It’s Monday and I should be working but the midday sun pulled me out into the garden so I spent an hour shovelling earth and pruning old raspberry stalks instead. Which I should have done last autumn but didn’t. The raspberries got almost no love last year and barely grew. I thought it was nearly impossible to not succeed with raspberries, they’re supposed to grow like weeds, but not these ones. More water and more fertilizer this year, I guess.

One of this year’s garden projects is to replace the planting boxes with strawberries. The boxes themselves are ten years old and nearly rotten through. The soil in them is also full of a particularly unpleasant weed, with thread-thin stalks that break as soon as you try to pull them out, that spreads like crazy. I hope I can get rid of it by replacing all the soil, and lining the new boxes with a higher-quality weed fabric.

I’ve shoveled out all the soil now so the next step is to buy new boxes and new fabric. And then start shoveling again.

Another day with wonderful weather. Adrian and I went out to do some gardening. We bought three bushes to fill some gaps in the planting. I dug holes. Adrian watered things, climbed on things, and took wheelbarrow rides.

Then he found my measuring stick from when I dug the hedge and started making balancing experiments. He balanced the stick on top of the street sign, and experimented with rocks on top of the stick. How far from the middle can he move the rock before the stick is out of balance? That, of course, led to see-saw catapults.

Those electricity cabinets and the street sign next to them are great for climbing on, even if they are a bit of an eyesore. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t choose to put them there. But I’m pretty sure that Adrian would, if he could choose. Just like with the sewer access thing that you can more or less see in this blog post. I found it an eyesore and tried to find ways to hide it; Adrian loved climbing on it, stacking things on top of it, and so on. I’m glad it’s gone; he misses it. In a way I’m glad for his sake that I can’t get rid of the electricity cabinets.

Another old blog post reminds me of the covers I made for the cabinets. Those got vandalized soon after with graffiti and then with a knife, so they got thrown out. Someone keeps spraying graffiti on the cabinets; Eric keeps covering it up with silver-gray spray paint.

It’s taken us a while to eat all the Easter eggs. Hard-boiling is not the most delicious way of serving eggs. But some of them accompanied a cauliflower soup, and some we actually had for breakfast.

After knocking them first, of course. The tournament was won by Stitch, who’s just about to meet the referee here. (Stitch beat him, too.)

This is the best of seasons. Every day, the world gets noticeably greener. Every day, more things are growing and flowering in the garden. It’s a joy to step outside the door. The rose currants here, the white anemones there, and the daffodils in the background… I wish I could take a photo to do it all justice.

I do still miss the office and the daily contact with my colleagues, but now that I’m getting my routines in place, it’s working out better and better, I am even finding new advantages in working from home.

Routines help. I go to “work” at the same time every morning, when Eric and the kids leave for work and school. I put on “work” clothes in the morning, instead of lounging around in the same comfy-but-worn things all day, every day. I take a proper break in the middle of the day for exercise and lunch.

The advantages mostly stem from flexibility. The difficult part is balancing that flexibility against the routine. I can go out for a long walk whenever I want – but because it’s so flexible, I keep thinking that I’ll just finish this little thing and go out later, and the “later” never quite arrives.

Today, though, I made great use of my flexibility and took some self-portraits in my home office at the end of my lunch break. I would feel more than a bit awkward doing that in the office.

The cardigan is proceeding well. I’ve passed the armhole bind-off and now I’m continuing with the back, while the two front parts wait their turn. Meanwhile the knitting looks like a torture device, with cables and needles sticking out everywhere.

Knitting a cardigan from the top down sounded simple, but turned out hard to get right.

Knitting a cardigan from the bottom up sounded intimidating, but has thus far been easier. Although, the part that sounds intimidating is the assembly and of course I still have that ahead of me.

The previous pattern I attempted had a lacy yoke that I just couldn’t size correctly. Only when most of the body was done could I see properly whether the yoke fit or not. (The answer: not.) And by then it was too late to do anything about it.

This cardigan (Drops 88-4) is also hard to try on when it’s hanging in half-finished parts. But what I can do is lay the parts flat on top of an existing cardigan to check the size and shape of them. And that looks promising!

Pasha looks like a bland, white lump, but tastes delicious. (Not unlike other desserts and puddings, to be fair. How appetizing does panna cotta look, really?) It’s my favourite part of Easter.

Lemon meringue pie, which we also made for Easter, can be so lemony and intensely sweet that after a small slice my body shouts “enough”. But pasha is so refreshing and un-sweet that it almost doesn’t feel like dessert.

Estonian quark is grainier than the Swedish Kesella and fatter than Keso. This year’s tweak to the recipe was to get the best of both by combining them: Kesella for the creaminess, and Keso (passed through a sieve) for texture. This worked out great; I’ll be doing that again next year.

Raisins have always been a part of my pasha, but next year I think I might skip them. They are the least interesting part, adding nothing but sweetness. Maybe dried cranberries could work?

Pasha was always served on its own when I was a child. Nowadays we eat it with raspberry coulis.

Traditions tend to accumulate. Every item is important for someone. Our Easter food traditions are nearly as many as for Christmas.

Easter eggs are a must, both the painted, boiled kind that originally come from hens and the painted, cardboard kind that hide candy inside. And devilled eggs as well.

One year my mum made paella for us at Easter; the kids loved it and now they ask for it every year.

For dessert, pasha is an important tradition for me, and Ingrid and Eric both love lemon meringue pie.

Speaking of eggs, we talked about egg knocking, and soon Adrian and Ingrid had planned an entire tournament for our eggs. Our six eggs were unsatisfyingly few, so we painted some more. They painted one each to bring the total up to eight, and I painted a referee. The referee got a beard, so I now have a skägg-ägg to go with my vägg-ägg and hägg-ägg.

I thought my puzzle was so obvious but it took a lot of hints for the rest of the family to solve it.

What would Easter be without painted Easter eggs? Nothing, that’s what!

Ingrid had a theme in mind for her eggs, and I also found inspiration, so we got to work.

Adrian quickly finished his first egg but then struggled to find ideas for the next one. Instead he painted the newspaper protecting the kitchen table, and then got caught up in some article.




Finally I suggested that he just pick a colour and start putting some paint on the egg, and that was enough to get him unstuck.

He usually makes abstract designs on his eggs, and today was no exception. This is him with a dark egg that he energetically splatters with small speckles for a starry-sky effect.

My eggs this year are a picture puzzle, but it only works in Swedish. I made a “vägg-ägg” and a “hägg-ägg”. (Vägg means “wall” and hägg means “bird cherry”.)

We usually go to Uppsala and my mum and brother for Easter. But with all the government recommendations to stay at home, not travel, especially not from Stockholm to other parts of the country, not meet people, especially older people… that’s not happening.

My usual default solution for long weekends is to go out for a walk. Today we went to Tyresta, back to that north-eastern corner of the national park where we camped last summer. The walk to lake Långsjön and back is picturesque and varied and not too long, and there’s a fire place at a beautiful spot on the lake shore where we could heat our lunch. It’s somewhat harder to get to than the area around the main park entrance in the west, and it doesn’t have any of the super accessible stroller-friendly paths, so I was thinking it would be less crowded.

“Less crowded” maybe it was, but definitely not “not crowded”. Dozens and dozens of families had obviously found themselves in the same situation as us, and come to the same conclusion as us. The parking lot at the park entrance was completely full. Luckily there was another parking lot just a kilometre before it, where we got the last but one spot. (Technically we were probably outside the parking area, but the ground was flat and not in a shrubbery, so it worked.)

The resting place with its shelter and fire place was of course full of people as well. But again we were lucky to arrive a bit later than a large group who were mostly done grilling their sausages, so Eric found room for our “hike bombs” at the edges of the fire. (More good luck for us in that someone had brought their own firewood, because the park’s official firewood box was completely empty.)

On our way back we had an Easter egg hunt. I hid eggs for Ingrid on one side of the path, and she hid eggs for Adrian on the other. We’ve done this in our own garden several times, but there aren’t that many good places to hide colourful eggs in a bare, early-April garden, so this was a lot more fun. Under roots and under rocks and under twigs and moss. I wish I had thought to take close-up photos.

Ingrid and Adrian are both in a phase where they enjoy each other’s company. Well, Adrian has always enjoyed Ingrid’s, but right now she enjoys his as well, which isn’t always the case. Lots of silly jokes. It always makes me happy to see and hear that.