Continuing on my purge journey, I am most of the way through our two filing cabinets.

The label on that folder says “1 year of bills” which indicates the original intent, but not the current reality. Firstly, it has multiplied from one folder into three – whenever one filled up, a new one just got added behind it. It has bills going back to when we still lived in London. Other folders have even more ancient content, such as phone contracts from 2001, and Eric’s rental agreements from before we even met. Thirty-year-old paperwork!

Eric was more fond than me of keeping paper copies of things. The utilities and services I had signed up for, I paid by e-invoice or automatic payment; the ones he signed up for, we got paper bills for – and they all ended up in the folders. But in the end, when push came to shove as he moved out, very little of it was important enough to bring with him.

Now the vast majority of all of it is going out. I threw out two large paper bags full of old papers today – around 20 kg and thousands of pages.

With the archives much reduced in volume, I can fit what’s left into one of the filing cabinets and get rid of the other one. That cabinet has been tucked away in one of the built-in wardrobes, which will then have room for my clothes instead, so I can sell or give away the free-standing wardrobe in the bedroom, which will in turn let me rearrange the rest of the furniture and figure out what kind of new bed will fit the new space. It’s a whole chain.

This summer I was gifted ~850 g of fine, white wool yarn. Since there’s so much of it, and it’s so elegantly fine and white, I had been thinking that it would make a lovely dress. Combined with some other colour so it doesn’t become a wedding dress – maybe knit sideways, with contrasting vertical stripes.

Then I made a gauge swatch, and the yarn turned out to be really stiff. Like, my gauge swatches stand up on their own, from just the natural curl of the knit fabric. It has no drape whatsoever. So a dress doesn’t seem like the best idea; it would look like cardboard.

Now I have a conundrum. How do I best use a yarn like this? Add mohair to give it some body and fluff? Go up in needle size to get a softer fabric and accept that it will be a bit see-through? Knit a sculpture instead of a garment?

A crisp, sunny day, with a dusting of fresh snow on the ground. It’s all bound to be replaced by gray skies and slush soon, I’m sure, so I hurried out.

Literally hurried: we had originally made entirely different plans for today, but Ingrid was feeling quite unwell, so this was a last minute idea, leaving me no time to pack or plan. Järvafältet nature reserve is my go-to place for a quick outing, and that’s where I ended up today as well.

There used to be a bird-watchers’ platform very close Säby gård, but it was torn down years ago. Too costly to repair, maybe. Now the only thing left of it is an odd dead-end stump of a path that goes very near the lake but stops just before, with a marshy wooded area in the way of a proper lake view.

With the ground all frozen firm, I skirted the trees and got all the way to the lake shore. The lake was under a thick layer of ice, and there were tracks going into the distance. Someone had also hacked into the ice in one place and the gouge was a good 7 cm deep, with no sign of getting through. Solid enough for me, so off I went on the ice.

I followed the tracks of two humans with a dog. A little bit away there were tracks of one skater and one skier. And here and there, going off in totally different directions: a hare, a fox, a deer, some unknown small creature. The deer went straight across. The dog followed the tracks of the unknown creature for a little bit, before getting called back.

I swung back along the other side of the long lake. Now there were two humans but no dog. The skater and skier were closer to the middle of the lake.

The circuit around the lake didn’t take me very long, maybe an hour and a half. Had I been walking on an ordinary path, I’d maybe have looked at the clock and decided to continue in some other direction. But this circuit felt so perfectly complete in and of itself that following it with something else would have been wrong, so that was that.

When I started handling my shiny new pot I immediately noticed that it was all sticky. Little specks of newspaper from the unpacking were sticking to the surface, and it left a waxy residue on my hands. And it had a kind of weird, unpleasant smell. Seems like the previous owner didn’t know how to properly season it. Could be the reason why they sold it. I know I wouldn’t enjoy using a pot that felt like that. In fact I didn’t want it anywhere near my food in the state it was in.

A quick, vigorous scrubbing will fix it, right? So I scrubbed. First with soapy steel wool. Then I upgraded to a coarser stainless steel scrubber. The stickiness just would not come off. When I’d been at it for nearly an hour and was running out of steel wool, I gave up and switched to 60-grit sandpaper and that finally did the trick. It no longer feels icky to the touch. But the cast iron lost much of the seasoning along the way – some spots look like we’re almost down to raw iron.

I’ve never tried seasoning a pot from such a raw state; I’ve only re-seasoned a well cared-for pot that just needed a touch-up. I hope I don’t end up with a similar sticky mess as before. My attempts will have to wait a few days, though, for the temperature outside to go up and the electricity price to go down.

We’ve barely seen any birds at the feeder this year. And it’s not that the birds are there but we’re not, so we just don’t see them. Last time I filled up the feeder was just after New Year’s, and it’s still more than half full.

Too warm, too little snow? First hints of an ecosystem collapse? Better offerings elsewhere?

I scored a Skeppshult pot!

Our old cast iron pot was a gift from Eric’s sister, so it went with him when he moved out. We had it for so many years that I’ve actually forgotten what the occasion was for the gift. Was it for our wedding? Or even earlier, when we moved in together?

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for a new one for a while, because I miss it all the time. Or rather, not a new one – they’re so expensive that I decided I’d rather wait for a used pot to turn up than just order one.

I was just getting to the point where I was considering other, cheaper brands, or maybe buying an enamelled one, or maybe actually buying a brand new one after all… and then two 4-litre Skeppshult pots turned up independently on Tradera within days of each other, and I got one of them at a total steal. And it even had the lid in perfect condition, which isn’t always the case. The pot itself can be restored if it hasn’t been properly cared for, but there’s nothing you can do for a chipped glass lid.

Today I learned that not all frost on plants is hoar frost. Some of it is rime ice.

Morning sun over the bay at Liljeholmen. And me.

Spånga scout club annual general meeting. An hour and a half of the kind of unexciting formality that is nevertheless absolutely necessary for democracy: approving the profit and loss statement and balance sheet, electing new board members, voting on a budget. I’m continuing in my role as (unelected) accounting assistant. I’d go nuts if I had to sit in regular board meetings and debate or spearhead projects, but I am happy to contribute in this kind of routine, introverted way.

Spånga scout club is one of the largest in Sweden (someone mentioned we might be #3?) so keeping the ship going is a fair bit of work. My role didn’t even exist before I took it on: the (elected) treasurer used to do alone what is now split between three people. Now we have one treasurer who thinks about finances on a strategic level and sits on the board, one accounting assistant (me) who does the day-to-day grunt work of accounting and paying bills, and one person who deals with applying for various state and local grants to keep us afloat.

I’ve had the same analogue paper-based organizer since 2006. If it was a human, it would be an adult now.

It’s literally the same sheets of cardboard as I started out with, getting slightly worn around the edges now. Each one has a small sticky note with a title at the bottom left, and even several of those survived until very recently. The oldest two categories are the original ones from the Getting Things Done method: “Actions” for general to do items, and “Projects” for larger items, which yield a stream of smaller steps that go into “actions”. Over time I’ve added “Info/think” for tasks where I need to either make a decision or find information to make a decision, and “Buy” for things to buy.

More recently I allocated one column of a sheet solely to things to “Clean out”.

Stuff tends to accumulate. The house is large enough that we could just let it do so. Sorting out unnecessary stuff was never a high enough priority for us to take time together to do it. Now that decisions only involve a single person, it’s going to be a lot faster. And I have tons of free time every other week.

I’ve only just started with the easiest ones. The closet with the least stuff in it; the laundry room; the hat and mitten storage. It looks like this can keep me busy for months.