Is there any more depressing weather you could have at Christmas? The skies are gray and the ground is wet and muddy, and half-frozen so the water can’t drain.

A Christmas day with my brother.

I picked him up by car in Uppsala as usual. What was not as usual was the thick slush coming down from the sky. I also hadn’t accounted for today being the first day of Christmas break and thus large crowds heading out of town to their cabins in the woods or wherever. The roads were slippery and full of snow and a lot more traffic than usual for 7:30 on a Saturday morning. The drive there and back usually takes me an hour and a half, but took two and a half today. For a good chunk of the way, we were all driving at 40 km/h behind a pair of snow ploughs.

Anyway, I managed to not become a statistic (and we saw no cars on the side of the road and no cars with sirens on) so all is good.

Then we baked. More lussebullar in all sorts of shapes, because after a while we all become bored with the traditional ones. There were lusse croissants and doodles and swirls and twists, and even a lusse snow lantern.

And then we made a batch of mince pies, too, because those are delicious and everyone should have access to mince pies at Christmas.

Visited Active Solution, my new employer, today for an intro session and to pick up my equipment. Time reporting, intranet, door tags, here are the office supplies, here’s the printer, etc etc.

My new computer threw a tantrum during the setup phase and got sent back to IT support, so I didn’t actually get access to any of these systems, but I did come home with a new phone. Same brand and series as the old phone, but four years newer and a slightly higher-end model.

It definitely wins over the old one in the “most camera lenses” category – as well as in “fewer smudgy fingerprints”. Samsung appears to have switched to a more sensible material for the phone body.

Reviews say the Samsung Galaxy S24 has a great camera, and I’m hoping that with the four lenses, this phone might replace my pocket camera for everyday use outside the house. (For any planned, more serious photography, I’ll still be using the Olympus, of course.) The little Sony camera I have is nine years old and some bits are starting to wear out. It would be nice if I didn’t have to buy a new one – and a lighter handbag wouldn’t hurt, either. My old phone (four years old) took decent photos in good light, but in low-light conditions the results were pretty horrible, and it had no optical zoom so any attempts at zooming in were likewise atrocious.

We celebrated the end of a great year with the developer team at Sortera. Dinner at a Bengali restaurant (Mowgli’s kök, delicious food, wide range of veggie options, indifferent service, 10/10 would recommend) and then indoor mini-golf.

I’m usually bad at hitting or throwing balls – with or without equipment – and making them go where they’re supposed to, but I finished in shared second place. I also had the most uneven performance of us all, being responsible for both the most holes-in-one and the group’s singular 7-pointer.

Here’s me hitting a hole-in-one at the last hole.

Christmas gifts all bought! Online shopping + one trip to IKEA. (If you’re one of the people hoping to receive a gift, don’t worry, there’s more outside the frame.)

I didn’t take a photo today, so here’s one from earlier, from when we actually had snow on the ground.

A bright-eyed little squirrel feeding from the bird feeder, using its tail to stay balanced.

We brought home a Christmas tree this weekend, and immediately it feels like Christmas is actually near.

As usual, the tree looks lovelier in real life than in a photo. When I am in the same room with it, it has just the right amount of glitter and bling on it – but in a photo, it still looks somewhat bare. Probably because I’m unconsciously comparing the photo to the over-decorated trees in stock photos, whereas the tree on its own has no such expectations to live up to.

It’s secured against tipping by climbing cats, as usual, and has no fragile ornaments on the lowest boughs. Nevertheless Nysse managed to knock down and break a plastic bauble on the first day.

Ingrid is practising for her upcoming driving test.

She started last autumn, took a break last winter, started it up again in spring, and has now been amping up the intensity during the fall. Eric and I have both been driving around with her for what is starting to feel (to all of us) like forever. She can drive, and has been a decent enough driver for a while already, but the tests are really nit-picky and you have to do everything perfectly to pass.

I’ve complained about the cost of international postage before, and it just keeps getting worse. In the five years since 2019, the price has increase by 70% – and another increase coming up in January will bring it up to over double what it was back then.

This is what you get when essential services are privatized and expected to “compete” on the market. We don’t expect the military to make a profit, or the road network, but somehow the postal service needs to.

Now I only have the golden-brown interiors of the sunflower blossoms left.

This is the first jigsaw puzzle where the “sky” is easier to finish than the motif itself. The sunflowers are all the same colour and have no distinguishing features, no lines. So it comes down to the shapes of the pieces – but also to the brushwork. I’m learning where van Gogh has slathered on the paint thickly, where his brushstrokes are long and even, and where the canvas peeks through.