It’s seven o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting in front of my work computer and wracking my brains. I was asked a few weeks ago if I could hold another talk for tretton37 and, eager to please people, I said yes. Now the bill is coming due. I need to actually come up with a topic, so that the talk can be scheduled and marketed and whatnot.

The talking is never the hard part. The hard part is finding something to talk about. I’m not working on anything new or exciting. It feels like everything I can think of has already been talked about. I keep second-guessing myself.

I used to think of this corner of the garden as a difficult one. Tucked in between a west-facing wall and a porch, it is dry, and in shade much of the time. I planted bergenias here not because I like them much (I don’t – they’re loud and somehow vulgar) but because they were among the few things I could think of that would survive here.

In the spring sunshine (not yet shaded by the large cherry tree nearby), teamed up with daffodils and with the red, still-nude branches of a dogwood bush, they actually look really good. A bit brash and vulgar still, but whatever.

I went back for more cherry trees. Today with less rain and wind, and more sunshine.

Yes, that branch of blossoms was literally hanging there against an evenly overcast sky, like it was posing for me.


The blossoms in these photos belong to two different varieties of cherry trees. The ones with the lighter double blossoms and green little leaves line the main street in Spånga; the ones with simple blossoms and dark leaves are a trio of trees off to one side. And soon the trees in our own garden will be flowering as well. What a luxury, to have all these wonderful trees around me!

These new socks are growing on me. I wasn’t too impressed with them when I had just finished them, but now I rather like them.

They pair well with all sorts of clothes because of the speckled colour mix. They go well with yellow, or brown, or blue-and-white, or even dark purple.

And the brioche knitting makes me feel them more than normal socks. I’m conscious of them when I walk around in them on bare feet. It’s almost like a tiny foot massage.

My desk feels more and more like a place of work. Work stuff fills almost all of it, both physically and mentally. I rarely sit there with my private laptop these days, unless I’m doing something administrative that’s almost like work. (Like installing OS updates, or backing up my stuff.) Instead there’s one corner of the living room sofa that has become “mine”. I’ve got my knitting and mending baskets there, and my Kindle, and a pillow or two. And now I’ve even splurged on a second charger for my laptop so that I don’t have to crawl under the desk move the one charger between the desk and the sofa.

This was the fifth hail shower in a week.

In English there’s a saying about April showers bringing May flowers. In Swedish the saying is simply “aprilväder”, “April weather”, which is unpredictable and unsettled.

Ingrid and I were at IKEA.

Or rather, Ingrid was at IKEA and I was at the IKEA parking lot.

There was a sizeable queue just to get in, what with the limits on the maximum number of people allowed inside, so I didn’t even bother trying. Sat in the car and read, while Ingrid queued. She said afterwards that the queueing took more time than the shopping itself – and that’s saying something, given how long it usually takes to tromp through the whole labyrinth that is IKEA.

You can’t see the crowd well in the photo because of all the fences and such, but there’s a whole zig-zaggy rope thing there in front of the entrance, like the queues at airports. And then even more people queueing off to the right who don’t even fit in the zig-zaggy arrangement.

The season’s first dandelions in Spånga.