School’s out and after-school care has a day off, so we were all at home today. Work didn’t get quite as much attention as it usually does.

I did my lunchtime workout as I try to do on most days, and I jumped rope as a warm-up exercise. Adrian was bored and got curious and gave it a try as well. He found it harder than it looked. I don’t think he quite understood that it’s not enough to just turn the rope and jump occasionally: that the timing is quite essential. And – just like Ingrid when she first learned to jump a rope – he puts an awful lot of unnecessary energy into the jumping. As if jumping higher and harder would compensate for the lack of coordination.

He got better and better, but never managed more than two jumps in a row.

Adrian’s class has been working with the theme of “Stockholm” for the past few months.

In a normal year, the class would have made several trips to various parts of Stockholm to see all the things they have been talking about: the Old Town, the City Hall, and so on. The coronavirus pandemic put a stop to all that, so the kids have been limited to theory.

Today Adrian and I made a trip to the city to at least see the Old Town. Old Town is normally so full of tourists that it’s no fun – all those families of five walking side by side, foreign tourists spreading cigarette smoke, etc. But today is a working day so there won’t be many locals walking around, and all the tourists are staying away anyway. So it should be really empty, I thought. Let’s seize the opportunity!

It turned out exactly as well as I had hoped. Beautiful sunshine, no people, clean streets… We almost had Old Town to ourselves. This was a great way to see Old Town.

We visited a few of the most famous sights: the royal palace, the Riksdag buildings, Stortorget (where a famous bloodbath took place five hundred years ago), and the narrowest alley in town. But also the street where the executioner used to live, as Adrian told me, and Slussen, which did not look like Adrian had expected at all.

There were lots of little shops to look at as well. Mostly souvenir shops with various kinds of viking- and moose-themed objects, and Pippi Longstocking – but also little odd crafts and design shops. This is the shop of HildaHilda, who make textile goods with quirky designs of pigs, dachshunds, daisies and other nice things. I really tried to find something we needed or at least could use but couldn’t think of anything, but I think we’ll be coming back here to buy presents for people.

We had excellent though expensive pizzas for lunch at Stortorget, at a nearly empty restaurant. (And within great hearing range of the church bells of Storkyrkan.) We’ll likely never get another chance at that!

The Aquilegias have decided that the crack between a concrete wall and a concrete pavement is preferable to the lovely, loamy earth just on the other side of that wall. I guess they really don’t like the competition from the other plants up there.

I am pretty proud of that neat and tidy and even shoulder seam on my cardigan.

I’m still not done with the assembly. Knitting it was something that I could do any time, even as a background task. But the assembly is fiddly and takes my full attention, so I’m doing it in little bits when I have the time and energy and peace for it.

1.
I baked a rhubarb cake with a sour cream filling, using an Estonian recipe. For some reason the rest of the family who are normally quite happy to eat cake decided that this one is going to be too sour, without even trying it, so I’m going to have to eat all of it. It’s absolutely delicious, juicy and just at that sweet spot between sweet and tart, so I really don’t mind, but it’s going to take me a while.

2.
Both ICA and Coop have decided that plastic bags are out and fruit and veg will now be sold in paper bags. I don’t mind the paper bags, they work great for the veg. But I miss the plastic bags, because I used them for all kinds of things that paper bags don’t work for. I used to have a little stash of rolled-up bags in a kitchen drawer. For covering up that cake in the fridge, for example, or bringing home trash from a hike, or throwing out small stinky garbage.

The plastic food storage bags that you can buy on a roll can fill the gap in some situations, but not all. Covering up that cake in the fridge, for example – even the 5-litre bags are too long and narrow to fit the cake. And they don’t have any tie handles.

So now I guess I’m going to be hoarding plastic fruit bags. Because the market stand at Spånga Torg still uses them!

Another day, another hole. What would a Sunday evening be without some digging?

Though I am getting a bit fed up with this endless digging. I am looking forward to getting this done so that I can do other things in the garden. Mow the lawn, prune the raspberries, plant something other than bushes. Well, after this thuja there are only three more bushes to go, so I’ll be done soon.

Speaking of planting, Ingrid and I have been watching Garden Rescue together. The main focus of the programme is on design, not so much the implementation, but they do show bits and pieces of the actual work as well, including planting.

Their way of planting bushes is surprisingly different from mine. I follow the standard Swedish recommendations: dig a big hole, mix up the soil with some cow manure, plant, water thoroughly. If there’s one thing all the books and articles and blog posts agree on, it’s the importance of a good-sized hole. Some say 60 cm wide and 40 cm deep; some say two or three times the diameter of the root clump. But the folks in Garden Rescue dig really, really small holes, often barely larger than the pot that the plant came in! And they do nothing to improve the soil, even when it is more gravel than soil.

I wonder how well their bushes and trees develop and grow. I wish I could see those gardens three to five years later. I haven’t done any real experiments with smaller holes, but I have two unplanned data points – the elderberry and the staghorn sumac that were among the first things I planted. I just plopped them in the ground, in holes just large enough to fit the clump of roots and soil because I hadn’t read any gardening books yet.

In the first two or three years they barely grew at all. A few years later, when I saw how much better all my more recent bushes were doing in their big holes, I dug them up, made proper holes, added fertilizer to the soil, and put them back. The difference was immediate – both bushes really shot up. The sumac was later killed by deer, but the elder is growing very nicely to this day. So I’m going to keep following the Swedish recommendations, even though it is more work. I’d rather do more work up front than be forced to replant later.

I met my colleagues face to face for the first time in months. We had a retrospective meeting and then lunch at Urban Deli’s rooftop restaurant. And since I was going to the office for this anyway, I worked there before and after the meeting as well.

Meeting the team was lovely, but working in the office was much less so. There were interruptions all the time – and while it’s nice that people stop by my desk to say hi and chit-chat, it really kills my productivity. Add the time spent on commuting, and by the end of the day I felt like I barely got anything meaningful done (and I do count the lunch as meaningful and time well spent) even though I was away for eight hours.

And for the first time in months I felt stressed. I had to look at the clock to start heading home at a reasonable time, and I felt the pressure to hurry home to the kids. Not pleasant at all.

Back in March, it took time for me to get used to working from home. But now that I’ve settled in, it really works very well for me, and I haven’t felt this relaxed and productive at work since… forever.

Yes indeed! I have finally adjusted the layout of this blog to work decently on mobile phones, tablets and other small screens. So if you’ve been dragging out your old computer just to read the blog, while what you really wanted to do was curl up in the corner of the sofa with the blog on your phone, your troubles are over! Put away your laptop, take your phone with you to that sofa corner, and enjoy the blog.

Ingrid has been saving up for a Nintendo Switch. Apparently sharing the one that Adrian has is not good enough. It’s her own money, so whatever.

Buying a completely new one is expensive, so she searched on Blocket and found several ads. Normally when buying via Blocket I’ve met up with the seller and done the deal physically. These sellers were not in Stockholm though, so that wouldn’t work. But a Switch is so expensive that paying up front and hoping that we will get something is not an acceptable risk.

Blocket has various suggestions for services that help mitigate the risk when buying online. The first seller wasn’t willing to use those services. That made loud alarm bells ring in my head and we decided not to deal with that guy.

The next person was more willing. We exchange all kinds of information and signed an online digital contract with our official e-IDs.

And still! As soon as the contract was signed and the money paid, the seller went no contact. Didn’t reply to our chat messages or SMS:s, and didn’t pick up the phone. Eric called Blocket and Blocket looked into the information they had on the guy. Whatever information they found led them to recommended that we should file a police report immediately. Sigh. Despite all our precautions, we got scammed!

Ingrid was in tears. Not because of the money, because we said we’d cover the loss, but because she had been looking forward so much to playing Animal Crossing and Zelda and all the other games. Now we’d have to start all over again.

She was in luck, though, because almost immediately she found a new ad, and this time in Stockholm. So I drove there and we did the deal the old-fashioned way (well, not very, since the payment is digital) and she got her Switch after all.

Now she is overjoyed about all the cute things she can do in Animal Crossing.