Adrian is now a mere 2 cm shy of Eric’s height. Given that he grew 10 cm in the past year and the same in the year before, he’s going to make that distance up soon.

I’m past the dead zone! It feels like I made more progress today, measured in volume of soil dug through, than in the past three weekends all together. No more scraping soil one fingers-breadth at a time. Now I’m cutting off entire chunks.

The soil here is like somewhat crumbly cheese: sticky and stable. Cut it, and it sticks to your tool, and what you cut off falls into a few pieces, but it can be handled in chunks.

The horrible soil was close to a place where there used to be a concrete sewer access. I’m guessing maybe the soil got compacted by heavy machinery when it was installed?

I have given up entirely on tretton37 – seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if the company doesn’t survive until the end of the year – so now I’m looking for a new employer. That means phone calls and meetings and interviews – and coding tasks. The first one I did was a small and simple one – I think I banged it out in an hour and a half. The other company I’m in serious discussions with has a bigger task, so basically I’m spending most of today working. I started after a leisurely Saturday breakfast and decided that I will stop when it’s time to cook dinner, and whatever is left undone at that point can stay that way.

It’s a serious time investment, and I might not be willing to do this if I was interviewing with more companies. But I’ve only got three right now that I’m interested in, so I can invest a bit more in each one. And I actually prefer this to the other coding task, which was almost too simple, and for which the feedback I got was roughly “this looks really great!” and that was that. Makes me suspicious. Are they desperate? If my code – admittedly nice but nothing earth-shattering – looked so great to them, what kind of low expectations did they have? They say they’re selective but this coding task wouldn’t winnow out many candidates.

I want to be challenged, and I want colleagues who will challenge me.

I just noticed that the lifts in the Waterfront building have mirror-blank ceilings. Not glass, though, because the reflections are slightly distorted.

The embroidery course isn’t until Tuesday, but the deadline for sending in photos of our work for discussion in Tuesday’s session is tomorrow afternoon, so I’ve been working hard.

The design inspiration:

And the first, A5-sized version:

And then the same thing scaled-down to A6:

I didn’t want the downscaling to be just a straight-up copy, because where is the fun in that, so I stitched the black areas instead of using appliqué. I kind of like it because the surfaces now have both structure as well as a flow and a direction. But I also don’t like it because the speckled look does not have the same impact at all as the unbroken black.

Also I just eyeballed the scaling-down and clearly didn’t get the proportions quite right. Should clearly have used a grid. The white blank space in the middle came out too large and takes over. I’m going to broaden the black curved areas around it, to balance it out – as soon as I buy more black embroidery floss, because all this surface-filling took a lot of yarn.

It’ll be interesting to hear what the teacher and the group will have to say about this.

It’s time for Nysse’s annual vaccinations. He was not happy about being in the transport cage. Other cats at the clinic were just quietly sitting in theirs, while Nysse was yowling and trying to claw and bite his way though the bars.

Adrian, opening the giant Lego set he got for his birthday – the tower of Barad-dûr. Forty bags holding a total of 5471 pieces.

I have lost all trust in tretton37 management and given up on the company. Which is sad, but it’s also such a huge relief to step away from the drama and be able to observe it from the sidelines without feeling that it really affects me. Not my problem any more.

So now I’m job-hunting. Having lunch with one consultancy and afternoon fika with another, trying to find one that I feel fits me.

At its best, tretton37 was such a wonderful place to work. Amazing colleagues, great culture. Now there’s nothing left of that. But I can’t help comparing all other companies to what it was like – and they all fall short in some way.

Adrian’s birthday isn’t until Tuesday, but baking a fancy layer cake is not something you just whip up after work, so we had the cake today instead.

It’s like there is almost no topsoil here. A hand’s breadth’s worth at most. And then it’s the hard-packed, concrete-hard, dead layer that no grass or bush roots penetrate, although cherry tree roots and earthworms manage.

And rocks. So many rocks. When the soil is so densely packed, even the smallest pebble stops the spade dead, because it has no wiggle room.

At this pace I can dig every weekend and still not be done before the ground freezes. Ugh.