There are all sorts of half-forgotten odds and ends in the pantry and the fridge. Ingredients needed for a single recipe, two-thirds of the package left over afterwards. Things that sounded interesting and were tried once and turned out to be so-so but not bad enough to be thrown out. Stuff that Eric liked more than I did so they’re never my first pick.

I prefer not to throw out food that there’s nothing wrong with. I’d rather find some use for it, if I can. Sneak it into a meal together with something else, a little bit at a time.

It might be a hopeless project – it’ll take me forever. Every other week there’s just me here, and I just don’t need an awful lot of food, and I’m also not spending all my time eating the forgotten stuff. Most of the time I’d rather eat something I really want to eat. But occasionally I remind myself to look at the odds and ends and pick something and do something with it.

It’s taken me until now to finish this cereal that’s been lying around since Eric left the house. It’s the most boring cereal I’ve encountered. Doesn’t taste bad, just… really boring. But with fresh fruit and a sprinkle of nice granola over it, it’s OK.

Is it silly to not have thrown it out? Probably. I chose to eat it anyway.

It’s plum season.

I’m picky when it comes to fruit – only local plums (and apples and strawberries etc) are worth buying. “Local” here means Swedish ones. I’d totally buy Estonian plums if I was in Estonia now, or Finnish or Norwegian ones if anyone offered them to me. (I assume they grow plums in Finland.) Italian-grown plums and Spanish ones, on the other hand, the kinds you get in a standard supermarket, are flavourless crunchy sugar water. They just don’t taste like plums at all. Like, if you told me to close my eyes and then gave me a bite of one, I don’t know if I would even recognise what fruit it was.

I want my fruit to be really ripe. I want it to burst in my mouth when I bite into it, and the juices to be near dripping. When Ingrid and Adrian eat fruit, they want them firm and crunchy, almost regardless of fruit – plums, peaches, apricots, kiwis… Well, no crunchy bananas, but they definitely prefer their bananas so green that I find them nearly inedible. When buying for myself, I look for the ripest fruit. I choose the plums that are so juicy and tender that I have to handle them carefully, and gently place them topmost in my shopping bag. I’m pretty sure that I rescue fruit that everybody else skips over, and that the staff would pick out and throw away if they could be bothered to look over the fruit they have.

The embroidery club started up today. I had considered continuing with some of the ideas from an embroidery course I did a year ago, or maybe with one of the printed fabrics from the workshop this spring, but I haven’t had time to look at what I have or what I want to do. Instead I picked something where I could just get going.

This brown cardigan is great but also not. It fits me well, the yarn is soft and warm, the colour is nice, the knitting is tidy. But: I made it an awkward length that I’m not happy with. It is unflattering on me, and I find it more and more difficult to ignore that. I already have a relatively long torso and shortish lower body; a too-long cardigan emphasises that even more. And the bottom hem hits right where I am broadest, which makes me look even more unproportional.

The way it’s constructed, I can’t just unravel the bottom and make it shorter. The next best thing is to redesign it to make it look shorter, by breaking up the long vertical with something horizontal, and to draw the attention away from the hips to the waist. Hence, a discretely colourful waistband.

I came down with a horrible stomach ache after lunch. I couldn’t figure out what happened and just suffered through the afternoon, until I got home and collapsed on the sofa. Afterwards I figured out that it was the pasta dish we had for dinner yesterday, from our meal kit service, that had milk in it. I’m so used to buying lactose-free milk and not even having any ordinary milk in the house that I just opened the package and poured the contents into the sauce without thinking twice. That was very much a mistake. I guess I should have just dumped it out as soon as I unpacked the ingredients.

One small luxury in my life is a subscription to an actual paper newspaper. I’ve been considering cancelling it to save money, but I enjoy it too much. One of the really good parts is the crossword. Sometimes I do it in my own, sometimes Ingrid joins me. They’re not at a level where Adrian enjoys them (although we occasionally bring home a free local paper that has easier ones).

The Friday crossword is themed. The theme can be anything from “Fredrik” (when it’s Fredrik’s name day in the calendar) to “fishing” to “the Finnish-Swedish athletics competition”. The Saturday crossword is tied to a picture, with one long word or phrase related to the picture going down vertically at the far left, and words for objects or concepts in the picture going across it. Figuring out what word the constructor might have meant for each thing in the image is where two brains are especially much better than one.

We’re getting familiar with the people behind the crosswords. Some of them we just don’t click with at all. Their clues make no sense to us, even when we look up the correct answer. It’s like we’re not even speaking the same language. When the crossword is signed by Håkan, we don’t even try any more. But those are few; pretty much just Håkan and Madelen.

The current crossword is often open on our sofa table, especially on weekends, and there are always two pencils nearby.

No, the button band looked no better with a fresh pair of eyes. I unpicked the seam, went and watched a better tutorial video, and had another go. (There’s plenty of tutorials on using mattress stitch for vertical seams in knitting, but not many that are helpful when the two edges have different gauge and go in different directions. The one I finally found was great, though.)

The seam is nearly invisible and it’s like the two pieces are one. That’s the way it’s supposed to look like. New version on the left (or top, if you’re on a small screen); old on the right/bottom.

The red cardigan has been waiting for its button bands to get finished and sewn on for two months. As usual, I put off the task because I didn’t quite know how to do it, and wasn’t sure that I’d be able to do it well.

Now I’ve made the button band, and today I sewed it on, and I am not happy with my attempt. It doesn’t even look bad in the photo – if you don’t see it up close, the seam doesn’t look to bad, I guess. But up close it looks uneven and ugly. I’ll let it rest overnight and see if I feel better about it tomorrow.

I’m challenging myself to get as much as possible done from my to-do list today, including running a bunch of errands in town. New baking “paper” (is there a word for the reusable kind?), embroidery yarn, knitting yarn and knitting needles, and chocolate.

I’m more and more disappointed with what used to be my favourite specialist chocolate shop. First they ran out of my favourite kind of chocolate, at least a year ago, or has it been two years already? They kept promising that it would be back in stock soon. It still isn’t. I tried an alternative, and now they don’t have that one in stock either. In fact the shelves were more empty than full today. “Well, we just came back from our summer break” was their explanation. Maybe spend some time actually getting ready to open, then?

Later I remembered that there is a Chokladfabriken store near the knitting store and went there. They make excellent pralines, but they don’t have much in the way of chocolate tablets. I got something, at least. And they offered free tasting portions of hot chocolate (delicious) and they sold ice cream, including a lemon and ginger sorbet (also delicious) which did a lot to alleviate my disappointment.

I walked through the churchyard of Katarinakyrkan on my way back across Södermalm towards the train station, and stopped to finish my ice cream there. I happened to be standing right next to the church when the bells rang for five o’clock.

When the kids are here, we cook a proper dinner every day and eat together. On the weeks when they are away, I usually start the week with a bunch of leftovers. When those start to run out, I often have leftover ingredients that guide my meals. A forgotten vegetable, half a bottle of juice… Things that would be gone in a day if it was three people eating, but that last me a while when it’s just me. I don’t need to do much grocery shopping at all on my “off” weeks.

Today I was faced with two carrots that were starting to look sad and wrinkly. Two forgotten potatoes. Half a package of quark. All on their last legs, really needing to be eaten.

I’ve made plenty of carrot pancakes before, and potato pancakes, and quark pancakes. If each of those can be put in a pancake batter, what do I get if I put all three together (and throw in some eggs and flour)? Franken-pancakes? Frankcakes?

It’s the perfect season for bicycle commuting. I leave home at around seven, at which point the sun is well up. My commuting route is in a south-easterly direction most of the way. Slightly more south first, which leaves much of the road in the shade. From Brommaplan on (that’s just short of halfway for me) I bike along the Drottningholmsvägen in a more easterly direction. The bike lane there is next to a wide four-lane road, which gives us cyclists plenty of morning sun.

The Drottningholmsvägen is a major bike thoroughfare with a lot of traffic. I’m normally early enough to miss peak bike traffic. Half an hour later, there will be clumps of twenty, thirty cyclists waiting at each red light. It never gets too bad, but it’s enough that I make sure not to sleep late or dawdle at home.

I’ve only got just over two kilometres of the wide, smooth, crowded bike lane if I’m going to the Sortera office. At Alvik almost all of the crowd continues east towards the city, whereas I turn off onto quieter roads towards the south-east again. By that time I’m warm enough that I don’t even notice whether I’m in the sun or not.