Our lussebulle-making sessions tend to be proper marathons. Eric makes a giant heap of dough, and then we roll a giant amount of buns, and fill the freezer with enough lussebullar to last us most of the Christmas season.

This time we made a smaller batch. The freezer is not so satisfyingly full as it usually is, but on the other hand the baking went much faster. And I think we all eat less sweets and sugar we used to (possibly with the exception of Adrian) so they probably won’t run as fast as they would have, even a year ago.

I tried store-bought lussebullar a week ago, and they barely tasted like anything. These home-made ones were better, but the saffron flavour wasn’t as strong as I remembered it. The colour looks good, but the taste is just kind of a bit weak. Either it’s nostalgia speaking, and the snow was always deeper when I was young, and the saffron buns more saffron-y, and the sun sunnier… or maybe we got lower quality saffron this year.

Escape rooms are all the rage right now. We had that as our team activity for the last tretton37 social get-together, and today we did it again with the team at our customer’s.

The theme today was zombies – we were tasked with finding a Russian scientist’s notes about his nearly-finished cure for a zombifying virus. It was a well-planned adventure, quite difficult we thought, but fun.

There was a hint button, which we used three times during our hour. The hints we got were all such that we could probably have figured them out if we had lots of time, but not within the hour we had. But with the hints (which were only available with a ten-minute wait after each one) we got it done just in time, so the whole thing was very well calibrated.

We had a “secret Santa” gift exchange at work. My secret Santa gave me some nice, dark chocolate, which I now nibble away at, a square or two at a time, after lunch.

I’m super pleased with the secret Santa gift I gave away. On a hunch, I bought a training top for a colleague who’s mentioned on a few occasions that she really should start going to the gym. The cost limit for the secret Santa gifts was just a hundred crowns, which is almost nothing. But a nearby sports shop just happened to have a big sale. I stretched the 100 kr to 130 which was enough for a really nice top at 70 % off. My colleague was more pleased and amazed than I could have hoped.

It’s lussebulle season!

The end-of-term show for Ingrid’s dance studio. Ingrid is in two groups so we actually watched two shows: one yesterday, one today. She did show & jazz dance rather than disco this term, which I personally found more interesting to watch. Competitive disco dancing is frenetic and seems to consist mostly of lots of straddle jumps and furious windmilling of arms. Show dance has less sweat and more emotion.

In between the various kids’ groups, there are numbers by the studio’s elite and competitive groups. To keep the audience interested, I guess: they’d be bored to death if they had to watch other people’s kids do their amateur numbers for an hour. Rather clever. As long as you’re not one of the parents watching more than one show, because then even the elite performances become much of a muchness.