I love our office dog. He does more for my well-being at work than many of my colleagues.

I like scratching him, and he likes being scratched. He’s a small one, so for the best scritches, I lift him up. He usually likes that and often climbs onwards onto my desk. Which kind of works but is a bit awkward because he cannot easily get up or down on his own.

Hence: the dog podium. A pouffe? An ottoman? A kind of padded low seat, in any case, that I moved from our guest area/lounge to where I sit. The dog got my point immediately.

We realized that we don’t actually need to wait for the new kitchen before we buy a new stove. All we needed was the new kitchen design, which gave us the measurements. The best design we came up with was built around the same sized stove as we have today – reducing it to the standard 60 cm wouldn’t give us any benefits.

The best thing with the new stove is that it is not broken, haha. The oven door can be opened and closed without special grips and secret handshakes, and it won’t fall off. As a side benefit we also get a much larger oven. Interestingly, ovens in 70 cm stoves are no larger than ovens in 60 cm stoves – one oven size fits all.

The really modern/trendy approach would have been to buy a separate oven and a stovetop, and the latter would be induction based rather than ceramic. Stoves are gradually going out of fashion. But the induction stovetops all have touch controls rather than knobs you can turn, and for me that is a non-starter. Touch controls don’t work well with my fingers. Our tumble dryer has them and I often have to press three or four times before my touch is registered. We had horrible microwave ovens at work that required sliding to set the time and I hated them with a passion. I found them totally unusable. Imagine doing that every time I am cooking, with spills and hot pans nearby. Nope. Plus the whole induction thing seems somewhat hit and miss. I read enough reports about high-pitched whining noises, rings turning themselves off unpredictably, cases where turning on the largest ring reduces power on all the others, etc, to put me off the idea completely. This relatively old-fashioned but stable and solid solution is good enough for me.

The workmen installing the new stove noted that our kitchen slants, and the two countertops to the left and right of the stove are not of equal height. Now the new stove is level on an absolute scale but not relative to anything else in the house.

She’s pretty good at Mastermind.

The box says the game is suitable for ages 6 and up. While a six-year-old can understand the rules and be the “hider”, they won’t enjoy the “guesser” role much because all they can do is make random guesses. At 12 Ingrid has just about gotten to the level where she has mastered the game and can get the most enjoyment out of it.

After the recent heavy snowfall, there are teams of workmen on the roofs in the city, clearing the snow before it freezes and falls on someone’s head. They do wear safety harnesses of sorts but don’t seem to find them particularly important; I often see the harnesses sitting badly and almost falling off. If I was climbing around on an icy, slippery roof at the height of six or seven stories, I’d want to be pretty securely attached…

Back from the library with a pile of the books.

More snow kept falling throughout the night, and by morning we had enormous amounts of snow everywhere. Not quite to the point where we couldn’t open the doors, but definitely enough that I was glad it was Sunday and not Monday.

The kids had a grand day. The snow lay so thick on both stairs and street that the lower stairs could be used as a sledding slope – it wasn’t even noticeably uneven. And there were snow angels to make, and wading through the piles of snow, and rolling through the snow down a hill. Later in the afternoon we went to the library and the streets still hadn’t been cleared or sanded so I could pull the kids on the sled. (Good thing I’ve been going to the gym; Ingrid and Adrian together weigh more than I do.)


While the kids played, I shovelled. And then shovelled some more, and some more. The snow was heavy and thick, over 20 cm in places, and the two staircases and the driveway took me an hour and a half. (Good thing I’ve been going to the gym, again.) The pile where I deposited the snow from the driveway is tall enough to be a little sledding hill of its own.


The traffic chaos in town today must have been quite something. It took until later afternoon before the streets around here were mostly passable, and then they were still edged by massive piles of snow, the largest ones taller than me.

Lots and lots of wet snow today so we made snowmen. The snow was so sticky that the snowballs grew much faster than planned – I started my first ball around the corner of the house and hadn’t even reached the spot where I had planned to stand my snowman before the ball was too heavy to move. The same happened with Ingrid’s ball which was going to be the torso – it turned into the next snowman’s bottom ball instead. We were more careful with the next two balls.

Adrian’s collections of sticks and stones came in unexpectedly handy.

Lots of snow to shovel.