… I got 30 child-free minutes in the middle of the day, AND Ingrid went to bed before 9, so I had time to clean out all the loose papers from my desk – filed, thrown out, filled in, read, converted into items on my todo list. Instead of a large pile of stuff I now have a todo list and a handful of papers I need for errands etc. Yay!

… it was the coldest day of this winter thus far (about –13°C) and we got back home to a really chilly house. All the radiators are now at full blast, so the bedroom feels OK, as does the corner of the living room that’s closest to the radiators. The rest, and particularly the floor, are less pleasant. Fleeces and thick woollen socks for both Eric and me, and a hat for Eric’s bald head and a blanket for my shoulders. Ingrid of course is not the least bit bothered.

All I want to do is curl up in the sofa, excellently placed right between the two radiators. I have no desire to do anything productive.

… we were away from home.

… I had great ambitions but then Ingrid’s afternoon nap happened very late, after which she stayed up all evening and half the night (it’s past 10pm now and she is STILL awake and creating a mess on my desk), meaning I had no time at all to get anything done. Bleh.

We recovered from our new year celebrations. Staying up until well past midnight threw my sleep rhythm all out of whack. Being woken just after 7 didn’t improve things, and then I had a too-long nap in the afternoon which made me feel even lazier.

Not many days left now so it’s time I started getting things done.

… we finished taking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room. Just in time for the new year! Unfortunately I didn’t get to join in any of the fun parts: my main task was to keep Ingrid occupied and out of the way, so my contribution was limited to taking photos and helping to clean up the mess afterwards, for tearing down drywall creates an awful lot of gypsum dust.

… I did nothing useful. Oh, actually, I did go to town to have a look at some Macs, and concluded that I want a MacBook Pro after all: the 13 inch screen of a MacBook felt too small. I’m sure it’s just framing – given three choices, 13/15/17, the extremes feel extreme and the middle feels kind of just right. But knowing that doesn’t change the fact that this is what I felt.

… we started taking down the wall between the kitchen and the living room. The innermost layer turned out to be more solid than expected, so now we’re unsure whether it might be load-bearing to some extent and hesitant to move forward. Will need to consult with someone more expert tomorrow.

I also packed away all the nappies that Ingrid no longer uses.

… I went through the top of my main pile of papers, threw away about 20 of them, filed another 10 or so, and found 1 invoice that got paid barely in time.

I sort of decided what laptop to buy. It will be a Mac, and very probably a MacBook rather than a MacBook Pro. I don’t think the extra power of a Pro is worth 6000 extra kronor. The one thing I’m not sure about is screen size: MB with 13.3″ might feel small, perhaps the MBP with 15.4″ would be better? I’ll have to look at them both in real life before I can make a final decision.

In fact I don’t even need the highest-spec MacBook: 160GB hard drive is more than enough for me, given that I have used about 35GB on my current hard drive.