It looks like we’ll have a great cherry harvest this year. And they reached peak ripeness just today. Too bad I won’t be here for it – the kids and I are leaving for Estonia this evening. Eric will have to eat and pick what he can on his own.

Humans and their cars are away on vacations, so the deer can be more bold than usual. A family of them (dad, and mum with baby) have been traipsing through the garden repeatedly in the last few days.

Or it could be because of the ripe cherries that have dropped from the tree, and the newly cut grass that makes the cherries easy to reach.

This season’s big garden project: replacing lawn with a planting under and around the elder bush, and the new plum tree next to it. The soil is thick clay, hard as concrete when it’s dry and like a lump of glue when it’s wet, so it’s slow going. And the elder is not making it easier. The dogwoods on the left I can just push aside – even tie them up with a piece of string to get them out of the way. The elder branches just break when I push them even the most gently. I started cutting the sod with a normal gardening spade, but in the end I was crawling under it with a little hand-held planting spade.

The little patch of green that’s left right next to the elder should be a patch of white anemones. I know they’re roughly somewhere there, but when I looked for photo evidence, I could only find close-ups of anemone flowers and nothing documenting their location. At this time of the year they’re all gone, so I can only hope I saved at least some of them.

Of course this also means saving the weeds around them, so I’ll be eradicating couch grass here forever.

Here’s the elder when I planted it, twelve years ago:

And here are the bags of sod and roots and the occasional rock. The first one has been here since last summer and I am starting to worry about its structural integrity, given how much the material has faded.

I got my big camera back! And it’s working! Back LCD screen all flat and folded in, and it shows an image! And the lens was repaired as well.

I’m super pleased with the Olympus service experience. Smooth, no surprises, stuff works.

I’ve also been mostly pleased with the photos I’ve been able to get with my camera phone. As long as I take its limitations into account (must have good lighting, absolutely no zooming) the results are not bad at all.

I do get annoyed by all the automatic adjustments it makes, though – it’s impossible to get consistent exposure and white balance even between photos in a single session. Like the ones above. The camera sees a light gray package in one photo, and a dark camera in another, and tries to even things out, and the same single table ends up looking like four entirely different ones (unless I spend a lot of time fixing them afterwards).

Bought fabric for a top. Lovely fabric, beautiful colours, thick with a nice drape.

Was going to try a new pattern. Forgot to check the amount of fabric that the pattern called for, assumed it would be about the same as for a normal top. It wasn’t – the pattern required more – so I couldn’t use the pattern.

That’s a bit sad, but OK, I’ll make an ordinary long-sleeve top from a pattern I’ve used before. Cut out the pieces, start assembling. Top does not fit because the fabric has less stretch than the jerseys I’ve used before.

The fabric was a one-off batch at that store and I can’t buy more.

Throw it all out.

Ingrid is learning to drive, and has advanced to the point where she’s driving in actual daytime traffic on normal roads. Not just to the nearest supermarket, but to a mall fifteen minutes’ drive away. On roads where the top speed is higher than what she’s done before on her scooter, even! Gives me reasons to get all kinds of errands done, like (finally) dropping off bags of outgrown clothes at the charity shop, or (finally) taking the empty planting boxes to the recycling centre. Win-win.

Sorting through all the paper that Adrian has produced during this school year. Archiving some for nostalgia; throwing out the rest.

Perhaps I’m more nostalgic and inclined to storing memories than most people. I like having the ability to go back and re-visit old memories, and not just in my head but with the support of pictures, words, and objects. I’ve saved a few baby clothes for both Ingrid and Adrian, and my favourite baby-wearing wraps, and material from my own years at high school and university.

I wish I had more from my own childhood. I’d have loved to show my school uniforms to the kids, because that’s just so different from how things work these days. Or my handwriting exercises, again because things are so different now. Fountain pens (not pencils), with a jar of ink on the desk, and exercise books with lines after lines of uniform, tidy copies of the letter “m”.

Twenty years from now, the idea of even having paper in school could be a quaint memory, so these might be fun to look at. Maybe Ingrid and Adrian won’t care when they’re all grown and have their own children. But maybe they will.

Bonus cat, because of course every flat surface is a cat bed.

I still say yes to strawberries when they’re in season. Also raspberries and blueberries, for those who prefer those.

Splurged on extra nice strawberries for today. The supermarkets here usually have a single kind, and it’s whatever they can buy in bulk. The veggie stand in Spånga Torg often has several varieties, sometimes named ones. Today they had “Malwina” strawberries. Intensely red all the way through, and super delicious!

I’ve been gently suggesting that we could retire this pillowcase, because there is not much left of it, but didn’t get any agreement because “it’s so soft!”

Now that it has actual rips in it, though, I’m throwing it out. But it deserves a mention here for its long and loyal service.

I remember using it in high school, so about thirty years ago. I also remember the colours being *a lot* more vibrant. The top half of the photo shows the fabric on the outside of the pillowcase; the bottom is the folded-in section that hasn’t been sun-bleached. The original colours were of course even stronger than that.

This year’s deer kids are old enough to be walking around with their mums.

When mum jumped over the hedge and the chain link fence behind it, the baby instead found the cat passage under the fence and used that.