The snow is all melting away again. It’s back to rain and slush.

Today was even more busy than yesterday, so I have no photo for today.

Today was my second day on the new project. The new team takes a bootcamp approach to inducting new team members, with back to back intro meetings all day. Quite exhausting.

And then during my lunch hour I’m watching live-streamed meetings at tretton37, all of last week and all of this one. The company is making major organizational changes and setting out a new five-year strategy right now, and informing everyone thoroughly. My longest actual break today was 15 minutes.

Anyway, one my tasks in the new team was to set a profile picture for myself in the various communications tools we use. And the instructions were specifically that everybody’s profile pictures had to be actual pictures of themselves. My standard profile picture since many years, a close-up photo of a Chihuly glass sculpture, was not approved. I couldn’t find any suitable recent photos of myself so yesterday I took 10 minutes to take a fresh one. Too proud to use a phone selfie.

There are so many photos of people these days. Everybody has their phone with them and keeps snapping away – photos of themselves, their friends, their family. But there are so few good photos of most people. Few of us go to an actual photographer to get professional-looking portraits taken.

I notice it in the obituary pages in the daily papers. There is often a portrait at the top of the obituary, and often a bad one. Low-resolution snapshots, slightly blurry phone photos, awkward crops of larger photos. Family and friends really want to include a photo in the obit but can’t find a good one.

What is it about guns and weapons that fascinates boys of a certain age? Or maybe boys of all ages, I don’t know.

Adrian doesn’t have even a smidgen of violence in him. Even in his most angry periods he’s never hit or kicked or otherwise tried to hurt anyone. No sibling fights.

And still he loves guns, or rather the idea of guns. A vast majority of his Plus-Plus constructions are guns of various kinds. Handguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, hand cannons, grenade launchers… The terminology comes from computer games, mostly Fortnite. He doesn’t even really understand the differences between them all, apart from the looks, so he makes up unlikely hybrids such as “sniper pistol”.

The cardigan has reach a point where I need to measure and make critical decisions to get the fit right, so I am procrastinating and avoiding the anxiety of all those decisions and knitting some socks instead. I’m trying out a new stitch for reinforcing the heels, called the Eye of Partridge stitch. A funny name for a very pretty-looking stitch!

Knitwear sizing is still hard. I knit gauge swatches and I measure and I calculate, and it still feels like hit and miss. Often the knitting behaves differently when there is more of it. With the ribbed cuff of a sock, there’s no point in making a decision about fit before there’s at least 5 or 6 cm of it. With these socks I made three starts (despite first making a swatch!) and still I’m not 100% happy with the fit. The next pair will be larger. My plan is to establish a good base pattern for this yarn weight and then just make variations of it – yarn colour, ribbing type, decorative details etc.

I thought I could give these slightly too tight socks to Adrian, who loves wool socks. It turned out that his ankle is as thick as mine, and his instep maybe even higher than mine. The only dimension where our feet differ seems to be length – his are about 2-3 cm shorter. So I guess I’ll keep these after all and wear them directly on the skin, rather than as an extra layer on cold days.

And I get the definite feeling that cardigans get narrower the longer I knit. I measured the black one when I had knit 10 cm and it was slightly loose. I put it around my waist again when I had 20 cm and it felt noticeably tighter. Perhaps the yarn’s own weight pulls it down?

The cold and snowy weather has finally brought some birds to our feeder! It’s been nearly empty until now. I can’t remember a winter with so few birds to look at.

Today I saw a hawfinch here for the first time. The Swedish name stenknäck means “stone crusher” and the Estonian suurnokk means “big beak” and there’s no doubt that the names fit! According to my bird book it eats cherry pits, after crushing them with its beak. The book says it visits feeders to eat hemp seeds, but here it seems to prefer sunflower seeds.

It’s clear that there is a power hierarchy among different breeds of birds. Sometimes it correlates with size. Most smaller birds avoid jays and magpies; blue tits and great tits avoid nuthatches. But not always: the hawfinch barely needs to turn its head, and blackbirds flee.

It’s my last day on my current project and I am in fact spending most of my time preparing for the next one. The new project utilizes technologies that I’ve never worked with (Docker and Kubernetes) so I’m getting familiar with them at least in theory.

I find video tutorials difficult. I get bored and lose focus. (I also never watch Youtube videos for fun, or TV series – I only do that as a mostly social activity together with Eric or the entire family.)

The biggest problem with video lectures and all other videos is that they happen at someone else’s pace. When I read, I decide how fast I go. I read fast most of the time, and slow down to re-read bits that are important or interesting.

Luckily this platform had controls for playback speed so I could do the same here. I started out at 1.25x speed, quickly moved on to 1.5 and then settled at 1.75. The speedy delivery, combined with knitting to keep my hands busy, got me through the day quite productively.

Real winter seems to have arrived all of a sudden. Masses of snow, and below-zero temperatures as well, so we might even get to keep the snow for a while.

I spent a good while cleaning the snow from the stairs and the driveway. I learned from painful experience, early in my days as homeowner in Nordic climes, that you cannot leave snow until later and clean it when you feel like it. Any place that you want to be snow-free at some point needs to be kept snow-free from the very beginning. If you wait, the snow will compact and freeze into an unmovable mass, especially where people walk on it, so the best thing is to shovel as soon as possible.

Everyone knows that paths and driveways need shovelling. Other things that need cleaning, that I had never thought of until we moved here, include rubbish bins and the mailbox.

The car took the most time, by far. Yes, we have a garage. Technically we even have a double garage. But the door on one side is effectively unusable, and we use the other side for bicycles. If we put the car in there, it’s nearly impossible to get the bikes out past the car. Short of lifting them over the car, which is about as convenient as it sounds. We drive very rarely these days (what’s there to drive to in these corona-affected times, anyway?) so we prioritize the bikes. Still, just in case we do end up needing the car for something, I got most of the snow off of it.

Christmas break is over for all of us and we’re back to our usual routines. I went back to work last week. Eric started working this week, and Adrian’s school term started on Monday as well. Today Ingrid’s school term also started.

We get up shortly after 7, although I sometimes stretch it to 7:30 since I have no particular hurry in the morning. I’m winding down my engagement in my current project (this is my last week) so I have no urgent tasks. And with no commute, I can be at work by 8 even if I sleep to 7:30.

Ingrid and Adrian both leave just before 8. School starts at 8. Ingrid has a three-minute walk to school; for Adrian it takes less than 10 minutes. Eric cycles to work and would much rather do so in daylight, so he waits until sunrise which is happens around 8:30.

They all have breakfast before leaving. I’m not fond of early breakfasts, so I start working first and break for breakfast around 9-ish.

All of us read while eating breakfast. Eric reads Dagens Industri. Adrian read Kalle Anka Pocket. I read Dagens Nyheter. What Ingrid reads I don’t know but I’m guessing it’s Snapchat.

Another month, and the sun will be up when I get up.

Having a calendar at all for this year feels rather pointless right now. There is nothing on the horizon or beyond it. The long-awaited ski trip to Norway that got cancelled last year will not happen this year either.

Oh well. I guess we can look forward to celebrating one year of covid-19 some time in March.