Every afternoon I cycle through central Stockholm. Every afternoon Stockholm City’s Christmas lights programme makes me all tingly and happy.

I love the way they have gone “all in”, with beautiful LED lighting all along the major streets in the city centre. (Somewhere between 600,000 and 700,000 LED lights – the various sources differ on the exact number.)

I love the breadth and variety: glowing red orbs, sheets of light, trees draped in lights, even LED-covered reindeer shapes. It may not be high art but it is heart-warming.

I wish I had the equipment to take some proper pictures of it all. You can see some photos on Stockholmsjul’s Facebook page.

Today we went pre-shopping for sofas. Not buying, not even quite deciding yet, but looking at what is available, roughly what things cost, what the different parameters are. We visited three furniture stores, conveniently located close to each other in Barkarby.

And all the sofas in their showrooms were either in non-colours (black, white, grey, beige) and in red. If you want colour, you get red. I think there were also two sofas in purple, but that’s it.

Oh, of course, if you go digging through all the fabric samples you will find some alternatives, but it is very clear what most people want. And your choice is narrowed down significantly if you want a sofa in, for example, green, as opposed to grey.

I’ve previously noticed that red is also almost always the only colour for leather goods. Any normal shoe brand will have shoes in black and brown, and if they have shoes in other colour, those will be red. Same for gloves and bags.

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Somewhat tired for no particular reason. Well, a bit of autumn darkness, the tail end of a slight cold, and a few nights of not-so-great sleep. Thus, no inspiration for blogging.

Ingrid’s swimming lessons brought to mind my own first ones. We had mandatory swimming lessons when I was in 2nd grade, 8 years old. I remember them as scary and not much fun, and I remember how the pool water made my eyes sting and how awful those exercises were where we were supposed to keep our eyes open in the water in order to pick up some ball or thing from the bottom of the pool. I still totally hate opening my eyes underwater, it makes my eyes itch and my tears run.

I didn’t learn to swim in those lessons, because I fell ill with pneumonia after a few of them, and you weren’t given a second chance if you missed the first one. I later picked up swimming on my own, in a lake during the summer.

Tartu’s old swimming pool has been abandoned in favour of the new water centre that was built some years ago. We walked past the old one this summer. For some reason the pool is still there, and so are the poolside seats, although the building around it has been torn down, and a new building is standing where the showers and changing rooms used to be. In the photo below the big pool is in the front – you can see the darkish rectangles at the end of each lane as well as the spots where the lane marker ropes used to be attached. The teaching pool is in the rear, behind the big one.

After over two years of waiting, I have finally found and bought some more green bowls. Patience wins.

One disadvantage of having a large door towards the garden that stays open most of the day is that lots of insects find their way into the house. The old veranda served as a sort of a buffer; the insects gathered there and not many came all the way into the house. Now they come inside.

Daily, I find dead flies and other small insects here and there in the house. In the beginning I found them mildly disgusting but now I’m so used to them that I don’t react much, just pick them up or sweep them into a wastepaper basket.

It feels like I take out at least one (live) wasp per day. So I guess they built a new nest somewhere after we interrupted their building works in Ingrid’s play house.

For a while we had moths who for some reason tended to congregate in the bathroom. Every evening I found several moths there, on the window, on the windowsill, on the wall, and almost daily one in the washbasin. (That last one got mercilessly flushed down the drain.) Now the moths are gone, I guess their season is over.

Once one of them went and died inside the bathroom fan. The fan made its wings vibrate so it sounded like there was a bee in the room. I kept looking for it and it took me several days to realize where the buzzing was coming from.

We have a bunch of linen kitchen towels of varying age and origin. The most interesting one among them is this one. I don’t remember its provenance. It is a simple square of relatively coarse unbleached linen, no woven pattern or anything. It is monogrammed AB, and the embroidery is as simple as the towel itself. And the towel has been darned, carefully, in the middle.

Nowadays most of us don’t mend holes in clothes. We just throw them out and buy a replacement. When did you last see a darned sock? When did you last darn a sock yourself?

I mend minor holes and tears in the kids’ clothes and in some of mine. (Expensive tights in particular, if the hole is in a place where it won’t be seen.) I restitch unravelling hems and seams. But I can’t imagine darning a towel.

I wonder what made the previous owner care so much for a simple towel that they would mend a hole in it. Was it a question of economy? Or did the towel have emotional value for them? A gift?

It makes me really like this towel.

We switched to unperfumed laundry detergent when baby Ingrid (then a few months old) had problems with dry skin and rashes. To keep it simple we used the same detergent both for her stuff and all our other laundry. Then about two years ago I took the next step and bought a laundry ball, which sounds like black magic and too good to be true, but it does actually seem to work. For really dirty stuff, like anything that Adrian’s worn, I take a tiny amount of (unperfumed) detergent, about two tablespoonfuls, which is about a quarter of what the manufacturers suggest. Everything still comes out looking and smelling clean.

By now my understanding of “smelling clean” is very different from most other peoples’. Now that my nose knows what clean laundry smells like, the perfumed detergents and conditioners smell disgusting. There is no way I will every buy any of those again.

Once I happened to cycle right past the air vent in a communal laundry room in an apartment block, probably coming right from its tumble dryer. The perfumed steam almost made me gag.

Any time I buy second-hand clothes (which I do often when it comes to baby clothes or nursing wear) the first thing I do is to hold them to my nose. In the vast majority of cases I then throw them straight in the dirty laundry hamper, because they smell of chemicals and synthetic perfume. I inspect the clothes again after washing, and sometimes send them back for a second round.

Ingrid loves picking flowers. There is no end to the amount of flowers she’d pick if given the chance. I ask her to pause when we run out of vases in suitable sizes.

We limit the picking to flowers in our own garden (with bulbs like daffodils and crocuses off-limits) and in no-mans-lands: outside fences, on roadside greens etc. And we try to leave flowers that are large and beautiful but few, such as if there’s a small stand of poppies just outside someone’s fence.

Other than that, she’s got free hands, and I don’t guide her. She picks anything that flowers. Scillas, hyacinths, wood anemones, daisies, cowslips, dandelions, forget-me-nots, pennycress, buttercups… cow parsley or something like it (hundkäx/harakputk), deadnettle (vitplister/piimanõges), greater celandine (skelört/vereurmarohi), etc etc etc. I think we had about a dozen species on our kitchen table as of today.

It turns out that cowslips, grape hyacinths, daisies and deadnettles keep very well in a vase, for many days. Both cowslips and daisies can even recover after wilting when running out of water if the water is then replenished. Scillas don’t live long in a vase; anemone flowers survive for several days but their leaves wilt quickly; buttercups spread lots of annoying yellow particles around them.