We’ve pretty much decided now to get a cat of our own. The neighbourhood cat’s visits have convinced me. Ingrid has always wanted a cat, Adrian is generally positive to pets, and Eric doesn’t mind. So here we are.

It won’t be a kitten, though, despite Ingrid’s pleas. I don’t want a baby in the house again, regardless of species. I’d much rather skip the mess and chaos of a kitten and get a cat that’s had some time to settle in its character and find its footing in life.

As soon as we had decided, Ingrid went on a Blocket spree and came back with a shortlist of suggestions of cats she liked. I contacted a few of the sellers, and reached a tentative agreement with one. So we might be cat owners a week from now – if, after meeting the cat, we think he would be a good fit for us.

Today I went shopping for essential cat equipment: a litter box and a crate. Our potential adoptee cat lives in the countryside now and is used to being outdoors, and mostly doing its business outdoors. He will definitely be going outdoors here as well – with the way we keep our doors open in the summer, it would be impossible to keep an animal inside. (Sometimes it is impossible to keep them outside.) But for the first few weeks after moving, while he’s still settling in, he’ll have to remain inside.

The stacks of litter box pellets were quite unphotogenic. And the cat food and water bowls were downright tasteless – golden with little paw prints, or pink with cartoonish fish skeletons. I don’t want any of those in my kitchen. The most interesting-looking thing in the pet shop was this shelf of dead tree branches, for terrariums I guess. Of course there’s a market for pretty-looking dead branches.

I knit socks during meetings where I’m mostly a passive participant, to help me remain focused and not just zone out or get distracted by reddit or something. At one point I told my teammates, in case they were wondering about my unusual movements.

One of them jokingly said something about knitting a pair for him next. Size 46. Well, joke’s on him, because he’ll be getting a pair of woollen socks for Christmas, in a nice self-striping yarn with a goodly proportion of dark Urb-it green in it.

Size 46 is huge. It’s going to be hard to get the sizing right because I have no feet of that size available to try the socks on. Eric has size 42 and that’s what a pair of normal adult male feet look like in my mind. The step from his feet to size 46 is as large as the step from Adrian’s 11-year-old feet to Eric’s.

Of course I’m doing this rather last minute as usual. But I’ve got the entire weekend ahead of me still.

Both kids are, quite synchronously, sick since yesterday.

Adrian has an incredibly runny nose and is going through toilet paper by the roll trying to clear it, but is otherwise perky and feeling well.

Ingrid is totally knocked out with fever and a headache, subsisting on water and ibuprofen and half a small bowl of yogurt.

I very much hope I don’t catch whatever they have because I have a Lucia thingy with tretton37 on Monday as well as a Christmas dinner with Urb-it. I feel hopeful because it wouldn’t be the first time, by far, for the kids to be sick while Eric and I escape with no symptoms. Our immune systems have had a few extra decades of practice, after all.

Worked in the office today. And ran some errands in the city afterwards, like it’s 2020.

Being in the office actually felt normal today. Working from home feels more normal, still, but I didn’t catch myself thinking “wow, I’m here” or “I’m actually going on the train” or “gosh, look at all this city around me”.

It’s taken me two and a half months – since late September – to get to this point. Just as I got here, though, covid-related restrictions and recommendations are being tightened again. By just a tiny bit, and they’re all still expressed in weaselly language like “if possible” and “where appropriate” and “to some extent” but I guess it’s meant to be a signal of what might be coming.

–17°C for the 2nd morning in a row. Bloody freezing. Indoors some bits are down to +17°C which isn’t quite bloody freezing but just a bit chillier than I would prefer. But yr.no promises above-zero temperatures already tomorrow so it’s not worth adjusting any of the thermostats. I’ll just pull a blanket over my shoulders in the evening.

The cold water pipe to the shower seems to have frozen. All the other taps work fine, but the shower only gives me hot water. Should have turned on the heating coils but didn’t think of it in time. So got to wash myself and my hair the old-fashioned way this morning, with a tub and a scoop. It brought back memories of all the saunas I’ve been to during my ski tours in the north of Sweden.

Bonus side effect of the cold snap: light pillars at night, several days in a row.

The neighbours have apparently bought new string lights and hung them on the fence between their garden and ours.

I’m normally a fan of string lights. We hang up many metres of our own, every winter. But these are an absolute monstrosity. The light they cast is very cold and incredibly bright. When they switch on, it’s like a flash. I cannot not look. They feel brighter than any other lights around me, although I’m sure it’s not quite as bad as that in reality but just my subjective experience, due to the contrast and the colour temperature. They pull at my attention, even though they’re far away in my peripheral vision, even though I’m looking at a well-lit screen in front of me as I’m typing this.

They’ve only been up for two days. Perhaps I’ll get used to them.

We promised Adrian a visit to his favourite restaurant, Ri Cora, for his birthday. Which was nearly 3 months ago.

First we were going to do it when we were in town anyway for Forever Piaf, but left it until too late with the booking so we didn’t get a table. Then we had a similar booking problem a few weeks later: just when we had agreed a day and time that worked for all of us, and I was about to press the button, the last few available tables got booked right as I was looking at it. And then there were weekends with other things in the way.

Now finally we made a new attempt and I was surprised to find tables for the same evening. Which works great, because Adrian’s school has a study day for staff tomorrow, so he doesn’t need to get up on time, so it’s OK if he’s a bit tired afterwards.

Ri Cora is Adrian’s absolute favourite restaurant because of the limitless egg rolls and dumplings he can eat. Ingrid also loves it, although she samples the buffet more widely, and prefers sushi to most dumplings.

The buffet has been completely unchanged for the last three or four years. Nothing changes, not even which fresh fruit they serve (melon, watermelon, pineapple, grapes, strawberries), or the ice cream flavours (blueberry, melon, Oreo, plus one I’ve forgotten), or the “season’s roast vegetables” which are always potatoes, sweet potatoes, sweetcorn and broccoli, completely regardless of the actual season. But predictable also means reliable, and the staff are always attentive and friendly, and make sure the buffet is fresh and clean and filled up. While I wouldn’t want to eat there very often, it’s a pretty decent place, as buffets go.

Borrowing a photo from an earlier day because I forgot to take one today.

We’re in the middle of a proper cold snap, with temperatures hovering around –10°C to –15°C for several days now. Luckily I had the foresight to sweep the garden stairs and scrape the car windows just after the snow came, when it was just a few degrees below zero, rather than in this cold!

I saw this dance performance together with Eric already several weeks ago. Jotting down my notes here for future me before the impressions fade too far away.

Six independent duets by six different choreographers. The whole thing was supposed to be performed in Oslo but there was some sort of strike there so it was moved to Stockholm with short notice. Lucky us to get tickets.

1. Sasha Waltz, Impromptus. Male/female. Technically beautiful but not very interesting. Lovely piano music by Schubert.

2. Emma Portner, Islands. Female/female, with the two dancers wearing a single set of four-legged loose trousers. They moved sometimes like twins, sometimes like mirror images, and sometimes my brain literally interpreted them as a single body with an unclear number of legs and arms. Very cool. Somewhat disappointing that they disconnected from each other towards the end.

3. Mats Ek, Julia & Romeo. Male/female. An excerpt from a longer narrative ballet. Energetic and playful and loving, but it felt a bit misplaced without the rest of the story.

4. Chrystal Pite, Animation. Male/female. The man’s movements start out broken, as if he doesn’t have full control over his body. The woman supports and guides. (Even so I clearly felt that he is the main dancer, not she.) As time passes, he becomes more “normal” and his body more “whole”. Something something love heals all ills? Too bad, because I found this message rather clichéd and his normal movements towards the end much less interesting.

5. Jiří Kylián, 14’20”. Male/female. I have no particular memories of this piece.

6. Ohad Naharin, B/Olero. Female/female. Bold, angular, energetic, cool. Great finale for the evening.

Photo credits: Islands © unknown because the page has been removed from www.operan.no; I got the photo from Google’s cache. Animation © Eric Berg.

tretton37 Christmas party at Riddarsalen (Münchenbryggeriet). Good food, good company.

After dinner a group of us played a game where we randomly guessed things about the person sitting next to us, based on nothing but gut feeling and prejudice. I guessed, among other things, that Ben to my right would be an overly cautious driver (and was spot on) and that Farnam to my left collects something weird (and was completely off since he turned out to be strongly against collecting anything). It was a lot of fun.

The people around me guessed that I am particular about some/many things in my life, but not about travel destinations, that I would be happy to travel just about anywhere. Yes, I said, but isn’t everyone like that? Apparently not – people can be very picky about wanting to travel to their bucket list places but definitely not want to go to some-other-place. I really would be happy to travel just about anywhere as long as I don’t have to worry about my health and life – Colombia would definitely be on my no-go list, for example.

It also came out that I am a private person, and that I give a serious impression regardless of what lies underneath. And I do. I keep the private and professional spheres quite separated, and make sure to make a professional impression at work. I don’t even really know why. I’ve done it as long as I can remember, and it is second nature by now. I think I expect people to not take me seriously unless I make them. And I think I expect/fear negative reactions if I let my private self come to the fore, so I keep it safely hidden.