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.


Getting out of the supermarket today, it struck me how gray the parking lot was. There was a single car that was not white/gray/black, out of twenty-odd cars in total.

Even red cars are gone. A few years ago I remember thinking that all cars were either white/gray/black or bright red, and now the colour range is even narrower.

It’s the same with clothes. It feels like everyone is wearing either black or gray, or a combination of these. And jeans, of course.

I read an article recently that analysed a set of photos of historical objects, and made the same observation. Gray is taking up more and more space.


Two expensive, high-end bars of dark milk chocolate. Very different on the outside – and very different on the inside.

Friis Holm Tobago dark milk is (still) creamy and smooth, with its sweetness and bitterness nicely balanced. Delightful.

Vaxholm dark milk is grainy, sweet and flavourless in comparison. I’m letting it melt in my mouth and trying desperately to find the flavour but there is barely any.

I was considering throwing it out, or perhaps taking it to the office and sneakily leaving it there without saying that I’m dumping it. But Adrian told me I was being too hasty and that he quite liked it. A matter of taste.


We don’t pay much attention to Valentine’s day, but Ingrid bought a bouquet of pink and red roses, and I made pink pancakes.

January was still very much about covid, but life started getting back to normal in February. We were even able to go on a ski trip in Branäs (Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.)

In March, when the pandemic was generally more or less over, I got covid.

Luckily I got well enough in time to not miss my ski tour on the Troll trail, which I had really missed during the pandemic. I wasn’t quite at 100% and started coughing as soon as I laughed or talked too much, but I was in good enough shape to ski. (Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6.)

Afterwards I was in a funk for months. I had no energy, struggled to start anything, and instead spent a lot of time curled up in the sofa, reading.

By summer all traces of covid restrictions were gone, and travel and large gatherings of people were on again. There were conferences at home and conferences abroad, and end of school celebrations and midsummer celebrations.

So the world around me was generally back to normal, but my brain didn’t catch up with the new reality for quite a while. I was stuck in stay-at-home, do-nothing mode, and I think there was some kind of residual tiredness after my covid infection as well. After summer I made it a project to get out again. I signed up to an embroidery course, and went to a local knitting café a few times. I made a concerted effort to build good habits to get my energy levels up even more. It’s taking time, but it’s working.

With travel restrictions lifted, we could finally go back to Estonia again to see friends and family. (After we got around the passport renewal logjam that occurred when everybody wanted to renew theirs.) We also went to Slovenia, where we climbed a mountain, saw scenic valleys and stunning caves and beautiful Ljubljana and pretty Bled. Ingrid, who didn’t feel up to a week of walking, stayed at home and took care of Nysse.

Later in the autumn we visited Amsterdam. I also did a solo hike along a section of the Bruksleden trail.

In the wider world, the situation in 2022 was dominated by the war in Ukraine and an ongoing electricity crisis, which led us to buying and installing a heat pump.

Work-wise I kept working at Urb-it, and enjoying it more and more. It’s a worthy project, with interesting challenges and a great team. We’re still mostly working from home but Wednesdays are office days, and since the summer I make sure to spend one day a week at the tretton37 office as well.

This was our first full year with Nysse. He went from a timid, mostly indoors cat, to a confident explorer. He managed to get lost three times during the year, brought home a mouse and a squirrel and a bird, and made friends with Morris.

I made two cardigans (one, two) and two scarfs. Socks I don’t even count any more.

Our neighbours blasted away half the garden and built an ugly house and moved in just before the new year.

November brought snow chaos.

I spent the whole day at the Urb-it office, much of it in meetings or informal chats. It was all useful and enjoyable and interesting, but by the end of the day I was completely done in. I’m not used to this kind of thing any more. I didn’t even take single photo, even though we have pretty cool rooftop views.


(Source: XKCD.)
The strategy here labelled “chaotic neutral” is exactly what a half-full egg carton looks like, if I’m the one to make it half full. In my mind this is clearly the best layout: the weight is evenly distributed so the carton is easy to handle, and it is aesthetically pleasing. It appears that people somehow find this egg layout unnatural or unusual. They are weird.


My brother spent the day with us. We don’t visit each other often – he doesn’t travel much and doesn’t like entertaining people at his home, so I usually see him at the usual holidays. We missed him at Easter and Midsummer, so I drove him from Uppsala to Spånga and back so we could simply talk.

I found out that he is distancing himself from our mother because the difference between their political opinions is becoming unbridgeable. (And, knowing them, neither of them can probably refrain from arguing about it.) They live a ten-minute walk from each other and I’m pretty sure that both are quite lonely, especially in these quarantine times, and yet they’d rather be alone than talk to each other.


The rainbow has nothing to do with any of that and is not symbolic in any way. It’s here only because rainbows are pretty, and the contrast between the dark band between the two rainbows and the light area below them is cool.


Adrian is discovering the wonderful world of image editing.

He knows that photos can be “photoshopped” and has seen enough examples online. Today he discovered how that actually works.

One of the games on our PlayStation that we play together is called Ultimate Chicken Horse. It’s a multi-player platform game where you build the level together, as you go. The player characters are animals – a chicken, a horse, a sheep, a raccoon etc. To me the name of the game sounded like a chimerical animal, half chicken, half horse. When Ingrid heard that she made a chicken horse for me in ibis Paint, which she otherwise uses to draw anime-style pictures.

Adrian was impressed and wanted to learn how to make images like that. Today Ingrid gave him a quick intro to ibis Paint and showed him how to import pictures into layers, and erase part of a layer to make another layer visible. He was mesmerized and proceeded to create a chicken-headed, tentacled superhero out of parts he found in Google Image Search.


At some point, a box of Humble toothbrushes somehow turned up in the house. I’m sure I didn’t buy them. But here they are, so I thought I’d try them.

After decades of smooth plastic toothbrushes in my mouth, a bamboo brush feels distinctly odd. The handle and the head are flat and straight, not rounded like I’m used to. It doesn’t have that kink in the handle that most brushes have, so the geometry feels a bit off. And I can feel the texture of bamboo against my tongue and cheeks all the time.

The plastic brushes, especially those with colourful patterns, radiate fun, modernity and slickness.
The humble brush radiates humility.

Buying plastic that I know I will throw away within months feels really, really icky now.