For this past year I’ve been keeping track of my costs again. We did the same in the 2000s but then stopped at some point. Now I’m starting it up again.

The first couple of months were very tight. Then my financial situation improved for several reasons (including moving my mortgage to a different bank) but I kept going with the records. A couple of months’ worth of data is better than nothing, but many costs are unevenly spread through the year – a full year gives a much better picture of where the money goes.

By far the largest item is the mortgage interest, at 20% of the total. Electricity, homeowner’s insurance, water and sanitation together make up another 10%, so that’s a total of 30% on housing. Almost all of that is fixed in the short term. Even with the electricity costs, over half is a fixed fee.

Food 15%, the children 7%, and those few categories together already account for half of all my costs. The average Swedish household spends 13% of their income on food; I’m comparing to total costs and not total income so it’s not quite the same, but close enough.

Fees at 6% was a one-off fee this year for repatriating my British retirement account. I could have postponed it, I guess, but it’s got to be done sooner or later. It was fine as long as the UK was in the EU but now I run increasing risks of administrative fees, double taxation, currency swings, etc etc. Got to be done: a known expense now is better than decades of mess later when I’m retired.

Car ownership is an expensive habit. Repairs, insurance, inspection, new winter tires, fuel, parking. On average it costs me 100 kr (just under 9 EUR) per day. Do I get 100 kr of value out of it on most days? No, absolutely not. But on the days when we do need it, there is often no alternative. Even just the bi-weekly rides when the kids move with all their things from here to Eric’s apartment – how would we manage those without a car?

Still I feel like I could do so much more fun things for that money. For less than the cost of car ownership, I’ve paid for four vacations, including both travel and lodging, some of them for several people. Two weeks in Estonia for the three of us, an archipelago ramble for me and Ingrid, a long weekend in London for myself and Adrian, and an upcoming two-week trip for me (that I’m doing together with Ingrid but she’s paying her own share). I will definitely revisit the question of car ownership in the future: Ingrid is about to start on 15 months of military service, and that will change our collective driving habits quite a lot.

Media is another category of costs that I am very conscious of. A newspaper, several magazines, a streaming service, Spotify, altogether over 1200 SEK every month on average. While I could do without them, I would really miss every single one. Except for the streaming service, that’s really only for Adrian’s and Ingrid’s sake, but that’s not a very large part. Really, everything below “Car” has been well worth the money.

The smaller categories that are bundled up in “Other” in the chart are many and varied. I’ve somehow managed to spend almost 6500 SEK on kitchen equipment and utensils, and roughly the same amount on knitting stuff. There shouldn’t be so much need for more kitchen equipment in the future, I would think, but the spending on knitting will continue.

I’ve bought fancy chocolate for 2000 kr and clothes for 1300 kr. How’s that for priorities? Although that’s perhaps a bit misleading because that doesn’t include shoes for 2800 kr.

Other fun things include museum tickets for 2900 kr, potted plants for 1000 kr and birdseed for 427 kr.

I’m challenging myself to get as much as possible done from my to-do list today, including running a bunch of errands in town. New baking “paper” (is there a word for the reusable kind?), embroidery yarn, knitting yarn and knitting needles, and chocolate.

I’m more and more disappointed with what used to be my favourite specialist chocolate shop. First they ran out of my favourite kind of chocolate, at least a year ago, or has it been two years already? They kept promising that it would be back in stock soon. It still isn’t. I tried an alternative, and now they don’t have that one in stock either. In fact the shelves were more empty than full today. “Well, we just came back from our summer break” was their explanation. Maybe spend some time actually getting ready to open, then?

Later I remembered that there is a Chokladfabriken store near the knitting store and went there. They make excellent pralines, but they don’t have much in the way of chocolate tablets. I got something, at least. And they offered free tasting portions of hot chocolate (delicious) and they sold ice cream, including a lemon and ginger sorbet (also delicious) which did a lot to alleviate my disappointment.

I walked through the churchyard of Katarinakyrkan on my way back across Södermalm towards the train station, and stopped to finish my ice cream there. I happened to be standing right next to the church when the bells rang for five o’clock.

Of course the yoke was too large. Again. I wish I could edit the PDF pattern to shout loudly at future me to not trust the sizing instructions and just calculate it based on my chest circumference and my stitch gauge.

On the plus side, the knit fabric feels very soft and fluffy and wonderful after blocking. Like a woolly hug.

It took three trains and two buses and seven and a half hours and a near miss, but now I’m here, in Ottenby, at the southern end of Öland.

I nearly didn’t make it, due to my own thoughtlessness. I had to change buses in Mörbylånga. The second bus was to leave from the same stop where I got off from the first one. I had been standing there for about ten minutes, and had another minute or two to go, when I realized that the same bus stop does not necessarily mean the exact same spot – the bus stop has its other half on the other side of the road. And since my first bus left the main road to head in to Mörbylånga, and the second bus would need to drive out of Mörbylånga back to the main road… I was on the wrong side of the road. It took me a minute to jog across the road and onwards to the “same but other” stop – and the bus arrived thirty seconds later. Had my brain not woken up in time, I would have missed my only chance today to get to Ottenby and instead been stuck there in Mörbylånga.

It feels a bit like the end of the world: last stop on the bus, with an overgrown little shelter to mark its spot, and a lot of near emptiness in all directions around me.

Today was going to be a transport day only. But… I’m here, I’ve got my boots on, I have at least four hours of daylight left, and I am so close to the actual southernmost tip of the island. (The signpost says 4.5 km.) I could sit around and do nothing – or I could walk there and back.

Southern Öland is mostly limestone, thorny bushes, sheep, rocks, and the sea.

There is a lighthouse at the southern tip of Öland, called Långe Jan – apparently the tallest lighthouse in Sweden. Across the wide open landscape, it looks like I’m almost there, even though the sign says I still have 1.8 km to go.

And here it is. Tall and imposing indeed! Open for visitors, in principle, but we’re in the low season, so it had closed for the day before I even got off the bus.

Instead I explored the surroundings. Next to the lighthouse is Ottenby bird observatory, where tens of thousands of birds are caught for ringing every year, and many more are observed. Because of the location, it’s passed by many migratory birds, and the coastal meadows and shallow beaches offer them lots of food. According to the observatory’s website, more species of birds have been sighted here than anywhere else in Sweden.

For me, with no particular knowledge of birds and no binoculars, it was just a lot of birds. “Looks like a bunch of geese of some sort” and “that’s a swan” and “some kind of wader”.

It wasn’t just birds, either. On one side of the headland, a herd of seals were basking in the evening sun. I didn’t want to get too close and disturb them, but from where I was, I counted at least thirty.

As fun as this was, it was time for me to head back, if I wanted to get my tent up before the dark. Here’s a last look back at the lighthouse.

I had walked down there along the shortest path, more or less straight south from Ottenby. On my way back I headed roughly north-east, so as to end up at an STF camping site – and to see something different.

The seaside meadows on this side were like a savanna, but with hawthorn trees instead of acacias. Just like in the savannas in Africa, they get their characteristic shape from animals eating the lower branches. Hawthorns, left alone, grow into bushes. But cows eat the branches they can reach, until the hawthorn becomes a tree with a flat-bottomed crown.

Ottenby used to be a village – “by” means “village” – and the lands around it were owned by a monastery. In the 16th century, along came Gustav Vasa and reformed the church and took the lands of most monasteries in the country, including Ottenby, which became a royal farm. Other kings later brought in English sheep for breeding, and deer for hunting. There’s a deciduous forest that still has a herd of deer, reportedly all descendants of the original herd, and according to sources, King Carl XVI Gustaf still has and uses the sole hunting rights for the Ottenby Royal Farm.

I reached the camping site right at sundown, but after the reception had closed for the day. I picked a suitable-looking flat spot of grass and put up my tent anyway, and used their facilities, and will pay tomorrow.

In total I probably walked 10-12 km here in Ottenby today.

My locker, at work.

On the outside: two magnets to identify the locker as mine. One with a fun photo taken when I joined tretton37; one a quick chain-stitched embroidered patch.

On the inside: essential stuff that I wouldn’t want to be without at work. This includes:

• A thick hoodie, almost invisible behind everything else, and a soft woolly shawl. For several weeks, if not months, the heating wasn’t working properly in the office. Facilities management claimed the system was fine, and yet everybody in the office was freezing and layering up. Now that they’ve fixed it, I might take the hoodie home. The shawl stays, though.
• An external hard drive with a backup of my home computer and all my photos.
• A bottle of fluoride mouthwash. I have weak teeth, and try to remember to use it every day.
• A carton of panty liners.
• A bar of Friis Holm Tobago dark milk chocolate.
• A pad of sticky notes and a good pen.

I have a similar stash at the Sortera office, with the exception of the extra thick hoodie, and the backup drive.

Getting out of the supermarket today, it struck me how gray the parking lot was. There was a single car that was not white/gray/black, out of twenty-odd cars in total.

Even red cars are gone. A few years ago I remember thinking that all cars were either white/gray/black or bright red, and now the colour range is even narrower.

It’s the same with clothes. It feels like everyone is wearing either black or gray, or a combination of these. And jeans, of course.

I read an article recently that analysed a set of photos of historical objects, and made the same observation. Gray is taking up more and more space.

Two expensive, high-end bars of dark milk chocolate. Very different on the outside – and very different on the inside.

Friis Holm Tobago dark milk is (still) creamy and smooth, with its sweetness and bitterness nicely balanced. Delightful.

Vaxholm dark milk is grainy, sweet and flavourless in comparison. I’m letting it melt in my mouth and trying desperately to find the flavour but there is barely any.

I was considering throwing it out, or perhaps taking it to the office and sneakily leaving it there without saying that I’m dumping it. But Adrian told me I was being too hasty and that he quite liked it. A matter of taste.

We don’t pay much attention to Valentine’s day, but Ingrid bought a bouquet of pink and red roses, and I made pink pancakes.

I spent the whole day at the Urb-it office, much of it in meetings or informal chats. It was all useful and enjoyable and interesting, but by the end of the day I was completely done in. I’m not used to this kind of thing any more. I didn’t even take single photo, even though we have pretty cool rooftop views.

(Source: XKCD.)
The strategy here labelled “chaotic neutral” is exactly what a half-full egg carton looks like, if I’m the one to make it half full. In my mind this is clearly the best layout: the weight is evenly distributed so the carton is easy to handle, and it is aesthetically pleasing. It appears that people somehow find this egg layout unnatural or unusual. They are weird.