Feeling lethargic but restless. Went out for a walk on Järvafältet, hoping to see some signs of spring, but it was all cold and dead. Ice on the lakeside wetlands, ice on the roadside ditches.

The lake there is a popular landing place for migrating birds, but it was still too early for those: all I saw was a few geese and two cranes in flight. And crows.

Watching all those cooking shows like Master Chef has really inspired Adrian to do more in the kitchen. He has been asking for some while now if we could try making our own pasta, like they always do on TV. Why not?

I looked for second hand pasta machines but didn’t find any, so I bought this beautiful shiny red thing. “Made in Italy” so it just has to make perfect pasta, doesn’t it?

I made the dough and Adrian operated the machine. It didn’t go very smoothly at first, and it took a while before we got a good handle on the whole folding-and-re-rolling process. Making the pasta took us over an hour.

It’ll go faster with practice, I’m sure. We’ll do this a few more times to get our skills up. And then – I wonder how hard can it be to make ravioli?

The resulting pasta was good, lighter and less chewy than dried pasta, but not earth-shatteringly delicious. I may have overcooked it slightly, to be honest.

Served with oven roasted cherry tomatoes, olive oil, Parmesan cheese and fresh basil.

Virtual Friday afternoon fika.

Did not feel like the real thing.

The benefits of working from home, continued: when I see that it is sunny outside in the afternoon, I can just decide to “pack up and go home” and then go out for a long walk, with no advance planning. And be lucky enough to find the year’s first little stand of blue anemone in an otherwise drab and dead-looking forest.

One of the best places for an afternoon walk in the sun is the cliffs near Kyrkhamn and Gåseborg. They face lake Mälaren on its east side and they are only sparsely wooded, so there are plenty of wide open views towards the lake in the west.

Kyrkhamn is also one of Stockholm’s quietest spots. The web site of Stockholm city has a guide to the city’s quiet places. There are no large roads nearby, and to one side of course there is only the lake. At this time of the year there are no noisy boats on the lake either.

There was also very little birdsong. Pine forests tend to be quiet; I guess not many songbirds like them. But the area near Gåseborg had more shrubs and deciduous trees, and some noisy blue tits, as well as some others I didn’t recognize by their sounds.

Working from home has its benefits. I can, for example, make myself a nicer breakfast, with smashed avocado on my buttered bread. And then eat it at the kitchen table, with views of tulips, and a squirrel on the bird feeder outside.

If working from home is going to be the new normal, I need to be properly equipped.

Yesterday I went to the office to take home one of the monitors. Wrapped it in a blanket and put it in a big bag to carry it home. But if I take the monitor then I’m going to need the dock as well, because the laptop has so few ports. And if I take the dock then I might as well take the mouse and keyboard as well. And if I take the mouse then I’ll also want the mouse pad with wrist support.

I ended up lugging home a very full and very heavy bag. My arms and hands were so tired they hurt when I got home.

Today I set it most of it up on my desk at home. I managed to just squeeze in the monitor between all the other things on my desk.

This definitely makes for more productive working conditions.

But I lost my view… When I look up, I cannot see outside any more. All I see is a big screen. I cannot even see the African violets on my window sill, and they are flowering so nicely right now.

The “Chalion books” or the “World of the Five Gods” novels are three. The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt.

The first one, The Curse of Chalion, was fabulous. This was one of the best fantasy books I’ve read, and so well worth all its awards.

The back cover on my edition, with its mentions of “traitorous intrigue” and “darkest, most forbidden magics” and “lethal maze of demonic paradox” gives an entirely incorrect picture of the mood in the book. It sounds like a wild, lurid tale full of shocking acts of magic – which is about as wrong as it can be. This is a thoughtful, beautiful, intelligent book.

Technically the description is correct. Those demons and magics and intrigues are there, and they make for an interesting plot, with some clever solutions to thorny problems. But the plot is not what I will remember the book for.

The most interesting part was the role that religion plays in the story. The book is a work of fantastical theological speculation almost as much as it is a story of adventure. What if gods were real and actively involved in the world? What powers might they have, and what limitations? What shape might divine intervention take? What might a saint be like, or a saviour?

The story follows one main character on his journey, both internal and external. I was rather annoyed with Cazaril at first. Nerveless, hopeless, weak, reduced to begging, nearly whining. I remember thinking – do I really want to read about this broken man for hundreds of pages? But then I came to understand him, and he started growing, and by the end I loved him. (As we are quite clearly meant to.) There are plenty of other interesting characters as well, many of them pleasingly intelligent. Only the bad guys were too obviously set up to only be bad guys and lacking in depth.

And all of this is told in beautiful language. Always flowing smoothly, always just right, never awkward. Plenty of sentences and phrases to savour, to read again just for the pleasure of it.

The second one, Paladin of Souls, explores similar themes of religion and personal growth to some extent. A forty-year-old madwoman, widow, murderer, decides to take a second chance at life. She rides off on a vacation, calling it a pilgrimage to make it seem more comme il faut for a noble lady. The gods get involved, and she is put in service of the gods regardless of her intents.

The starting point of the story is interesting, but I found the book as a whole weaker than the first one in both plotting, character-building, and exploration of its themes. The first book was small and personal in scale but grand in spirit and ambition. This one was enjoyable, and Bujold’s writing is masterful as ever, but the book was somewhat predictable in plotting, and more lightweight and conventional than I had hoped for.

The third book, The Hallowed Hunt, was a disappointment. There was none of the depth of the earlier books: neither depth of theme nor depth of emotion. Instead this was even more of a mystery story than the second one. Every chapter uncovered more facts and added more complications. So many plot twists!

The main character was surprisingly, almost annoyingly passive and uninteresting. I don’t think he ever had an interesting thought. Or even took any interesting action – things happened to him instead.

And the book has a “love at first sight” romance which really stuck in my craw. The couple are proclaim everlasting love and are ready to marry after knowing each other for barely a few weeks, which they have mostly spent apart from each other. But their souls are connected, or something. Ew.

I’m very glad I read the books in this order, because if I had started with The Hallowed Hunt then I am quite sure I wouldn’t have been interested in the others. And what a loss that would have been!

Two of us are working from home now: myself and Ingrid.

For me it was a team decision. For Ingrid it’s quarantine. She has a slight cold, with a sore throat and a stuffy nose. Students with any symptoms of a respiratory infection are to stay at home.

On top of that, she also has whooping cough. Despite all the vaccinations! The next top-up vaccination is due next year, in eighth grade. I guess her immunity wore out a bit faster than whatever percentile the general vaccination schedule is based on.

I am somewhat proud of my ability to diagnose her whooping cough based on symptoms only. The doctor at the local clinic was sceptical but swabbed her anyway, and then replied a few days later that the test came back positive. Unfortunately she had been coughing for three weeks by then, so it was too late for antibiotics. And she might keep coughing for several more weeks. No school in sight for some while.

Adrian is still at school, and Eric’s job hasn’t decided to work from home yet.

PS later at night: Eric’s company is following suit, and will also switch to working from home as soon as practical.

I’ve had enough of coronavirus thoughts, and enough of gray March weather. I want spring!

Usually I shop for groceries online once a week and get all the heavy or bulky basic goods delivered to our door. All sorts of dairy goods, canned beans and tomatoes, frozen vegetables, pasta, rice and flour, etc. Then I top up with fresh fruit and vegetables at the local supermarket, and with any special ingredients for the day’s dinner that I don’t keep at home. Or Ingrid does the top-up shopping when she cooks.

I sat down to order food yesterday night and discovered that the next available delivery date from MatHem was five days from now – instead of tomorrow, like usual. Time for a new plan, I guess…

So we drove to a larger supermarket today and did our weekly grocery shopping ourselves. For the first time in weeks, if not months.

The mood in the supermarket was calm (no fights like in Australia!) but it looked like people were preparing for a major catastrophe. Shelves and freezer boxes were gaping empty and staff were everywhere, rushing to restock.

It was interesting to see what people stockpile.

Toilet paper, of course, just like elsewhere in the world. There wasn’t a single bale to be had at Stora Coop in Bromma Blocks. I wonder what the reasoning is. Is toilet paper truly the most important thing for your survival and well-being? Good thing we didn’t need any today.

Pasta and rice and noodles, I can understand. If you are going to stockpile food because you’re panicking, then it makes sense to buy these. They’re good bases for most meals, cheap, easy to store. Canned and frozen vegetables likewise, and frozen meat if you’re into that sort of thing.

Canned ready meals, like generic “canned meat soup”? Getting stranger. Who actually wants to eat that stuff daily, for real? What kind of scenario are you preparing for, when you think you’ll need to subsist on this?

Chocolate bars, though? What the heck?