The weather outside is dull and gray and so is my mood. So here’s a pretty flower to make everything feel better.

There’s a story attached to this one.

Everybody except Eric got books, bought online like almost all my gifts this year. All packages but one arrived on time, and many of them I didn’t even unpack until the evening before Christmas Eve when it was time to wrap all the gifts. And then I discovered that one of the parcels had the wrong contents. I had received someone else’s order. The name and address on the outside of the parcel were mine, the packing list and the contents were not.

I looked up the guy who was supposed to get those books and he turned out to live in Stockholm. Gave him a call and he came by to pick up the books on Christmas Eve, because they were a Christmas gift of course. He gave me this potted hyacinth as a thank-you.

He said he had gotten books that were supposed to be shipped to Arvika. So I guess there was an off-by-one error somewhere in the packing process at Adlibris: each package got the shipping label of the next package in line. I wonder how long that line was, how many packages ended up in some other corner of the country, before they discovered their error. If they even did that.