Commuter train schedules have been unusually erratic for the last couple of months, because of staff shortages. I don’t understand how staff shortages can come out of nowhere and stay for months, but whatever.

Now the train company has decided that trains no longer need two members of staff, and a driver can do the job without a conductors. Drivers vehemently disagree and say that it is unsafe. If anything were to happen, they would be alone with no help or support. I can understand their point of view. Imagine being involved in an accident, for example – and then, while still in shock, being solely responsible for upwards of 2000 passengers.

It’s gotten to the point where the drivers have gone on a three-day wildcat strike. Spånga is located right on a train line, but far from the tube lines – which is great most of the time, but not so much when the trains don’t run. Spånga to Sundbyberg (the next station towards the city) takes 5 minutes by train, but 25 by a zig-zaggy combination of bus and tube via either Rissne or Tensta.

I worked from home yesterday and the day before, but didn’t want to miss the tretton37 lunch today. For the way home I picked another tube + bus combo, via Brommaplan. The next 117 bus from Brommaplan to Spånga was a shortened route that stopped earlier, and instead of waiting for the next one, I walked the last kilometre and a half. It was nice.

Every spring, for about a week or two, we get ants in the house. They wake up because it’s spring, but don’t quite find enough food outside yet, so they come in to look for more. As soon as the ground comes to life with whatever they eat, they leave our kitchen alone again.

During that week or two, though, they can be quite annoying. We have to make sure to not leave any overripe fruit in the fruit bowl, and to keep the food compost inaccessible.

I’m pretty inured to the ants and just squish them when I find them and flush them down the drain. The kids both find the ants kind of disgusting, and complain a bit. And then one of them leaves half an apple on the kitchen counter, and is surprised when there are more ants the next morning. It’s like they sometimes just turn off their logical thinking abilities.

The Venus flytrap isn’t looking quite as lush and happy as last year, but it’s sending out flower stalks and making new leaves.

Just a piece of downy fluff that I saw on the garden stairs.

Vårsalongen, “The Spring Salon”, is an annual art event where anyone in Sweden can send in their works to be considered for inclusion. The result is always eclectic and varied. The works range from paintings, drawings and sculpture to video installations, and more. This year all the works can be seen online.

I was happy to see quite a few pieces of textile art, even though I didn’t particularly like any one of them. Another memorable works this year was Vintern 2021/22 by Mårten the dog, which consisted of all the gloves and mittens that the artist had carried home from his walks during one season.

Ingrid is a budding artist and it wasn’t hard to convince her to come with us, and Eric is always up for art exhibitions. Adrian was perhaps a bit less enthusiastic, but I was pretty sure even he would enjoy it. The exhibition is so democratic and relatable – there’s even a “Young Spring Salon” section for sixteen to eighteen-year-olds – that there’s always something for everyone.

Predictably, Adrian enjoyed the sculptures the most. When given a choice, he always prefers to work three-dimensionally, whether with paper or clay or Legos.

Liljevalchs was recently expanded and now has several new galleries which I hadn’t visited before. The upstairs ones had amazing ceilings.

Those galleries currently exhibited works by Jockum Nordström, whose graphical works I didn’t find particularly interesting. But his mobile sculptures were nice: agglomerations of objects and pieces of wood, with a weight attached to a rotating arm of metal wire, and something noise-making for that weight to hit on each pass around the circle: a zither, or a broken violin, or a bicycle bell.

Afterwards we had lunch at Liljevalchs’ new vegetarian restaurant. The food wasn’t bad but they were badly understaffed so we waited a long time for our food, only to find out that they had lost half of our order, so half of us had to re-order and wait again.

The street is all dug up for engineering works, to prepare the ground for a new apartment block to be built just behind the blocked-off area. It looks empty now but there used to be a building there, a couple of stories high. It housed a cinema a long time ago, I’ve read, but had been converted to a Pentecostal church by the time we moved to Spånga.

The Sortera logo at the far end of a corridor, and a glass meeting room wall.

Nysse is in raptures about the spring. He’s out all day, playing with his friend Morris or watching birds. He comes in only to eat and sleep, and does both with more vigour than he’s shown all winter, and soon goes out again. He’s also shedding like crazy.

Here he is, enjoying the sun to the max, like a little cat rag.

Moped season has started! And it has involved a lot of disassembly, fixing, re-assembly, re-disassembly and re-fixing, to get the thing to run. Good thing Ingrid has lots of motor-interested friends, including one who goes to a specialized motor sports high school, to help her.

The pink shoots of bleeding hearts.