Ingrid has been practising driving, off and on since autumn. Started on a parking lot with stopping, starting, basic manoeuvering and shifting gears; then moved on to an industrial area that was mostly abandoned during weekends. Today we went out into actual traffic and drove first to Vällingby and back, and then to Råcksta and back. Both times on roads that Ingrid is well familiar with from all her moped trips. The moped driving has been a very practical way of warming up to driving a car – she’s used to traffic, speed limits and all that, and all she needs to get used to now is handling the car.

My Stockholm-themed embroidery is slowly moving forward. It feels like I’ve spent forever on the houses, and especially the little bitty windows. But today I did all of the red house on the left and then, boom, all three of the roofs on the right as well, which felt good.

First of May, public holiday, great weather – gardening time!

This year I’m decommissioning the planting boxes in the kitchen garden. They’re more hassle than they’re worth. I can’t say they’ve been useless – the home-grown peas were nice – but overall just not worth it.

Most of all I’m tired of the endless watering. Maybe it’s because they’re raised (heated by the sun from the sides, no buffering from the soil around them). Maybe it’s because of the soil I’ve bought – much of the soil that is sold is very peaty. Maybe both and then some more. But the soil dries out so fast that I can never get a break from the watering. And then we go away for a week and come back to half-dead plants.

The work might be worth it if the yield was great. But with strawberries, for example, a planter fits six plants, which altogether yields a couple of breakfast bowls of strawberries. Maybe three. To share between the four of us. Enough to whet the appetite, but it’s not like we could eat home-grown strawberries with our cereal all summer. So to make it worth it, we’d need to have a much larger kitchen garden.

The raspberries, which I had hopes for – larger plants, more fruit – just died. Could be because I couldn’t keep up with the watering?

So now I’m giving up. I don’t know what I’ll do with this part of the garden instead, but whatever it is, it’ll have to tolerate dry conditions and shallow soil and survive without daily coddling. And as for strawberries, we’ll just buy all the strawberries that we can eat.

I’m using the soil from the planting boxes to fill in sunken bits of the lawn. I recall the lawn as being much more even when we moved in – now it’s got dips and bumps and depressions all over. If I really cared about the state of the lawn, I could invest much more work in evening it out properly, but this might at least improve the situation while utilising all this soil I have. Throw some grass seeds on it, and it’ll be good enough.

On the days I cycle to work, I need a shower when I get there. These days all offices have showers, I guess – I haven’t run across one without a shower since forever.

This is the lavatory & shower on the 2nd floor at Sortera’s office in Liljeholmen.

#1 on the right is the shower, of course.

#2 on the left is the motion detector for the lights.

#3 in the middle is a large cleaning cabinet.

Want to guess whether the cleaning cabinet blocks the motion sensor from seeing half the room? Including the entirety of the shower? Of course it does. So I have to make sure to finish my shower before the lights turn off. Even standing outside the shower drying myself off is not enough to keep the lights on. Several times I’ve had to wave my towel around the cupboard to get the lights back.

Despite the apparently never-ending surprise snow days, I’ve switched out my wardrobe. Bring out the jersey dresses and lace-sleeve tops; put away the layers and layers of wool.

Now I have a whole pile of wool tops and sweaters to wash, and most of them I don’t dare put in the washer. They might survive, or they may shrink or stretch or felt etc. I’m not taking that risk. I only have room to dry one or two at a time (one on the blocking mat and one on the laundry rack) and the thick ones take multiple days, so this is going to take a while.

Drove to Hägerstalund and Hansta nature reserve to walk among the anemones. Nature delivered – endless seas of white anemones everywhere.

The woods there look like they belong in a picture book. As if any moment now, a group of singing elves will glide past in the distance. Or, at the very least, a group of hobbits.

There were many more liverworts flowering than I recall here seeing before. Perhaps I came earlier in the season than in previous years?

There were also some odd blue anemones, that almost looked like a hybrid between anemone and liverwort. Which is not botanically possible, I believe – even if the Swedish names of the two are very similar and make it sound as if the flowers are very closely related.

There’s a small wood nearby, fully contained within a single city block. Roads on all sides, housing along all of the roads – and behind that ring of houses, a rocky hill covered in pine trees. Climb up to the top and you can almost pretend the city isn’t there.

There are other small woods nearby. What I find interesting about this one is that it’s so hidden. I’d lived here for years before I discovered it. While some other nearby city woods touch a street somewhere, so you can see them when walking past, this one you can’t see at all past the houses around it. I found it on a map first, and then went looking for entrances. There are three, not counting people’s back gardens: two cul-de-sac streets, and this tree-shaded footpath between two yards.

Now I wonder whether there might be more similar hidden woods nearby.

Still a cold and wet day, but not actually raining, so I could have a “walk and talk” meeting with the new product manager in our team, to get to know each other. Suited me much better than an awkward and stiff “let’s have a coffee”.

I really hoped we were done with the snow.

There’s convenient bicycle parking just outside the Sortera office. I guess those with more expensive bikes park them in parking garages, but mine isn’t enticing enough to make me worry about anyone taking or damaging it in full daylight in the middle of a street.

The other bikes that mine shares the stand with are all also ordinary, classical city bikes. What I see on the roads is rather different. The classical bikes aren’t so common among commuters any more. Instead, commuters and their bikes are diverging into two extremes. On the one side there are the racers: long men (mostly) clad in Spandex, on skinny bikes with lots of gears. On the other side there are the e-bikers: people dressed in jeans or office wear, casually pedalling on e-bikes. One group focuses on the exercise; the other one on convenience. (And both are willing to pay a fair bit to get it.)

Both groups go quite fast, so the average speed of cycle commuting along the routes I follow has definitely gone up over the years.

For me, the city bike still seems like the best compromise. I like getting exercise while I commute (and really, while the e-bikers move their legs, it’s not like they’re going to break a sweat) and I also like being able to use my bicycle in my everyday life without making a whole deal out of it. I can bike to a store and step off the bike and walk around in normal shoes.