My locker, at work.

On the outside: two magnets to identify the locker as mine. One with a fun photo taken when I joined tretton37; one a quick chain-stitched embroidered patch.

On the inside: essential stuff that I wouldn’t want to be without at work. This includes:

  • A thick hoodie, almost invisible behind everything else, and a soft woolly shawl. For several weeks, if not months, the heating wasn’t working properly in the office. Facilities management claimed the system was fine, and yet everybody in the office was freezing and layering up. Now that they’ve fixed it, I might take the hoodie home. The shawl stays, though.
  • An external hard drive with a backup of my home computer and all my photos.
  • A bottle of fluoride mouthwash. I have weak teeth, and try to remember to use it every day.
  • A carton of panty liners.
  • A bar of Friis Holm Tobago dark milk chocolate.
  • A pad of sticky notes and a good pen.

I have a similar stash at the Sortera office, with the exception of the extra thick hoodie, and the backup drive.

The Nordic Museum had posted an invitation today, on their 150th birthday, to share memories of this day, in words and pictures, for the future. I’m posting here the photos I submitted to their collection as well.

The morning was gray and windy, just a few degrees above freezing, but there were glimpses of sun breaking through as I got to Spånga station.

Normally during rush hour the trains here are supposed to go eight times an hour, but the company currently running the commuter train service hasn’t managed to deliver that for quite a while. At least you can generally count on a train once every fifteen minutes. The train this morning was quite crowded but not too horribly crammed full.

I got off the train at Stockholm Central and walked from there to the tretton37 office in the Waterfront building. On the way I stopped by Coop at the lower floor of the station to buy lunch, because I was all out of leftovers at home.

I got a small green smoothie for breakfast 29 kr and a bouillabaisse for 79 kr, for a total of 108 kr.

Many supermarkets have replaced most of their manned checkouts with self-checkout stations. I like it when I only have one or two things to pay for and can get it done quickly, but their occasional random checks really annoy me when they happen.

The entrances to the Waterfront are all automated doors, just like the entrance and exit to the train stations and the supermarket.

The office was relatively empty today. Even though it was almost 9 o’clock when I got there, almost all desks were still empty and I could choose whichever seat I liked.

I didn’t even think of photographs or much else around me during the day as I was working. Then I stood up at five-ish and realized the sun was going down already, glinting off the skyscrapers next to Hötorget.

This street, Klarabergsgatan, used to see a lot more traffic. It has now mostly been closed off for everyone except public transport, and the pavements have been widened.

The folks in the office were gearing up for a Halloween-themed after-work event, with people dressed up as anything from kings to bananas, and a monthly company meeting. I was out of social energy and went home, and will watch a recording of the meeting some other day.

A blip of the SL Access card to take the train home. Costs me 39 kr for a one-way trip. After the most recent price hike, a monthly card costs 970 kr so it is generally not worth it if I only go to the office twice a week.

I got a seat on the train back to Spånga so I could crochet on the way. Much better than randomly scrolling social media. This piece of lace has been my travel project for literally years. I’ve gotten tired of waiting for it, so now I’m working on it more frequently during meetings and such so that I can get it done.

One of the station entrance doors has been broken for the last few days, and for some reason the staff has elected to leave it in the closed position, rather than having it always open. All the people getting off the train clump up in front of the entrance.

On Spånga Torg, the second-hand ladies’ wear shop has filled their windows with warm coats. The florist’s show windows are an odd mixture of Halloween, and pink for breast cancer awareness month.

The first to do when I got home was to feed Nysse.

Then to feed the rest of the family. They would not like pellets from a tin. I made a meal from a Linas Matkasse meal kit – a vegetarian bibimbap.

Reduced the amounts of all chillies and such by a factor of three or four, and some of it was still super spicy. We didn’t manage to eat all the spicy cabbage salad.

After dinner, Ingrid disappeared to her room, while Adrian & Eric watched season 2 of Loki, accompanied by potato chips for Adrian and some leftover lemon merengue pie for Eric.


It’s a beautiful autumn day, and I had a great day at the Sortera office with my colleagues, and we had a great lunch at a new restaurant nearby.


It’s Knowabunga time – the tretton37 annual internal conference. A bit more superficial compared to past events, which wasn’t entirely surprising, given all the reorganization that has been going on this year.

After the knowledge part I went for an evening walk. We’re out in the archipelago so I was hoping for sea views but it was all built up, with private properties all along the coastline.


Sortera, where I am currently on assignment, is a company after my taste, in many ways. Environmentally conscious, relaxed and informal, focused on providing great service.

Sortera is also the first company I’ve seen where there is a “shoes off” policy in the whole office. In most places I’m the only one who changes out of outdoor shoes into indoor ones every day. It started at their waste sorting facilities – nobody wants garbage-covered shoes walking around on office carpets – but then spread to the administrative offices as well. The IT department has a little cubby for our outerwear and shoes, and almost everybody has a pair of slippers or sandals waiting for them. Or fancy Italian loafers, for some.


Went to the office to meet my colleagues and collaborate with my teammates. It was nice, but also quite unproductive due to all the noise.

Back in my days (haha) or even back in our previous office, people used to go into a meeting room or a phone room for longer online meetings. Now everyone was just doing their meetings out in the open working area. At one point I was literally surrounded by meetings, sitting in the middle of a triangle of meetings, plus there was one person who was listening to music on speakers. Like of course everyone wants to hear your music while they’re trying to work. And when people have got their headphones on, they’re usually even louder than when talking to someone right next to them, probably because they don’t hear themselves. It was like trying to work at a train station.

I wish I could use headphones but they give me a headache. And in my mind it’s the people making the noise who should adjust their behaviour in an office environment, not the ones who want some quiet.

I feel like an old curmudgeon. It’s not like I can tell everyone to just please keep it down, people are working here. Although I kind of wanted to.

It was very nice and quiet after five, though, when most folks had gone home.


My hands, and myself, are starting to feel restless in meetings again. I haven’t done any meeting knitting for months, but now I feel the need again. I take it as a sign that I’m settled in at my new project, no longer flailing around and struggling to keep up. Things feel stable and safe.

I want to knit a dress, and some more cardigans for the winter wouldn’t hurt, but those require planning and designing, neither of which I have the mental energy for right now. I just want to knit. So it’ll be a shawl. Large enough to keep me busy; interesting enough to be fun; simple enough to work as a background task.

I find it tricky to plan a knitting project. If I pick a pattern first, I might not find a suitable yarn for it. If I pick a yarn first, I don’t know how much to buy. I want to see the yarn colour in person, and touch it, before making a decision. If I pick a pattern and then swap out the yarn for something close enough, I’ll need a different amount than what the pattern specifies. So I end up trying to keep a whole bunch of patterns in my head while looking at all the yarns, and trying to choose both at the same time, and struggling to make any decision at all.

Shawls are easier than most projects because the sizing really doesn’t matter much. I went to my favourite local yarn store, browsed for a yarn that looked nice and felt nice, found one that was on sale, and bought a bunch, assuming that there were bound to be shawl patterns that call for two colours of yarn. Ravelry didn’t let me down, and now I’m knitting a nice two-colour brioche pattern.

The Multiverse pattern is really clever in its simplicity. After the first few setup rows, it’s just brioche, but with 2 increases (branchings) on each right-side row with the leading colour, wherever you like. There’s no pattern to read, which makes it perfect for background knitting, but there are always decisions to be made, which keeps it interesting.

I really like the subtle tonality of my yarns. Looking at the knitting you almost can’t see that there are two colours – it just looks like light and shadow. But the shadowed parts would not look as shadowed at all if they were also knit in the lighter yarn.


For the past few weeks, I’ve been doing much of my work like this: in a sofa, with a cat in my lap, and my laptop balanced in front of me. The ergonomics have not been great. The alternative of listening to a crying cat has been worse.

Now with Nysse’s recovery getting the physio’s approval, I’m trying something new. Since climbing to and from low, stable surfaces is OK, and walking on soft, wobbly surfaces is even encouraged, I’ve converted the bedroom into a cat-safe space. Sofa cushions all around the bed to give him a safe way up and down, and all other high surfaces blocked off.

More freedom for both of us. Nysse is happy about it, and so is my back. Win-win!


Crayfish party at work. I like crayfish, and fresh ones are even more delicious than the ones you buy in a plastic jar.

Before the party I spent the entire day in the office with my teammates and colleagues, and that was actually even more fun, after barely having left the house for anything but short walks and supermarket trips.


Office day today. One of my colleagues spotted a Sortera truck doing a pickup right across the street. We had a good view from six floors up!

The trucks have been abstract concepts until now. But now we could look up the pickup order in the ordering system that my team works on, and then in the driver’s app, and the customer’s live tracking page, and correlate the physical activity we could see happening to the data. Here are the large bags of cardboard, and the small bags of metal, and here’s the driver marking them, etc. Here is the extra pickup time because there was no room to line up all the bags in advance. Trivial, in a way, but still a bit of a highlight of today.