Toilet paper, pasta and canned soup are not the only quarantine shortage items. You know what else is? Webcams.

I decided to buy a web camera yesterday. The cheapest model of any brand will do, I don’t care about the image quality, I just want something that shows a picture of my face.

And there were none to be had anywhere in northern or central Stockholm. I searched the web sites of all electronics chains I could think of, or find on Google Maps, and they were all completely sold out of web cameras. Elgiganten, MediaMarkt, Teknikmagasinet, Webbhallen, Kjell & Co, Clas Ohlson, NetOnNet… All sold out in their central warehouses as well as all their physical shops. Expected back in stock: 10 days from now at best.

In the end I found one model in one NetOnNet shop in Veddesta. About twice as fancy and expensive as I had intended to buy but this was not a time to be picky. I reserved it and cycled there immediately to get it before someone else buys it. It may not have been quite the last one but it was close – when I checked again this morning the stock level was down to zero.

My desk is packed so full of computer equipment now.

I tried making do with the laptop keyboard but it just wasn’t working out for me for coding, so I had to add a full-sized keyboard.

The conference microphone quickly became a must as well. The Dell laptop’s built-in microphone sucks. At first I kept the microphone in a drawer and just took it out when I needed it, but now it’s permanently there.

The camera at least takes no space, perched on top of the monitor as it is. All it adds is another cable.

March 25 is waffle day in Sweden. Why not.

I found a recipe for waffles with lingonberries which sounded delicious. When I tried cooking them, the berries all got burnt and stuck to the waffle iron, no matter how much I coated them in batter. So I ended up putting the lingonberries on top of my waffle topping (of cottage cheese, cucumber, apple and mayonnaise). Not exactly what I had in mind, but it tasted really good nevertheless.

The batter itself was also not very good. The waffles came out floppy and limp rather than crispy – more like thick pancakes. Not a good recipe. I had checked that this was a recipe for “frasvåfflor” based on whipped cream, rather than an egg-based recipe for chewier waffles. I didn’t think that there would be that much difference between one recipe for “frasvåfflor” and another. But apparently there is. Afterwards we compared the recipe to the classic one in Rutiga kokboken and the proportions were way different. Note to self: don’t trust random waffle recipes.

The flashback section at the top of the blog is showing me posts from last year’s Norway ski tour. I look at them with mixed feelings. I had this year’s trip all booked since way back in November and had been looking forward to it for months. It truly is one of the absolute highlights of my year. And now this coronavirus came along and I get no trip. So disappointing.

Instead I am stuck at home. I am also not getting any exercise. Not commuting to work, not going to my gym classes. (The gyms are still open, which surprises me. If people are recommended to work from home and keep away from other people then going to the gym goes against the whole point of it, doesn’t it?)

Working out on my own has never worked for me. It is just too boring; I can’t make myself do it.

I’ve been going for walks but it really isn’t enough. My back is getting stiff and my body is nearly itching with restlessness. This afternoon after I was done with work I simply cycled halfway to the office (to Brommaplan), turned out and cycled home again. It felt boring and meaningless but at least it was something.

If working from home is going to be the new normal, I need to be properly equipped.

Yesterday I went to the office to take home one of the monitors. Wrapped it in a blanket and put it in a big bag to carry it home. But if I take the monitor then I’m going to need the dock as well, because the laptop has so few ports. And if I take the dock then I might as well take the mouse and keyboard as well. And if I take the mouse then I’ll also want the mouse pad with wrist support.

I ended up lugging home a very full and very heavy bag. My arms and hands were so tired they hurt when I got home.

Today I set it most of it up on my desk at home. I managed to just squeeze in the monitor between all the other things on my desk.

This definitely makes for more productive working conditions.

But I lost my view… When I look up, I cannot see outside any more. All I see is a big screen. I cannot even see the African violets on my window sill, and they are flowering so nicely right now.

Usually I shop for groceries online once a week and get all the heavy or bulky basic goods delivered to our door. All sorts of dairy goods, canned beans and tomatoes, frozen vegetables, pasta, rice and flour, etc. Then I top up with fresh fruit and vegetables at the local supermarket, and with any special ingredients for the day’s dinner that I don’t keep at home. Or Ingrid does the top-up shopping when she cooks.

I sat down to order food yesterday night and discovered that the next available delivery date from MatHem was five days from now – instead of tomorrow, like usual. Time for a new plan, I guess…

So we drove to a larger supermarket today and did our weekly grocery shopping ourselves. For the first time in weeks, if not months.

The mood in the supermarket was calm (no fights like in Australia!) but it looked like people were preparing for a major catastrophe. Shelves and freezer boxes were gaping empty and staff were everywhere, rushing to restock.

It was interesting to see what people stockpile.

Toilet paper, of course, just like elsewhere in the world. There wasn’t a single bale to be had at Stora Coop in Bromma Blocks. I wonder what the reasoning is. Is toilet paper truly the most important thing for your survival and well-being? Good thing we didn’t need any today.

Pasta and rice and noodles, I can understand. If you are going to stockpile food because you’re panicking, then it makes sense to buy these. They’re good bases for most meals, cheap, easy to store. Canned and frozen vegetables likewise, and frozen meat if you’re into that sort of thing.

Canned ready meals, like generic “canned meat soup”? Getting stranger. Who actually wants to eat that stuff daily, for real? What kind of scenario are you preparing for, when you think you’ll need to subsist on this?

Chocolate bars, though? What the heck?

A recommendation came today at work that we should work from home from now on, to help reduce the spread of covid-19.

A recommendation, not an order, but it’s one I definitely agree with. Especially after reading this article about what a big difference earlier social distancing can make to slow down the virus’s spread.

I don’t enjoy working from home. I feel isolated and shut in.

I’m going to miss the physical act of getting to work. My commute is not the best part of my day but it’s good for me. In the morning it’s a good way to gradually come fully alert and ready to work. In the afternoon it’s a good way to wind down and let go of work tasks.

My desk at home is not set up for long work sessions. It’s more of a storage area for “to do” items – paperwork, magazines to read, books to blog about – than a place for work.

I only have the small 11-inch laptop monitor to work on – nothing like my three-monitor setup at the office. Working on a small monitor makes me less productive but also has a weird kind of effect on my brain – after staring at a small rectangle for eight hours, by the end of the day I feel weird in the head. It’s like I get a kind of mental tunnel vision.

I’m going to have to think about how to make this work, if this is the new reality for the foreseeable future.

The office today was nearly empty. So were the streets. I guess people are staying at home.

In the gym, people were wiping down their barbells with soapy water. But nobody was worried about door handles, which have been touched by a hundred times more hands than those bars! It’s like wearing those face masks that all the news sources tell you don’t help. But it makes people feel less anxious.

Meanwhile, the Stockholm region has announced that they will stop testing people for the coronavirus, with the exception of hospitalized cases – the argument being that resources are better spent caring for sick people than testing those who might be sick. And that just a day or two after reassuring statements about how we have all the resources we need. The trade-off is reasonable, but it does not feel reasonable at all that we reached the point of having to make that trade-off so soon. So we won’t have any meaningful statistics about the spread of the virus from now on. Not impressed.

The news are all full of covid-19.

The number of cases in Stockholm is at a few hundred and increasing, but people are generally not too worried. The Melodifestivalen final still took place last Friday, with tens of thousands of people, and so did the Women in Tech conference with a few thousand.

But it’s getting closer. Now we can start playing “six degrees of covid-19 separation”. I’m currently at two: a colleague’s relative has been diagnosed.

The general advice for avoiding infection sounds simple. Wash your hands frequently. Avoid touching your face. Keep at a distance from people who are coughing or sneezing.

This has made hyper-aware of just how often I touch my face. I do it all the time! My nose itches, my lips are dry, there’s something in the corner of my eye…

Sweden’s parliament will vote tomorrow about a law restricting asylum and immigration. It includes rules that limit the right of families to reunite, replaces permanent residence permits with temporary ones, and sets higher requirements for paying for your own upkeep. All signs point towards the proposal being passed.

I am appalled and ashamed. We live in one of the world’s richest countries, and instead of helping those in desperate need, right on our doorstep, we shut them out and pretend that it’s someone else’s problem. Just like during WW2, Sweden pretends to not see the problem. We make a dirty deal with Turkey and turn a blind eye to Turkey’s human rights problems, so that we won’t be inconvenienced. We’d rather let refugees die than have them come here and disrupt our comfortable lives. Fifty years from now, Sweden will look back at this time as a shameful period in our history.

The refugee situation has made me consider applying for a Swedish citizenship, for the first time ever, just so that I can go and vote against the people who are pushing Sweden in this direction.

I remember my own first few years in Sweden. It wasn’t in any way comparable to the refugee children’s situation, of course. But still, even now, over twenty years later, I remember the stress of having to live with a temporary residence permit, the anxiety that started building up months before our permits would need to be renewed, and how it grew and grew the closer we got to the deadline. Never knowing whether I might be sent back, away from my friends and my school; never daring to make plans for a longer-term future; having to take undocumented summer jobs (because we needed the money) instead of openly looking for a proper legal job. Not being able to sleep at night because I didn’t know if and when we might be kicked out, leaving my life behind.

I had my mother and brother with me at least. I cannot even imagine what it might feel like to go through this alone, knowing that your family is living in a war zone and won’t be allowed to join you for years.

And now Sweden’s politicians intend to put all refugee children through that.

So grateful that I do not need to trek across a continent to save my family from war.
So grateful that I do not have to worry about my children drowning when crossing a sea in an overcrowded boat.
So grateful that I do not have to leave behind everything I own and try to build a new life from scratch in a strange place.

It’s hard for me to imagine being in a situation like that – and yet not so hard after all. After all, it’s not that long ago that Estonians were fleeing across the sea. Not in my lifetime, not in my mother’s – but in my grandmother’s.

In another timeline, it could have been me.

I could be living in Estonia still instead of having moved to Sweden as a child. Russia could have aimed their provocations at Estonia instead of the Ukraine. I could be trying to escape from war to a peaceful country on the other side of the sea.

The populist, nationalist, far-right Sweden Democrats got 13% of the votes in this weekend’s elections, ending up as the third largest party. This awakes all kinds of negative feelings in me. On the one hand, the negative, ranging from simple distaste to worries about a future that echoes 1930s Germany.

And on the other hand a guilt-mixed gratitude that I share none of the worries and frustrations that have driven so many to vote against the “establishment”: I do not need to worry about unemployment, the social safety net, the availability of health care for the young and nursing for the elderly, integration and segregation, crime… Intellectually I know that several of these topics could become relevant to me personally with very short notice, but for now I blithely live on in my worryless world.

But what this also does is awake debate. I normally skip all the articles about politics in newspapers etc. They’re either full of dull questions about administrative details (who wants to lower which tax by how many percentage points) or about individual politicians (who was caught fiddling what rule, or who said what about somebody else).

And now, for the first time in forever, there are interesting articles about politics in the newspapers. They discuss ideology, the big issues, visions for the future. Oh there also are endless pages of discussion about who will or will not ally themselves with whom to form a government… but for the first time in years, or possibly EVER, I am reading and sharing articles about politics, such as this, and this. Good things might yet come out of this.