We’re in Kläppen for a few days of skiing and I’m sick as a dog. Instead of skiing I’m spending all day lying down. Not even sitting up. My body hurts at night so I can barely sleep, and I have a fever and zero appetite, so I’m weak and tired all day. Don’t even have the energy to read or knit or anything.

We’re off to Kläppen for some skiing.

Nysse does not like long car rides. He especially does not like being boxed in inside his crate. This time I let him sit outside the crate but on a harness and leash, and the leash tied to the seat, so he couldn’t climb around just anywhere, or go flying freely in case of an accident. He was still vocally unhappy – until I let him climb up on the luggage behind us. Later I pushed up the headrest to provide him with more protection – and there he stayed, all the way. There was still some yowling, but on the whole he was much more content than during previous trips.

For next time, I’ll get him a better harness, though. This one was meant as a secondary means of containment, not as a safety belt.

Estonian butter knives are the best. Swedish butter knives (not pictured) are better for spreading butter than ordinary table knives, but they’re thin and the blades are small, so they’re not very comfortable to use. We somehow manage to wear ours out, so several of them are now barely more than flat sticks.

I’ve been planning to buy more butter knives of the well-designed Estonian kind when we go to Estonia. I was already planning on it last summer but never found the time. Oh well, we’ll make do with pointy sticks for another year. But yesterday at the crafts fair I saw a whole huge stand of wooden utensils, including butter knives with sturdy, rounded handles – and the lovely smell of juniper wood.

At first I thought that maybe some Swedish firm had copied the superior Estonian design, but then I saw the Estonian brand name. No need to wait until summer – the knives have come to me.

I bought several. And then sniffed at them for a good while before packing them away in my bag.

I took a half day off work to go to the crafts fair at Älvsjömässan. I’ve missed the last few fairs (it’s a semiannual thing) because of travels and other calendar conflicts, and really wanted to go. Not with any particular plans of buying anything – mostly just to go pet pretty yarn and be inspired by all the fun and colourful things.

I really liked these sweater designs. Just a plain black base yarn, and the simple but striking design arises from combining it with a colourful mohair yarn. Such a simple but powerful idea.

Ekman’s Cacti.

Intense, fun, captivating, irreverent. Made fun of itself, and of ballet critique, through a voice track that at times described what was going on and at times asked, in an anguished voice, “What does it mean?” Never a dull moment.

Memorable scene: a man, with his upper body bare, standing and posing in harsh side light. As the light switched from a source on the left to one on the right, everything changed, even though nothing did.

Hjálmarsdóttir’s Riptide.

Never really connected to this one. Already two weeks later I’ve mostly forgotten what it was like.

Naharin’s Minus 16. Same experience as last time: the initial Echad mi yodeah chair dance was powerful and unique (although a bit less so this time around because I knew what was happening) but the rest felt kind of pointless. Yes, the audience members they invited onto the scene had fun dancing, but it wasn’t interesting for me to watch other people dance with no particular choreography.

Ballet evening at the Royal Opera. The first of the three pieces was called Cacti and involved cacti. Which at first glance and at a distance looked like real things, but it didn’t take a long time of watching the dancers hold and swing them around in a rather cavalier manner to figure out that they can’t be. It would have been way cooler if they had danced with real cacti, but health and safety probably wouldn’t allow it. And the cacti might not survive it, either.

The Urb-it office is on the seventh floor, with grand views over the roofs and squares of central Stockholm.

First thing in the morning, walking up all seven floors is sometimes a struggle. I arrive huffing and puffing, and sometimes a bit dizzy. Sometimes I even take the lift.

After lunch it’s like it’s a whole different set of stairs. Or a whole different me, I guess. I’m fairly racing up the stairs, taking them two at a time without any particular effort.

Early mornings are not my thing. My body needs hours to properly wake up.

Nysse likes to sleep on the heated floor in the hallway.

The grassier parts of the lawn are muddy and brown, but the mossy patches are fluffy and green all year round. Moss in lawn is, like, the best thing.

Continuing to walk the Stockholm Signature Trail. About 22 km around Brunnsviken and then circling the entire northern side of Norra Djurgården.

This walk goes through the Royal National City Park of Djurgården, with everything from royal parks to protected wilderness areas. I’ve seen bits and pieces of it before, but many parts were new to me. Several areas that I previously could only roughly locate on a map, and only make my way there by metro, now became real. My mental map of north-eastern Stockholm went from disjointed patches into a coherent whole.

The first few kilometres wended through the grounds of Ulriksdal palace, and that was followed by the park around the royal palace of Haga, the residence of the crown princess.

At Ulriksdal I found my old friend Igelbäcken, the little brook I followed during last week’s walk. Apparently it goes all the way to Brunnsviken.

In between the parks, the city with its motorways and shiny office blocks was never far away.

Long stretches of the trail followed the water’s edge. Like the previous sections, none of it was specifically marked – the trail is an agglomeration of random pieces of existing paths. This section was unusually easy to follow, because much of the time I just kept following the shoreline. It was nice not to have to look at the digital map all the time and just enjoy the views.

The botanical garden at Bergianska was not at its best on a snowless day in February. Then again, not much is.

Towards the end of the walk, behind Stockholm Stadion, I learned that there is also an equestrian stadium at Djurgården, as well as an archery field, and a ski jump tower. I had no idea. And a few hundred metres later on, there were boggy forests and muddy, wild streams. The walk was truly a study in contrasts.