My brother spent the day with us. We don’t visit each other often – he doesn’t travel much and doesn’t like entertaining people at his home, so I usually see him at the usual holidays. We missed him at Easter and Midsummer, so I drove him from Uppsala to Spånga and back so we could simply talk.

I found out that he is distancing himself from our mother because the difference between their political opinions is becoming unbridgeable. (And, knowing them, neither of them can probably refrain from arguing about it.) They live a ten-minute walk from each other and I’m pretty sure that both are quite lonely, especially in these quarantine times, and yet they’d rather be alone than talk to each other.

The rainbow has nothing to do with any of that and is not symbolic in any way. It’s here only because rainbows are pretty, and the contrast between the dark band between the two rainbows and the light area below them is cool.

Adrian is discovering the wonderful world of image editing.

He knows that photos can be “photoshopped” and has seen enough examples online. Today he discovered how that actually works.

One of the games on our PlayStation that we play together is called Ultimate Chicken Horse. It’s a multi-player platform game where you build the level together, as you go. The player characters are animals – a chicken, a horse, a sheep, a raccoon etc. To me the name of the game sounded like a chimerical animal, half chicken, half horse. When Ingrid heard that she made a chicken horse for me in ibis Paint, which she otherwise uses to draw anime-style pictures.

Adrian was impressed and wanted to learn how to make images like that. Today Ingrid gave him a quick intro to ibis Paint and showed him how to import pictures into layers, and erase part of a layer to make another layer visible. He was mesmerized and proceeded to create a chicken-headed, tentacled superhero out of parts he found in Google Image Search.

At some point, a box of Humble toothbrushes somehow turned up in the house. I’m sure I didn’t buy them. But here they are, so I thought I’d try them.

After decades of smooth plastic toothbrushes in my mouth, a bamboo brush feels distinctly odd. The handle and the head are flat and straight, not rounded like I’m used to. It doesn’t have that kink in the handle that most brushes have, so the geometry feels a bit off. And I can feel the texture of bamboo against my tongue and cheeks all the time.

The plastic brushes, especially those with colourful patterns, radiate fun, modernity and slickness.
The humble brush radiates humility.

Buying plastic that I know I will throw away within months feels really, really icky now.

The company Christmas party this year took place at Såstaholm. It’s a place with a story, and the theatre theme ran strong through the entire interior. There were posters, photos, rooms named after recipients of their annual prize to young actors etc.

But better than all that was their collection of theatre costumes. Two large rooms in the basement were full of real, “retired” costumes from the Royal Opera and the Royal Dramatic Theatre. After we’d all eaten the traditional julbord, while some people went to the bar for drinks, others went downstairs to play dress-up. Later there were pirates and bishops and counts in capes in the crowd hanging out at the bar.

I found this amazing, wonderful skirt: black, floor length, wide and swishy, with several different luxurious fabrics, all shimmering and lacy. Underneath and between the visible layers there were hidden swathes of yet more fabric. With all its layers upon layers of cloth, the skirt was far heavier than my thick winter coat!

Looking inside I found one part that was like a thick tail, a rope of fabric tied together with string. It was bunched up at the top but the rest simply hung down, longer than the front of the skirt. I think it was supposed to add some fullness at the back, and structure and heaviness to the “train”. When I walked, the tail trailed behind me, invisibly under the skirt, and just sort of made the visible fabric fall differently. Quite an interesting construction detail, I thought.

I kind of wished I could take the skirt home and have it forever. But then again it was so supremely impractical that I would hardly ever wear it, not even for parties. That thing would be quite impossible to wear outside the house, but also nearly impossible to wear among other people. (Among modern people, that is, who are unused to walking among ladies with trailing skirts. I guess people used to manage, two hundred years ago.) Even as I was trying it on, someone already stepped on the fringe of the train. But still…

There were a few other skirts and dresses and corsets that I wanted to try, but couldn’t fit into. Here’s one from The Nutcracker that seems to have been used in six seasons, from 1984 to 1991. The label says “vita par” so I guess it was used for some “white pair” dance.

I’m not exactly large, but the ballerinas must be truly tiny to fit into those things! I know that they are super slim, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when the skirt waists were way to narrow for me. But even the corset tops were far too small. I don’t understand how they can have rib cages as narrow as that.

Maybe they were teenagers when they wore it, I thought. But I looked up one of the dancers (the things you can do with Google nowadays!) and, no, she was 24.

This day ten years ago I noted that people were starting to pay attention to global warming.

Ten years later we’ve gone from attention to climate anxiety. Tens of thousands of fruit bats dropped dead from a single heat wave, literally dropping from the trees by the dozens. Another heat wave going on right now is so bad that fruit is cooking on the trees.

And what are we doing? Still mining and burning coal. Still driving gasoline powered cars, and buying more of them. Still flying to Thailand to “treat yourself”. Still waiting for someone else to do something.

Our garden is still covered by a good 15 cm of snow with no signs of spring, but the first snowdrops are out at Spånga Torg.

It’s fascinating that they can feel spring in the earth, despite the snow covering them.

I am a sweet snob. I find most candy – and biscuits and cakes – not worth eating. Good quality dark chocolate is one notable exception – in the shape of both bars and truffles/pralines (the Belgian kind, with a soft flavoured filling inside a chocolate shell).

My favourite maker of pralines is Chokladfabriken, a Swedish firm. In part because they make really good ones, and in part because they have a shop at St. Eriksplan, which was very close to my previous office. I could easily pick up pralines on my way home from work.

Then I changed jobs and lost my easy access to Chokladfabriken, and there was a serious chocolate drought at home. Even the children – who have learned to appreciate the pralines, especially Adrian – started telling me they missed the pralines, even though they are quite happy to eat the standard cheap sugary stuff as well.

And now I found out that the new office is right around the corner from another Chokladfabriken shop. They have three shops in Stockholm, and I’ve had the luck to move from near one to even nearer another. I’m happy again.

The day has come (and passed) when the sun actually reaches our kitchen window over the neighbours’ house in the afternoon. It still went behind the roof last weekend but above it today so the turning point was some time this week.

In Swedish I think of it as vårtakjämning. The vernal equitectum doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. In Estonian perhaps katuseharjapäev, to go with taliharjapäev?

Life changes:

• Changed jobs. Left ReQtest, which had changed beyond recognition during the past year, and joined tretton37 as a consultant.
• Started playing Pokemon Go. Which is definitely not in the same category as a new job, but it’s something that is a part of my life now that I used to think I’d never do. But Adrian and Ingrid started, I sort of joined half-heartedly and passively, then Eric wanted to see it was all about, which made me start playing “for real” – and here we all are. I have mixed feelings about the game. I like it because it’s something that gets us all out of the house on those gray days. But I also dislike it because it’s such an attention magnet.

Achievements:

• Learned F#. I undertook this as a mini-project during my first few weeks at tretton37 while I had no client project to work on. It was quite a struggle at first, since I was determined to write “proper”, functional F# rather than following the imperative patterns I am used to. But it got easier with time. I can’t think of a situation where I would choose to use it “for real” but it was interesting to learn.
• Planted two sections of hedge.

Memorable events: mostly travels.

• February: family ski trip, the first one for all of us together. Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4.
• April: ski tour in Jotunheimen. Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6
• July: the Estonian Song Festival. Here.
• July: rainy family trip to Cornwall. Rainy. Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6
• September: solo hike in Jämtlandsfjällen. Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4

And two more distant events:

• The terror attack in central Stockholm in April. Not an event I particularly want to remember, and not one that touched me personally – but a sign of the times.
• The new commuter train stations in Stockholm. A mundane change that I am nevertheless reminded of daily.