We did something wild and crazy today and bought a new kind of pasta. Eating it was such a ridiculous experience – we literally spent most of dinner laughing and joking about the pasta – that I had to memorialize it.

Bucatini is what happens when spaghetti begets children on macaroni. Long like spaghetti, but slightly thicker, although not quite as thick as macaroni, and with a hole in the middle. It turned out to have all the bad sides of both.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that they don’t fit into a normal pot. Spaghetti softens after just a minute, though, so you can push them down into the pot and they’ll soon be submerged in the boiling water. Bucatini take a much longer while to soften, by which time the bottom ends have already had time to stick to each other, while the top ends are still hard. So one half of each ends up softer than the other half.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that you can’t just fork them into your mouth. Unlike spaghetti, though, they’re too thick and stiff to be wound around a fork. We next tried cutting them in pieces but then they were too narrow to easily stab, and too long and stiff still to easily scoop up. Whatever we did, it was awkward. It’s like the bucatini are not designed to be eaten. I’m sure there is a trick, because must be a reason for their existence, but I don’t plan on ever trying them again.

Another type of pasta that looks better than it works is orecchiette. I’ve tried cooking them several times and every time they stick to each other. They’re shaped like little hats, and they stack as well as hats, too, and then they stay that way. I tried turning the heat up higher so the water would boil more vigorously; I tried using more water; I tried stirring more frequently; I even tried adding oil to the water. Nothing worked, and I always ended up with clumps of orecchiette. So I’ve given up on them.

The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.

We had a minor snow storm on Saturday afternoon that delivered a few centimetres of snow – enough to cause mild chaos in traffic, with bad visibility, and cars in ditches because they were caught out in their summer tires. I caught the beginning of the snow storm on my way back from Uppsala, where I’d helped my brother pick up furniture I’d ordered. Luckily I did have winter tires on (Eric switched them that morning) and with careful driving I got home safe.

Sunday brought more snow. And then more, and more, and today was absolute chaos. By the end of the day the snow was knee-deep, over the edges of my tall rubber boots, so it must have been close to 40 cm. According to an article in Dagens Nyheter central Stockholm still got less than in the snowstorm in November 2016, but I’m not sure if that also holds for Spånga.


There was no way for the snow ploughs to keep up with it. Getting anywhere in the city was hopeless, I read in the news: cars stuck in the snow, many bus routes cancelled, trains delayed… I’m glad I didn’t have to go there. Here in Spånga pavements were impassable, except where there was enough foot traffic to trample a narrow path, and at least one bus had gotten stuck in a roadworks ditch hidden by the snow cover.

I shovelled snow for an hour Sunday night, another hour this morning, and a third hour at lunchtime, and I was still barely keeping up. There was just no end to it. My snow dump pile by the root cellar was as tall as me by the end of the day.

Cat, for scale.

Nysse was not fond of the snow, at all. The last winter was half his lifetime ago, and it wasn’t a snow-rich one, so he’s never seen anything quite like this. Once or twice he stepped on deep snow only to sink right through it, so that even his head didn’t peek out.

After I had cleared the deck and the back stairs for him, and the cars had made deep tracks in the snow in the streets, he made some cautious rounds. But he’s clearly sceptical of the whole thing. His walks are short, and he keeps shaking his paws to try and keep the snow off.

Adrian and Ingrid on the other hand are loving it. Both went out sledding with their friends – even sixteen-year-olds aren’t too old to enjoy sledding. Adrian spent all his breaks at school out in the snow, rolling giant snowballs and building snow forts and having snowball fights.

We’ve been saying for weeks, if not months, that we really should play a longer board game, with all of us. In the evenings, the kids are often busy with schoolwork or online games with friends. Whenever we’ve agreed on a time for a weekend, something always turns up. Adrian has a sleepover; Ingrid’s friends want to go to town…

This time we set the time a week in advance and decided that we’d go ahead no matter what. Whoever is not at home loses out. No postponing.

And of course Adrian was invited to a sleepover and was near tears about having to choose. The FOMO is strong with these ones.

But then we played Small World, which is one of our all-time favourites, and had a lot of fun, and the anguish of losing out on a sleepover was forgotten. I like the rule that this game has about keeping scores hidden until the end – this way everyone can believe that they have a chance, all the way to the end.

Eric won, by picking a new race in the very last round, with 5 bonus coins because the other players had been skipping that race so many times. I came in second place thanks to my army of skeletons, who very determinedly harvested their enemies’ bodies. Ingrid steamrollered her neighbours repeatedly, first with amazons and then with giants. Adrian’s trolls bullied my sorcerers because my skeletons had previously harvested too many of his tritons.

Adrian reading The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which he got assigned from school. I have very mixed feelings about this assignment. I’m glad the topic of the Holocaust gets covered, but I remember the book being so inaccurate that I’m afraid he’ll come away with a skewed picture.

We’ve done canals and crooked houses, and an art museum and vintage shopping. Today we went to one of the larger parks in Amsterdam, and then tram-hopped our way back to the city via a circuitous route.

We wandered around Vondelpark and dodged cyclists. Adrian climbed a tree.

The rose garden in Vondelpark was still blooming.

Back in central Amsterdam we visited the lovely and peaceful Begijnhof.

Near our hotel the Beurspassage caught our eyes. The ceiling mosaic is filled with motifs inspired by the canals, including fish, rusty bicycles, and for some reason a tiger, and the chandeliers are made of bicycle parts.


We also went to see the allegedly famous floating flower market, which was much less impressive and interesting than it sounded. The shops were technically floating but they were just large booths that were open on one side, and you couldn’t even see that they floated. And the flowers were mostly seeds and bulbs this time of the year.

There was a cafe near the flower market, though, that sold macarons.


And then it was time to start heading home.

Amsterdam was an interesting city to visit, and parts of it were very pretty. But it’s not one of my favourite cities and I’m not sure I’d want to come back for a second visit. I didn’t like the crowds, or the ever-present smell or weed, or all the cigarette smoke.

In the end the best part of the weekend for me was simply spending three full days together as a family. At home we’re often each doing our own thing. Here we were together all the time.

We started both yesterday and today with luxurious breakfasts at a café that Ingrid had found online. Pluk on Berenstraat, in case you find yourself in that area. The online reviews are very mixed but we got very good food, though the service was rather slow.

We had seen enough canals and crooked houses and cute little streets yesterday and wanted something different today, so we went to the Rijksmuseum.

The museum was very visitor-friendly, with easy-to-read maps that guided people to the most popular paintings, but also to other parts of the collection. The popular works – like their one and only Van Gogh – had large crowds in front of them, so I didn’t even bother to try and look at those. There were plenty of other interesting things to see.

Even though we all walked in the same rooms, we often split up because of our diverging interests. Ingrid is interested in art and paints herself, so she looks at details and technical aspects that Adrian doesn’t care much about. So she and Eric (who also painted when he was young) looked at the paintings with artists’ eyes, while Adrian and I looked at them with general curiosity.

We noted, for example, the prevalence of grapes, glass bowls, and curls of lemon peel in 17th century still life paintings.

The curators at the Rijksmuseum had done a great job with the signage. All too often, museums label each work with its title, maker and year, and nothing more. Here there were often interesting background facts, and info sheets with even more facts and stories.

When we tired of paintings, we looked at cannons, porcelain, Delft pottery and ship models.

I liked this glass vase by Émile Gallé, with its irregular patterns borrowed from various cultures.

And this repeatedly darned sock, found in a seaman’s chest after a shipwreck.

From high culture to low. In the afternoon we took the boat to North Amsterdam to a large flea market that Ingrid wanted to browse for vintage clothing. She didn’t find anything that fit, but I bought a jacket.

This was our first time in Amsterdam, for all of us. Mostly we just walked around the city, with no particular goals or destinations in mind. This large and imposing building is apparently the royal palace – looking almost as dreary as the royal palace in Stockholm.

We quickly left it behind us and walked among the smaller streets and all the pretty little canals instead.

The weather was unseasonably warm. Even when there was no sun, we didn’t need any jackets. Pleasant, but worrying – this is not what it’s supposed to feel like at this time of the year.

The streets were narrow and chock full of cyclists. It took some getting used to, before we learned to dodge them. They don’t behave like Swedish cyclists: they’re slower, closer to walking pace (compared to the lycra-clad racers you often see in Stockholm) but more numerous, so in aggregate they move differently. And they’re all helmetless – which makes sense given the lower speed, but still felt weird.

Amsterdam has fewer inhabitants than Stockholm, but so many more tourists, and therefore so many more shops. We kept finding fun little shops everywhere. Central Stockholm is all fashion chains and other large, impersonal stores instead.

The tourists keep the shops alive, but I wonder what made them happen to begin with. A history and culture of shopkeeping, as opposed to Sweden’s history of large industry employing masses of workers? An inner-city architecture of small buildings and thus small retail spaces where you can’t even fit an H&M, whereas Stockholm’s large 1960s city centre has the opposite – mostly large spaces that are unsuitable for small shops?

Ingrid liked the vintage clothing shops. I was horrified to see that ugly 1990s fleece jackets are now considered desirable.

This antiquarian bookshop sold reproductions of prints of all kinds, ranging from “here is how you recognize measles” through anatomical drawings and comparisons of tulip varieties to “this is how you arrange a centerpiece for your dinner table”.

Most of the houses in Amsterdam lean one way or another. Or several: they lean sideways because the foundation sank, and the facade leans forward because it was built that way to allow goods to be hoisted to the upper levels. I kind of got used to it after seeing enough leaning houses, but then you come across something like this and it’s hard to grasp how it even remains stable. It must be a challenge to be a window-maker here, to produce windows that fit these crooked walls.

Away from the small canals and back to the innermost city, we were surprised at how crowded the streets were, mostly with groups of young people.

The inner city kept surprising us with red-light streets. Some were clearly noticeable and avoidable, others were sort of just in our way when we wanted to get from A to B and there was no easy way around them. And some looked normal when we entered them and only turned “red” at the other end. You can avert your eyes and try to pretend they’re not there, but it made things uncomfortable for the kids, especially Adrian. Not the most family-friendly city centre.

And the “coffee shops” everywhere. The smell of cannabis – and cigarette smoke, there are so many smokers here and smoking is apparently allowed in most places – got really annoying. Now we’ve seen the inner city, been there, done that, checked the box, let’s leave it behind and get away from here.

When our legs were tired of walking, we went for a boat tour on the canals. Despite the tour being marketed as family-friendly, the boat was effectively a floating bar and both the crew (not the captain though) and most of the passengers spent the entire trip drinking. We got to see the city from new angles, but didn’t get the kind of guided tour that we had been hoping for.

We’re spending a long weekend in Amsterdam, since Eric was already here for work and next week is autumn break for the kids.

Hotels in central Amsterdam are crazy expensive, especially when booking at short notice. This is definitely one the most basic hotels I’ve ever stayed at, and it’s still more expensive than the luxurious spa hotel in Bled. It’s officially got a single star, and it truly offers no extras. There is a room with four beds and a small desk and enough room to walk between the beds, and a functional bathroom, and that’s it. No TV, no breakfast, no safety box, no elevator.

Everything is clean, though, and mostly whole (though there are cracks in the sink) so they’re delivering on their promises. No complaints.

Oh, there is actually one luxury: plenty of outlets, both 220 V and USB-C, for charging electronics. Basic, but also modern.

The fifth and last session in my embroidery course, and today is about combining embroidery with painting.

I dug through our cupboards yesterday evening and found some fabric paint. The greens were from when I printed napkins. The purple I have no idea about and I’m not even sure if it was me who bought it, but it contrasts nicely with the green. A bit dried out and slightly lumpy, but after adding a splash of water it was perfectly functional again.

Adrian was immediately interested in joining me so we painted one square each.

When it was time to embroider, it was easy to be inspired by Adrian’s wild, spontaneous and chaotic design. The swirls and sweeps were crying out for swirly, sweeping embroidery.

As usual, we were out of time before I felt done. It needs more swirls.

I have a whole pile of half-finished embroidered squares now. Some I have an actual project idea for, others still need thinking. This one is going to be interesting enough that I would really like to find some kind of use for it, not just bundle it away somewhere. Maybe I need a pretty bag for… something?