I didn’t take a photo today, but here’s one from last Wednesday’s city trip.

The last weekend in January, BirdLife Sverige has a bird counting event. I’ve been participating for the last five years.

This year we had an absolute invasion of Eurasian siskins during the counting weekend. The largest group swarming around and below the feeder was about thirty birds strong. We also saw goldfinches, blackbirds, and a lonely great tit.

Apparently this year is a siskin year. The Eurasian siskin is number three in the aggregate statistics as of now, and didn’t even make it into the top ten last year. According to the internet, siskins tend to stay for the winter when alder seeds are plentiful.

Blackbirds have been the most consistent visitors at our feeder over the years – they’re the only species I’ve reported every single year. Great tits, blue tits and goldfinches are in shared second place, each seen four out of the five years.

The cardigan has reached the point where all the pieces come together and make up a cardigan-shaped object, albeit incomplete. The end goal is not quite in sight yet but sort of on the horizon at least. And the part that is finished actually fits decently well!

This is, unfortunately, also one of those points where difficult decisions need to be made regarding size and gauge and adjustments, because reality is annoyingly not matching up with the pattern. I love the knitting but I really hate those times where I know that taking the wrong route may lead to frogging weeks’ worth of work and then spending an hour swearing while I try to get the stitches back on the needles.

I’ve now learned about the concept of lifelines which will reduce that swearing at least. So now my work is a complicated tangle of all sorts of components: not only the cardigan itself, the two balls of yarn and the needles, but also the lifeline, temporary holders for underarm stitches, and stitch markers. Just getting it all out of my basket and unbundling it all is a bit of a project, every time I pick it up to start working on it.

Ingrid’s favourite pair of shoes needed mending. A fleece patch and some superglue, and they’re wearable again.

I’ve come to realize that polyester fleece is the ultimate mending material for any kind of textiles – clothes, shoes, bags and so on. I’ve even used it to mend laundry baskets. It is durable, comes in many colours, doesn’t fray, has a little bit of stretch to it but is still stable, and is easy to sew. I know polyester has its shortcomings (like spreading microplastics) but nothing else compares. Which is the case for many plastics, isn’t it.

Treated myself to a whole day in the city today, to get out of the house. Worked in the office (where there were not many colleagues to meet, but way more than at home) and a few errands afterwards, including a chocolate shop. Finished the evening with dinner at an upmarket pizzeria where I ate pizza bianca, topped with arugula even, and nobody around to complain about it.

I received a notification yesterday that I could book my third covid shot, and had the great luck to find an open slot already for this morning reasonably close by. Someone must have just cancelled their booking.

For future me, here’s the covid status as of now. The omicron variant is taking over and now accounts for 90% of all sequenced cases in Sweden. It leads to less severe symptoms but spreads faster than the previous dominant variant, delta. The vaccines are much less effective against it, but a third vaccine dose probably gets the efficacy up again.

Meanwhile covid is spreading everywhere. Right now half a million Swedes per week are estimated to get infected, out of a total population of 10 million. In Stockholm, 22% of staff in the city’s schools are home sick, and 19% of pupils. The authorities have been forced to relax quarantine rules (for people who have a covid infection in their household) so that essential activities such as water and power supply, police and public transport etc do not get disrupted due to lack of staff.

Public events are limited to 500 persons and require proof of vaccination. Restaurants have to close at 23 and groups are limited to a maximum of 8 people. Travelling actually seems mostly possible right now, and I still have hope that this year I might actually get my spring ski tour.

I got my previous two doses at Kistamässan, a shiny, large convention hall. Today’s appointment was in a scruffy school gym. The school itself appeared to be closed. The post-shot waiting area at Kistamässan had carefully spaced chairs with ropes to ensure that people keep their distance, and a large clock to help people stick to their 15 minutes, and staff keeping an eye on people. Here the waiting rooms were barely signposted (the first room slightly too full because the second one was not very discoverable) and haphazardly furnished.

The clinic was short-staffed (you can guess why!) so there was a longish queue. I’m glad I had an early spot – the queue was about 30 people long when I got there (in advance of my appointed time) but had grown to twice the size when I finally got out, an hour later.

Watching the roe deer in the garden and probably wishing he was big enough to take them on.

I made grilled cottage cheese sandwiches for lunch. I guess a sandwich in English maybe needs to have two slices of bread, but for me the Nordic, open kind of sandwich is also a sandwich.

Ingrid and Adrian both tend to wrinkle their noses at these, while I love them. They both like other types of grilled sandwiches, especially with cheese – cheese and apple, cheese and tomato, cheese and pepper, banana and curry. But not with cottage cheese. “It’s like pizza bianca,” they say, as if that was a bad thing. (They do not like pizza bianca either.)

For me these sandwiches are childhood nostalgia food. To be really right, there should be dill in the topping, instead of the basil that I used today. If you want to make these at home: mix about 500 grams of cottage cheese with 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and chopped dill. Spoon generous amounts of the mixture onto buttered slices of toast and grill them until they look good. Don’t skimp; if there’s too little of the cheesy stuff, the result will be too dry.

There are other meals I remember from my childhood that I feel no desire to recreate. Milk noodle soup, for example, which is exactly what the name says – cooked noodles in milk. I remember eating this with gusto, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it now.

I had thought this was some Soviet-era invention but apparently it’s a traditional German recipe that’s existed for far longer than the Soviet Union. I stumbled upon a digitization of an Estonian cookbook from the beginning of the last century that has not just one but two recipes for milk soup with pasta, one using macaroni and one using noodles:

Piimasupp nuudlitega
3 toopi rõõska piima, tükike värsket võid, natukene soola
ja teelusika täis suhkrut keedetakse üles. Nüüd lisatakse sinna
juurde 1 nael katki murtud jõhv-nuudlid või 1 nael stern-nuud-
leid ja keedetakse kuni pehme on.

Drove Ingrid to Mall of Scandinavia for some clothes shopping, first thing in the morning to avoid the crowds.

Ingrid had scoped out a pair of trousers online. They turned out to not fit her – too tight over the thighs. Welcome to the club, girl… This is just the beginning of an eternal struggle to find non-baggy trousers that actually fit. So many women’s clothes are made for twig-legged skinny girls, and so few for more athletic legs.