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!