Newly ironed kitchen towels, cooling.

I’m helping Ingrid with her physics homework, while she coughs all the time.

Their current area of study is mechanics, which has a lot of counter-intuitive topics. I’ve really struggled to explain some of these to Ingrid in a way that makes sense for her.

Why do satellites at different altitudes move at different speeds?

When a hammer thrower releases the handle, in which direction does the hammer fly, and why?

You have two jars containing wasps. In one the wasps are dead, in another they are alive and flying around in the jar. How do the weights of the jars differ?

Quintessential Adrian. Dressed in colourful, loose, comfy clothes, slouched in his favourite corner in the sofa, feet on the table, reading Kalle Anka.

We played Catan. It was fun for about an hour and a half but the game dragged on and the fun started disappearing. In the end Ingrid traded some rocks to Eric to let him win.

Darning black socks with black yarn turned out to be really hard. In my efforts to see the individual threads I kept stretching the holes too wide, so when I was done with the darning it didn’t lie flat.

At some point I realized how stupid this was. Why was I making this so hard for myself? I picked up a yarn in a contrasting colour. And now I could see what I was doing! My darning on this third sock looks a lot more even and tidy than the first two I did before it.

I’m darning socks again. I recently rediscovered a very nice shop that sells Swedish crafts (which I remembered) and crafts materials (which I had mostly forgotten). The best thing they had was darning mushrooms. I’ve been able to darn some of my favourite socks anyway, but this makes the job a lot easier, and the end result looks better.

The BBC, meanwhile, considers darning mushrooms a historical object, no longer used.

The darning mushroom would have been an essential tool in an era when women were constantly repairing worn socks. Before the advent of synthetic materials, socks and other items of clothing were in constant need of repair. Darning would have been considered a necessary skill for girls and young women, part of their education as future wives and mothers. The mushroom was used to make repairs to clothing, bed linen etc a practice that has largely disappeared with the development of modern textiles.

I don’t agree with the BBC about using the mushroom for bed linen, though. This is for darning holes in stretchy, knitted materials, not in woven textiles.

The mushroom brought back memories of a mending tool that really is no longer used: latch ladder menders. My mum had one of these. It was really fiddly to use, but the mend was practically invisible. The instructions in the photo suggest stretching the stocking over an egg cup. Since my mum worked in chemistry, we used a small lab beaker instead.

Adrian is sick, feverish and weak and tired and miserable, so I stayed home with him all day. Basically spent the day in the sofa with my laptop, working while keeping him company. Ideally he wanted to use me as a pillow all day but that was a bit too much for me, so he just lay really close. Now my brain feels sluggish and mushy because of the monotony and lack of stimulation, and my back is tired for the same reasons.

Staying at home all day can be very nice, but not staying in a single corner of a sofa all day.

I’m starting to look forward to my spring ski tour at the end of March, and thinking about the kit I’ve missed during my previous hikes and trips. A sewing kit was one of them.

Hence today’s mini craft project: a travel sewing kit/mini needle book from mixed scraps of fabric.

The needle book obviously holds a few needles in different sizes. The orange pockets behind the felt flaps have pieces cardboard with sewing thread in a few colours and thicknesses. I’ll be adding safety pins as soon as I’ve bought some; it turns out that we have very few left. Somehow safety pins seem to be a consumable even though I can’t remember ever throwing one away.

I also hope to find small, light-weight, blunt-ended scissors somewhere. Embroidery scissors are small but have sharp tips, so I’m afraid they would poke holes in this thing.

I replaced my dead office plant and bought an extra one while I was at it. My little corner is looking cheerier again.

Today was another unbelievably warm and bright Sunday, so I went for a walk again. On my own this time. I took the train to Jakobsberg, walked to Säby gård, and then made a big and crooked circle around most of Järvafältet. That’s another good thing about clear skies: I can use the sun for navigation. I could simply head roughly north for a good while without having to look at any maps.

Järvafältet is large enough to be quite varied. There are few small lakes: two are shallow and reedy and almost more mud flat than lake; a third one is more rocky. There is plenty of the usual spruce and pine forest with granite outcroppings, plenty of moss and blueberry bushes. There are some deciduous forests. There are small heritage farms, and riding schools. There are wide, even paths that are good enough for city strollers, narrower riding trails, bumpy trails mostly used by mountain bikes, and everything in between.

I walked for four hours and got some of all of that. The narrow, hilly, rocky paths are empty and quiet. The wide, even paths are naturally more crowded, but where they’re not, they make for peaceful, meditative walking.