I visited the 13|37 Borlänge office today (and will be staying until tomorrow) to hold my multi-tenancy talk again. I did it live in Stockholm twice when it was fresh, and streamed it once during the quarantine years – you can watch it on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s a few years old but the content hasn’t aged at all; the architectural questions and choices are all still valid, and even the code examples are still fresh. The audience seemed to agree, because the feedback this evening was almost embarrassingly complimentary.

The deer are cleaning up after the birds, eating spilled seeds. Surprisingly unbothered by me standing two metres away with a camera. I guess they’ve learned that humans can’t walk through walls.

I’m halfway through my post-lunch walk, and the street lights have already switched on. Admittedly I’m a late luncher and this was probably around three o’clock, but still.

If we had no children in the house, I’m not sure we’d bother with a Christmas tree. But I’d definitely still want Advent lights.

I seem to have inherited a keyboard.

It used to be that Ingrid and Adrian inherited Eric’s and my old electronics – laptops, phones, cameras, etc. That was when it was exciting to have any kind of laptop that was their own. That they were trusted to use, that wasn’t borrowed, that they could use without having to wait for when I didn’t need it. Performance didn’t matter, and neither did OS versions.

Now we’ve come full circle and I may end up inheriting Ingrid’s hardware. She upgraded her gaming keyboard, utilising the Black Week sales to get a great deal on a really good model, and asked me if I wanted her old one.

I have actually been thinking of replacing my keyboard, because the keys on the one I have feel a bit “mushy” and indistinct when I type. Plus it’s noisy enough that I have to turn off my conference microphone if I want to type during an online meeting, or my colleagues will complain about the noise.

Ingrid’s old keyboard turned out to be as noisy as mine, so that’s not going to be any improvement, but it does have a nicer feel.

It also has LED backlighting.

I guess I can understand the appeal of colourful backlighting if you’re trying to set the mood for gaming, but I’ve literally never felt any desire to have the keys on my keyboard light up when I type, or to have all the colours of the rainbow constantly rotate across the keyboard. But I had to try out all the effects after I had plugged it in – if not for anything else, then to see just how crazy they were. The Wheel was truly almost nauseating to my old brain.

The Breathing effect was actually kind of nice, though. A pleasantly slow swell of a single colour colour, that softly ebbs away again. I liked it well enough that I didn’t immediately turn it off.

So now I’m doing my work on an RGB keyboard. With colour effects. For real.

The photos of dumbbells are boring, I know, but I did a proper workout, with weights and everything, this week again, and I’m rather proud of that, and I want to revel in that pride for a moment.

Maybe next time I’ll bring out the tripod and try to get some more interesting workout photos.

Every year since 1988, the Swedish Retail Institute has announced a “Christmas gift of the year” – a product that somehow embodies the zeitgeist for that year. Apparently it is based on “an independent analysis of consumption trends” but it’s probably just some group’s fingers in the air.

Sometimes they capture the beginning of a trend, or the introduction of a product that stays. The CD player in 1992, a cookbook in 2002 when cookbooks were starting to be hip, a flat-screen TV in 2004. Sometimes they zoom in on a temporary madness – the spiky acupressure mat in 2009, a juicer in 203, VR goggles in 2016.

In 2020, the camping stove got to embody the Swedish people’s new-found love for the outdoors, triggered by the covid quarantine; in 2021 an event ticket symbolized the end of the quarantine.

Anyway, it’s a bit of fun, even though I’ve never let it affect my actual choices of Christmas gifts.

Until this year. The Christmas gift of the year for 2022 is a home-knitted garment. Inflation is high, and so are electricity costs. There is a war going on, and people in bombed-out cities are without heating or electricity. The world feels like a chilly place. People want something to warm them, both in body and heart. And home-made crafts, which used to be something for grannies and oddball hippie activists, are suddenly trendy again.

I have a cardigan to finish, and I really hadn’t planned to knit any more socks right now, but I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. So there will be some socks under the tree this year again. I did half a sock today, just in meetings or while reading – thicker yarn makes the work go fast – so I can easily get some done before Christmas.

My dentist had some strong things to say about the state of my teeth at my last visit a couple of weeks ago. Flossing was yet another habit that I didn’t manage to keep up with when my energy levels dipped during the last quarantine year.

I’m working on forming new habits. Started flossing every morning – currently on a 20-day streak. Switched to a toothpaste that foams less so that I don’t have to rinse after brushing. Trying to also use mouthwash some time during the day but struggling to actually remember to do it.

It’s going to take me forever to get the old habits out of muscle memory. Every single time, my hand reaches for the old toothpaste that Eric still uses. Every single time, I reach for a cup to get water afterwards. I do remember, but the hand is faster than the conscious brain.

I always wear out the elbows on my cardigans. I am very aware of it when I’m wearing any of my hand-knitted cardigans, and try to keep my elbows off my desk, but I’m sure I’ll still end up wearing through them.

I’ve sewn on leather patches on two of my cardigans. For this one I didn’t think the leather look would be a good match, and I find it difficult to get ordinary darning to look even in larger sizes, so I looked for an alternative. (Good thing I have books about mending.)

One of the books described Scotch darning as a good fit for elbows – sturdy and hard-wearing. It’s effectively blanket stitch over weft yarn. I tried it out and it came out really well, if I say so myself. Sturdy and even.

What I discovered, and wish the book had told me, was that the weft threads should have more distance between them than for normal darning. Because effectively you’ll be fitting another thread in every gap between the weft threads. Mine ended up too densely packed and I sometimes had to stitch around two of them at the same time, to fit my stitches in. I ended up with some thicker wales here and there, but you can’t see it from a distance.

And it took so much yarn! That’s why there are so many ends to weave in. I had small hanks of embroidery wool specifically for mending, one of which was a lucky colour match for the cardigan, and it ran out just as I finished. I used up the whole hank for this one patch. I could have done another row if I’d had more yarn, where the fabric is thin but not quite worn through yet.

We had a minor snow storm on Saturday afternoon that delivered a few centimetres of snow – enough to cause mild chaos in traffic, with bad visibility, and cars in ditches because they were caught out in their summer tires. I caught the beginning of the snow storm on my way back from Uppsala, where I’d helped my brother pick up furniture I’d ordered. Luckily I did have winter tires on (Eric switched them that morning) and with careful driving I got home safe.

Sunday brought more snow. And then more, and more, and today was absolute chaos. By the end of the day the snow was knee-deep, over the edges of my tall rubber boots, so it must have been close to 40 cm. According to an article in Dagens Nyheter central Stockholm still got less than in the snowstorm in November 2016, but I’m not sure if that also holds for Spånga.


There was no way for the snow ploughs to keep up with it. Getting anywhere in the city was hopeless, I read in the news: cars stuck in the snow, many bus routes cancelled, trains delayed… I’m glad I didn’t have to go there. Here in Spånga pavements were impassable, except where there was enough foot traffic to trample a narrow path, and at least one bus had gotten stuck in a roadworks ditch hidden by the snow cover.

I shovelled snow for an hour Sunday night, another hour this morning, and a third hour at lunchtime, and I was still barely keeping up. There was just no end to it. My snow dump pile by the root cellar was as tall as me by the end of the day.

Cat, for scale.

Nysse was not fond of the snow, at all. The last winter was half his lifetime ago, and it wasn’t a snow-rich one, so he’s never seen anything quite like this. Once or twice he stepped on deep snow only to sink right through it, so that even his head didn’t peek out.

After I had cleared the deck and the back stairs for him, and the cars had made deep tracks in the snow in the streets, he made some cautious rounds. But he’s clearly sceptical of the whole thing. His walks are short, and he keeps shaking his paws to try and keep the snow off.

Adrian and Ingrid on the other hand are loving it. Both went out sledding with their friends – even sixteen-year-olds aren’t too old to enjoy sledding. Adrian spent all his breaks at school out in the snow, rolling giant snowballs and building snow forts and having snowball fights.