One more last-minute knitted Christmas ornament to give away, this time with an elephant pattern.

These balls were really quick and easy to make, and quite a lot of fun. Just four pattern repeats, so I’m done with it before the work has time to start feeling repetitive.

Last year when we put up the Christmas tree, Nysse climbed right up into it. The tree toppled, the poor cat was shocked, and a couple of our ornaments were broken.

The tree may have seemed like a safe and familiar place in an otherwise scarily new house. At the time, Nysse had been with us for just a few days, and he used to live in the countryside before moving in with us. Or maybe it was the opposite and he climbed up there because it was novel and exciting with all the shiny, sparkling ornaments.

So either he’s going to be much less likely to climb it this year, because he’s no longer insecure and looking for a familiar place, or he’s going to be much more interested, because he is more inclined to go exploring.

We’ve got the tree secured to hooks in the wall in two directions, just in case, so it might remain standing even if there is some not-too-energetic climbing. It’s only been a few days but it looks like the tree might be safe. Nysse goes batting at some of the baubles on the lower branches, where everything is inexpensive and cat-proof, and licks water from the container, but hasn’t been trying to climb the tree at all.

Today an electrician did the last bit of work on our new heat pump and it is now fully operational. It is more discreet in both looks and noise level than I had expected, and it’s doing a great job at heating up the rooms.

It comes with an app – of course – in addition to the remote control. You can tweak the settings, set up a schedule for it, and, most interestingly, monitor its energy consumption. The numbers are incredibly low for the heat it outputs and I would almost question their truthfulness if I didn’t see our overall electricity consumption also take a steep dive, in the other app.

The snow is melting away. We had a white December, but will have bare ground for Christmas.

Today was a boring day and I didn’t take any photos, so here is one from after the snowstorm in November. Nysse needs and wants to be outside, but really doesn’t like deep snow. So when there is a lot of snow, I clear the deck for him, and the stairs from the deck to the street. When I’m done shovelling, I make paths for him in the garden. I make small loop to the tree, a larger one beyond that, and a fork to the left to the big rock underneath the thuja, where he likes to curl up and lurk.

I call them his catwalks. Naturally.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.

So apparently 14°C is the point where my hands get noticeably cold.

Outdoors I normally don’t need gloves until the temperature gets to around 10°C – that’s my usual “hat and glove” point. But then I’m walking, moving my arms and moving the blood around, and not holding a cold piece of plastic like a computer mouse. Sitting still and mousing around feels much colder.

It’s 14°C inside and –14°C outside and that’s probably as cold as it will get here this winter – the weather will get warmer for sure (this is well below average for a Stockholm winter), the electricity prices will go down perhaps not to normal but to at least less painful levels, and we’re getting a heat pump installed today. But a pair of fingerless typing gloves could still be useful to have later as well.

I have a standard sock pattern that works well for my feet, and only needs minor adjustments for Adrian’s. It’s barely modified from a standard pattern that I found for free on the internet. I thought gloves might be the same – but the standard glove pattern that most websites have didn’t fit my hands at all. When I made the thumb gusset long enough to reach from the base of the thumb to the split between thumb and palm, the thumb itself came out ridiculously wide.

So it’s back to that most common of knitting techniques: ripping it all up and redoing it. The glove on the left is my second, better fitting attempt; the one on the right I just started ripping up.

I’m still puzzled about the patterns all being so off. When I asked for thumb gusset shaping advice on Reddit, the responders all unanimously said that what I thought was the standard, was not. I should increase on every 3rd round, they said, not every 2nd – which the websites and books all had told me to do.

Half past one, and most of the roofs are out of reach of the sun.

Last Wednesday when I was in town I happened to walk past Riddarfjärden and see the City Hall across the water, with a spectacular light show. I guessed it was connected to the Nobel week festivities. When I later googled to check, I found out that it was a whole thing, with light installations at at least twenty places around Stockholm. I wish I’d known about this before – I’d have tried to see more of them. The City Hall probably got the most impressive installation, but I’m sure the rest were beautiful and interesting.

I’ve had this long, fluffy, woolly skirt for at least 16 years, because I know I bought it at Spitalfields Market when we still lived in London. It was love at first sight: I love the look and the feel of the fuzzy material, and the skirt itself is constructed in a unique and interesting way. And it has pockets!

Despite its awesomeness, I haven’t been wearing it more than a few times every winter. It’s warmer than I usually need when I’m in an office. And I’m also aware that its hairy look is rather eye-catching, and I don’t want to be “the crazy lady who wears a fuzzy blanket all the time”.

This is the winter the skirt has been waiting for. With the cold (–8°C) and the electricity prices (around 5 SEK/kWh) right now, the best thing to prevent both bankruptcy and freezing is to dress warmly in multiple layers of wool. And I’m working from home, so the only person seeing my hairy skirt all day is me.

Nysse seems to have feelings about this skirt as well. He never reacts to any of our clothing, except Ingrid’s shoelaces, which he likes to play with – and this skirt. I get the impression that he’s curious and maybe puzzled about it, and sometimes almost seems to think it’s alive, so he bats at its edges when I walk past him.

Gingerbread cookies are an essential part of Christmas. We made this year’s batch this weekend.

We have a whole pile of cookie cutters. I’m a traditionalist and prefer the Christmas-themed shapes: the Christmas trees, stars and hearts and angels, and the traditional gingerbread man and woman. Pigs have a very decoration-friendly shape, and so do mitten-shaped cookies.

The stranger shapes include a set with tiny animals and a boat, which I believe is Noah’s Ark, kind of thematically appropriate – but it also a train engine and a car. This set gets used a lot because the small shapes fit so nicely in between the larger cookies.

Another set has more animals, which for some reason includes a crocodile and a shark. Who hasn’t heard of Christmas crocodiles? Adrian especially likes the shark and the crocodile, so we usually end up with a lot of those.