Progress on Sörmlandsleden is still blocked by a long stage that requires a whole weekend, and I wanted to be at home most of this weekend to see Adrian between his travels, so I walked the “adventure trail” at Lida. 9km.

Stigen är på vissa ställen tekniskt utmanande med kuperade passager, glest markerad och inte röjd.

The trail is technically challenging in places with hilly sections, sparsely marked and not cleared.

Sounded like fun! (Except… how hard would it be to actually paint some more blue markers on a few trees here and there? Especially since the Lida activity centre suggests you buy a map of the trail from them for 30 kr.)

Parts of the trail were indeed just as the website described.

But there were also many stretches of pretty boring gravel road, and the last section was a particularly dull one. Yes, we’re technically in nature, but it didn’t feel like it.

The trail is a circular one and goes around a small lake, and I had hoped for nice views of the lake, but those were few and far between. Overall this trail did not impress me much and won’t be on any kind of list of favourites.

It started raining towards the end of my walk. It had been rather hot before, so I didn’t mind, and found the cooling effect quite pleasant.

It rained a bit more and then a bit less, and then, during my drive home, it rained more and more and then even more. At times I was driving at half the speed limit. And then I’d drive through a dip in the road and it was like running into mud. And then some idiot in a giant SUV would overtake me in the left lane and spray me with so much water that it was like being in a car wash. I could literally see nothing but a sheet of water. I wished I could stop at that point but there were cars behind me so I just carefully continued straight at an even pace for the 5 seconds it took for the water to flow down and some visibility to be restored. The 40-minute drive home was more exhausting than the three-hour walk.

Back from a week at scout camp. Tired and hoarse and happy.

Ingrid drove us to the pickup point and then back again, and helped carry the packs.

Knackered. He only has a day and a half for recovery, and on Monday morning he’s off to Göteborg to spend time at a friend’s summer cottage.

The latest issue of Utemagasinet (“Outdoors magazine”) had a section where various contributors described their outdoor memories, based on a series of prompts. It made me think, and then I decided to do the same.

And I realize again just how bad my long-term memory is at storing experiences. Eric and I went to all sorts of places before we had children – Wales, Lake District, Scotland – but since I haven’t looked at photos of those trips in many years, I only have rather hazy mental images of them. I am very grateful for this blog.

Anyway, here goes.

Day trip: The last day of our trip to Mercantour. This was our first outdoorsy trip with the kids, and on the last day we went up to a mountain pass where we got our first taste of high alpine landscape. Dramatic views, everybody super impressed, until the afternoon thunderstorm with heavy hail. We all still have strong memories of that day.

Week trip: Padjelanta on skis. My own hikes are usually long weekends so they don’t quite qualify. All my ski tours have been lovely but this one was wilder and more fun than most. In the middle of the Padjelanta national park, we were sometimes the only group in a hut.

Of the weekend trips, I still have very fond memories of the Kinnekulle hike. Most of my hikes have been to mountainous areas, or in various pine forests, but this was a beautiful lowland hike in a completely different landscape. I’ve been thinking of going back there during a different season.

Accommodation: The cave house on Gran Canaria, or perhaps the yurt in Mercantour, which I unfortunately have no photos of.

Highest peak: In 2005 Eric and I climbed the Kilimanjaro. That was BTB, Before The Blog, so I have no post to link to, but here’s a photo from my archives:

Worst weather: Actually not the day with hail and thunder, but a gale in Skarvheimen. High wind, wet snow. The only time I’ve felt truly miserable due to the weather. No visibility, exhausting skiing. By the end of it I was numb with exhaustion and chilled all the way through.

Camp site: Nothing immediately stands out as “the greatest”, because many of the sites near Stockholm are rather similar to each other. The camping site at Trehörningen in Paradiset nature reserve is beautiful, and so is the one by Finnsjön on Sörmlandsleden stage 18. Especially when I am the only one there.

View: Actually not Kilimanjaro. It was a high peak and the views were expansive, but not the most interesting ones. The land around the peak is quite flat and barren. And at the very top I was feeling pretty awful with altitude sickness. No, the best views I can remember were from Viševnik. Only 2000 metres compared to Kilimanjaro’s 5900, but with rather more scenic views. Or perhaps the Centenario SAT via ferrata route, which is right above Riva del Garda.

Here’s Eric’s photo of a very young-looking me on that route, with Riva del Garda far below us, in 2004:

A time when I was afraid: The gale in Skarvheimen. I remember having the realization that this is how people die in the mountains. It doesn’t even take any extreme temperatures – just a bad combination of them, and a long day, and a lack of visibility.

Swim: Many of the swims in the lakes near Stockholm have been pleasant, but the dip in a bog lake in Soomaa felt unlike everything else. The top layer was warm, but beneath it the water was very cold, so I had the strong sense how large the invisible waters were that the tiny little pool connected to.

Food: The outdoor food above all other outdoor foods is porridge, especially with newly picked lingonberries.

Look who’s all caught up with the blog posts! I’m so used to having to back-date all my posts that not doing it felt a bit confusing.

I put on my glasses for reading the newspaper today. I’ve been wearing them regularly for embroidery and for some mending, but haven’t felt the need in other situations. But after seven hours of screen time at work today, with very fiddly tasks for the last couple of hours, my eyes were so tired that I couldn’t focus on the newspaper.

At first I thought this was the first time ever, but my “related posts” plugin tells me that I did it once last autumn. It felt like the first time.

Now that I think about it, the text on this blog is also kind of tiny. Smaller than many other sites. A larger font size might be a kindness to more readers than just me.

Ingrid at her summer job.

Does it look like she’s working? No.

Does she feel like she’s working? Barely.

But she is employed and is getting paid and can put it on her resume.

The city of Stockholm offers summer jobs to young people living in the city. The summer is chopped up into three three-week periods, and Ingrid got a job for the last three weeks of her summer break. Her job is to (together with a team) host activities for children at Spånga Torg.

Unfortunately they barely get any children visiting their tent.

I don’t know who did the planning, but they can’t have had much local knowledge. There are no children just randomly hanging around Spånga Torg in the summer. Spånga is an affluent suburb of large-ish detached houses, not an inner-city area. Kids here are either at home with their parents, or more likely out of town.

The team leaders (who are actual adults) work all three periods, and according to them, the group was in other parts of Spånga-Tensta before, where they had a lot more visitors. Yeah, because those areas are densely populated areas of apartment blocks.

The “employees” are making their own fun. Braiding bracelets, painting posters to advertise the tent’s existence, etc. The highlights of Ingrid’s day are when she gets to do face painting on some kids.

We all hope that word will spread, and people will come back from their vacations, and they’ll get more visitors next week.

My mum asked if I could share photos that I have of her.

Hello, 40 000 untagged photos.

The task seemed overwhelming so I put it off for many months. Today I thought I’d have a go at skimming through a subset at least. In the end I scrolled through all twelve and a half years of photos that I have in Lightroom in a couple of hours. After a while I found patterns that made the work easier – I could easily spot longer trips that I could quickly skim past because I knew she wasn’t there, etc. (And then had to do it all over again because I misunderstood a Lightroom sync setting and lost all my choices and this specific action, of all things, did not have an Undo possibility. The second time was even faster.)

I could definitely prune some of that. In the early years, when I was new to photography, and the kids were squirmy and wiggly, I often took many photos in the hope that some would be OK, and then kept more than I really needed. I wasn’t even photographing daily, then, so the output of each “session” must have been even larger. The kids sit still these days, so I don’t need to spray and pray any more. On the other hand, now I can take ten or twenty shots of the same flower, with only minor variations. I try to be better at culling them afterwards, but sometimes I don’t have the energy for that effort.

2021 was clearly a bad year for photography. And for life. I’m still not living like I was before the pandemic; I go out less and undertake fewer projects of any kind. It takes an effort now, where I could just make things happen before. I’m improving, though.

The Olympic Games are happening in Paris. I’m sort of vaguely interested, but not enough to pay for access, so I’m not watching any of it, apart from short clips of highlights.

Except today! We had an Olympic day at the office, since it was just the four of us on the third floor, and nobody could complain. A teammate who is more into sports has a paid Eurosport account, and we have a big screen on the wall that normally shows graphs and statistics about new customer signups and take-up of the new customer portal and other such inspiring things, that he could Chromecast the stream to.

We saw various branches of gymnastics (always super impressive), table tennis doubles (all Asian teams at the top), swimming, men’s volleyball, and probably more. Not continuously, but whenever I was waiting for a build to complete, or was switching tasks, etc.

The technical setup itself was interesting enough. 360 degree cameras around the table tennis setup, so they could freeze the scene and pan around, Matrix-style. Visualizations of all the spots where ball had hit the table during the game. Miles beyond the blurry slow-motion cameras of yesteryear.

It’s World Embroidery Day today, which I discovered only by chance on Instagram. I just picked up my Stockholm embroidery again a few days ago – I need to make progress before the embroidery club starts up again to avoid endless shame – and continued today. I feel done with all the houses so I finally started on the trees now.

The best light was out on the deck, so that’s where I sat.

First day back at work. The same for four out of our five-person team, so we congregated at the Sortera office.

I tried to remember how this office work thing works, and mostly managed to pack all the necessities (computer, mouse plus pad, change of clothes, lunch box) except for my knitting. Missed it several times during the day. When I got home, the first thing I did (after unpacking my used lunch box) was to put the bag with my sock knitting in my backpack for tomorrow.

I’ve only used 3 out of my 5 weeks of vacation. But Adrian is away at scout camp all week, and Ingrid will be working, so we won’t be doing anything as a family anyway. I think I’ll use another week to go for a full-week hike some time in September, instead of the long weekends I’ve been doing in the past. And the last week is for Christmas.