Ingrid’s moped has been acting up for a while, and now won’t even start. She’s been doing her best to fix it herself, but ran out of ideas and energy. We’re taking it to a repair shop for servicing and fixing up. Which, given that the thing doesn’t even start, is a bit of an exercise. The trickiest part was to get it up into the trailer. I was thinking we could make do with a thick plank, but after some consideration, Eric bought a steel ramp.

Even with a purpose-built ramp, it was a three-person job. One in the front to guide (“a bit to the right!”), one to steer, and one to push. It’s not like you could grab it and hold it up if it went over the edge – it’s over 100 kg of expensive, breakable machinery.

The sweater body is finished, and now drying after I wet blocked it.

The colourful stripes are as crazy and colourful as I pictured them. The lines between the light gray and the almost-but-not-quite-the-same light gray were not planned. I guess I got two different batches of the gray yarn. Given how the sweater is constructed, I can’t even easily avoid them by alternating the two skeins. With the line at the top, for example, I actually started the knitting there, and knitted first in one direction (downwards in the photo) and then re-joined the yarn when the rest of the body was done and knitted upwards to make that shaped section.

But I guess if I’m doing stripes anyway, what’s a few extra ones?

Or, maybe, if they do end up bothering me, I could use duplicate stitch to embroider a thin line there with the crazy yarn and pretend that it’s part of the design.

I have been taking levothyroxine daily to compensate for my underactive thyroid for almost twenty years.

I can’t remember what the pill jars looked like in the UK. In Sweden, they looked like the jar on the left for many years. Until one day a couple of years ago someone tried to be clever and changed the design to the one on the right.

On the left: a normal lid, with a nice ridged edge for extra grip. With grooves on top, even, that you could use for more leverage – put a pencil in the groove and twist. Nice if you’re elderly, or have reduced mobility or grip strength. Human-friendly, in other words.

On the right: what is that even. Carefully align one tiny symbol with another tiny symbol, by twisting the lid. And then somehow lever it off. I don’t know how you’re actually supposed to do that. Pushing with my thumb doesn’t work; I normally claw it off with the nails of two or three fingers, with effort.

Once I’ve got it open, my immediate next step is to decant the pills into the old jar, and throw away the new jar, swearing at it while thanking my luck that (i) I had the foresight to keep one of the old jars, and (ii) the jar openings are exactly the same size so I can just hold the two against each other and flip them upside down and don’t need to look for a funnel or something, or chase dropped pills on the floor.

Now that I googled about it, I see that the new jar was introduced in 2017, and complaints were registered immediately. In 2020 they were working on it and now in 2024 nothing has happened yet.

The new jars are so bad that they’ve been written about in national magazines, and the pharmacy staff joke about it every time I pick up my prescription. I replied that “at least I’m young and strong and healthy so I can open mine”.

Then it struck me that, while I’m strong and healthy, describing myself as young is perhaps not entirely accurate any more. I’m closer to 50 than 40, after all. It may be time to re-frame things.

As I was about to step in through the revolving front doors of the Waterfront building, where the tretton37 office is located, I was stopped by a fire alarm ringing through the lobby. The alarm kept ringing, until a fire crew turned up some ten minutes later, probably checked something, and turned the thing off.

What was interesting about the incident was that the people already in the office didn’t even notice that anything was amiss, until I finally got in and could ask them. We’re on floor 6, and apparently the fire alarm had been triggered on floor 5. But the floors are so completely separated from each other that they’re not alerted nor evacuated for a minor alarm on an adjacent floor.

I had the honour of mending one of Eric’s sweaters. His style is definitely more subdued than mine, so there was no doubt that I would aim for a discreet mend. Then I found a near-perfect yarn to match the sweater, and while the result is not invisible, it blends in pretty darn well. I guess if I had endless time and infinite patience, I could have done something even less visible with Swiss darning, but with these tiny stitches? No thank you.

It’s tricky when the yarn thickness doesn’t quite match. Taken singly, the yarn was too thin. Held double, it was thicker than the original, so I made my grid at half the density of the original stitches. Which afterwards turned out to be a bit too sparse, making the result look like a basket rather than an even weave. You can see it in the photo below, on the left side of the mend, if you look really carefully. I went back and wove in more vertical threads between the existing ones here and there – I’m about halfway done in the photo, starting from the right. Inserting extra warp threads was more work than if I’d had them there from the start. But I don’t know how I could have gotten the density right without experimenting.

There was some trouble with the commuter trains when I was leaving the office for home. I thought I’d save time by doing my grocery shopping in town while giving it all some time to settle. All fine and good, but it was enough of a deviation from my routine that I accidentally left the bag with groceries on a bench in the train station. I always, ALWAYS only have my backpack to think about, so when the train arrived I just grabbed it and boarded.

I realized my mistake about 5 minutes later, unfortunately after we’d already passed the next station. Had it been just the groceries, I might have just left it and bought everything again in Spånga. But it was also my favourite grocery bag, made for me by Ingrid, colourful and comfortable and just the right size, and I wasn’t going to just leave that.

So I got off at Sundbyberg, where I got to wait 10 minutes in the cold wind for a train going in the other direction. Back at Stockholm City my bright orange bag was exactly where I had left it, a splash of colour on dark benches against a dull red floor. Looked very pretty, and I wish I could have taken a photo – but the train home was standing at the platform, ready to leave, and I really did not want to wait 15 minutes for the next one.

Here is the bag, holding the makings of fritters for dinner: two courgettes, a three-pack of tinned sweetcorn, and some feta cheese.

I went out looking for more growing things. Didn’t find much apart from patches of Eranthis in various gardens and hedges. So here’s some no-longer-growing things from the park.

I use colourful, patterned melamine bowls for Nysse’s drinking water. (Although he often prefers to drink from planting saucers instead.)

I wonder what, if anything, he thinks of the bowls. Is his perception of colour close to ours at all? Does he mind the leaf-green bowl, or the violently violet saucer beneath it? Does he notice when I switch out the bowl to put it in the dishwasher?

Ingrid is studying WW1 at school, and her teacher had recommended the class to visit the Army Museum to learn more. She asked for company, so I went with her to the museum.

The permanent exhibition was much smaller than I had expected given the teacher’s express recommendation. And it was very much about the army and its experience of the war, rather than about the bigger picture, the whys and the wherefores. Still, well presented and rather interesting, and we learned things. About the breakneck pace of technical innovation during the war, for example. And that guns are heavy.

We breezed through the rest of the 20th century and didn’t visit the section about older history at all. What we did spend time on, though, was a very topical temporary exhibition about historical relationships between Sweden and Ukraine.

I had no idea that there were such close ties between the royal families, and important political alliances. Starting Ingegerd Olofsdotter, daughter of a Swedish king, marrying the Grand Prince of Kiyv, which I had never heard about. Then Karl XII allying with Ukrainian leader Ivan Mazepa against Peter I of Russia – what I remember about the Great Northern War from my years in Swedish school is all about Sweden warring against Russia, with Ukraine coming up only tangentially as the place where the battle of Poltava took place. (And the parts of GNW that were discussed during my Estonian schooling were mostly those that took part in Estonia, i.e. the battle of Narva, and the fact that it brought with it the end of the “good old Swedish days” and the passing of Estonian territory from Swedish rule to Russian.)

I also (re-)learned that Gammalsvenskby, an old village in Ukraine of people of Swedish heritage, was originally settled by Estonian Swedes from Dagö/Hiiumaa. Sadly most of the village has been destroyed now in the war.

Vaguely, tantalizingly spring-like weather is here, with above-zero temperatures on most days.

Indoors it’s not a lot warmer than before. The heating is still set to the same target temperature of 19°C, but on sunny days the system is more likely to overshoot slightly than to fall short.

The bedroom is warmer at night, though. I’ve switched from sleeping in long-sleeved thermal shirt, to short-sleeved cotton t-shirt (under the winter-weight duvet, still, and the flannel sheets, still).