When it’s just Ingrid and me for a meal (and sometimes with Adrian) we tend to watch Robinson, which is a Swedish version of Survivor. A bunch of people on an empty tropical island, with very little in the way of equipment – surviving, competing, and voting each other out, until only one remains. We’re not invested enough to watch it outside of mealtimes, so it’s taking us far longer to watch it than it took for the actual events to take place.

Today we had strawberry cake to go with the entertainment, because Ingrid felt like baking.

I hate it when a long-time favourite product stops being produced. Especially when it comes to cosmetics. They’re close to my body, and they have scents, and the scent matters a lot to to me. I find it really difficult to deal with “bad” scents – too strong, too sharp, too artificial. And entirely unperfumed cosmetics have a kind of chemical smell of their own, which I also dislike.

I’m on my second body wash crisis. First I used Palmolive Almond & Honey. When I noticed it getting harder and harder to find, I bought a pile and stashed them in the basement, which gave me a few years to find a replacement. Then I found Apoteket’s body wash with Almond & Argan Oil. When this one disappeared, it was sudden. One day I went to the pharmacy to buy more; they had none, and it was also out of stock online.

Panic.

I bought the least offensive body wash I found at the pharmacy. It seemed OK when I sniffed at it, but in actual use I really disliked it. Then I tried another almond-scented body wash (from Weleda) but where the others were soft and mild, this one was like getting a blast of bitter almond extract in my face. Horrible.

Today I spent a long while at Åhlens, sniffing different kinds of body wash. Most of them sucked. Finally I had to ask the staff for help, and they helped me find a few that were… less bad. Now I’ll try them out and pick one, and then hope that it doesn’t go out of production soon. Which I don’t actually have high hopes for, given that these are fancy branded stuff, unlike the ones I used before. This sucks.

Ingrid and Adrian have both had their last test of this school year. School may not be over, but what’s left is just coasting downhill.

There’s a lot of talk about “borders” in this year’s campaign for the EU parliament elections in Sweden.

The Centre party at least say what their “borders” or limits are about = against Putin, against animal cruelty, for climate action. The Christian Democrats just promise “borders and freedom”. Umm. Ok? Sounds good?

I got to spend today with one of Sortera’s trucks, picking up bags of waste for recycling.

Here’s John, the driver, ready to start the day, bright and early at 7 o’clock.

And here’s me, kitted with a hard hat and high-viz vest.

I always thought that they’d attach a hook to the straps of the bag and lift it that way. Ain’t no one got time for that! Turns out they use the scoop to grab and lift the bag. And it can be a delicate job, when the bag is right next to a building facade, or in between trees and lamp posts and other obstacles.

One of the jobs involved lifting the bag over a dense 3.5-metre hedge. A little bit challenging.

The truck has a veeery long arm.

When the container started filling up, John had to climb up into it so he could see where he was placing each bag, so he could use the container to its maximum.

When it was all full, we drove to the sorting facility, where we dumped all the bags. Another guy with a tractor took over and sorted the bags into their respective piles.

We drove off again to a fire-damaged school building to pick up chunks of roof metal. For John this was the best job of the day because he got to put his crane skills to good use, trying to pick everything up in as few lifts as possible.

And then back to the facility again, to dump all the metal in the metal pile.

Look what we found on a shelf, dusty and forgotten – a gingerbread house.

It’s “health week” at tretton37, which includes both a step challenge and group activities, one of which is a hike of the first stage of Sörmlandsleden (which gave us plenty of steps for the step challenge).


The leader of our group had prepared and packed a picnic dinner for us all, which we ate on a pleasantly secluded little cliff shelf by Sandasjön lake.


On our way out we spotted a sleepy slowworm on the gravel road. The first one I’ve seen in many years.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Stadsteatern. This time the actual Shakespeare play, not a ballet, and this time the whole family went. Eric and I obviously knew roughly what we were in for; Ingrid enjoyed it; Adrian was mostly restless and not particularly spell-bound.

I found it all pleasantly modern while still true to the spirit of the original. (No microphones!) And of course Shakespeare would have wanted battery-driven hobby horses for his actors, if he had had access to them.

I will remember the wonderfully zany costumes. A bizarre mixture of fashion from Shakespeare’s era (ruff collars and puffy knee-length trousers) and Greek-themed decorations. Lysander and Demetrius wore sweatshirts, one a souvenir shirt from Athens and the other with University of Athens branding. Exaggerated face paintings reminded me of the masks used in Greek tragedies.

There were no photos allowed during the performance of course, so the photos below are official press photos from Stadsteatern.