The deer are cleaning up after the birds, eating spilled seeds. Surprisingly unbothered by me standing two metres away with a camera. I guess they’ve learned that humans can’t walk through walls.

We had a minor snow storm on Saturday afternoon that delivered a few centimetres of snow – enough to cause mild chaos in traffic, with bad visibility, and cars in ditches because they were caught out in their summer tires. I caught the beginning of the snow storm on my way back from Uppsala, where I’d helped my brother pick up furniture I’d ordered. Luckily I did have winter tires on (Eric switched them that morning) and with careful driving I got home safe.

Sunday brought more snow. And then more, and more, and today was absolute chaos. By the end of the day the snow was knee-deep, over the edges of my tall rubber boots, so it must have been close to 40 cm. According to an article in Dagens Nyheter central Stockholm still got less than in the snowstorm in November 2016, but I’m not sure if that also holds for Spånga.


There was no way for the snow ploughs to keep up with it. Getting anywhere in the city was hopeless, I read in the news: cars stuck in the snow, many bus routes cancelled, trains delayed… I’m glad I didn’t have to go there. Here in Spånga pavements were impassable, except where there was enough foot traffic to trample a narrow path, and at least one bus had gotten stuck in a roadworks ditch hidden by the snow cover.

I shovelled snow for an hour Sunday night, another hour this morning, and a third hour at lunchtime, and I was still barely keeping up. There was just no end to it. My snow dump pile by the root cellar was as tall as me by the end of the day.

Cat, for scale.

Nysse was not fond of the snow, at all. The last winter was half his lifetime ago, and it wasn’t a snow-rich one, so he’s never seen anything quite like this. Once or twice he stepped on deep snow only to sink right through it, so that even his head didn’t peek out.

After I had cleared the deck and the back stairs for him, and the cars had made deep tracks in the snow in the streets, he made some cautious rounds. But he’s clearly sceptical of the whole thing. His walks are short, and he keeps shaking his paws to try and keep the snow off.

Adrian and Ingrid on the other hand are loving it. Both went out sledding with their friends – even sixteen-year-olds aren’t too old to enjoy sledding. Adrian spent all his breaks at school out in the snow, rolling giant snowballs and building snow forts and having snowball fights.

We Eric put up the bird feeder this weekend. I’ve been watching it since then. Plenty of magpies, thus far, and some blue tits and nuthatches. But they’re few, and skittish still.

Birchleaf spirea, after the birchleaf part of them is gone.

The glory of cherry trees in autumn colours.

This year is a good one, with the right kind of weather – the trees are blazing in reds and oranges and yellows.

Potentilla flowers, and a cute little wasp. It’s nice to have something flowering abundantly and brightly this late in the season.

Returning from my daily walk, pleased to be welcomed by all this greenery. Almost every day I’m reminded of how much I love having a garden – even in a year I haven’t had any energy to plant anything new, the investments of time and effort from past years are paying off.

Raindrops never go out of style.

The lock on the garage door stopped working. Eric managed to get it out, but not to fix it, so for now we are lockless. We came up with a pretty clever workaround, if I say so myself – we just parked the car with its nose right up against the garage door. Getting a bicycle in or out of the garage is a bit of a hassle (or a two-person job) but it’s only for a week or so.

The Venus flytrap is trapping plenty of flies and other creatures, now that there are plenty flying around, but not snapping closed around any of them, regardless of size. I wonder if it will slowly digest them and get some nutrition out of them anyway, or if it doesn’t work like that.