Cherry blossoms make me happy.

Stora mossen tube station is the halfway point of my bike commute, both literally and figuratively.

The first 7 km from Spånga to Stora mossen feels relaxing and suburban. Spångavägen and the outer parts of Drottningholmsvägen are lined first with detached houses and then with small apartment buildings. The bike paths are straight and wide and mostly empty.

The other 7 km from Stora mossen to the city begin with the traffic nexus at Alvik, with several traffic lights in a row and lots of cyclists queuing at each one, and then continues in the same vein: narrow bike lines shared with pedestrians, the Tranebergsbron bridge, and all kinds of other distractions.

I enjoy almost all of my bike commute (although Kungsgatan is a bit less nice) but it does feel nice to leave the city behind me on my way home and cruise along Spångavägen.

It’s spring, and we can dry the laundry outside in the sun and wind. (Adrian’s socks, in this case.)

A year ago, when the Royal Opera published their calendar for this year, the piece we saw today was simply presented as “Alexander Ekman is back”. No title, no photos, no description. I guess he wasn’t as done with the piece at the time of publication as he was supposed to be.

We booked tickets nevertheless. The last piece by Alexander Ekman that we saw was “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. There was perhaps a bit too much theatre and too little dance in that one, but it was far from boring. I could think of many worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Before the start of the performance, it’s started already: in the orchestra pit, a silent, slow-motion dinner party is taking place, with guests in surreal costumes.

The performance is sprawling and contains not only group dances, solos and duets, but also a movie and a monologue. The movie explains the concept of the escapist: a man who doesn’t just dream of a more interesting, pleasant life, but truly makes himself believe that he is living that life. That he is digging his feet into sun-warmed sand on a beach when he is getting out of bed in the morning, and that he is playing with large, friendly dogs during his boring afternoon in the office.

(Side note: This whole idea of escapism as a way to escape “dead time” is presented as fun and uplifting and heartwarming. After all, sun-warmed beaches are pleasant, and so are large fluffy dogs. But I couldn’t help finding it rather sad. That his life, or our life, is so empty that it needs to be escaped so thoroughly and completely.)

The performance is energetic and entrancing. Sometimes absurd, sometimes sublime and lyrical. But above all and through it all, it’s playful, as Ekman lets his fantasy run loose. This playfulness seems to annoy some reviewers, it’s “pandering to the audience” apparently. I guess ballet is supposed to be a serious thing, for serious viewers only. (I admit, there were a few cheap gimmicks, but those were few.)

The stage design is mostly minimalist, to the point where the backstage mechanisms are visible. Except when it isn’t minimalist, and the entire scene is decorated with white furniture – beds, chairs, shelves, potted plants, a cot.

The lighting likewise was simple and harsh. The costumes, like the stage design, ranged from minimalist skin-coloured underwear – to beautiful, graphical, rich designs in black and white.

The most interesting aspects of the performance to me were those that seemed random and absurd, but also very intentional. Groups of people are dancing, in large, swelling movements – and one man is sitting alone on a chair at the very far end of the scene, flexing his legs. Or a large outline of a flamingo that stands slightly off center. None of the dancers interact with it while it rises ever so slowly until it is out of sight.

My eyes hurt because I forgot to blink for long stretches of time.

Note to self: great music by Mikael Karlsson.

Alexander Ekman’s Eskapist at the Opera was visually quite memorable.

I like the Viburnum I planted a couple of years ago. Last year when I planted the hedge, I added two more (of hopefully the same variety) to keep it company.

The first one has had a few years to establish itself, and it shows. It prepares by putting out flower buds in winter already, and when spring comes, it’s all ready to go.

The second one is clearly playing catch-up and is only just budding now.

The third one seems to have died during the winter; I guess I’ll have to replace it.

Pasha is an Estonian Easter dessert of Russian origin. When I was a child, we always had pasha for Easter – it was as much a tradition as eggs. Somehow we lost that tradition for many years, but now we’ve picked it up again. We usually go to Uppsala to my mum’s for Easter so she makes the pasha, but recently we’ve concluded that one or two days of pasha just isn’t enough, so we made another batch when we got back home.

The bulk of it is sweetened quark, fluffed up by adding whipped cream, but much of the flavour and texture comes from all the other ingredients: lemon peel, chopped nuts, finely chopped chocolate, raisins, candied orange peel etc. You mix it all up, spoon it into a mould, and then let it stand for a day to drain out some of the liquid. After a day you turn the finished pasha out of the mould.

I have a lovely hand-made wooden pasha mould with decorative designs cut into it. Did I take a photo of the beautiful pasha with relief patterns that came out of that mould? No… because we attacked it like a horde of hungry locusts, and before I could think of bringing the camera, there was nothing left to photograph. This photo is of the other pasha, made of the mixture that didn’t fit in the nice mould and that I put in a sieve instead. The photo doesn’t do it justice, although to be honest, pasha does taste better than it looks in real life as well.

The team has been working on a large project since February, and today we finally deployed the first part of it. Mostly we do no-downtime deployments but this time we made such deep-going changes that we would have to shut down the system for the deployment. The client absolutely would not accept any downtime during normal working hours, so we deployed at 5:30 in the morning. By the afternoon (when we celebrated with some cake) we were pretty knackered, and the celebration wasn’t exactly lively.

Cherry trees are blossoming in central Spånga.

Long weekend, beautiful weather – I went for a full-day hike, and Ingrid came along. Last weekend’s outing was nice, but there was a lot more sausage grilling than walking going on.

Normally the Sörmlandsleden would be my first go-to trail, or maybe something in Tyresta. But due to the long weekend, engineering works were underway and there was no train service from Spånga station, so most trails south of the city (including Sörmlandsleden) were unreachable. So we went for something completely new and different and walked the Lovö trail instead. 17 km around the island of Lovö, mostly hugging its coast, easily reachable by bus.

Another reason for picking the Lovö trail was that I hoped it would have more than just the usual rock and pine and blueberry forests that are everywhere near Stockholm – perhaps some deciduous forests or open fields. I wanted birdsong, and while pine and spruce forests can be lovely in other ways, they usually don’t harbour much birdlife. I remember coming back from a long walk last spring, having heard nearly no birds, only to finally hear them on my way back through a park near the train station.

Lovö did deliver on that. The trail was quite varied, and while much of it was pine forest, there were some pleasant leafy forests along the southern and western coast, with both birdsong and boggy patches that seemed to promise flowering irises soon.

Spring flowers were blossoming here and there, but overall spring hasn’t come very far yet even though it’s warm, so from that point of view the pine forest was good to have, too – at least it was green. I’d like to come back here and see what it looks like in summer and autumn as well.

I stopped for photos, Ingrid stopped for sketching.

The path was well marked and in that sense easy to walk, but it was quite rocky and uneven, and there was a lot of up and down. We were walking slower than usual and the 17 km felt longer than I had intended. Towards the end Ingrid was quite tired and even I felt that I had had enough, so for the last 3 km or so, we left the trail and walked back along roads instead.

Luckily Lovö is so criss-crossed with trails that if we ever want to come back, we can mix and match and come up with a shorter walk. Not only for the kids’ sake.