angle.

He makes all his sketches and most watercolour paintings out in nature, drawing from life. His birds are not smoothed-out averages but unique individuals.

There is literally a wall with just hundreds of sketches of gulls. Some of them are multiple sketches in one: a sheet of paper with just beaks, or with several variations of the striation on their sides.

And you think: he’s able to produce this amazing work because of the decades of practice he’s put in. But then you see that even his early paintings, over forty years old by now, are amazing.

An incredible dedication; almost an obsession. After 50 years of drawing sea birds, how does he not get tired? How can he still see something new in each bird that is worth capturing?

Seeing this exhibition on a weekday evening after work was perfect. Much of the time it was just the two of us; in total I think we saw three or four other pairs of people pass. Large, calm paintings of sea birds, softly lit, in large, quiet rooms – very tranquil. Nobody passing behind us – or in front of us – when we’re backing up to take in a large painting.

If you’re in Stockholm, the exhibition is open for another 10 days, until October 12th. Very much recommended.

The results of our team retrospective we had this afternoon.

Do I expect you to find it interesting? Not really, no, but it’s the only thing that I photographed today.

Bought a knife sharpening block to finally do something about my outdoors knives and my pocket knife. I’m sure my technique would make a professional cringe and say things about consistent angles, but hey, the knives are sharp now.

I only cut myself once on the pocket knife, and that wasn’t even during the sharpening itself – it happened when I was oiling it afterwards. It has sharp bits in all kinds of directions.

The outdoors knives get spotted and pitted no matter what I do. I can clean and oil them all I want at home, but when I take them with me on a hike, I inevitably cut acidic stuff like apples, and wiping the knife blade afterwards clearly doesn’t get it clean enough. Well, they exist to be used, so if they wear out, then that’s that.

Scouternas natt, “Scouts’ night”, is a district-wide weekend event for older scouts (such as Adrian). Hiking, walking, some sort of competition thing.

Each participating scout group had to rustle up volunteers to make the thing happened – especially the competition elements required a lot of staff. I volunteered to help out with some evening/night activities. (Almost got roped into helping with night orienteering which would have ended at 2 o’clock at night, but managed do side-step that and only work until 23.)

Our activity (a memory challenge) could easily have been done with half the number of volunteers we had. There was plenty of standing around and waiting between the arrival of each competing scout group.

Even though I was there all evening, I never saw Adrian’s group pass through, and he never saw me, either. Then again, it was pitch black by the end of it, and if you weren’t within the same pool of lamplight, there was no chance of seeing who is who.

The local Facebook group had a post offering plums. Almost discreetly begging people to come and pick more. So I went and picked some. The plums were small, but juicy and flavourful.

When I saw the tree in question, I understood the near-begging. The tree was overloaded with plums – and of course anything that doesn’t get picked ends up falling on the lawn and then rotting there. Cherries, like we have in our garden, are small and can almost disappear into the ground, whereas squished overripe plums make the whole lawn rather slimy.