One unalloyed benefit of the divorce for me is improved sleep quality. I literally haven’t slept this well in decades.

Eric snores. Has snored for years, and not done anything about it. I on the other hand have been a light sleeper since Ingrid was born – the gentle click of the bedroom door handle used to be enough to wake me when the kids were toddlers. Probably still is. Instinctually I know that I am needed, so I wake up.

I used to bulk buy earplugs to try and deal with the snoring. A little bowl for my earplugs was a permanent fixture on the bedside shelf, next to a lamp and an alarm clock. It worked so-so. Inevitably my ears were quite close to the source of the noise. I just got used to the fact that it could take me over an hour to fall into proper sleep.

No more! I go to bed, and I fall asleep. I wake up in the morning, and I am well rested despite spending fewer hours in bed than ever.

For a few years, until recently, I didn’t use an alarm – I just woke naturally some time between 7 and 8. Early enough to get to work at a reasonable time. Now I have an alarm set for 7:00 every morning. On weekdays I need to get up to wake Adrian, but I have the alarm on weekends, too. It works well for me to get up at the same time every day. (He is of course absolutely able to get up on his own, but school mornings are dreary enough without having to go through them all alone, so I get up to keep him company.) Ingrid’s hours vary, with work and school, so she manages her own wakings.

It didn’t take long for Nysse to figure out what the morning alarm means. Breakfast!

I feel guilty for leaving him alone as long and as often as I do these days, so I keep the bedroom door ajar for him in case he wants company at night. Sometimes he does, and he comes and sleeps next to me or on my legs. That also means that he has access to me in the morning. He used to come and bother me about breakfast – mrouwing in my ear and nosing at my face – at whatever hour he woke, but now he knows that it’s pointless. The moment the alarm goes off, though, he’s in there.

Sometime back in early December I calculated that the dark season would end for me mid-February. The sun would be up in Stockholm by 7:30, which is about the time I try to leave for work, and wouldn’t go down until 16:30, so I’d catch the tail end of daylight at the end of the working day.

I’ve been looking forward to that day since then. We’ve still got a week to go, but it’s almost here! And we’re gaining 5 minutes of daylight every day.

Today the street lights were still on when I was approaching the office, but it actually didn’t feel that dark.

I have a plan now. One “Helen standard length” of embroidery floss per session. One session per evening (unless I’m away) but I can do two per day on weekends.

No more and no less. I want a predictable rhythm, and I don’t want to overdo it one day and then not want to pick up the work the next day. A HSL of DMC embroidery floss yields about 3 square centimetres of embroidered surface. I have about 90 cm² of trees left, which will take me a month at this pace. Then I’ll have a few weeks to fill in the glimpses of street and car and railroad, and the dark reflections of the trees in the water. Those will both be less dense and far less monotonous than the trees and should hopefully go faster. (Original image here.)

For the first time I am thinking about efficiency while embroidering. What can I do to make the stitch from back to front in the blind, without having to turn over the fabric and watch what I’m doing. How can I reduce strain on the left wrist, which has the less fun and more tiring task of holding the work in place.

Most venues have equal numbers of female and male bathrooms, despite women on average needing longer time in there. Theatres, concert halls, airports – everywhere women have to queue while men get to just walk in and get their business done.

I don’t quite know what I feel about this ex-female, temporarily de-gendered bathroom at the Lustikulla conference venue. Obviously men dominate the audience at a conference for software developers. It makes sense from a practical point of view to share equally and keep the queues short, and in general I’m absolutely for unisex bathrooms. On the other hand, it would have been rather nice to, for once, have been in the privileged group.

Went to Swetugg, a .NET-themed conference. AI is the dominant theme, like last year, but now it was less about the foundations of how it works and more about how you can design a solution that incorporates AI, or the things you need to be concerned with when shipping it to production.

One of the most interesting and inspiring sessions was by Mads Torgersen, the Program Manager at Microsoft for the C# language (which is what I work with). He talked about possible upcoming new language features and the thinking behind them, as well as some of the trade-offs they’re discussing. How OK is it to break existing code for 1% of language users, in order to deliver the best version of a new feature to 100% of them?

C# has existed for so many years that the changes now can only be relatively small, a bit of sugar on top of the cake we already have. But I’m still rather excited about some of them.

It was also just really interesting to hear about the process, which is very open, with discussion documents available on Github. Designing an entire programming language sounds like such a faraway, impossible thing, distant magic – and here is an entirely normal human being who does just that.

On the one hand, during the weeks when the kids are with Eric, I have more free time than ever. I could go out to concerts or jazz clubs or all sorts of places.

On the other hand, for those weeks I am the only person taking care of Nysse. If I’m gone from early morning to late night, he’s going to be alone and hungry and cold. (I’ve tried waiting around in the mornings to see if he’ll come in again after I let him out after his breakfast, but he doesn’t.) So I feel less guilty if I book an evening activity for when Ingrid and Adrian are staying with me, even though I am then leaving them alone. Poor Nysse got the short end of the stick in the divorce.

Half an hour of morning sun today, which both Nysse and I made sure to catch.

Happy forty-seven and a half to me!

For my birthday this summer I wanted to go out to have a nice restaurant brunch. I was going to wait until September so the brunch places in the city would open again after the summer. But then it was the kids’ birthdays, and the divorce, and Christmas, and more divorce, and it never happened.

Today Ingrid, Adrian and I finally went for my birthday brunch at Kelp, a very local restaurant, just five minutes’ walk from home. We all ended up ordering the same things: scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, single-variety Swedish apple juice, and French toast with a home-made berry compote. And then, while Ingrid and I were bemoaning how full we were, another serving of French toast for Adrian, who is in that teenage bottomless phase. Very nice.