Art exhibition. Boooring. At least they had benches in some rooms.

(No, we don’t go to art exhibitions on school nights. These are from Sunday’s visit to see Lars Lerin. I got the dates mixed up when catching up with past photos.)

Adrian bought a “buried treasure” toy. He enjoyed the digging much more than I would have thought possible.

The actual treasure that came out consisted of parts for some little plastic figure and I doubt it will ever get played with. But that was never the point of this toy, anyway.

One of our visiting wasps has died.

I don’t actually know much about Lars Lerin or his works, but the little I’ve seen (including some postage stamps with winter motifs) has made me want to see more. The exhibition at Liljevalchs seemed like a great opportunity.

The exhibition was organized thematically. The winter landscapes were present, and were my favourite part of the exhibition. The light and especially twilight in them is both very real and somehow otherworldly in its soft luminosity. I wondered what I would have seen in that same place, at that same moment – would I have seen that same light in the real world, or was it only in his eyes? What would a photo of the same scene have looked like?

That same treatment applied to cityscapes from war-broken Syria was surreal. The combination of soft light and gaping holes in and between houses is jarring. Seen up close, they break down into squares of light and dark: painted from photographs, I’m pretty sure.

Other themes and topics were technically impressive but uninteresting. Especially his paintings of people felt impersonal, as if he was observing them clinically from a distance.

We were talking about plums, and that led to Eric baking a plum cake. And that led to me also baking a plum cake, because Eric’s was going to be yummy but not the kind of plum cake that I was craving.

I want my fruit cakes to have lots of big, luscious, juicy chunks of fruit in them. A cake should have enough batter to give it some structural integrity, but not much more – there should ideally be more fruit than cake. Quite often I decide that the amount of fruit in the recipe is ridiculously small and double it.

So we had two plum cakes, and it was interesting to see just how different they could be. Eric’s was like a loaf of banana bread but with plums instead of bananas: spicy, very moist, but with no clear plum flavour. Mine was dense, heavy, and with distinct pieces of plum.

Mine also had half a cup of sweet plum wine in it. (The recipe called for madeira, probably because most people don’t have plum wine at home…) Adrian tried the batter before I added the wine, and then the finished cake, and said the wine totally destroyed the cake. Eric and I thought it was the best batter ever.

Upside down plum cake (Swedish)

The kitchen faucet is leaking.

The oven door is falling apart and it takes a special two-hand “twist and lift and pull” to open it fully.

And the veneer on the kitchen table is worn through in places, and two of the chair backs have broken and been screwed together.

But it makes no sense to replace these things one by one when what we really need is a whole new kitchen, so we make do and keep patching things until I somehow find the time to go kitchen shopping. It’s kind of close to becoming urgent.

Overnight, things in the fridge grew eyes. Not just the egg carton but also juice bottles, the lid on the butter box, and all sorts of jars and cartons. It was like they were all staring at me when I opened the fridge.

Finally, finally proper heavy rainfall during the night.