Within a month we have both Adrian’s and Ingrid’s birthday to celebrate, and Adrian’s friend Hanna has her birthday two days before Adrian.

So we have within the space of about 5 weeks:

• Hanna’s birthday party
• Adrian’s actual birthday
• Adrian’s birthday party
• A gathering for the extended family for both kids
• Ingrid’s actual birthday
• Ingrid’s birthday party

We celebrated Adrian’s birthday early in the morning before school with a little cake and candles and singing the birthday song.

We hadn’t actually intended to have much of a party for him, thinking him too young, but Adrian had very definite wishes about which friends he wanted to invite, so we had a party anyway. Adrian asked for a strawberry cake, so we had both that and some cookies, and chocolate sprinkles on top.

Ingrid’s head has been full of birthday thoughts since early September. She makes lists, and plans, and draws and writes invitations. She considers types of cakes (Swiss roll? or waffles with ice cream?) and whom to invite and what games to play.

A clear sign that it’s autumn: noticing that I need to stop mowing the lawn well before I’m tired, not because the kids need to be put to bed but because it is getting too dark outside.

Birthdays are coming up, and it’s made me think of gifts and gift-giving. Sometimes the most thoughtful, loving gifts can fall flat – and spur of the moment gifts can end up being unexpectedly valuable and long-lived.

I got a pin cushion for my birthday when I was maybe six years old. Or maybe seven or eight, whatever – a very very long time ago. It was given to me by a girl whom I didn’t really know, the daughter of some acquaintance to my parents, who just happened to be nearby when I had my birthday, or something random like that. And she probably happened to have just finished it. I have no memories of the girl. But I still have the pin cushion, and I still use it.

A similar “hey here’s a crafts project I had in a drawer at home” was given to us when we moved into this house five years ago. We had a housewarming party and invited the neighbours. A lady and her daughter from across the street came by and gave us a crocheted potholder. It just so happened that the potholder was green and white which matched our other potholders pretty well, as well as most of the rest of the kitchen. It’s still in use.

During my years at university a crafty member of one of the clubs made hand-painted mugs for each of the club members. I got one, too, even though I never drank tea or coffee. She knew it, but was kind enough to give me a mug nevertheless. It’s been with me through the various moves since then, packed away and unpacked, but never really used much. Then the kids came along, and Ingrid loves colourful mugs much better than plain old glasses. So now the mug is in constant use.

Another unexpectedly useful gift was a toaster we got as a wedding present. We did not then own a toaster and had never thought about needing one. And I myself still almost never eat toast… but the rest of the family do. So it’s still with us, still looks stylish and works well, and earns its keep every weekend morning.

The new MacBook is awesome. Saving a photo in Capture NX (Nikon’s editor for RAW files) went from about 15 seconds to 2. My workflow used to be “edit, press save, browse the Internet for a while, come back”. Not any more!

After four and a half years of dedicated service, I have now retired my old MacBook Pro and bought a new one, of roughly the same kind. (The battery on the old one has warped with time and is now so bent out of shape that it puts pressure on the trackpad from underneath, so after about an hour of use the trackpad stops working properly.)

In addition to a working trackpad, unaffected by a misbehaving battery, the new one has one really cool thing: a Retina display.

The Retina display seemed like an unnecessary luxury. I was pretty happy with the old screen. But the model with Retina display had other things that I wanted (more memory compared to the non-retina one, and Flash storage instead of a hard drive) so I bought it anyway.

And now I am in love with the new display. Everything looks so crisp. It’s a pleasure to look at, and especially to read – or write.

PS: If anyone is interested in buying a cheap 5-year-old 15″ MacBook Pro with a badly warped battery, then let me know. The battery can be replaced, I’m sure.

663 photos from our trip to Estonia await triage and editing. Sigh.

There was an ad campaign some years ago for a water park. It was built around photos of swim shorts and bikini bottoms with holes in them, from too many rides down water slides.

It turns out that this can actually happen, and it doesn’t even require much effort or excessive usage of said water slides.

Some weeks ago we discovered a slightly moldy smell in our basement and a few boxes felt like they were a bit moist. We took those up and aired their contents. To get the moist air out of the basement we kept the door open during the day a few times, and put a high-powered fan in there.

A while later Eric discovered that someone had seized this opportunity, walked into our basement, and walked out with all the alcohol that was in there. It was all stored in a closet inside the basement, not visible and not even anywhere near the entrance, but I guess someone felt comfortable enough to go poking around inside.

A bunch of bottles of wine (we get wine as a gift now and again and never drink it), some half-empty bottles of glögg, etc. I guess they worked really fast because they also grabbed the totally non-alcoholic home made sloe cordial that sat on the same shelf…

While there were a few bottles there that will be hard to replace, the incident felt no more than a minor nuisance to me, especially since I don’t drink any alcohol. It was more of a loss to Eric. To me it was like a slap on the fingers, “don’t leave the door open, stupid people!” Kind of sad, though, because I really wouldn’t have expected this kind of thing to happen in our neighbourhood.

Today I discovered the real loss. To carry away the alcohol, they took our two suitcases. One of them we only bought last year and I had hoped for it to last at least twenty years. Now it’s gone. Now that made me angry.

It’s a good thing that they didn’t take our kit bags, because I just started packing today for our two-week trip to Estonia. (Hence my discovery of the loss.) Otherwise there would have been some panicked emergency shopping here.

Everybody has a smartphone these days. I don’t. And I have no intention of getting one, even though I kind of like our iPads, especially for long car trips, or for that “dead time” up in the bedroom waiting for Adrian to fall asleep.

Everybody has a smartphone, and it’s always in their hands. In the train station, half the people are blipping on their phones, playing whatever latest game they have. Once on the train, even more people take their phones out. Eyes down, no contact with the world around them.

Friends sitting at a café, next to each other, each one with a phone in their hands. Mums on the train with their babies, ignoring the baby’s talk and even cries, blipping on their phones.

In the street you can easily spot them from a distance: it’s the people who are walking slightly too slowly, absent-mindedly, not quite in a straight line, getting in others’ way because they don’t even look up to see where they’re going.

I am by now so fed up with seeing this incessant phone-blipping everywhere that, by extension, I am fed up with the idea of smartphones. I feel a twinge of distaste when I think of them.

You could say that it’s not the phone’s fault. It’s the people using the phone. But at the same time it is inherent in technology that it changes our behaviour. Smartphones are made to be always with you, always on, always offering that titbit of entertainment, of distraction. The constant blipping is part of the soul of the smartphone.

For the same reason I resisted buying a car for many years. Owning a car changes your behaviour. Yes, it enables lots of new things, good things, nice things – but there is no denying that now that we own a car, we cycle much less.

Once you have acquired this subtly life-changing technology, it weasels its way into your habits, and will be difficult to get rid of. You own the thing, and the thing owns you. Even though I don’t like owning a car, I would not get rid of ours, now that we have it.

Or perhaps this is just general age-related Luddism. All these new-fangled gadgets! Kids these days! Etc etc.

Picnic, strawberries, dancing around the maypole, and a train ride with Lennakatten, a museum train near Uppsala.