What's Good This Week

We have been having a bit of a heatwave here in Stockholm over the past couple of weeks, with highs of 30°C / 86°F during the day, and uncomfortably hot evenings. I don't know how hot it gets where you live, but here since we're so far north the sun can be really intense when it does come out.

Couple that with buildings that are designed to keep heat in to handle our cold winters, and we have been sweating our butts off up here.

It's given me the nudge I needed to start embracing Swedish summers, although with travel off the board for most people, the city is obnoxiously crowded right now. Normally once midsummer hits Stockholm becomes a bit of a ghost town except for in tourist areas, but this year it's the total opposite.

We have a lake just out our back door with a public beach that gets pretty busy, but another, quieter beach a short bike ride away. I'm an ocean girl at heart, and lakes have always kind of weirded me out. I don't like the way the water smells, I don't trust it to be clean without a little salt in there (NaCl, AKA nature's chlorine) and the bottom always feels slimy and I just assume there are leeches or some gross algae that is going to make me sick.

Where are the barnacles? Where is the seaweed? Where are the pods of orcas swimming by? Where is that perfectly briney salt water smell? Where are the mountains in my skyline?

Alas, they are out of reach for me this year, and it's been hot enough that we've been down at the lake pretty much every day. The kids love it, they don't care that the water isn't salty, and my biggest challenge is to get Odin to stop drinking it. (Lake water! So gross!)

I'm kicking myself for not hustling to get my driver's licence before the summer, and now since there is a backlog of cancelled tests to make up for, the earliest date I could get was at the end of October! When I realized we wouldn't be going back to Canada this summer I pretty much gave up on the process because I figured there was no point, but now I know I could have been bombing around to quieter parts of Sweden and enjoying lake days, or even salt water swimming days, at my leisure.

In any case, I'm trying to embrace the lakes and the Swedish summer in general, and as part of that, on the hottest day this past week I finally took the kids and I to the vaccine clinic to get our tick shots.

Ticks are a huge problem in Sweden - problematic enough even in the city that we need to do tick checks when we get home from the park, but even more so out in the archipelago where we will be spending part of our summer vacation. They carry, in addition to Lyme disease (for which there is no vaccine) tick borne encephalitis (TBE) which you can vaccinate against.

There was a lot of drama from one certain four-year-old when I told him we were going to get shots, but both kids were total champs when it came down to it. I got Odin's chicken pox vaccine done at the same time as I'd been dragging my feet on getting that one, and since both shots need to be repeated in one year (with an additional TBE shot one month from now) the timing was good.

I don't think we are fully protected from TBE until the second dose, so this is clearly something I should have taken care of much sooner, but we have at least got the ball rolling.

two boys on the sofa with fake tattoos of ticks on their legs — We got tick shots and tick tattoos

Hey, has anyone noticed something weird happening with my site in the last month? A few people reached out about something strange and spammy happening where they clicked on my site and it suddenly became something else called "Tiger Scroll" which was basically endless photos of cute cats and whatnot.

I actually ignored the first comment about this issue because it came from "Boris Johnson" and the email address was at "10downing" and I was like, ok thanks Boris, marked the comment as spam, and deleted it. Thanks Boris! Sorry to have doubted you.

A week or so later I got an email from a longtime reader describing the same thing, but when my tech support looked into it they said there didn't look to be any problem, no security breach, and everything was a-ok. I was in contact with Feedly, where people were noticing it taking over the feed, but their tech support couldn't find anything either.

It wasn't until my friend Sarah had it happen to her and actually took a screen recording of it that we were able to get to the bottom of it. And it still took several tries, with my host telling me there was no problem and me insisting that they needed to dig deeper until we were able to solve it.

What happened was that a month or so ago, after recurring problems with my server, I migrated the site to a better and more premium host. I knew that if I was having problems accessing the site some of my readers likely were too, and when I kept getting bandwidth errors I finally bit the bullet and made the move.

But! Longtime readers will recall that this site used to be called The Muffin Myth. A little more than two years ago I rebranded to Hey Nutrition Lady, with a site-wide redirect set up pointing all of the old Muffin Myth content to the new domain. When I moved to the new host a month ago they missed one tiny detail of that redirect, and when my subscription ran out with the old host the set up a new site - Tiger Scroll - at the old IP address.

So it was never intentionally spammy or malicious, but man, it took a lot of detective work to get to the bottom of this! If you were ever affected and saw this Tigerscroll thing, that's what it was and it's all sorted out now. Phew!

A toddler playing with a rolling pin in the kitchen — Odie working the dough

Another longtime reader, Christine, sent me an email last week asking why she gets two emails from me every Sunday. Maybe some of you are in the same boat, so let me explain.

When you leave a comment on the site you get the option to subscribe to posts, which is from an automated RSS feed and means you'll be sent an email whenever a new post gets published.

I also have a newsletter that goes out twice a week, on Wednesday and Sunday, which is written by me and is curated content. So if you're subscribed to both the RSS feed AND the newsletter, you'll get two emails. If you find that annoying, there are handy unsubscribe links at the bottom of every mail which you are very welcome to use.

You may or may not know that sending out email newsletters costs money, and although I aggressively prune my list (if you haven't opened an email in three months you can expect a byeeeee Felicia) I certainly don't want my newsletter going out to people who don't want to read it.

If you're *not* subscribed to the weekly newsletter and you wish to be, just let me know and I'll add you!

ON HEY NUTRITION LADY THIS WEEK

This week we kicked things off with one of my favourite muffin recipes, Healthy Cherry Muffins with Dark Chocolate Chunks. Made with wholegrain rye flour, cooked oatmeal, and yogurt, these are one of my favourite things to make when cherries are in season.

We also took a trip to smoothie town this week, with this nourishing Blueberry Avocado Smoothie that'll get you glowing from the inside out.

WHAT’S TRENDING ON HNL

Yeah, yeah, we all know that Mung Bean and Coconut Curry is in number one. So let’s look at what else is trending.

1. Chia Fresca. Topping the charts again! It's good to be hydrated.

2. Turmeric Latte Mix. Are you guys drinking this hot or cold?

3. Indonesian Black Rice Pudding. This makes a perfect warm weather breakfast.

4. Peanut Butter Oat Bars. I made these this week!

5. Carrot Apple Smoothie with Ginger. Mmmm. So good.

COMMENT OF THE WEEK

Sharon left the following comment and 5-star review on my Indonesian Black Rice Pudding recipe:

I rarely leave comments but after making this weekly (in the instant pot or on the stove) for the last couple of months, I’ve decided I’m way overdue for a review!

This is an easy, tasty, healthy recipe! I often share it with my friend’s family, who tries to minimize refined sugars in their children’s diet. Initially, I tried to use less sugar than indicated, but Nutrition Lady got it right! The 2 tablespoons of coconut sugar is really the minimum amount needed, and it goes so well with that pinch of salt!

Thank you!!!

Thank YOU Sharon, for such a fabulous review!