Stuff is broken at work. Stuff that impacts our work immensely but is entirely outside of my circle of control; there is nothing I can do to fix it. I can only watch the alerts go off constantly and the graphs all point in the wrong direction. And I can turn things off and back on again at regular intervals to minimise the damage. I’m like a data administrator from the previous century, pressing buttons to refresh my numbers and then manually twiddling knobs in response.

It’s simultaneously stressful and boring. There’s no way I can focus on any of my actual work while this is going on, but I can absolutely make pancakes in between clicking stuff, so that’s what I’m doing to add some cheer to my day.

A cat path has appeared between our deck and the gap under the wire fence, where it’s easiest to cross from our yard to the neighbours’.

Fifteen years on I am still on the lookout for green bowls from the M-L Hellgren collection by Höganäs, and sometimes I get a hit. The medium bowls are still the hardest to find.

We may have broken one or two, but also we just want/need more of these. The bowls are the perfect size for a dinner portion for me or Ingrid, and for serving, and for yoghurt and granola, and just very useful in general. We use the small plates even more, but those are easy to get hold of – I think we might have twice the original number by now.

I didn’t think that glazed stoneware got worn with use, but clearly it does. The bowl I just got today from Tradera looks luxuriously glossy compared to our well-used one. Were all of them as shiny at one point? I don’t remember.

Conference day with Active Solution on Gistholmen.

Theme of the day: workshop techniques. So we workshopped about workshopping.

In the afternoon we took a ferry back to the city. Much noisier than sailing, but also quite a lot faster.

Two-day company conference with Active Solution en route to and on Gistholmen. The company is really spoiling us.

We spent half of today sailing to Gistholmen.

Met up at the harbour at Strandvägen and got on the four boats that would be ours for the day.

None of the people on our boat were particularly familiar with sailing, but luckily the boats came with skippers who actually knew what they were doing. We got put to work pretty soon, though, pulling on ropes and sometimes not pulling on ropes and manning the wheel.

Sailing boats are high-tech equipment these days, with all sorts of sensors and meters. Speed, depth, the angle at which the wind hits the sails…

We left the city behind.

When we got into roomier waters, we raced the other three boats. Really the skipper did all the racing and we just did our best to follow his instructions as quickly as we could, without misunderstanding him. Which we didn’t always succeed at.

It wasn’t very windy at all, but when we caught as much wind as we could, the boat leaned quite impressively. For a non-sailor like me, at least.

I don’t know what looks weirder: the below-deck room at the angle that it actually was, or seeing everything hanging crooked because I’ve straightened out the room.

We passed some narrower bits around Vaxholm, had lunch on board, then raced the others again.

Arrived at Gistholmen and did a bit of actual conferencing.

The island is a small one. A cabin village with 21 small cabins, one larger central building with a reception, a kitchen and a great hall, and that’s about it.

I was all peopled out after the day and took a walk around the island in the early evening. Circled about 80% of the perimeter of the island.

Somehow it has become tradition for us to go for fika at Spånga Konditori on the weekends the kids are with me.

Their fancy pastries are delicious, beautiful, interesting, and come in new flavours every week.

The red cardigan is done and I am starting to think of the next knitting project. (I’ve got to remember to take a proper picture of it when worn – it looks better on a body than on a table.)

Money is rather tighter this year than it has been in the past, and I’m looking for more budget-friendly yarns. There are tons and tons (almost literal tons, I think) of yarn on Tradera. I’ve been keeping an eye on the stuff that turns up there. A lot of it is nice, but not right for me; finding something that I know I will use requires patience.

This lot was interesting enough for me to bid immediately. Marks & Kattens Recycled is 100% recycled wool, and with a slightly hand-dyed feel to it – semi-solid colours rather than that perfectly even colour that is common in yarn from large-scale production. And with this purchase I get a palette of colours that I like, but might not have chosen on my own. I’ve been thinking that I want to knit more colourful designs going forward; this is a nice nudge in that direction. Plus it’s an established Swedish brand that I can buy more from. That’s a concern that has held me back from bidding on some of the yarns at Tradera: if the yarn isn’t quite enough for whatever I end up knitting, and the brand is an odd one, it might be hard to get more.

Our usual room at the community centre was locked for some reason, and no staff were around at this time of the day to let us in. We made do with a smaller room, which didn’t feel as cramped as it could have, since we were fewer than usual.

We’ve got everybody’s works in progress to fit on the table. Boxes or bags with threads and yarns and notions. Snacks, teas, water bottles. Phones and glasses. Embroidery-related books that someone has bought to show to the others.

Some of us make small projects with small stitches. My recent projects have been on the larger side, and I do like to spread my stuff out so that I can work comfortably.

We had a board game night at work, and tried out a new game. Prepper is, as you can hear, a game with a disaster prep theme. Players first compete to gather resources, by answering questions and performing tasks, and then use those resources to overcome challenges when disaster strikes. I aced the questions of the first phase – years of being exposed to scouting, and just a certain hunger for general knowledge, served me well.

The questions were survival-adjacent at best: “name the four largest predators in Sweden”, “what colour are the fruits of Myrtillus vaccinium”, knowing how a compass works. The second phase was, of course, also light-hearted rather than realistic. It might have some real-life relevance, though. A vast majority of challenges could be beaten with a first-aid kit, a knife, a light source, a communication device, some plastic sheeting, and duct tape. I always have the first four with me when I go out hiking. Plastic sheeting might be great for survival, but it’s never going to be worth the weight. (I do have a good-sized roll of it at home, and the game did kind of make me view it in a new light.)

Duct tape, though. It can really come in handy in an awful lot of scenarios. Might be worth figuring out a good way to include some in my standard hiking kit.

When Nysse got his shots the other day, he also got weighed, and told off for being slightly overweight. Not much – he’s at 5.4 kg and they’d rather prefer him to be at 5-ish. Less than 10% off ideal weight is not bad.

The packaging of his dry food pellets says that a 5-kilo cat should eat 55 grams, and a 6-kilo cat should eat 65. I think Nysse has been getting somewhere around 19 grams per meal (of which he gets three per day), plus as much cheap tuna between meals as he wants.

I find it difficult to regulate his portion size. The portions are so tiny to begin with! Say I want to get him more towards the 55-gram daily target. The difference between 19 grams and 17 grams per meal is, like, 10 tiny pellets at most.

There is no chance that I would get out a scale to weigh each of his meals – especially with him meowing and begging and head-butting me while I’m at it – so I just measure it with a small cup. I guess I might aim for slightly less heaped cups, going forward.