Various reasons took me to the office today.

1.
An appointment with an optometrist with Ingrid, a few blocks from work, which unfortunately got cancelled just before, because the optometrist was off sick. She’s been waiting for that appointment since we first discovered her vision problems in December 2018, and it already got postponed once, so this was rather a disappointment. And probably all that the optometrist has is a slight cold.

2.
A job interview with a potential new hire at tretton37. While we generally work from home, the candidates get the choice between remote and face-to-face interviews. Today I had one of each.

The remote one was my first remote technical interview, and it was a bit of a challenge. We always do these in pairs, and a surprising amount of coordination between myself and my co-interviewer apparently happens wordlessly. The most noticeable difficulty was in taking turns – signalling when I wanted to jump in, or seeing whether my colleague was waiting to say something. In a room, three people naturally sit in more or less of a triangle, and it’s very obvious whether I’m facing the candidate or my colleague. When we’re on screens, they are both right in front of me, separated by a hand’s breadth. I am inevitably always facing both.

3.
While I was there anyway, I brought home more of my things, especially the plants. The things I need for work I already carried home two weeks ago. Now came the turn for the things that need me, i.e. my potted plants. They had all survived two weeks without water, but probably wouldn’t last much longer than this. Right now I can still go there occasionally to water them, but who knows what the situation is like two weeks from now?

The windowsill in my home office nook is quite full now. I just barely managed to squeeeze in the jade plant and dracaena and others from the office between my African violets.

An unexpected side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: badly chapped hands.

Adrian (and all the other kids) are constantly reminded at school to wash their hands. Before meals, after breaks, after going to the loo of course, etc. And with plenty of soap and a lengthy scrubbing of course.

He has somewhat dry skin to begin with, and all this washing is affecting his hands quite badly. His knuckles are constantly chapped, red and rough. On bad days, it spreads to his wrists as well.

An “ultimate strength” hand salve is his constant companion through the day, and among the most important things he packs with him to school every day.

Ingrid is also back at school now. Her post-whooping-cough-coughing has finally subsided so she won’t be scaring people any more by her violent coughing attacks.

The chocolate I chopped for yesterday’s cookies.

The best way to chop dark chocolate is not to actually chop but to stab it with the tip of a small paring knife. Dark chocolate is so brittle that it will split neatly where stabbed. If I try to chop it with the edge of the knife, I end up with lots of shavings and crumbs instead of evenly-sized distinct chunks.

That technique doesn’t work at all with milk or white chocolate. They are so much softer and stickier that they need to be actually chopped.

Adrian wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies. We made a batch a few days ago, but had to tweak the recipe a bit. It called for dark, milk and white chocolate, and we only had dark chocolate at home. Today we made a new batch, with all three kinds, as it should be.

And as before, the part that Adrian likes best is weighing ingredients. The rest can all be good fun – the mixing, and the cracking of eggs, and the tasting, and the rolling of the balls of dough. But weighing is where his enthusiasm lies.

When we cook, there usually isn’t much to weigh. But baking is full of weighing, especially in the “prosumer” recipe books that Eric has.

Toilet paper, pasta and canned soup are not the only quarantine shortage items. You know what else is? Webcams.

I decided to buy a web camera yesterday. The cheapest model of any brand will do, I don’t care about the image quality, I just want something that shows a picture of my face.

And there were none to be had anywhere in northern or central Stockholm. I searched the web sites of all electronics chains I could think of, or find on Google Maps, and they were all completely sold out of web cameras. Elgiganten, MediaMarkt, Teknikmagasinet, Webbhallen, Kjell & Co, Clas Ohlson, NetOnNet… All sold out in their central warehouses as well as all their physical shops. Expected back in stock: 10 days from now at best.

In the end I found one model in one NetOnNet shop in Veddesta. About twice as fancy and expensive as I had intended to buy but this was not a time to be picky. I reserved it and cycled there immediately to get it before someone else buys it. It may not have been quite the last one but it was close – when I checked again this morning the stock level was down to zero.

My desk is packed so full of computer equipment now.

I tried making do with the laptop keyboard but it just wasn’t working out for me for coding, so I had to add a full-sized keyboard.

The conference microphone quickly became a must as well. The Dell laptop’s built-in microphone sucks. At first I kept the microphone in a drawer and just took it out when I needed it, but now it’s permanently there.

The camera at least takes no space, perched on top of the monitor as it is. All it adds is another cable.

Ingrid brought some spring into the house.

The sunniest parts of the garden are flowering.

We had no winter, and for a while it looked like spring would be really early, but in the end it arrived at just about the same time as usual.

March 25 is waffle day in Sweden. Why not.

I found a recipe for waffles with lingonberries which sounded delicious. When I tried cooking them, the berries all got burnt and stuck to the waffle iron, no matter how much I coated them in batter. So I ended up putting the lingonberries on top of my waffle topping (of cottage cheese, cucumber, apple and mayonnaise). Not exactly what I had in mind, but it tasted really good nevertheless.

The batter itself was also not very good. The waffles came out floppy and limp rather than crispy – more like thick pancakes. Not a good recipe. I had checked that this was a recipe for “frasvåfflor” based on whipped cream, rather than an egg-based recipe for chewier waffles. I didn’t think that there would be that much difference between one recipe for “frasvåfflor” and another. But apparently there is. Afterwards we compared the recipe to the classic one in Rutiga kokboken and the proportions were way different. Note to self: don’t trust random waffle recipes.

The flashback section at the top of the blog is showing me posts from last year’s Norway ski tour. I look at them with mixed feelings. I had this year’s trip all booked since way back in November and had been looking forward to it for months. It truly is one of the absolute highlights of my year. And now this coronavirus came along and I get no trip. So disappointing.

Instead I am stuck at home. I am also not getting any exercise. Not commuting to work, not going to my gym classes. (The gyms are still open, which surprises me. If people are recommended to work from home and keep away from other people then going to the gym goes against the whole point of it, doesn’t it?)

Working out on my own has never worked for me. It is just too boring; I can’t make myself do it.

I’ve been going for walks but it really isn’t enough. My back is getting stiff and my body is nearly itching with restlessness. This afternoon after I was done with work I simply cycled halfway to the office (to Brommaplan), turned out and cycled home again. It felt boring and meaningless but at least it was something.

It’s green! I’ve gotten my Raspberry Pi running, and made it serve up a simple Python web app.

That means I now have three computers crammed on my small desk. If only they could all be as small as the Pi.

I’m making less progress on this project than I had thought. Mostly because, now that I work from home all day, working on a coding project feels like going back to work. Same desk, same activity. I don’t want to spend all day in the same position in the same spot in the house. Maybe on weekends.

Adrian loved pasta-making so much that he wanted to do it again today, when it’s his day to cook dinner with me.

I read up a bit on pasta-making, we tweaked our process, and everything went more smoothly this time. I made the dough an hour in advance so it was easier to work with. We got a good feel for how dry the dough needs to be, and how much to dust it with flour to make sure it doesn’t stick to itself. I got a better understanding of the point of all that folding of the dough.

Once the dough was done and tested and we got a first batch through, Adrian took over the whole process of making pasta, which let me focus on all the other parts of dinner. So all in all, we got dinner done as fast as I would have on my own with dry pasta. Not bad.