I was glad to still be invited to the Bergheden family Christmas, even though I am not really a Bergheden anymore.

I made puff pastry mini pies and an orange & saffron cheesecake. The first time in many, many years that I attempted a cheesecake. It took forever, cracked in the middle, but tasted delicious. When I offered Ingrid to decorate it, she jumped at the opportunity, and turned the crack from a bug into a feature.

For a day or two I had a new laptop. From the very start it was clear that the D key on the keyboard was misbehaving, and I would have to return it. I got a day or two with it, while the returns procedure was being sorted out, and now I am without again. The phone covers immediate, urgent needs, and the work laptop can be used in a pinch for some tasks where the phone just isn’t enough, but overall this is very inconvenient.

Ingrid and I still do the crosswords in Dagens Nyheter. This weekend we even took on one made by Håkan, whose brain works in strange ways and whose vocabulary is most weird. Normally we don’t allow ourselves any outside tools, but with Håkan’s we need more help. It’s OK to use the internet to confirm a word that looks to be the answer, if we don’t even recognize it as a valid Swedish word.

From today’s crossword we learned ten new words, including töva (= dröja), ami (= halsduk), eda (= strömvirvel), dat (= dåd) and ria (= torkhus).

Here is the white dress in all its glory.

It came out just the way I had envisioned it. Fits well, looks great. By far the most elegant thing I have created.

And the most labour-intensive one. I tried to roughly estimate how many stitches I knit, and came up with about 133 000.

I am very grateful to my friend in Estonia who gave me the yarn that started this project. It’s a lovely fine vintage wool yarn, probably hand-spun and unbleached. I don’t think I could have found anything like it from a commercial source. I held it double with a silk mohair, and the end result is soft and woolly, but still drapes well.

This is no superwash merino yarn, the kind that almost doesn’t feel like wool, and it definitely feels woolly against my skin. Not so that bothers me – just so that I am aware of it. Like a gentle reminder that it is there, and it is wool. (I’m writing this several weeks later, after I’ve had a chance to wear it to a family Christmas party for several hours.)

I had planned to add embroidery to the dress, to make it look less stark. Now that I have it in front of me, I rather like it in all its simplicity. I think I’ll hold off on the embroidery for now.

It started snowing heavily yesterday and kept going all night. The weather service issued red alerts due to heavy snow and heavy wind, telling people in some areas to avoid driving completely. Not just “stay home if possible” but more like “stay at home because emergency services won’t be able to reach you”. Up to 50 cm of snow was promised in some places, and with strong winds it will pile into deep drifts that you just can’t drive through.

The worst hit parts were two or three hundred kilometres north of here – not that far on a Swedish scale. Down here it didn’t get that bad (we only got yellow warnings, later upgraded to orange) but we still got plenty of snow.

It’s a giant hassle for everyone who needs to get to places, and for those who need to clear the streets, but I love it. I don’t mind shovelling the snow. I love the way the world is bright and light all of a sudden. It feels like real winter, instead of that dreary gray limbo we had in December.

And it’s brought so many more birds to our feeder!

It’s been a year now of me living a single/divorced life. It has been a good year.

I don’t miss Eric, and I don’t miss our relationship. I can miss what we had some twenty years ago, but the thing we had towards the end was not worth keeping on life support. It was broken, which is so obvious now when I see it from some distance, even though it took me years to realize when I was right in the middle of it. The decision to divorce was absolutely the right one for me. I feel so much better now.

The bi-weekly lifestyle suits me excellently. Every other week I have Adrian and Ingrid for company – someone to cook for, to watch movies with, to talk about our days. Every other week I am on my own – nobody to cook for, peace and quiet, and plenty of time to get things done.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed having significant stretches of time for myself. When I have the house to myself, I can breathe out and relax in a way that just doesn’t happen otherwise.

Cooking and buying groceries for three persons every other week, instead of four persons every week, is a lot less work. And it usually leaves me with leftovers and enough groceries for the other weeks, so those weeks I barely need to do anything. I feel like I have so much more spare time than I used to. And that’s even though I’m working 100% instead of the 80% I used to.

On the negative side: being solely responsible for everything, big and small. No chore just disappears because someone else noticed it and stepped in before I got around to doing it. There is no one to share the big, scary decisions with – I have no sounding board.

Also, of course, I have less money. We used to be two breadwinners, me with a really good salary and Eric with an excellent one. Now I still have many of the same fixed costs but only one salary. There is much less left for discretionary spending.

I worry quite a bit about money these days. Less income, larger loan, narrower margins, smaller reserves, no backup. Should I lose my job and end up long-term unemployed, things could get very bad. Not, like, starving in the streets bad, but definitely lose the house bad. The labour market in Sweden is shaky, especially for those who are older; there are scary articles in the newspapers about highly educated specialists losing their jobs and not being able to find a new one despite hundreds of applications. I am still working on finding a balance between worrying and saving for an uncertain future, and allowing myself to spend now.

Nysse was snuck out just as we came in from looking at all the fireworks and didn’t come home all night. I was worried.

Then at like four o’clock in the morning someone started yanking on the front door, loud enough to wake me. What kind of idiot tries to break into a house at this time? Some drunkard who’s gotten lost? No, Morris the neighbour cat. He knows how door handles work, and had the door not been locked, it would have opened for him.

The noise annoyed me enough that I let him in. In the morning he went out but later came back again and actually stayed for cuddles. Maybe his family is away celebrating New Year elsewhere?