March is not winter, but also not spring. It’s not not cycling season, but it’s still cold enough for me to be tempted to take the train.

If I pack and prep everything now for tomorrow morning, then it’ll be easier to just grab the rucksack and cycle, than it would be to re-pack for a commute by train.

When there’s too much “stuff” going on around me, my executive function just shuts down and I do nothing. It happens mostly when I feel like I have no control over my time. One child wants to be woken so that we can have breakfast together. The other needs lunch to happen at a particular time, and then to be driven somewhere straight after. And then some more in the evening.

It’s not that it takes up a big part of the day. And it’s not at all that I don’t want to do these things. I am happy that they still prioritize mealtimes with me instead of being away with friends.

These fixed points spread out through the day chop it up and I feel like it all slips away from me. Then it feels like there’s no point even trying to take any control over the rest of it, and I just let time pass between those moments.

The mere knowledge that I could be interrupted at any time is almost as bad as actually being interrupted. When the day is over and everyone else has gone to bed and I know that nothing more will happen, that’s when I finally breathe out, look up, and feel like I could actually do something.

Charles Dickens reputedly felt similarly. “The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day,” he’s quoted to have written.

What can I do about this? Make a list. Commit in advance. Remove myself from the situation even for five minutes to get out of the tunnel and clear my head of this illusion.

The season’s second mosquito, already. I guess this is in line with birds not eating at the feeder any more – there are juicier meals out there.

AI is invading every space and it’s annoying the heck out of me.

Google gives me AI-generated slop instead of search results. Recipe searches result in AI-generated nonsense. Discussion threads get AI-generated replies. Customer support queries get useless AI-generated replies.

The administrator at my knitting club uses AI-generated banner images for the group’s Facebook events. Workshop participants turn to ChatGPT for generating creative ideas.

The other day I was co-interviewing a candidate for a role as a software developer in our team. Part of the interview was a pair coding exercise. We had turned off AI assistance in the code editor, and the candidate was completely helpless without it. Before diving into live coding, he had told us about all the problems he had solved and projects he had architected and completed. And yet, when given a keyboard and a text editor, he couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t initialize an array. Couldn’t loop through one, either. Couldn’t explain any of the choices he had made in past projects – everything ended in “I’d have to ask Google or ChatGPT about that”. We concluded that we need to update the job requirements to clearly specify that candidates are expected to be able to code without AI assistance.

Some people are literally losing their ability for thinking. They’re outsourcing not just the boring tasks, but even the fun and creative stuff. And they even seem proud of it.

Third attempt. The second one came out too small. I’m not entirely sure about this one either. Should I make them looser? Well-fitting socks need to be tight but not too tight.

It’s a good thing that socks are small; I have time for a fourth attempt if needed. Maybe I’ll put this one to the side and start a slightly larger version in parallel and then see which one I believe more in.

There are two birthdays coming up in April, for people who deserve hand-knitted socks.

I’ve knit so many everyday socks for myself that it takes no effort. Knitting socks for someone else – whose foot I don’t have access to, for trying them on for size – is a whole other matter. I’m also using a thicker yarn than usual, so the numbers I’ve learned by heart don’t work at all.

This is my second attempt of the first sock. The label on the yarn suggested using 3 mm needles. The fabric came out way too drapey and floppy with those. Could have worked for a cardigan or something, I guess, but it was absolutely not right for socks. This is a sock yarn, both by fibre content and by name. Why would they suggest a needle size that won’t work for knitting actual socks? Argh.

The worst of it was that I discovered this at the knitting meet-up. And, trusting the label, had only brought my 3 mm needles. Luckily another knitter had extra 2.5 mm needles that they could lend me for the evening. I brought the sock home with the stitches on a piece of scrap yarn.

Disassembled the bird feeders, scraped out the birdseed still stuck in the corners, and scrubbed them clean. Time to pack them away for the summer.

Sometimes people say that feeding birds makes them too dependent on humans for food. I guess it could possibly do that during winter. But the moment the ground thawed – not even down deep, just the top finger’s width or so – the birds here lost absolutely all interest in the sunflower seeds in the feeder. I left it up for another while, hoping that they’d keep eating and I’d have less to clean and throw away, but they really did not. Whatever bugs they find in the ground and the trees are much tastier.

Both feeders are a bit banged up. Just this weekend something (or more likely someone) knocked over the tripod the feeders hang on. The wooden one might need some glue. The metal one I mostly bent back into shape. The sheet metal parts were thinner than I had thought.

The pansies are a lost cause. There is almost nothing to bite off of them any more, and still they get yanked out.

The piano recital series at Konserthuset. Pierre-Laurent Aimard with Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, Part 2. Lovely, but also rather intense, with 140 minutes of focused listening. I was running out of energy towards the end and maybe a little bit less enraptured with the last four pairs or so.

Several parties in the rows in front of me left in the interval. I absolutely support walking out of a concert that isn’t doing it for you (if you can do it without interrupting). Still, it surprised me, that someone would choose to do so with this particular work. To me, this was – well, not quite the easiest music to listen and enjoy, but definitely not one that takes a real effort (like John Cage). You get a theme nicely and clearly presented at the beginning of every fugue and then you can follow it around all its twists and turns, like a guided tour.

Things I bought in Japan: beautiful bowls.

I have a bit of a weakness for beautiful bowls. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I collect them, but I occasionally buy some. Especially if they are green. (One of my favourites is the one that broke and managed to mend so well that I’m still using it a decade later.) Whenever I randomly browse the shelves at a thrift shop, I look for (i) wool clothes, (ii) cool fabric scraps, and (iii) interesting small bowls before anything else. I have a tiny souvenir bowl from Venice (from my first visit there in the early 2000s) and an olive wood bowl that I know I also got on a trip but now can’t remember which one.

Ceramics were on my shopping list for the Japan trip, and Ingrid and I visited several ceramics shops.

The ones that kept catching my eye were the simplest, cheapest, most rustic ones. Very convenient to have a cheap taste! I came home with one platter and three small bowls, about the size of my palm. The platter matches one of the bowls, and although the three bowls don’t match each other, they have some kind of kinship, still. Maybe they were made at the same workshop? I didn’t check.

The platter will mostly come out as a serving dish for fancier meals, but the bowls are perfect for everyday use: for storing half a lemon, or serving a handful of cherry tomatoes.