We finally get a brief break from clouds and drizzle. There is a bit of snow, and there is even some sunlight forecast for the weekend. Life is a little bit lighter.

The company Christmas party this year took place at Såstaholm. It’s a place with a story, and the theatre theme ran strong through the entire interior. There were posters, photos, rooms named after recipients of their annual prize to young actors etc.

But better than all that was their collection of theatre costumes. Two large rooms in the basement were full of real, “retired” costumes from the Royal Opera and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. After we’d all eaten the traditional julbord, while some people went to the bar for drinks, others went downstairs to play dress-up. Later there were pirates and bishops and counts in capes in the crowd hanging out at the bar.

I found this amazing, wonderful skirt: black, floor length, wide and swishy, with several different luxurious fabrics, all shimmering and lacy. Underneath and between the visible layers there were hidden swathes of yet more fabric. With all its layers upon layers of cloth, the skirt was far heavier than my thick winter coat!

Looking inside I found one part that was like a thick tail, a rope of fabric tied together with string. It was bunched up at the top but the rest simply hung down, longer than the front of the skirt. I think it was supposed to add some fullness at the back, and structure and heaviness to the “train”. When I walked, the tail trailed behind me, invisibly under the skirt, and just sort of made the visible fabric fall differently. Quite an interesting construction detail, I thought.

I kind of wished I could take the skirt home and have it forever. But then again it was so supremely impractical that I would hardly ever wear it, not even for parties. That thing would be quite impossible to wear outside the house, but also nearly impossible to wear among other people. (Among modern people, that is, who are unused to walking among ladies with trailing skirts. I guess people used to manage, two hundred years ago.) Even as I was trying it on, someone already stepped on the fringe of the train. But still…

There were a few other skirts and dresses and corsets that I wanted to try, but couldn’t fit into. Here’s one from The Nutcracker that seems to have been used in six seasons, from 1984 to 1991. The label says “vita par” so I guess it was used for some “white pair” dance.

I’m not exactly large, but the ballerinas must be truly tiny to fit into those things! I know that they are super slim, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when the skirt waists were way to narrow for me. But even the corset tops were far too small. I don’t understand how they can have rib cages as narrow as that.

Maybe they were teenagers when they wore it, I thought. But I looked up one of the dancers (the things you can do with Google nowadays!) and, no, she was 24.

I walked to my desk this morning, unpacked my things and sat down to work. Not noticing at all that the desk to my right had been swapped with another. It is still a white desk but everything about it is different. It has that privacy panel right next to my desk (the other desk didn’t). It has one monitor (the other desk had two). There is a different chair in front of it.

And I didn’t notice any of it! Until an hour later, when the guy who now sits there arrived, and I saw that it wasn’t the person who usually sits there. The desk, within arm’s reach, was completely different than it used to be and I just didn’t notice anything. Not even a large, dark privacy panel privacying right inside my field of view!

Even worse. They later told me they had moved their desks around yesterday afternoon, so I had sat next to this new arrangement already yesterday and not noticed anything.

Total tunnel vision. All I see is what is right in front of me.

I have a cold and I’m sneezing all the time, so I worked from home today to try and not infect everyone else in the office.

Having a cold isn’t much fun, and I don’t really enjoy working from home either. The laptop keyboard and monitor are inconveniently small. And I miss the company of my colleagues.

But it is rather nice to sit and work at the kitchen table, with plenty of daylight. And even though it isn’t green outside, the garden is still much less gray and much nicer to look at than the office building across the street from the office.

No community, organization, club, or other group in Sweden would ever arrange a meeting without fika. Spånga scout group is no exception. I’m a sort of consulting member of the scout group, acting as a mentor when it comes to planning and organizing food for larger events such as summer camps. There is a standing committee that coordinates the scout group’s events. We had a meeting today, and it was my turn to bring fika. Shop-bought lussebullar since it’s nearly December.

There are some in the group who really like to talk, and these committee meetings often take an hour and a half even when there isn’t much on the agenda. An hour and a half seems to be some magical limit; when we start approaching that limit people tend to cut down on the chit-chat and get to the point much faster.

Today only three members were present and we barely had anything on the agenda but one of the ladies really wanted to tell us each of her things at least three times so it still took 40 minutes before we were done.

Reaching for the light that isn’t there.

We watch Robinson occasionally. Adrian and Ingrid find it more exciting than I do; I keep them company and usually knit at the same time.

Eric and Adrian are away on an overnight scout hike. Ingrid is busy with her own stuff. For the first time in a long time, I had a day of complete peace and quiet at home.

I spent all of today doing nothing. I read, mostly. I played some silly computer game for half an hour. Ate when I was hungry. Read more. Knitted.

I wish I could regularly kick the rest of the family out of the house for an entire weekend. Because as long as I am at home and they are at home, I don’t get much rest.

I love butter. Especially melted butter, and frying things in butter. Broccoli, for example, fried in butter with garlic. Or pancakes, but without the garlic. And I loathe all the low-fat fake-butter sandwich spreads.

Some Swedish cookbooks have a recipe for pancakes where melted butter is added to the batter, with the argument that you then won’t need to butter the pan. Why on Earth would you want to not fry your pancakes in butter?! I’ve tried that approach, and while it does lead to pancakes of sorts, the taste is thin and flat. Not doing that again. Give me pancakes that make my fingers properly greasy!

Hoodies are Ingrid’s favourite type of clothing. This one she got from me, and I got it from work. It’s a very nice and comfortable tretton37 hoodie, warm and thick and with a silky lining. It’s just not in my colours or my style at all, and Ingrid is getting way more enjoyment out of it than I would.

Since her thirteenth birthday, Ingrid doesn’t have an allowance any more. Instead she gets her entire monthly child benefit in her bank account, and is responsible for buying her own stuff. Clothes, shoes, books, friends’ birthday gifts, decorations for her room… Everything and anything that she may want to buy. The only cost that is purely for her but doesn’t come from her budget is all her various activities, because I want her to keep dancing and scouting without having to weigh the cost against other things she could spend that money on.

We were talking about buying clothes, recently, since she will need to buy new winter clothes soon. Ingrid’s summary of her approach to buying clothes was something like this: “Do I need it? Do I like it? Is it a hoodie?”