Adrian made things with polymer clay: an infinity gauntlet, and a rainbow of tiny rosettes.

I love photographing him doing things. He goes all in and his face is so expressive. And there all these colours!

(I borrowed these photos from a recent weekend. We do not have quite this much light on weekday afternoons yet.)

Ingrid suddenly went on a smoothie making spree, with smoothies for both breakfast and an afternoon snack. Adrian realized that he can also make smoothies on his own and doesn’t have to wait for me to make one. Here they both are with a smoothie breakfast.

Adrian is reading Kalle Anka as usual. He never tires of them.

Ingrid is reading her notes for her upcoming physics test. She totally does tire of them. (Forces, levers, action and reaction, acceleration and all that.)

Remember that green cardigan that I have now started on four times, and twice gotten most of it done only to realize that it does not fit? (First attempts in 2012 to 2015, then again in January 2018 to May 2018.)

It’s been waiting for me in my cupboard, half-finished for nearly two years. But whenever I think about it I mostly feel frustrated and hopeless, so I never actually pick it up. Instead I’ve worked on various other projects.

It’s time to give up.

This pattern is not going to work for me. Either it’s not right for me as a knitter, or it’s not right for my body – which would explain how I can end up with a cardigan where some parts fit me while others are way too tight or hang loose and floppy.

Today I ripped it all up so I can reuse the yarn. Deep inside me I’ve apparently given up on this cardigan a long time ago, because I didn’t feel the least bit of loss while losing all this work. All I felt was relief.

“Coraline” is great as a book, a movie, and a comic book. Why not an opera?

In terms of story, the opera version at Folkoperan was true to the original. The scene decorations and costumes all had the right kind of eerie mood, and the buttons-for-eyes looked truly creepy.

The problem was the singing.

This performance left me more convinced than ever that I just do not get opera. I would have liked the show so much more if they had just stopped singing and talked like normal people.

Opera singing is simply weird, and this opera was weirder than many, I think. The music was not just atonal but also a-structural. I couldn’t discern any melody or musical theme at all in what the orchestra played and the singers sang. The orchestral music felt like a vague soundscape more than anything. And the singing literally seemed like something that a kid could have made up when pretending to sing opera. Just make your voice really high and stretch out each word! Look, ma, I’m doing opera!

We were in town. The way home took us to Södra station, Stockholm’s South station, with its colourful platform floors. Between each pair of pillars is a field of yellow. Between the fields of yellow the floor is made up of regular curved shapes coloured either red, green or gray.

At some point years ago we made up a game. (Probably one of the kids was tired or cranky or bored and needed entertaining.) Each player has a colour and can only step on fields of that colour. The yellow fields are “home” for everyone. The shapes are just wide enough, and the colours distributed just evenly enough, that it’s doable but slightly challenging – especially but not only for those with short legs. Sometimes, if you don’t plan ahead, you may have to back track and choose another path.

Ingrid and I have outgrown the game and Eric was never a fan but Adrian still enjoys the challenge.

I am so glad I read the newspaper this morning and that I even skimmed the pages with event listings and event ads, which I sometimes skip. Otherwise I would have missed the yearly sewing and crafts festival, and that would have been a pity.

I spent several hours just walking around and looking at things. I barely bought anything (2 metres of fancy woven ribbon and three pairs of socks) but I came home with a whole lot of inspiration and creative energy. Just like when I go to software conferences – even when I don’t learn much, I get an incredible amount of energy.

I was not very interested in the sewing side of the festival, other than as a curious observer. Sewing machine makers and resellers took up a lot of floor space. There was also an immense variety of fabric. Quilting is clearly a big thing – there were lots of vendors selling colourful fabrics in smallish pieces clearly meant for patchwork. Also lots of printed jersey fabrics, and I think the main target group there was mums sewing clothes for their young children.

Mums sew, but knitting, embroidery and other such textile crafts is clearly mostly done by ladies of an, ahem, mature age. I felt quite young there.

There were endless amounts of crafts materials of all kinds. So many lovely yarns in so many colours! But I can’t just buy something without a plan, without knowing what I will use it for. Maybe some other year I’ll go there with some actual projects in mind and have a reason to buy some.

I was more interested in all the finished projects, displayed to inspire you to buy yarn or even whole ready-made kits. I’m not interested in embroidering someone else’s design, but I can still be inspired. I’m especially happy to find ideas about what to actually do with embroidery. It’s not hard to come up with designs, the hard thing is to find something to do with them. I don’t want to make useless things that can only be hung on a wall.

Adrian likes watching cooking shows. We’ve been watching Sveriges mästerkock together, and he likes Sveriges yngsta mästerkock, the junior version, even better. We’re waiting for the new season to be released. He also watches Gordon Ramsay on his own.

He sometimes asks me if I think I could be on that show, or if some meal I cooked would be good enough for it. I guess that’s a sign that he appreciates my cooking.

The most obvious difference is that the contestants always cook carnivore food. Many challenges are explicitly meat-based. But they nearly never make vegetarian meals otherwise either, even when the challenge to me looks incredibly vegetarian-friendly. (I think a very few pastas and soups have been vegetarian.)

But what if they had a “Sweden’s best vegetarian chef” contest, Adrian asked?

I explained that the food I cook – no matter how good – is of a different kind. I cook everyday food.

The flavours are part of it. My cooking is way more varied and interesting and flavourful than what the average Swede cooks, I believe, but ultimately still comfortable rather than adventurous.

But it’s not just that. I could easily use flavours with more edge. What is it really that makes my food “everyday” food and not “master chef” food?

I think the answer is a low level of complexity.

When I improvise a meal without a recipe (which is often how I approach cooking) I tend to end up with a single complex part, with potentially some simple ones accompanying it. And with “complex” I mean something made up of many elements.

Sometimes it’s just the one complex thing on its own: a soup, or a stew, or fried rice, or even something like a lasagna or frittata. Like the stew in this photo.

Sometimes the complex thing could be a rich saucy thing, or a stir-fry, and then it would be accompanied a simple thing like carbs (rice, pasta, potato, bread) or maybe a separate protein (halloumi, tofu) or vegetables (fried broccoli, steamed asparagus). These simple things may be flavoured or marinated etc, but they clearly have just one main ingredient.

Master chef meals often have several complex parts. If there is a soup, then it has a topping and some dipping sauce for the bread. If there is a meaty thing then it has both a fancy sauce and a complex vegetable thing and possibly even more things.

The meal kits from Lina’s Matkasse were also often like that. That’s why I liked those meals: they had not just new flavours, but often a whole different structure.

The snowdrops at Spånga torg are already flowering in large bunches, so they’ve probably been at it for a good while already. These are the earliest snowdrops I can remember seeing, ever.

It looks like we will literally not have winter this year. We had one small batch of snow in November, and the occasional night with sub-zero (Celsius) temperatures, and that seems to be it. If winter hasn’t come by mid-February, it probably isn’t going to.

I wonder if this is the new normal now. Will snow be just a thing in stories and faraway lands for my grandchildren?

I was going to take a self-portrait with my new haircut (which I got today) but it’s dark and the light just doesn’t work so I gave up. Here is the hair, without the rest of me.

If I could freeze my hair in time and have it never grow, never change, I’d be quite happy. Getting a haircut can feel nice and all, but it feels like such a waste of time. So I usually put it off as long as possible. But my hair is thin and flat these days, and doesn’t look good if I let it grow. And what’s worse – when it grows past a certain point it starts touching the back of my neck, and that is really itchy. So I have to cut it.

I finish every dinner with three pills.

Pill one is glucosamine. Many years ago I had trouble with my knees and my hips. They hurt a bit and “clicked”. My biochemist parents suggested glucosamine. Apparently vegetarians may need glucosamine supplements. It made an immediate difference. Whenever I take a break – travelling, running out of pills – it takes about a week before I miss it.

Pill two is omega-3. I’ve been taking these for years as well. For every supplement I read about there are studies with conclusions in both directions. Omega-3 is one of the few where the benefits seem clear, especially (again) for vegetarians.

Pill three is a multivitamin for vegans. This is a very recent addition.

I eat a varied diet, not vegan, not even 100% vegetarian since I eat some occasional fish, so I’ve lived in the belief that I get all I need from just eating food. I even had my B12 and iron levels checked as recently as November, on a hunch, and according to the doctor all was good.

Recently I got cracks in the corners of my mouth that just wouldn’t heal. Weeks of treatment with balms and creams made no difference. I did some research and guessed that maybe I have a vitamin B deficiency after all. The pharmacy had no products with vitamin B only; this “for vegans” thing was the closest I found.

Literally after a week the cracks stopped bothering me, and another week later they are effectively gone.

It bothers me that the doctor said that all is good when all is apparently not good.