I just noticed I’ve made over five thousand posts on this blog. Here’s to five thousand more!

These first five thousand took almost eighteen years. If I keep up my daily posting – which I haven’t even considered giving up – the next five thousand should go faster, in less than fourteen years. I should reach ten thousand around April 2037, at which point I will be approaching my sixtieth birthday. And probably be one of very few bloggers still active, because blogging has been going out of fashion for years already.

I am experiencing some technical problems with the site after an upgrade by the hosting provider. So if you see any issues, I am working on it. I will start posting again when everything is stable.

The pause in posting was mostly intentional this time. We were gone hiking for 10 days, but Ingrid preferred to stay at home on her own, and I didn’t want to publicise the fact that she was on her own here. Not that I have any untrustworthy characters reading this blog but it still felt better to be safe. Now that we’re all at home again and I’ve spent 2 days acclimating to work, I’ll be catching up in no time!

My energy levels have been low for months. Blogging was one of the few things that I still managed to keep up until recently, but once I fell behind, it got harder and harder to motivate myself to catch up.

I’m going to start working my way back up the hill again. It may take a while. But this blog is not abandoned.

I just saw that ten years ago I was happy about having found Pinterest. How things change. Nowadays I mostly associate Pinterest with polluting my Google results with links to annoying influencer-y pictures and ads. And any time I click one of them by accident, it won’t let me look without logging in. I actually installed a browser extension specifically so that I could block all its gazillion domains from turning up in my search results. How I wish the internet could have stayed its early, innocent, un-monetized self.

I’ve fallen behind on posting here, I know. I’m alive and well and not corona-infected or anything. Just hit by a bout of laziness.

With my mid-day workouts I’ve gotten into such a nice daily pattern. Only in the last week or two I’ve had to skip it twice because I have had meetings upon meetings and really just physically couldn’t squeeze in one more thing. But when I do actually have time I don’t make up excuses or postpone it.

I haven’t achieved the same kind of discipline with blogging, even though I think it would do me good. Time to make a new effort.

Is there even a point to writing a review for the year that ended? I thought. But what is obvious and top of mind for everybody right now, won’t be as obvious a few years from now.

2020 was the year of the coronavirus and its associated disease, covid-19. It became a topic during the last week of February in conjunction with winter break, when many people go on ski trips either in the Swedish mountains or in the Alps. (We went to Åre: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7.)

There were plentiful reports of lots of people being hospitalized with covid-19 in Italy but the Swedish authorities still thought it unnecessary for tourists returning from the Alps to self-quarantine. Just two weeks later the situation had deteriorated enough for the authorities to recommend working from home. People were stockpiling toilet paper, fearing a full lockdown, which never came. The summer was a bit better (the virus being less active during the summer, just like other coronaviruses such as the common cold) but in autumn it all went downhill again.

Some countries managed to contain the virus and limit its spread but Sweden plainly didn’t, and the situation now is worse than ever. Hospitals are nearly full and people are dying in record amounts. 8727 deaths thus far in Sweden, which is about 870 deaths per million people – ten times more than Norway (80 per million) and Finland (100). The authorities keep trying to redirect comparisons towards the worst-hit countries instead and of course we could be up there with France, Italy, Spain and the UK (1000+ deaths per million) or even Belgium (near 1700) but given that we are closer in all ways to our neighbouring countries, this just looks like a futile effort to deflect blame.

I started working from home on March 13. While things were calmer in the spring and summer I made a handful of trips to the office for workshops and retrospectives, but I haven’t been there at all since early September.

Working from home felt unfamiliar at first. Then during summer I quite enjoyed it. It’s more flexible than working in the office: I could have lunch outside in the sun, or work in the garden. I dug and planted bushes behind the house as well as a new flowerbed. Not commuting saves me at least an hour and a half every day – I’ve never been so little stressed about times and schedules. And I am mostly more productive this way.

Now during the dark, dull half of the year I am enjoying it rather less, especially with all the extra restrictions.

Eric has been working in the office mostly (or sometimes at a customer’s office) but commuting by bicycle. Ingrid and Adrian’s daily lives have been least affected. Adrian’s least of all; Ingrid would be hanging out at the movies or McDonald’s or a gaming centre with her friends, if it wasn’t for the virus.

All trips abroad for the rest of the year were cancelled and most domestic trips as well, some before booking and some after. We were forced to cancel our annual trip to Estonia. We replaced our usual summer hiking trip with a week in Gotland, just before the larger crowds got there. (Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6. I missed my ski tour in Norway and my autumn hike in Jämtland, but replaced it with two lowland hikes (Kinnekulleleden day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, and Sörmlandsleden day 1, day 2, day 3.)

And of course we have been to no concerts, theatre, dance performances, museums, or other culture (apart from one movie, with two empty seats between each family group for distancing, back when the cinemas were still open) since March. No visits to gyms or swimming pools. No scout camp. No birthday parties and no Christmas celebration with the extended Bergheden family. Only a funeral.

For the past month or so I’ve started to really chafe at the restrictions. I used to get fresh air, exercise and at least a little bit of variety from cycling on small errands in the middle of the day, but since November all that is also strongly discouraged. I feel locked in, and I struggle to find ways to fill my time at home. Reading, knitting, blogging, cooking, etc… All nice activities, but I would enjoy them more if I could choose them freely, rather than doing them because I cannot do much else. Reading a new book is still just more reading. I want out.

Even though vaccines are on their way (and the first doses have arrived) covid-19 will be with us for many months still. But I’m about to start working on a new project at work in a few weeks: something new in my life! And the days will become longer, and January and February are usually colder than December, so perhaps we will get freezing weather and firm ground so that I can go walking without wading in mud.


PS: other notable events or achievements for this year include developing my Sonos companion app which I am quite proud of, and finally finishing my green cardigan.

I also made two skirts, one scarf, two pairs of socks and two pairs of mittens.

This was also the year of the wasp invasion in Ingrid’s room.

Photos I took earlier today, when I had daylight, are nowhere to be found. The SD card is empty, the “Unprocessed” folder on the computer is empty, and I know I haven’t worked on them. Mysterious and worrying.

I’ll retake the photos tomorrow. No big deal. There was only a handful of them.

But this incident serves as a reminder for me to appreciate the habit of emptying the SD card every few days, and the importance of a robust backup system. I don’t want to be one of those people whose phone dies or computer crashes or Google locks them out of their account, and they lose all their digital memories.

I have three copies of my original RAW files: on a hard drive that sits on my desk, in the cloud, and on a separate hard drive stored elsewhere. That separate hard drive used to live in the tretton37 office, but now that I never go there, it’s moved to Eric’s workplace. It comes home once a month or so, gets that month’s photos, and then goes back to the office. If the house were to burn down together with the primary hard drive, and the external backup service somehow were to not deliver, then I’d still have this hard drive.

In addition I have JPG exports of every photo on yet another separate hard drive. I have them to make it easy to browse photos together with the kids, but they do provide a kind of backup as well. And the blog is a fifth backup in a way. It doesn’t have all my photos but if all the other sources were lost somehow, the blog would still have thousands of my photos.

I have the same three backups of the database for this blog – local, off-site, cloud. I have no idea how easy it would be to restore the blog starting from zero, so I hope I never need to use these backups, but it is good to have them.

My photos and my blog are important to me, and I would be devastated to lose them all.

The fifteenth anniversary of this blog came and went without me noticing it.

What I did notice, though, was this post from 15 years ago, about why I blog. All of my reasons from back then still hold true. I could have written it today, if I wrote such long posts these days.

If I were to write it today, I would add a fourth reason. I write because I enjoy writing. I enjoy finding the right words and phrases to express my thoughts and feelings as well as possible.

I enjoy writing text the same way that I enjoy writing code. Done well, the two are very similar. Programming as a field is often lumped together with maths and technical subjects, but coding in high-level languages has as much to do with writing skills as with engineering. You want to express certain ideas or concepts as clearly, correctly, and elegantly as possible. You want to be concise but not too concise; consistent but not repetitive.

The ten-day posting gap from October 10th to 19th is now filled with posts. If you missed any of them, you can find them all here:

Daily: 2105 – the house is cold
Daily: 2104 – Kinnekulleleden, day 4
Daily: 2103 – Kinnekulleleden, day 3
Daily: 2102 – Kinnekulleleden, day 2
Daily: 2101 – Kinnekulleleden, day 1
Daily: 2100 – making chestnut creatures
Daily: 2099 – gloomy
Daily: 2098 – hole in the ground
Daily: 2097 – steam coming off the deck
Daily: 2096 – we have wasps