A low-key New Year’s celebration, as usual. Salmon stew with cream and saffron for dinner. (With kohlrabi instead of fennel because, shockingly, the supermarket was all out of fresh fennel.) And an experimental dessert, which tasted absolutely delicious, even though parts of the recipe didn’t work out as expected. (ICA’s whipped panna cotta with marinated raspberries and an oat crunch.)

Ingrid went off after dinner to celebrate with her friends, and my mum also left before midnight in order to drive home safely before the promised snow storm. With just Eric, Adrian and myself, the mood wasn’t quite as celebratory. We watched Pulp Fiction – Adrian has been interested in older movies recently – and that was that.

The snow storm wasn’t too bad around midnight, but visibility was crap. We didn’t bother going up on the roof, which we normally do for the great views, because there wouldn’t be any views anyway. Instead we walked to a nearby football field, hoping that people around it might use it to fire off their fireworks. A few did. But a lot of the time we could hear the cracks and booms but not see anything through the snow and the low-hanging clouds. It was like there were invisible ghost fireworks all around us.

Guess what we had today? Sunlight! Clear skies from morning till evening.

I went for a long walk around northern Järvafältet, mostly following the Järvaleden trail. Säbysjön to Översjön to Fäboda to Väsby gård to Hägerstalund and back to Säbysjön. Four and a half hours with barely a pause (because it’s cold to sit still in this weather) so maybe 18 km?

The temperatures have been around zero for a while. The ground was frozen in the shadier places that the sun doesn’t reach at all, and a bit muddy in sunnier spots. Even then, it was mostly just a thin layer of mud at the top and decently firm, frozen ground beneath it. Which was good, because I went out in my barefoot shoes, which are barely more than socks with a rubber sole and definitely not waterproof. But I managed to keep my feet dry.

Some of the smaller streams and ponds were covered in a thin layer of ice, but overall this winter is not wintering.

Last year I could go out skiing on Järvafältet in December. I know I skied on the ice on lake Översjön. This year there’s no ice in sight.

The woods near Hägerstalund look less like they’d harbour elves this time of the year, but I could imagine trolls, or ogres, I guess.

I bought a new old sewing machine, but haven’t actually tried using it until now. Today Ingrid wanted to hem a pair of jeans, and I realized I didn’t even know how to thread the machine.

Just winging it based on past experience didn’t work. Compared to Eric’s old Bernina, nothing quite works the same. But – thank goodness for the Internet – I could buy a PDF scan of the original user’s manual for 75 SEK, and that finally got me sorted.

I got nice and tidy seams with ordinary sewing thread, but didn’t manage to get the tension right with a thicker polyester thread, no matter how I adjusted it. The top thread was always too loose. Turning the tension knob towards “looser” made it noticeably worse, but tightening did not make it better. Maybe it would work better with a thicker fabric to match the thick thread?

Anyway, getting a handle on the basics took me so long that Ingrid had already finished hand-seaming her jeans hems. I guess I’ll just stick to normal thread and normal fabric to begin with, and tackle this again later if a need arises.

Nysse, in a cherry tree, asserting his territory against a magpie.

I’ve been thinking of seeing I Follow the Sun at Artipelag since the summer. Was hoping that Ingrid would find time to join me, but she’s been working at least one day every weekend, so I ended up going on my own.

This was my first time at Artipelag. With a new museum, you never know what you’ll get. I came fully prepared for a small provincial art show with a couple of big-name works padded out with unknowns, and was blow away by the whole exhibition. I’ve really been missing out!

The exhibition was a lot larger than I had hoped for. There were works of Fernand Léger, Emil Nolde, Carl Larsson, Ai Weiwei, etc, and beautiful works of contemporary Nordic artists. No actual Van Goghs, which is understandable. I read in the book accompanying the exhibition that the concept for the exhibition had started years ago with the idea of borrowing Van Gogh’s paintings, but withered away when it turned out to be impossible. The museum staff pivoted and made something different happen instead.

But his paintings are the quintessential images of sunflowers, impossible to avoid. They’re on jigsaw puzzles, mouse pads, mugs, aprons, shopping bags, towels, and everything else you can imagine. I wonder what he would say about how his works have been used.

And he was here as well, in the shape of Vik Muniz’s works. He has recreated Van Gogh’s works with pieces of coloured paper. You’re looking at a digital copy of my photo of a print of a photo of a recreation of a painting. How many layers of indirection is that?

There were very soft, romantic sunflowers, and harsh, stylized sunflowers. (Clara Gesang-Gottoft and Tal R.)

There were works by artists who have made sunflowers their “thing”, and by others who have said that flowers are the worst thing you could possibly paint but then couldn’t help themselves after all.

There were sunflowers carrying a heavy load of symbolism, and sunflowers reduced to abstract shapes. (Carl Larsson and Fernand Léger.)

There were colourist sunflowers and pointillist sunflowers and naïve sunflowers.

I loved these simple ink paintings by Anna Bjerger.

There were also photographs. What struck me about those was their timelessness. A photograph of a sunflower from 1920 is mostly indistinguishable from one taken in 2020.

Eric is packing for his move, and there are moving boxes in half the rooms, and I feel like I’m in the way wherever I am, while in reality of course it’s the boxes being in the way. And I just feel so done with this. I am counting down days until this is over. Except there is no fixed date, it’s “just after New Year’s”, so I don’t even know.

I try to read or knit and I keep getting interrupted. I want to use the Christmas break to do something actually relaxing or fun, but there is no room for fun and no peace and quiet to be had, so this feels like the worst and most wasted Christmas break ever. And it’s +8°C and a drizzle out there, to top it all off.

I am breathing my way through the days. I am annoyed by things that would normally not bother me the least, and I resent the heck out of the situation.

What a difference love makes. And how obvious it is that love is an active choice more than a feeling that just happens. When I actively chose to love Eric, if there was some little thing he did that could be perceived as annoying, I could decide to not view it as such. I loved him, and he had his foibles, and ignoring those foibles was a part of loving him. And they truly did not annoy me, because in the grand scheme of things, they were nothing. Leaves the toilet lid up when flushing? Puts apples in the fruit bowl without rinsing them? Cuts up everything on his dinner plate so he can shovel it all up with just a fork? It was nothing.

Now it is not nothing.

Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera. Technically a musical, which is nice, because it made the whole thing sound more pop-culture-ish and got the kids to join, but really, what makes this a musical rather than an opera?

I was most impressed by the work of the dialect coach, because Ms Lovett sounded as British as could be, and so did the others.

Ingrid building her new computer.

For both Ingrid and Adrian, computer games is their main hobby, so a second gaming computer each was more or less a must-have for their split living situation, on par with a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. You can’t cart gaming computers, monitors etc back and forth every week.

It’s Christmas Eve!

Knowing Nysse and his habit of attacking wrapped-up gifts, with all their play-friendly paper and ribbons and shiny bits, we didn’t leave the gifts out overnight. But when he’d had his breakfast and gone out, we put the gifts under the tree. He managed to attack one of them – luckily the one where the inner layer was a sturdy cardboard tube, and thus hard to damage and easy to re-wrap – but after that I kept my eye on him all the time and chased him away twice, after which he was almost afraid of even going near the tree, so there was no more damage.

Lunch was devilled eggs, pickled herring of three kinds (flavoured with blackcurrant, apple and curry, and mustard, respectively) and a citrus and gravad lax salad. Plus potatoes and vörtbröd, a Swedish Christmas bread.

Ingrid piped and decorated the eggs, and folded the napkins.

The citrus and salmon salad was a new entry on the menu. Tasted good!

Then it was time for presents. With everybody so grown-up, there’s a lot less cheering and jumping up and down than there used to be!

Nysse, when he woke up, attacked the rolled-up Santa hats as if they were fluffy little animals, and for some reason really enjoyed licking the little olive wood bowl that I gave to Eric.

Ingrid and I went grocery shopping for all the Christmas meals we’ll be having tomorrow. Herring and gravad lax and brussel sprouts and potatoes and all that.

I always mix up the Stora Coop shops near us. I know that one of them has a deli counter that sells their own pickled herrings, but I forget which one it is. (Note to future self: it’s Coop Bromma Blocks.) This year, without a helpful note from past me, we started at Coop Vinsta. While it didn’t have the good herring, it had plenty of parking space and almost no queues, so it was rather nice to get the bulk of the shopping out of the way here. Then we headed to Coop Bromma Blocks for herring. And for julmust, because Coop Vinsta didn’t have the good stuff there, either.

Neither did the other Coop, as we discovered. Usually they all have several brands, sugary and sugar-free, large bottles and multi-packs of small bottles, but this year it was just this single variety, and that was that. We thought we must have walked past them, so we searched, even asked the staff, but no, that was it. Ingrid remembered seeing at least the sugar-free kind (which she prefers) at our local, small Coop, so we ended up going there as well, and finally got the julmust we wanted.

None of the three Coop supermarkets had cranberries, though, and neither did our local ICA. Some years ago I know I bought fresh American cranberries at one of the large Coop supermarkets, and then after that at least there were frozen Swedish ones. (Different species, and they behave differently when cooked, but they taste similar enough.) But I guess there’s not enough demand. We’ll have to make do with some kind of lingonberry-based sauce instead.