Nothing green is growing yet, apart from eranthis and snowdrops. And… weeds. How come it’s always the weeds that start first? Not even crocuses are out yet.


My family walks through the house without noticing a lot of things that I can’t help but notice. They leave chairs pulled out from the table, at an angle. They leave rugs askew. They leave doors half-open in such a way that, when I walk into the space, I am met by the edges of the doors.

The family are clearly not bothered. But to me, the doors meeting me edge-on almost feel like the doors are attacking me. It’s like walking into hostile territory. A palisade, or a barred wall.

So I keep pushing the doors away to the side, all the time. And a few hours later, they’re back again.


We’re almost at the vernal equinox and some of the city’s Christmas decorations are still here. There’s this reindeer, and also a star-shaped thing on Spånga torg. The reindeer looks a bit lost.

For a month or two so I figured that it just takes them time to get around to all of them. After all, the number of staff is probably more or less constant, and it’s not reasonable to expect them to take down all the Christmas decorations in a week or two.

But… mid-March.

I’m starting to think the city may just have forgotten about these.


Nysse tends towards overweight when given free access to food. We serve him his measure of kibble three times a day. If he demands more in between meals, he gets canned “cat-quality” tuna. If he is hungry for real, he eats it; if he was just feeling peckish, he ignores it.

Today I dished up some tuna and he was sort of not very interested in it. He was, however, interested in the activity in the sink. The sink is an interesting place and can contain all sorts of delights, from eggy whisks to buttery knives. Or empty tuna cans, for that matter.

Nysse was much more interested in the empty can in the sink than in the bowl at his food station. When he’d licked the can clean, I put his bowl with the actual tuna in it in the sink as well. And that suddenly made it worth his attention.


Ingrid’s moped has been acting up for a while, and now won’t even start. She’s been doing her best to fix it herself, but ran out of ideas and energy. We’re taking it to a repair shop for servicing and fixing up. Which, given that the thing doesn’t even start, is a bit of an exercise. The trickiest part was to get it up into the trailer. I was thinking we could make do with a thick plank, but after some consideration, Eric bought a steel ramp.

Even with a purpose-built ramp, it was a three-person job. One in the front to guide (“a bit to the right!”), one to steer, and one to push. It’s not like you could grab it and hold it up if it went over the edge – it’s over 100 kg of expensive, breakable machinery.


The sweater body is finished, and now drying after I wet blocked it.

The colourful stripes are as crazy and colourful as I pictured them. The lines between the light gray and the almost-but-not-quite-the-same light gray were not planned. I guess I got two different batches of the gray yarn. Given how the sweater is constructed, I can’t even easily avoid them by alternating the two skeins. With the line at the top, for example, I actually started the knitting there, and knitted first in one direction (downwards in the photo) and then re-joined the yarn when the rest of the body was done and knitted upwards to make that shaped section.

But I guess if I’m doing stripes anyway, what’s a few extra ones?

Or, maybe, if they do end up bothering me, I could use duplicate stitch to embroider a thin line there with the crazy yarn and pretend that it’s part of the design.


I have been taking levothyroxine daily to compensate for my underactive thyroid for almost twenty years.

I can’t remember what the pill jars looked like in the UK. In Sweden, they looked like the jar on the left for many years. Until one day a couple of years ago someone tried to be clever and changed the design to the one on the right.

On the left: a normal lid, with a nice ridged edge for extra grip. With grooves on top, even, that you could use for more leverage – put a pencil in the groove and twist. Nice if you’re elderly, or have reduced mobility or grip strength. Human-friendly, in other words.

On the right: what is that even. Carefully align one tiny symbol with another tiny symbol, by twisting the lid. And then somehow lever it off. I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to do that. Pushing with my thumb doesn’t work; I normally claw it off with the nails of two or three fingers, with effort.

Once I’ve got it open, my immediate next step is to decant the pills into the old jar, and throw away the new jar, swearing at it while thanking my luck that (i) I had the foresight to keep one of the old jars, and (ii) the jar openings are exactly the same size so I can just hold the two against each other and flip them upside down and don’t need to look for a funnel or something, or chase dropped pills on the floor.

Now that I googled about it, I see that the new jar was introduced in 2017, and complaints were registered immediately. In 2020 they were working on it and now in 2024 nothing has happened yet.


The new jars are so bad that they’ve been written about in national magazines, and the pharmacy staff joke about it every time I pick up my prescription. I replied that “at least I’m young and strong and healthy so I can open mine”.

Then it struck me that, while I’m strong and healthy, describing myself as young is perhaps not entirely accurate any more. I’m closer to 50 than 40, after all. It may be time to re-frame things.


As I was about to step in through the revolving front doors of the Waterfront building, where the tretton37 office is located, I was stopped by a fire alarm ringing through the lobby. The alarm kept ringing, until a fire crew turned up some ten minutes later, probably checked something, and turned the thing off.

What was interesting about the incident was that the people already in the office didn’t even notice that anything was amiss, until I finally got in and could ask them. We’re on floor 6, and apparently the fire alarm had been triggered on floor 5. But the floors are so completely separated from each other that they’re not alerted nor evacuated for a minor alarm on an adjacent floor.

I had the honour of mending one of Eric’s sweaters. His style is definitely more subdued than mine, so there was no doubt that I would aim for a discreet mend. Then I found a near-perfect yarn to match the sweater, and while the result is not invisible, it blends in pretty darn well. I guess if I had endless time and infinite patience, I could have done something even less visible with Swiss darning, but with these tiny stitches? No thank you.

It’s tricky when the yarn thickness doesn’t quite match. Taken singly, the yarn was too thin. Held double, it was thicker than the original, so I made my grid at half the density of the original stitches. Which afterwards turned out to be a bit too sparse, making the result look like a basket rather than an even weave. You can see it in the photo below, on the left side of the mend, if you look really carefully. I went back and wove in more vertical threads between the existing ones here and there – I’m about halfway done in the photo, starting from the right. Inserting extra warp threads was more work than if I’d had them there from the start. But I don’t know how I could have gotten the density right without experimenting.

There was some trouble with the commuter trains when I was leaving the office for home. I thought I’d save time by doing my grocery shopping in town while giving it all some time to settle. All fine and good, but it was enough of a deviation from my routine that I accidentally left the bag with groceries on a bench in the train station. I always, ALWAYS only have my backpack to think about, so when the train arrived I just grabbed it and boarded.

I realized my mistake about 5 minutes later, unfortunately after we’d already passed the next station. Had it been just the groceries, I might have just left it and bought everything again in Spånga. But it was also my favourite grocery bag, made for me by Ingrid, colourful and comfortable and just the right size, and I wasn’t going to just leave that.

So I got off at Sundbyberg, where I got to wait 10 minutes in the cold wind for a train going in the other direction. Back at Stockholm City my bright orange bag was exactly where I had left it, a splash of colour on dark benches against a dull red floor. Looked very pretty, and I wish I could have taken a photo – but the train home was standing at the platform, ready to leave, and I really did not want to wait 15 minutes for the next one.

Here is the bag, holding the makings of fritters for dinner: two courgettes, a three-pack of tinned sweetcorn, and some feta cheese.