Ingrid is away on a scout hike this weekend, which gave me that little nudge to also go out. So Eric, Adrian and I went for a spring walk.

Spring is at its best in leafy places, where there is birdsong and flowers, not in pine forests. I vaguely recalled a woodland with anemone carpets in Hansta. I wasn’t 100% sure of its location, but when we got there, it was exactly where I thought it was, and fully as lovely as I remembered it.

Last time we cycled past the woodland and only took a brief look. This time we left the bikes at home and walked, and took a smaller zig-zaggy path instead of the wide, cycle-friendly track.

Adrian found plenty of great sticks. (That was his main reason for preferring walking to cycling. You can’t pick up and carry sticks and staves on a bike.)

I spotted a black woodpecker. Well, first I heard it. I’d never heard one before – its call is not what I would expect from a woodpecker!

Later during the day we also saw a grass snake. They’re pretty common, I think, but I don’t see them often; this was a rare chance.

There were several concrete foxholes dotted around the forest. (Of the military kind, not the kind that foxes dig and live in.) In surprisingly good shape, given how old they must be.

We made our way to the wetlands near Väsby. There were probably all sorts of interesting birds there, but none of them had the courtesy to come close to the trail. The only ones I could see were the large, visible ones (one pair of whooper swans with their young) and the ones who are used to humans (plenty of geese and ducks).

The cafe at Väsby farm was closed, but we came prepared with sandwich materials, hot and cold drinks, and flapjacks. And because the cafe was closed, there were plenty of free seats and tables in the sun.

Adrian reduced his stick collection to just one ultimate walking stick and walked with it all day. And it was a really nice one – a straight, smooth piece of some deciduous tree, maybe aspen or hazel. Unfortunately it was a good bit taller than Adrian so whenever he waved around with it, or even walked carelessly, it came dangerously close to our faces, so Eric and I kept our distance to that stick.

When we came out of the woods again near the parking lot, Adrian finished off the walk by picking dandelions. They do quite well in a vase, apparently. At night they close up as if they had wilted, but they open again with the sun the next morning.

Ingrid, like Eric, prefers the Kindle to paper books, and often borrows mine. She often comes back to a few favourite books, such as Ender’s Game, and The Loneliest Girl in the Universe.

The best way to read is lying down.

I’ve been having twinges of soreness in my throat since last Tuesday. Just a tiny bit, just a few times a day. In normal times I might not even have noticed it. But now, like most people, I’m hyper-aware of any cold-like symptoms.

The soreness never got any worse, and I think it has now passed. I felt nothing today. If no new symptoms have appeared after ten days, then this was probably nothing. No more self-quarantine, I can hug my family again!

Meanwhile, Sweden’s handling of covid-19 looks more and more like a failure, with three thousand deaths and counting. Our neighbouring countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark) count their deaths in the low hundreds. They’re all half the size of Sweden, but even counting deaths per million, Sweden has three to six times more deaths than them.

The experts and politicians say that it’s too early to evaluate. Or they question the choice of countries to compare to – “well but what about Belgium?”. Maybe they’re right – who knows? Maybe two years from now we’ll pat ourselves on our shoulders and say that we did a good job anyway.

But one thing that is clear is that I hope I never end up in a Swedish elder care home, or as a recipient of care at home (hemtjänst). Most of the deaths in Sweden have been in care homes. And when I read and hear news reports describing the situation there, it’s no wonder.

The care homes are short of staff, of equipment, of training. Nurses who go back and forth between sick and healthy people. Staff who go to work despite cold-like symptoms.. 40% of staff do not follow basic hygiene rules.

Elderly people who get municipal at-home care meet on average 15 staff in 14 days. And that’s an average, not a maximum! It’s a constant flow of random strangers in your home, helping you with your private, personal needs. Dehumanizing, is what it is.

Ingrid did her laundry today. Hanging up laundry is boring, so she usually asks me to “help” her but really to keep her company.

While she was hanging up all her numerous dark hoodies, I hung up her socks.

When I hang socks, I naturally pair them. I pick up a sock, look for its twin on the hanger, and hang them next to each other.

Ingrid doesn’t. She wants her socks mixed. I think initially she just couldn’t be bothered to sort them, but now it’s become her thing. She rocks her socks every day. Not only did she hang them all in a jumble – she purposely mixed up all the pairs I had paired up. It almost hurt my brain to hang up socks like that… She can even pair an ankle sock with a crew sock! The mere thought of it is enough to make my ankles itch.

Working from home, I’ve cut out well over an hour of commuting time from every day. I “go to work” the same time as usual, but since there is no commute, I actually get to work earlier. So I’ve been racking up overtime daily. Now I’m close to hitting the overtime limit, so I’m going to have to make changes. I could go up in working time, but I really don’t feel like it.

So: more breaks, and more days off.

I already take proper lunch breaks, with half an hour for exercise and half an hour for lunch itself. Breakfast I usually have at my desk while reading emails or doing some other semi-passive task. I’ll be taking proper breakfast breaks from now on. Especially when the weather is as lovely as it is, and I can have breakfast outside.

This is the most relaxed, stress-free daily routine I’ve ever had during my working life. I have no schedule and no deadlines. I have time to sit in the sofa and read the morning paper. I work when I feel like it. I don’t need to hurry home in the afternoon – I’m already at home when Adrian comes home. I don’t even need to plan or cook dinner, because Ingrid cooks nearly every day now, to earn money.

The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is warm, and the cherries are blossoming. Can life be better than this? I love May.

There’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it out of the house.

We’ve seen its like before. One spring, a young cat out for the first time when its family had gone away from the day, came into our house looking completely lost and abandoned. So much so that we thought it might have run away and took it to a nearby vet to scan its chip and find out who it belonged to. He turned out to be called Sid, and lived just two houses away from us.

Sid and his family have moved away, but there are several other cats whom I recognize by sight. They are all older and feel more at home in the neighbourhood. They walk in a very different manner – more confidently and purposefully.

One thing the young and old cats apparently all have in common is a love of birds. Not our kind of love, but the kind that expresses itself in hunting and eating the birds. This kitty quickly discovered the bird nest box up in our cherry tree and decided to go fish for baby birds. Climbed up and poked its paw inside the box and tried to catch things.

When I had chased it down from the tree with a broom twice over, I had enough and decided to saw off the branch that seemed to offer it best access to the nest box. (It was mostly dead anyway.) I’m hoping that this will make bird-fishing less comfortable for the cat, so the cat will find some other fun activity and leave the box alone.

Breakfast outside. Me over here, the family over there.

Pink is not my favourite colour in interior decorating or in clothing. I don’t think there is a single pink thing in the house. I remember buying one skirt with pink flowers and giving it to charity because I barely wore it. But in the garden, I like pink. It contrasts well against all the green. I like all other colours in the garden as well, to be honest.

I finished filling the new planting boxes with fresh soil today. Well, soil, at least, but maybe not so fresh… I’ve had three-quarters of a cubic metre bag of soil sitting next to the driveway for at least two years. But it’s not full of weed roots, so that counts as fresh in a way. Now I’m kind of stuck, though, because I need fertilizer and strawberry seedlings, and that requires a shopping trip, and I’m not doing that while I have a sore throat.

Speaking of weeds, the Japanese sedge in the slope is spreading almost like a weed. But it’s not doing that in front of the house, so it must really love conditions on the slope. It spreads vigorously in all directions and tends to smother other plants. I had hoped that some taller things like alliums would be able to grow through the sedge, but they don’t, really. I guess they get too little sun in their early days and die before they get tall. Or maybe they just don’t like the slope as much as the sedge does.

Martagon lilies and bleeding hearts do like this spot, though, which makes me happy. And luckily the sedge has superficial roots and is easy to yank out around them.

Adrian is discovering the wonderful world of image editing.

He knows that photos can be “photoshopped” and has seen enough examples online. Today he discovered how that actually works.

One of the games on our PlayStation that we play together is called Ultimate Chicken Horse. It’s a multi-player platform game where you build the level together, as you go. The player characters are animals – a chicken, a horse, a sheep, a raccoon etc. To me the name of the game sounded like a chimerical animal, half chicken, half horse. When Ingrid heard that she made a chicken horse for me in ibis Paint, which she otherwise uses to draw anime-style pictures.

Adrian was impressed and wanted to learn how to make images like that. Today Ingrid gave him a quick intro to ibis Paint and showed him how to import pictures into layers, and erase part of a layer to make another layer visible. He was mesmerized and proceeded to create a chicken-headed, tentacled superhero out of parts he found in Google Image Search.