We had a board game night with the team at Sortera. I was going to take photos of us playing, but forgot. Then I was going to take photos of us at dinner, but forgot. Too busy enjoying it.

We used to play a lot at home, but nowadays Ingrid and Adrian tend to be busy with their friends, and board games with me isn’t a priority. Tretton37 also had board game nights, but that and all other social events fell by the wayside long before the company went under. I’ve been missing board games – it was great to play again.

Dream On is a great warm-up game; everyone I’ve played it with has enjoyed it. The first round is always chaos, people throwing down random cards and then realizing the error of their ways in phase two. The same happened today – we got twice as many points in round two as in round one.

Mysterium is another perennial favourite. Such a well-designed game, and the vision cards always amaze me with their many layers of potential interpretation.

All the spring feeling we had this weekend is gone. We’re back to a few degrees above freezing, and the constant cloudy sky. Still, it’s not freezing, and it’s not raining, and there is daylight, so I have no good excuses for not cycling.

I need two clothes rails for my IKEA PAX wardrobes. They’ve been general storage closets for many years, but now I want to get rid of the large free-standing wardrobe in the middle of my bedroom and move all my clothes into the built-in wardrobes.

Choose a standard product from IKEA and you’ll have no trouble getting spare parts and replacements later, right? PAX wardrobes have existed for decades and they’re still there. But for some reason IKEA decided to abandon the standard 60 cm width at some point and left me somewhat stranded after all.

At least the fixtures and fittings and the holes for them are all still the same. I bought two clothes rails meant for the 75 cm wardrobe, and hopefully I can adapt them to the narrower width. Sawing off the rail is not too tricky, just tedious and noisy, but then there’s a small hole on one side of the rail that needs to fit a pin in the fastening mechanism, and that might be more challenging. I’m not there yet, though – first I need to borrow a drill somewhere.

I grew up with no particular skills in the DIY department. Wood shop and metalworking was for boys only, in 1980s Estonia. Girls got sewing, knitting and cooking classes instead. I can assemble furniture and re-upholster chairs, and maybe hack together some simple bookends or tool storage. But I don’t really know what I’m doing.

What’s the difference between all the wood saws in my basement? How do I make sure the holes I drill are straight? How do I get precision in my cuts and angles? Should I screw or glue? What kind of file do I want for this? Can I use this screw in this type of wall?

It’s been easy to leave most of the DIY work to Eric all these years – but it feels good to be forced out of my comfort zone now.

First thing in the morning: IKEA, to start looking for a new bed, and to buy clothes rails for my built-in closets. Visiting IKEA on a Saturday can be a nightmare, but not if you’re there right when they open. Plenty of space in the parking lot, and no crowds inside, either. By the time I was ready to leave, the situation in the parking lot was rather different, with cars hunting for free spots.

Next up: a trip to the city to buy embroidery yarn, which was also this season’s inaugural bicycle trip. My 30-day travel card ran out yesterday, and today was a bright, sunny day, which seemed like a clear sign that it was time to dust off the bike, pump up the tires, and start pedalling.

The sun is warm, but the air isn’t. And at this time of the year the sun still doesn’t reach very high in the sky. Even at two o’clock in the afternoon, long sections of the cycle lanes from here to the city are in full shade from the houses that line them.

In the evening: party. Eric, Ingrid and Adrian had a housewarming party at their new apartment. They’ve got all the essential furniture in place and have settled in. The living room sofa is large enough to fit Adrian’s entire band of friends at the same time!

And then later in the evening, Melodifestivalen with Ingrid, while Adrian was watching it with his friends at the apartment – we preferred a quieter evening. Much of the music is pretty boring – artists trying to repeat their wins by replicating previous hits – but the winning song, a catchy and humorous Swedish-Finnish song about saunas, was actually fun.

Exhaustion and bedtime after that.

The dogma prompt: Black fabric. Fabric paint in the colour you used last week (which for me was orange). Make circles. Make straight stitches across the circles in black, and straight stitches between the circles in a colour matching the circles.

The only black fabric I found in my stash was a thin, slinky polyester thing. No stability to it whatsoever, and fraying so badly around the edges that I was afraid it would disintegrate in my hands.

I had no orange fabric paint, but I found a red (that was very dried out) and a gold (that was still liquid) so go for gold.

Those long, straight stitches that the prompt asked for, combined with the floppy fabric, produced the least durable piece of embroidery I’ve ever made. Don’t touch any of the stitches, or they will deform.

I keep saying it because I keep feeling it: I really like this kind of playful, no-commitment, low-stakes embroidery. Do something, try something new, and it doesn’t matter if it comes to nothing. Except it will probably never come to actual nothing: I’m getting so many ideas from each of these. I don’t like the look of the golden stitches between the circles (if this was an actual project, I’d rip them out) but the rest of it? Yes please. (Imagining a black blouse or top with some golden circles artfully fake-randomly sprinkled out, black stitching across the circles.)

When the Eranthis are flowering, I know that the snowdrops will be out, too. The ones in central Spånga are just that little bit out of the way that I don’t notice them on my way past. Then some sign of spring makes me think of them, and I go check, and see that they’ve clearly been there for a while already.

I checked for crocuses in my lawn, too, but nothing there yet.

I keep an eye out for the first spring blossoms nearby. There’s nothing, and nothing, and nothing – and suddenly the Eranthis are there. Some years, they peek up through the snow, but we’ve barely had any this February, so they’ve got an easier start this time around.

New housing has been going up in Spånga for years now. Low-density industrial sprawl replaced with apartment buildings, student housing, and services. That area is out of my way, so it’s happening close enough for me to notice it when I’m driving past, but not close enough to affect me day to day, or for me to be particularly interested. The most I do is occasionally make the detour to go to the new, larger Coop supermarket, instead of the smaller, closer one in the centre of Spånga.

Now the hair salon I’ve been using in Spånga has moved from central Spånga (from a building that is slated for demolition and replacement) to a shiny new one on the other side of the tracks, right across from the “new” supermarket. I know that a pedestrian tunnel under the railway tracks has been in the works for a while, but I’ve never had reason to look at it, so I was only moderately sure it was finished and open. Google Maps still hasn’t caught up with the change and was suggesting a twenty-minute detour, but I took my chances.

The tunnel was indeed finished and open and functional, but the area on the other side was eerily empty. The houses are up and finished, the streets are there, but there are no people. No bushes, no bicycles, no garbage, even – no signs of human habitation. And wire fencing still blocked off much of the pavement. It was like a ghost town, not because it has been abandoned, but because it hasn’t come to life yet.

That’s why I haven’t noticed the tunnel being in use: there are no people there to use it.

When Eric moved out, we split our shared property evenly in value, but unevenly in kind. I got most of the things, he got most of the money. I believe we both wanted it this way.

Now I have the mismatched drinking glasses, the chipped bowls, the incomplete sets of crockery, while he has brand new everything.

That’s the way I like it. Had I ended up in the opposite situation, I could probably have found my way to accepting it, found a way to make myself see the positive in it, but it would have hurt. When we agreed to divorce, one of his first comments was “we’ll need to sell the house” while my first thought was “what do I need to do to keep the house”. Was keeping the house an economically sound decision? The jury is still out on that, but I need to at least try.

I get attached to things. I mend things that, from a utilitarian point of view, are in no way worth the effort, like old towels and shopping bags. The mere fact that I have owned something and used it for years gives it an inherent value of its own. I feel a responsibility to my things – to value them, to take care of them. To hold on to them.

Leaving the buns overnight made no difference.

I thought again about throwing them out but Adrian convinced me to bake them after all, because why not.

Some of them (I had four trays full) rose a bit in the oven – not to the level of fluffiness I’d expect, but there was a definite improvement. Others came out almost as small as they were when they went in. I tried one, and while the texture was disappointing, there was nothing wrong with the flavour. Good enough that I ate another one. I guess they can go into the freezer instead of the compost bin. I just need to remember to have the right kind of expectations when I take them out to eat.