Waiting for Adrian’s parent-teacher meeting.

The meeting itself held no surprises. Adrian is happy at school and does well in all subjects. Only two subjects are really discussed in these meetings, the ones that matter, and that’s Swedish and maths. Adrian reads well and loves maths.

Eric and I started couples therapy today, to try and figure out some stuff together.

I learned a new technique for mending holes in an aesthetically pleasing way (from reddit) and tried it out on a knitted vest that some wool-eating bug had nibbled a hole in.

My umbrella is broken. It got caught on some door and one of the ribs broke, unrepairably.

Actually it broke already well over a year ago. I was going to buy a new one in Estonia last summer. There is an umbrella shop in Tartu that sells umbrellas that are colourful and pretty and fun to look at. Like this one. In Sweden the shops mostly sell black umbrellas, other single-color umbrellas, and umbrellas with tacky pictures such as palm trees or parrots or dollar bills.

Before I had bought a new one, Ingrid hinted that she might buy me one as a birthday present – since my birthday very conveniently comes a few weeks after our Estonia trip. She must have forgotten it or changed her mind, though, because I got other gifts instead.

So then I was going to buy an umbrella in Estonia this summer instead. Somehow our trip ended and I never found the time to go to that shop, so I came home without an umbrella again.

The funny thing is that during these sixteen months or so, the lack of a properly working umbrella hasn’t bothered me very much. I’ve used this broken one a handful of times. Sometimes I’ve worn my waterproof jacket and trousers instead. Sometimes I’ve simply gone without and hoped that the misting rain wouldn’t get any worse.

From my childhood I still remember my grandmother’s umbrella, mostly because I wasn’t allowed to use it because of the risk that I might break it. It was beige and lilac in colour, I believe, or maybe brown and purple. Like many things, umbrellas were “defitsiit” goods in Soviet Estonia: they were not produced in sufficient quantity and were not available in shops. You needed the right connections to get hold of one. Grandma’s umbrella was probably a gift from her emigrant friends in Germany rather than some cheap ugly Soviet thing.

The circles have turned and now I am abroad and making plans to buy an umbrella in Estonia. Although I probably won’t put it off for another year and will order something from the UK where, unlike Sweden, they do know how to make pretty umbrellas.

I’ve been knitting and crocheting most evenings recently, and both Ingrid and Adrian have been inspired to try out crocheting. Ingrid has undertaken to crochet a pouffe for her room.

Another school year, another invitation to a parent/teacher information meeting. The usual anodyne presentations of goals in Swedish and maths, and exhortations to read at home, etc.

Before the meeting we were invited to try and pick out our children’s self-portraits from a wall of unlabelled pictures. I went through all the drawings that I thought could possibly be Adrian’s, and then started over and went through the ones I really didn’t think were his and actually looked at the names on the reverse of each piece of paper, before I found it. Rather surprised to see that his drawing of human anatomy was on the level of a five-year-old, I mentioned this to the teacher. She then told me that Adrian had spent 15+ of their allotted 20 minutes on the Lego piece (drawn in isometric projection) and the PlayStation controller (in color and great detail) and only scribbled in a rough human figure when the teacher reminded him of the actual task. I guess he just didn’t find his body as interesting as his mind.

Overwatch, I believe.

Ingrid tells me that playing (computer) games together is the main way for her and her friends to spend time together. Each one in their own home, but nevertheless together through voice chat.

There’s a whole group of them and someone is nearly always online, so Ingrid is struggling with her FOMO and isn’t entirely happy with her screen time limits. (I’m very glad there are built-in controls for this in Windows so I don’t have to be the bad guy every night.) “Some of them are only online before dinner, and some of them are only online after dinner, so if I want to talk to them all, I need to play before and after dinner” – not quite making the connection there.

Our friendly neighbourhood wasp likes scrambled eggs, and butter. Butter it seemed to eat straight from the butter knife, but with scrambled eggs it cut off a bit and flew back home with it. You can see it holding that piece of eggs between its front legs.

The wasp obviously has a good sense of smell if it can smell our breakfast from wherever it otherwise spends its time. But once it arrives here, it struggles to find the exact source of the smell. It circles around the table and lands on nearly everything before it finally figures out which bowl the eggs are in. I guess it is better at picking up the presence of a faint smell than at sensing its exact direction. And I get the impression that it is quite near-sighted.

We’re getting used to its presence. Even Adrian, who was initially quite bothered by it, is now cheering it on in its search.

One of my birthday presents this year was a ticket to see Bortbytingen (“The changeling”) at Dramaten with Ingrid.

The play was based on a short story by Selma Lagerlöf, who is one of my favourite non-sci-fi writers, and one of a very few Swedish writers I like.

A human child was taken by trolls and a troll child left in its place. The troll has grown up with humans, hated and despised by all of them. The mother, too, hates and despises it and longs for her own baby, soft and pink and beautiful, but still feels some responsibility for the ugly thing and cannot bring herself to stop taking care of it, much less kill it. It’s breaking her and her husband and their marriage.

The troll meanwhile is as unhappy as its “parents”. How much should it suppress its nature to fit in? How much of an effort should it make to drink the nauseating milk and eat the disgusting bread? Would it be better to leave the “mother” he loves and see if he fits in better with the trolls in the dark, scary forest?

I loved all parts of this play. The story, the small venue, the minimalist stage design, the simple acting, the folk songs woven into it. I’ve often found Swedish theatre performances overly dramatic and been disappointed in the quality of the acting. This play was truly a pleasant surprise.

Notes for the future:
Written by Sara Bergmark Elfgren, directed by Tobias Theorell. Actors I liked: Maia Hansson Bergqvist, Maria Salomaa.