Opening advent calendars.

We have a multitude of calendars. A bit too many, in my opinion, but hey, it’s not me who needs to keep up with them all.

We begin the day by listening to the radio calendar in bed. The alarms go off, Ingrid comes to our bedroom and pokes at Adrian, and they both come into our bed. The story this year (“Marvinter”, roughly “Nightmare Christmas”) is interesting and the voice acting is good, so we all enjoy it. Plus it’s a nice way to wake – I’m barely awake at the beginning, and mostly OK with getting up by the end of the 10 minutes it takes.

The TV calendar (“Jakten på tidskristallen”, “The hunt for the time crystal”) got good reviews but I really disliked it and didn’t even want to watch it to keep the kids company. The story is silly but I could live with that, but I cannot stand the mannered acting that makes several key characters come across as caricatures rather than actual people. Adrian watches it at school; Ingrid has given up on it.

Both the radio and TV calendars have an accompanying cardboard “open the flap” calendar. In addition, Ingrid drew “open the flap” calendars for both myself and Adrian. I got a Christmas-themed one, while Adrian’s had a Minecraft theme. Plus of course there is the calendar I made, with small gifts for the kids every day. Phew!

Knitting a scarf.

The kids in Ingrid’s class spent half the day selling candy floss at the local Christmas market, to earn money for a trip next year. Making those fluffy balls of floss turned out to be harder than it looked, and there was sugar everywhere.

My new company has a ninja theme. We’re like code ninjas, supposedly. The office decorations follow the same theme. There is a bunch of shuriken embedded in the wall next to my desk.

Sometimes he looks up a design in Google image search. (Good spelling practice.) Today he made his own design. It’s a TV with a large antenna, showing a video game with two figures fighting each other.

Settling in at my new job and equipping my desk with the essentials. The computer was the first and most obvious one, but close behind are a good pen and a pad of sticky notes.

I am not always able to stick to the GTD method but the one thing I do nearly religiously is noting down anything that needs to be done, which is why I like to have pen and paper at hand at all times. Any time someone I am pulled into a meeting or discussion or anything similar, my first reflexive reaction is to grab the pen and paper.

(My other strongly ingrained GTD-ish habit is to always confirm at the end of a meeting what the next actions are, and who is responsible for which ones. Surprisingly often it transpires that we didn’t really know that yet, and were about to leave the meeting without pinning these things down.)

I am a pen snob. I cannot stand ballpoint pens. Gel pens slide over paper, making writing smooth and effortless. I make sure to always have a gel pen at hand: not just at my desk at work but also at my desk at home, in the kitchen next to the shopping list, in my handbag etc. At work I tag my pen with my name, so it doesn’t grow legs and go wandering.

Ingrid participated in her first ever dance competition, and she and her partner got a bronze medal in the “duo junior 1” class!

It was an internal competition for members of her dance studio only, intended to be an easy first step into competitive dancing. So it was quite relaxed and low-key, but of course Ingrid was nervous anyway.

Malt bread or vörtbröd is part of Swedish Christmas tradition. It is sometimes possible to find decent vörtbröd in supermarkets if you are lucky, but none compare to the ones that Eric bakes. Rich, spicy, moist and yet fluffy.

The hedge hasn’t lost its leaves yet and is in fact still green. You’d hardly believe it’s December. Except that the sun is so low that even at midday it doesn’t even clear the neighbours’ house.

There’s a brief time window in the morning – maybe 5 or 10 minutes – when we get sunlight in the living room, and another in the afternoon around half past one when the sun sneaks in between the neighbours’ house and a pine tree. And a short while later, when the sun gets to the other side of that pine, the edge of the garden gets a moment of slanting sunlight.

We attended Stockholm Chamber Choir’s advent concert at the German Church. Beautiful. My opinion is perhaps a bit partial because one of Eric’s sisters is a member of that choir, as well as her husband, but I stand by it.

I’m no expert so I have nothing particularly insightful to say… The singing was beautiful and moving. The programme was interesting and varied and contained both old and new works, ranging from Händel and traditional Swedish hymns to John Tavener and other “modern classical”. (The Tavener piece was my favourite.) The church has beautiful acoustics, and choir used the entire church hall with great effect for rounds songs.

Make sure to attend next year as well.