I went to the office for the first time in three months.

I was looking forward to cycling to town but it rained all morning and I really don’t like cycling in the rain so I took the train. Regretted it. All these people everywhere. I can only describe the train as “crowded”. Not as crowded as it would have been a year ago but still.

On the plus side, I met a few of my colleagues face to face, which was really lovely. We had a great workshop (about recruitment and technical interviews) and plenty of the kind of idea-bouncing and discussions that just don’t happen online.

On my way home, I passed a pavilion in Spånga where some representatives for the city were gathering information about how the locals here use all the parks and other green spaces that we have. I realized that our family rarely uses the green spaces in Spånga. We’ve outgrown them. If we want greenery, we want something larger than the little patches that Spånga has to offer, and we’ll go to Starboparken or Nälsta at the very least.

It was interesting to see just how detailed the city’s inventory of green spaces is. The map used nearly ten different kinds of green colour to mark the different kinds of green spaces. “Nature park” is distinct from “nature in the city”, and a “city block park” is different from “park square”. Some of their terms I can’t even find English equivalents for.

I had an hour of free time between finishing work and the start of a recruitment interview. I was going to just read, but fell asleep instead. And my throat feels scratchy. I guess I’ve caught some virus.

It’s disconcerting, to have to think about deathly pandemics and all sorts of potential long-term health damage for every little cough and sniffle.

For the first time in a long while, Adrian is building with Legos. First we brought up boxes with his old Legos from the basement, and he rebuilt a few of his old Ninjago sets. Yesterday we went shopping in the Mall of Scandinavia for a new one, which he built today.

Of course the best way to build Legos is sitting on the table. Not on the floor, or the carpet, or the sofa.

The other thing we did in MoS was go to the movies for the first time in many months. Apparently movies are now allowed again, but with every other row empty and two empty seats between each group.

SF (now renamed to Filmstaden) is showing a few classics, now that there are no new releases. We saw Interstellar on the Imax screen. I’ve seen it before and it’s a great movie, and works exceptionally well on a supersized screen and with large sound as well.

I’d forgotten how long the movie is! Three hours, and it ended close to eleven o’clock. No problem for Eric and myself (and Ingrid is away at scout camp) but that is waaay past Adrian’s bedtime. I was worried that he might find Interstellar too impenetrable, that we’d dragged him there and forced him to stay awake at night for something he didn’t even enjoy. But he said he liked the movie and would like to watch it again, at home, with maybe a few more explanations.

Most people in MoS seemed to not care about social distancing and covid-19 at all. People walked so close that they brushed against each other. Young people feeling immortal – “This won’t affect me.”

Meanwhile a study found heart damage in 78% of people who had recovered from covid-19 even though these people were relatively young and most had not even needed hospital care. This is not a disease you want to get.

I’ve never been fond of crowded shops and malls. Now, after months of abstinence, the experience at MoS was more annoying than ever. I will stay away as much as possible in the future.

Because of the coronavirus situation, our annual Estonia trip and our equally-annual hiking trip both get added to the long list of “things we were looking forward to but had to cancel”.

Non-essential travel in Sweden is now allowed, though, and I’ve been vacillating about whether and where and how we should travel.

On the one hand, we don’t need to travel. But on the other hand, if we’re careful and avoid crowds and travel by car and don’t go too far (so we can get home if anyone falls ill despite everything) then it should be OK.

On the one hand, this might be the best time ever to travel to e.g. Gotland. No crowds, hopefully, which would be really nice. (Adrian’s and my trip to the empty Old Town in Stockholm was my best time there, ever.) And the hospitality industry could do with some support or the whole bunch will go bankrupt. But on the other hand, what if everyone thinks like that, and we’ll be one of a gazillion annoying Stockholmers there?

We took the chance, in the end, and here we are on Gotland. We arrived in mid-afternoon and spent the rest of the day simply walking around the town, following the city wall.

The wall is pretty amazing. It’s worn and dilapidated and none of the towers are standing (unlike some of the medieval towers in Tallinn for example). But the wall itself is still standing along its entire length, and you can follow it all the way around the centre of Visby, which is pretty darn impressive.

I am surprised at how much vegetation I see growing on the wall everywhere. It looks pretty, but roots generally tend to weaken walls, so I would have expected it all to be cleaned away.

Official Midsummer celebrations with maypoles and music such are not happening this year due to covid-19. We usually have a Midsummer picnic somewhere. And we don’t need an official celebration for that!

Most Swedes celebrate on Midsummer’s Eve. I didn’t have time to plan or prepare anything for yesterday, so we had our picnic today instead, at Hammarskog. Normally there would be a folk band and a maypole and dancing around it, but Hammarskog is a nice picnic spot without all that as well. There’s a wide open lawn sloping towards a view of a lake, and trees all around.


We had a nice and leisurely picnic lunch with silltårta and devilled eggs, and a strawberry and elderflower cake.

The cake was almost the same one as last year, because it was so delicious. (Here’s the recipe, possibly behind a paywall.) This year we transformed it into a Swiss roll, though, because Swiss rolls are more fun than cake-shaped cakes, and easier to transport. The marinated strawberry filling went inside the roll, and we spooned the elderflower curd on top of each slice, and then piled strawberries on top.

After lunch hung around for a while and didn’t quite feel like going home yet. Then we decided to play games. Apparently that’s a tradition at Midsummer parties, which I wasn’t aware of. Now I know. Femkamp, meaning a contest in five different “events”, is the most traditional form. We had no plans and no equipment with us, so we improvised with what we had and tried to find events that can be done more or less equally by all ages, even when wearing a somewhat impractical dress.

• Frisbee throwing with a lunch box lid
• Kast med liten sko, i.e. shoe throwing
• Pin the tail on the donkey (with a few post-its to mark the donkey on the lawn)
• Strawberry-and-spoon race
• Counting to two minutes (with your eyes closed)

Ingrid won every single one of them. But we all had fun, even though the thistles in the lawn bothered Adrian’s bare toes. Even my mum, who can be a bit stiff and “proper” sometimes, went all in!

The lunch box lid made a surprisingly good frisbee. It flew quite well, and even curved the same way a normal frisbee does.

Many of our neighbours apparently partied in their houses instead: there were a lot of noisy parties going on yesterday. People were getting drunk at 6 pm already, and continuing well into the night, some getting rather rowdy.

I’ve been having twinges of soreness in my throat since last Tuesday. Just a tiny bit, just a few times a day. In normal times I might not even have noticed it. But now, like most people, I’m hyper-aware of any cold-like symptoms.

The soreness never got any worse, and I think it has now passed. I felt nothing today. If no new symptoms have appeared after ten days, then this was probably nothing. No more self-quarantine, I can hug my family again!

Meanwhile, Sweden’s handling of covid-19 looks more and more like a failure, with three thousand deaths and counting. Our neighbouring countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark) count their deaths in the low hundreds. They’re all half the size of Sweden, but even counting deaths per million, Sweden has three to six times more deaths than them.

The experts and politicians say that it’s too early to evaluate. Or they question the choice of countries to compare to – “well but what about Belgium?”. Maybe they’re right – who knows? Maybe two years from now we’ll pat ourselves on our shoulders and say that we did a good job anyway.

But one thing that is clear is that I hope I never end up in a Swedish elder care home, or as a recipient of care at home (hemtjänst). Most of the deaths in Sweden have been in care homes. And when I read and hear news reports describing the situation there, it’s no wonder.

The care homes are short of staff, of equipment, of training. Nurses who go back and forth between sick and healthy people. Staff who go to work despite cold-like symptoms.. 40% of staff do not follow basic hygiene rules.

Elderly people who get municipal at-home care meet on average 15 staff in 14 days. And that’s an average, not a maximum! It’s a constant flow of random strangers in your home, helping you with your private, personal needs. Dehumanizing, is what it is.

I’m guessing we might get a stricter quarantine soon, and I’ve tried to think about what that might mean for us. Boredom, of course, and cabin fever. We’re well equipped, with Netflix and Kindle and PlayStations and board games. But just in case, one of the things we did today was to buy the Nintendo Switch that Adrian has been saving up for, and letting him spread out the rest of the cost over the next six months. Just in case.

And we went quarantine shopping. If we get a quarantine, we might end up with the same kind of shopping routines that they have in the UK: strict limits of how many people are allowed to be in a supermarket at the same time, and hour-long queues outside. If this happens, it will probably be at its worst at the very beginning, so we stocked up with enough basic groceries to last us a week. No canned ravioli or meat soup or other panic food; just normal basics like pasta, rice, canned tomatoes and beans, and frozen vegetables, that we’ll eat anyway, with or without quarantine.

I made a list and Ingrid and Adrian immediately volunteered to take care of it, and seemed to have fun doing it. Meanwhile, Eric and I did the normal shopping for this weekend.

What we saw in Bromma confirms Google’s statistics. The parking lot wasn’t as packed as it would be on a normal Sunday, but it was more full than empty. Not much staying at home going on here.

All other large countries in Europe are going into lockdown, yet in Sweden life is pretty much continuing as usual. The official recommendation is to work from home, avoid going anywhere to the extent possible, and avoid larger gatherings, but people don’t seem to be taking this very seriously. Fewer people are using mass transit. But gyms, restaurants and shopping malls remain open, and people are still going there. A 30% reduction in visitors is not much.

The effect is that people in Sweden are dying. Yesterday (or was it the day before) 50 people died in Sweden of coronavirus, which is as many as have died in Norway in total. Norway has a smaller population, true, but even counting deaths per million inhabitants, Sweden stands out. We’re not at the level of the worst hit countries yet, but we’re not doing great, either.

We’re about to do much worse quite soon. We’re following in the footsteps of all those dark red countries on the map. Our curves are pointing up at the same angle as theirs, just with a bit of a delay.

There may be perfectly good reasons for this voluntary, recommendation-based, “we should all do our duty” approach. I’m not going to join the army of armchair epidemiologists who all know better than the experts what we should be doing. But I am guessing that the country is going to switch over to a mandatory, prohibition-based proper quarantine very soon.

Sources: Our World in Data Coronavirus Statistics and Research, Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

I had a chocolate cookie for today’s online Friday fika, ending our third week of remote working.

I’m sort of getting used to it, settling into this new reality, and finding solutions to make it a sustainable way of working. Our team retrospective today was also all about adapting to working 100% remotely and compensating for not being in the same room.

How do you check if your teammate is available for a quick chat, or deep in the middle of a tricky problem and doesn’t want to be disturbed? In the office you say their name, and if they’re busy, they can reply and tell you to go away, without breaking that thread of concentration. Remotely, you ping them on Slack, and then sit and wonder if they didn’t reply because they just forgot to check Slack or because they’re really busy.

Various reasons took me to the office today.

1.
An appointment with an optometrist with Ingrid, a few blocks from work, which unfortunately got cancelled just before, because the optometrist was off sick. She’s been waiting for that appointment since we first discovered her vision problems in December 2018, and it already got postponed once, so this was rather a disappointment. And probably all that the optometrist has is a slight cold.

2.
A job interview with a potential new hire at tretton37. While we generally work from home, the candidates get the choice between remote and face-to-face interviews. Today I had one of each.

The remote one was my first remote technical interview, and it was a bit of a challenge. We always do these in pairs, and a surprising amount of coordination between myself and my co-interviewer apparently happens wordlessly. The most noticeable difficulty was in taking turns – signalling when I wanted to jump in, or seeing whether my colleague was waiting to say something. In a room, three people naturally sit in more or less of a triangle, and it’s very obvious whether I’m facing the candidate or my colleague. When we’re on screens, they are both right in front of me, separated by a hand’s breadth. I am inevitably always facing both.

3.
While I was there anyway, I brought home more of my things, especially the plants. The things I need for work I already carried home two weeks ago. Now came the turn for the things that need me, i.e. my potted plants. They had all survived two weeks without water, but probably wouldn’t last much longer than this. Right now I can still go there occasionally to water them, but who knows what the situation is like two weeks from now?

The windowsill in my home office nook is quite full now. I just barely managed to squeeeze in the jade plant and dracaena and others from the office between my African violets.