July 21st 2025

The deer ate my veggies!

Well, some of the corn survived, and I've got plenty of carrots that they didn't manage to uproot, but the broccoli? Probably not getting any of that this year either. I'll find out later this summer. So tonight we put up sticks slathered in sheep tallow. Supposedly they won't like that smell and leave the vegetables alone for now. The everlasting flowers are alright though, and I think I'll be able to pick some flowers soon.

Anyway, These last few weeks me and Tofi have finally started to learn how to use the grill, which is about time to be honest. We've been using grandpa's old grill, so we invited him and grandma (maternal grandpa, paternal grandma) over to make them something with it. It's a good thing sausage is easy to make, we need more practice with the temperatures and all that other stuff. Though I did grill some meat once, it went okay.

Grandma had brought some strawberries for dessert, and I'd bought ice cream to go with it, but she'd also made some strawberry jam to give us to eat later. Me, Tofi and dad had it with oven pancake last week, it was delicious.

Later in the evening, after I'd driven grandma home and grandpa had left, I went for a walk. I got distracted on the way, when I saw some blueberries growing by the side of the road, so I ended up getting off the road and picked about a fistful of blueberries that I found in the forest. Prisad vare allemansrätten! I had them with dad and Tofi the next day, with the leftover ice cream.

Yesterday, me and Tofi picked about 3 liters of cherries. We still have a lot more to pick, but they weren't ready yet. I also need to use a different ladder, you can't reach all the branches when you're propping the ladder up against the trunk of the tree. I need to use the one that folds out so it can stand on its own next time.

After we picked the cherries, we made cherry soup from the cherries we still had left over from last year, chilling in the freezer. Or, as we call it, spit soup. Because you cook the cherries with the pits and all, so you spit the seeds into a glass while you eat the soup. Not a very appetising name, but it's what we've grown up calling it, so it's what we use.

Also last week, I finally got around to going to the forest lake where I like to go swimming in the summer. Since then I've been twice, once being this morning, cus guess what? I started my vacation today. So I got to go swimming in the morning and when I got home I got to have some of the spit soup me and Tofi made yesterday.

My little brother's sambo doesn't like this lake, cus the one time she went there with me and my brothers she saw a leech. But despite the leeches, the sludgy bottom and how you're covered in said sludge when you get out of the lake, I love it. It's pretty and it has spots where the rock has been broken so you can sit on them like you're sitting in a chair with your feet still dipping in the water.

I don't remember if I wrote about it last year (or was it two years ago?), but once I almost collided with a snake that was swimming in the lake, but it veered off. I only knew cus someone on a kayak near me suddenly started yelling "snake! a snake's swimming toward you!" and I realised they were yelling at me. I don't swim on my back as much anymore, but I do still do it.

On to video games! My hands are still not healed, so I've been taking it pretty easy with video games. The only one I've been playing is Tomodachi Life. It's so easy to just play for a couple of minutes and then put it away again. I recently made Takeuchi and Suwa, as well as Sumomone and Uiui. I'm trying to get them to marry, but Sumomone went and got a crush on Suwa?! Come on, fall for Uiui! I usually just let the miis fall for whoever but once in a while you wanne get your ships in there, you know?

Since Sumomone and Uiui are from a music anime/game, I had them sing a duet. I feel like I should make the last member of their band now, Rararin, so I can have them sing as Reijing Signal.

Obligatory kitty pics! Kalma likes keeping track of me when I go to Tofi, cus he knows a scary meany lives there (my brother's black cat), so in the photo on the left he was waiting for me underneath this tree, then when I came outside again, he jumped up on the low spot where the tree splits off and meowed at me expectantly to come pet him and then follow him inside my own cottage, where the only scary meany is Njord.

The photo on the right is Njord helping me read my Mars Red doujinshi. She's very good at reading Japanese, I'll have you know. Unlike me, who needs the dictionary constantly. Some of the doujin were made by my twitter moots (back when I still used twitter - I wish they used bsky TAT), and I hold those especially close to my heart. I had a lot of fun gushing about Takeuchi and SuwaTake/MaeTake with them.

Speaking of Takeuchi, I've been working on his shrine, but wowie, there's a lot of writing. I still have so much to do on it! I wanna make more stuff for it, like icons and stamps. I wanna make wallpapers too, real 2000s looking ones, but I've never made any before so I'm trying to collect a bunch of wallpapers made in the 2000s as a reference.

July 3rd 2025

It's been a while since I wrote about my vegetable garden (it's been a while since I wrote about anything, really)! If I even have? I can't remember.

Most of it is growing really well, though not all of the corn took so it's a bit sparse. Not to speak of the poor wild strawberries. We might have the very beginning of one plant, but it's been growing so slowly. The carrots, everlasting flowers and the broccoli however are doing really well! No flower buds yet though, but we'll get there.

I'm honestly a little surprised by the broccoli, considering how bad my luck has been with it these past few years. We'll see if they continue to grow as well as they are. The everlasting flowers I'm growing specifically to put in between the inner and outer windows. I live in an old house so there's several cm of space between them, where you put stuffing at the bottom to fight the draft. It doesn't look very cute though, hence, I'm putting flowers on top of the stuffing! You can kinda see it in the photo I'm adding to this entry.

Mostly unrelated, I was gifted a kg of strawberries by dad. They both smell and taste amazing. I've been considering getting a strawberry perfume when the vanilla one I use is empty for a while, and I'm getting more certain about it now. I love the scent of strawberries. And these have a lot of flavour, too, unlike the ones I sold back when I was a strawberry salesman for a summer. Selling strawberries outdoors in April was freezing business. I was relieved when I got to move to a place that was inside, especially when it moved over to sweltering heat instead. When you do that job you don't move a lot, so if it's cold it's terrible, and if it's hot you're sweating your ass off cus the sun is usually right on you unless it's the middle of the day. I had a pretty unpleasant time doing it, but at least I got to eat a lot of free strawberries cus we were supposed to get rid of the ones that were too squished. I don't think they do that anymore, I bought some strawberries from the same company a few years ago and they hadn't even bothered to check for mouldy ones. Gross.

Going from barely related to not related at all, my car is in the shops. Again. I feel like it's been one thing after the other ever since that damn mouse ate a cable and died on the engine cus it was trying to nest on top of it last year. So I've been driving a replacement car. There are two problems with this car.

• It's super long, I'm used to driving a very short car.
• It's automatic.

I am soooo not used to driving automatic. I can count on one hand the times I've driven one before this week. I could give you a middle finger with it, too. That's how little I've driven automatic. Manual is still the standard in Sweden, I'm pretty sure. It's cheaper and when you take your license you have to pick between a license for manual or automatic, and while you're allowed to drive automatic with a manual license, you're not allowed to drive a manual with an automatic, so most people opt for the former.

To be honest, since my hands continue to be fucked, I should probably be driving an automatic, but I... don't want to. Humans are creatures of habit and I'm so used to manual, I almost had several panic attacks when I had to drive the automatic the first time this week and hit the breaks while looking for the clutch. Several times. And also, it's not just that easy of a thing to change cars, you know? It's expensive.

Anyway, for some reason the breaks on my car decided that it was going to permanently stay partially on the wheel (right side), which made it very difficult to drive. And then they found some other problem with a tube connected to something-something (I am not a car person, I'm lucky my dad knows a bit more about that).

Hopefully I get my car back tomorrow, but I was supposed to get it back yesterday originally. I just want it back til the weekend so I can go swimming in the lake. I do not wanna do the turning required to go back home after, where parking is literally just a tiny spot cleared of trees, so most people park along the side of the road. And it's a very narrow road, so not that easy to manoeuvre a long car there.

I know I'm not a car person, but I learned how to drive in this car, so I'm kinda attached to it. Even with how much trouble it's causing recently.

Well, I'm gonna go eat more strawberries (dessert before dinner, hello!) now.

Bye!