Finally finishing the sweater I started in March. The last little bits are taking forever.

Out of curiosity I logged the time I spent on making this sweater. People showing off their knitted objects on Reddit sometimes say how long it took them to make the thing, and I realized that I really have no idea. Now I do! The first attempt – that I ripped up – took 23 hours. The second one that actually led to a finished sweater took 67 hours. I may have forgotten to log some small bits, so say a round seventy hours all in.

The last couple of weeks’ work hasn’t felt inspiring, just redoing this and redoing that and weaving in ends, so I’m not feeling much of a sense of accomplishment right now. And it’s not the season for woollen sweaters now, anyway. I’m close to just packing it away until November and forgetting about it.

Nysse’s tail on the front of a newspaper.

Newspapers, as we all know, are prime cat bed material.

Two more dresses based on the same basic pattern as the first one, gives me a whole three everyday summer dresses.

I tweaked the pattern slightly each time, so the dresses got closer and closer to what I like. Slightly slimmer around the upper body; slightly lower neckline. Too bad I don’t need any more, now that I’ve gotten the pattern tweaked the way I want.

Adrian and Ingrid both wanted to be involved in the plant shopping, so we ended up with perhaps a less coherent planting than I usually do. I picked some, Adrian picked some, Ingrid picked some… And some of the plants I had in mind were out of stock at Ulriksdal, so I had to replace them.

Ingrid helped me with the grouping and layout, and then we went back to get more ground cover plants to fill in the gaps.

I’ve always wanted a hellebore in the garden, and now circumstances came together to give me one: I have a shade planting that I’ll be passing daily – and the plant nursery was advertising large, home-grown hellebores.

tretton37 moved to new premises, because we outgrew the old ones. Especially the meeting rooms, of which there was a constant shortage. The new place seems to have plenty more.

We’re in the Waterfront building, almost on top of the train station. Which makes for boring views of station roofs and train yards, but for an incredibly efficient commute.

I can’t go so far to say that I’m excited about the move – I haven’t been spending much time in the tretton37 office recently – but it does look nice.

Cherry blossoms against a cloudy sky.

Nysse has rediscovered the birdhouse outside the kitchen window. He climbed on top of it and wouldn’t leave. Not a behaviour I want him to get comfortable with, so I poked him with a broom until he jumped off. When he went there again, Eric sprayed him with water.

Unfortunately, his displeased jump-off was forceful enough to knock down the entire birdhouse. Fortunately, the inhabitants had all left. There were neither eggs nor birds in there.

Nysse’s climbing skills being what they are, there’s no cat-proof place to hang up the birdhouse. No tree branch is strong enough to support a bird house, but small enough to deter a cat. But we can hang it up more securely for next season, and maybe add a larger roof that will block him from reaching the opening.

The space to the right of the front stairs is complicated. If it was just a rectangular patch of ground, I’d have no trouble filling it – a few bushes, ground cover under them, perennials between and in front, maybe some spring-flowering bulbs here and there. But there is the access hatch to the crawlspace under the house, to begin with. We don’t need to get in there often, but we also cannot block it off completely. And there is the water tap, which needs to be even more accessible.

Ideally I’d have have something pretty and green growing in the entire space. But I don’t know of any shade-tolerant ground cover that would stand up to frequent trampling, so for the sake of practicality I’m putting paving stones in the parts where I think we’ll want to walk the most. Wall-to-wall (that is, house wall to retaining wall) in front of the tap, and a shallower bit in front of the hatch, that I’ll hide behind some greenery. To keep the overall impression natural, rather than sleek and paved, I’m leaving gaps here and there between the stones to fill in with ground covering plants.

Laying out irregularly shaped paving stones in an aesthetically pleasing way is hard. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, where each piece weighs several kilos. The balance between “pleasantly irregular” and “sloppy” was tricky. It took me three hours of work, and I was knackered by the end of it.

It’s wood anemone season, and the woods in Hägerstalund are always flooded with anemones. Ingrid and I went for an anemone walk in the spring sun.

It’s amazing how they carpet the whole ground.

I found a dead moth of some sort on the stovetop after cooking dinner. I imagine it got killed by the steam rising from the pots and pans. Sort of like a human paragliding over an active volcano, or over the reactor in Chernobyl.