My daily exercise is a brisk midday walk more often than it is a proper workout session, these days. Often I don’t have the energy for more.

With lower energy levels, my taste in workout videos has also changed. My favourite sources used to be PopSugar (on YouTube) and HASfit. The PopSugar videos with Raneir Pollard were the most fun. But then YouTube turned up their advertising earlier this year to truly annoying levels – interrupting a HIIT workout to show me some ads in the middle really doesn’t make me a happy user! – and I had to give up on those. I don’t mind paying for online services, but I’m not going to be bullied into paying.

I actually support HASfit via Patreon, because I watched their workout videos a lot. But now their tone doesn’t work for me any more. I used to find them motivating, but now it’s almost the opposite. Telling me “you can do more”, “if your brain is telling you you’re tired then it’s lying”, “don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done” does not help when I was already struggling to find the energy to just start. Reminding me to think about what made me come here, when I barely managed to do that, just makes it harder.

Now I mostly watch FitnessBlender. The workouts are quite similar but the tone is very different. Calmer and less pushy. Forgiving any weakness in advance, somehow. And right now this low-key approach works much better for me.

I often start the workout telling myself that I am allowed to quit before the end. I commit to five minutes only. Sometimes I find the flow as soon as I start. Other times I don’t, and I keep promising myself that I am allowed to quit after this exercise, and after the next one, and so on, if I really don’t feel like continuing. But I’ve never actually used my out.

One might almost get the impression that we chose Nystagmus so that he would match the furniture and carpet. Which we didn’t, but I do think he is very handsome in his gray coat. And soft like velvet.

I’m going to have to hold back with the cat photos here. The temptation is there. This will not turn into a cat blog.

We have a new family member. Meet our new cat, Nystagmus, also known as Nysse, also known as Musse.

Nystagmus is a graphite-coloured mixed-breed domestic cat, just over a year old. We drove to Mörtbol this afternoon to meet him. We all liked him immediately, he seemed to like us as well, so he came home with us.

He has lived in the countryside until now, so we hope that a free-range life in our suburban home will suit him. It would be impossible to have an indoor cat in this house, with the way we keep the French doors open all day in the summer. Hopefully he has enough survival instincts to learn to cope with the traffic here, which isn’t fast or heavy but is still more than he is used to.

I read up in advance on how to introduce a cat to a new home. Keep them indoors initially, even if it’s an outdoor cat, while they get used to their new home. Don’t take them out of the carrier – let them come out at their own pace. Let them hide if they want. Keep them in one room initially and let them get used to the rest of the house gradually.

So I was all prepared for Nystagmus to not leave the bedroom today, and to possibly stay hiding in the carrier for the entire evening. Making contingency plans for moving the litter box into the bedroom, even, if he didn’t want to come out.

Well, Nystagmus ignored all of that useful advice and bravely went around exploring the house straight away. He was not the least bit shy about eating in a new place, either. And within an hour or two he was already up on the sofa with us, asking for cuddles and pets. I’m glad Nystagmus is not as shy as the neighbours’ cat, who took weeks to feel that secure in our house – a sociable, cuddly cat is a much better fit for us.

My brother came by for a pre-Christmas visit. We made gingerbread cookies. We all take optimal dough usage very seriously. It matters! Every time you gather up the scraps and roll out the dough again, you work more flour in it. This year the dough was perfect to begin with, easy to work with. By the fourth or fifth rolling, it was all dry and barely workable.

Later we also made mince pies which I love even more than gingerbread cookies. Both taste great, especially when made from scratch after years of tweaking the recipes, but mince pies are moister.

Adrian still likes us to read him a good night story. We’ve left children’s books behind a while ago already. We just finished an old Estonian translation of Karel Čapek’s Nine Fairy Tales. I can make myself speak Swedish to my children when others are in the room, so as not to exclude anyone, but good night stories just have to be in Estonian.

We’ve run out of suitable books in Estonian. I usually buy piles of books every time we visit Estonia, but we’ve had to skip our annual trips for two summers in a row, so we had a bit of a book crisis. I’ve got a few boxes of children’s books we haven’t read yet, but we probably never will – Adrian has outgrown such stuff.

Luckily my mum still has many of our old books, some from her childhood, some from mine. I called her, and here’s what she lent us to read next: an old Estonian edition of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

In the Soviet planned economy, things had fixed prices. This book cost 7 roubles, according to a printed price on the rear cover. That was before the 1961 currency reform; book prices were in kopeks (1/100 of a rouble) when I was a child.

The front cover has a dramatic scene of a dinosaur threatening a man wielding a firebrand. Clearly drawn in a different era, when artists’ knowledge (along with everybody else’s knowledge) of dinosaur anatomy wasn’t what it is today. That dinosaur holds itself like a large human in a dinosaur costume. It will be interesting to look at more illustrations – and to see what kind of mental picture Sir Arthur had of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and other prehistoric creatures. I haven’t read this book for a good 30 years at least.

Adrian is still home with a cough even though he is basically all well. I take him out with me when I go for my daily walks, so that he also gets some daylight and fresh air.

There is so much talk in him, about just about everything. When I come back from a walk of my own, my brain is clear and rested. After a walk with Adrian, work feels like rest.

We talked about daylight savings time and time zones, among other things, because he asked what I’d done at work thus far. (Time zone conversions.) In this day and age with international entertainment everywhere, like live streams on Twitch and special events in games, even an eleven-year-old is well aware of how time zones work. I certainly wasn’t, at his age.

It’s dark not only when I go to and from work, but already when I still have several hours of work left. This is not my favourite time of the year. But on the other hand – there are only six more days to go until things turn around.

Ingrid still has long, painful-sounding coughing attacks, but is otherwise back up on her feet and not feeling too unwell. Perky enough to try on all the shoes she’s ordered. She desperately needs winter shoes, gym shoes, and running shoes.

We’ve arrived at that magical moment where Ingrid, Adrian and myself all have more or less the same shoe size. 39 is the magic number. We could all borrow each other’s shoes – if we didn’t have entirely different taste.

Ingrid wears classical sneakers like Vans and Converse, both low and high, mostly in black and white but sometimes also sky blue. She’s interested in shoes in a way the rest of us aren’t, and would gladly buy more shoes only because she likes them, not because she needs them.

Adrian also likes sneakers but values ease of use above other things (except comfort) so he can wear any brand as long as they have a velcro closure and no laces. In practise he ends up wearing black.

I choose shoes in soft leather in warm, deep colours.

Eric is the odd one out with his size 42 feet. Soft leather, like me, but usually black.

Although Adrian is surely bound to end up there as well in a few years. Ingrid’s feet may actually be near her final size, which would be practical because then we could stop buying new winter boots every single year.

Today was a very Christmas-themed day.

From shortly after lunch I was helping prepare for the Urb-it Christmas-ish dinner – fetching and carrying and shopping and setting the table etc. In the afternoon I walked over to tretton37 for a Lucia gathering with singing and glögg and lussebullar etc. Then back to Urb-it for the dinner itself.

I’m still amazed by the luck that put the two companies within a hundred metres of each other. I’m glad I didn’t have to choose between the two parties – and it was incredibly convenient I could use the tretton37 office for storing the party materials, because we only had access to the Urb-it office from midday. I had so much stuff – tableware and decorations and snacks and what not.

Urb-it today feels somewhat like the tretton37 Stockholm office felt like when I joined in 2017: small-scale and DIY. We ordered our own food. Someone brought a speaker from home for the party music, while someone else brought table runners, and a hotplate for the glögg, and so on. tretton37 has grown and become more professional: we have people who fix these kinds of things so the rest of us don’t have to. But the home-made spirit is still there – the singers were a self-organized group from among ourselves. I hope we manage to keep it.

A lussekamel, to join all the lussekatter