My conclusion from the Friday evening series of new classical music is that modern classical music is often too modern for me. My brain can’t find anything there to hold on to and it just feels like shapeless sounds.

Today’s concert was for the unusual combination of cello and accordion. They alternated between the very old (music by Hildegard von Bingen) and the very new (Jouni Kaipainen, Britta Byström, Sofia Gubajdulina). The very old was excellent; the very new was too much.

This is not a series I will be renewing for the next season.

It must be coming up to a year now that I’ve been busy with the Stockholm embroidery. Time to get it done. We have a weekend embroidery workshop planned for the end of March, and my goal now is to finish it before then so that I can finally do something else.

High school students in Sweden write a diploma essay, a kind of a research project, during their third year. It follows an academic process, so part of the work involves disputation of someone else’s work. Ingrid is reading through someone’s essay and has strong opinions about their subpar writing skills, and how much harder that makes it to read and understand the essay. Using fancy words to sound sophisticated while not really understanding those words; being sloppy with commas; losing track of where your sentence construction was going. I tell her to pity her poor teachers who have to read this kind of writing all the time.

I’m still clinging to the tretton37 backpack. Now that I’m working for another consultancy, it would be too weird to keep using tretton37-branded gear… so I anonymized it. The logo was only glued on, and after more than seven years, easy to rip off. There’s just this vague outline left. Symbolic, isn’t it?

Cleaned out and sorted through Adrian’s hat and glove basket in the hall. For some reason I’ve been assuming that he would do it himself, but clearly it doesn’t bother him that half the space in it is taken up by things he has outgrown.

Well, it bothers me, so I did it for him.

There were hats in there that are so small he literally can’t have worn them since he was in pre-school. The fingerless gloves I made for him in 2017. And underneath the too-small hats and scarves, there was a pile of literal junk. It was like looking through a window into an earlier time.

Several safety reflectors. Mitten clips, which I had forgotten were even a thing. Stones, of course, and sticks and chestnuts. A broken balloon. A marble, a bread bag tie, and a broken pencil.

At some point in time, each of these things was important enough for him to put in the basket.

I went to a local yarn shop. The visit did not go as planned.

My one goal was to buy a soft mid-weight yarn for a hat in a neutral-ish colour. Maybe like a nice hand-dyed grey or beige. Maybe they’d have something like the Malabrigo Rios I used for a pair of scarves but in a more subdued colourway.

(I need a hat to pair with my red leather jacket. My spring/autumn hat is red, and my gloves are red, and the overall impression of them all together is just way too red, so I need to break it up. And also, it is crazy that I am wearing my spring/autumn outerwear in January.)

Did I buy anything like that? Not at all. I came home with almost the opposite. Rosarios 4 Bulky Light Print is super bulky (not mid-weight) and definitely not a neutral colour. But it was so soft and I loved the colour so much.

I’ve never used a yarn even close to this kind of weight. You can’t really get a feel for it from the photo, I think – should have included a banana for scale. The hole in the middle of the knitting is the size of my fist, and each stitch is about the size of the nail of my little finger. Huge!

Using this yarn feels very different than my usual projects. It goes very fast, but also requires a whole other kind of attention than my usual knits; not something I could do while reading, for example. It’s nice to try something new! And I’ll get a hat out of it that definitely won’t be red. It remains to be seen whether I can wear it with the red jacket; it might be a bit too much. The sewing & crafts fair is coming up in a month, hopefully I’ll find an actual mid-weight hand-dyed grey yarn there.

I also bought material for a pair of felted slippers. I’ve never knitted anything with the intention of felting it, so that will also be entirely new.

I really was going to try and not spend money on yet another pair of winter boots. But when my feet literally started cramping in the old ones, I grit my teeth and started looking for barefoot winter boots, expecting it to be a painful, drawn-out process.

I’m picky. I wear skirts and dresses so I want tallish boots; I like my footwear to look elegant rather than sporty or space-agey (although I’ve been known to make exceptions); I’ve got thick calves so I need lacing and not just a zipper.

To my very pleasant surprise, I managed to find a pair that I’m happy with already on my second attempt.

The first pair looked like clown shoes on my feet. Literal centimetres of space left over on each side of the front of the foot. When I buy mainstream shoes – although I guess I’m now at “when I used to buy mainstream shoes” – I always asked for the widest model they had. With barefoot shoes, as I have now learned, I should definitely not do that. There are shoes for way wider feet than mine.

The second pair are lovely. Nice colour, soft soles, natural materials, lightweight. They weigh about 60% as much as my old ones.

With mainstream footwear, I used to be happy if the shoes didn’t straight-up hurt my feet. But it was always a relief to take them off. When I put these on, I felt like I could just keep them on around the house all day, because why not?

This was a very international experience. Free movement of goods FTW! There are a few web shops in Sweden for barefoot shoes, but there’s not a lot to choose from. The first pair I ordered from the Czech Republic; these came from bLifestyle in Germany.

I am almost but not quite coming down with a cold. The symptoms never went further than a scratchy throat, chills, and tiredness. Feeling better today than yesterday so I’m pretty sure that was that.

I’m still cold, though. I don’t like drinking tea or coffee, and hot chocolate is too sweet, so I warmed myself with a hot glass of low-alcohol glögg. It’s traditionally a Christmas drink in Sweden, but I’m not Swedish enough to care about that and can happily drink glögg all the way to February.

Not being used to hot drinks, I need to be careful about the temperature of my drink. Coffee drinkers are sometimes like fire swallowers – how they don’t damage their mouths, I have no idea. There’s a narrow range of temperature where it’s hot enough to warm me, but not hot enough to burn me. Hence my improvised glass cosy, to keep it in that range.

Immediately I thought – I should knit a proper one! No, I should not. I would use it literally once or twice a year at most. A sock is a much better solution.

The car and taking care of it was always Eric’s thing. Now that I’m newly independent, I’m learning all sorts of new things and gaining life skills. I have replaced wiper blades (front and rear) for the first time in my life, and, today, seen what a car inspection looks like.

Verdict: the styrleder (Google says tie rods?) are worn out on both sides and need replacing. Good to know, I guess.

Ingrid works extra at Spånga konditori, a local café-patisserie-bakery. When she works the closing shift, she brings home all sorts of leftovers. Sourdough bread that’s too old to sell; buns that are too misshapen or have been baked slightly too dark; cakes that to my eye have nothing wrong with them at all but for some reason are unsellable. Tons more stuff gets simply thrown out.

I take a sourdough loaf to work on most Mondays and drop it off in the lunch room. Sometimes Ingrid drives round to a bunch of her friends to deliver day-old pastries. Sometimes the friends are narrow-minded philistines and say no to delicious chocolate and almond pastries, because they’ve never eaten those particular ones before, and I get take a whole box of them to serve for fika at Sortera.

Sometimes I get fancy pastries all to myself. This weekend I got a mini lime pie, a vegan brownie, and a mango/passion fruit pastry. They were all absolutely delicious.