My favourite cyclamen has gotten an infestation of some sort of nasty, tiny, black fly. I spray it with a soap and alcohol solution and temporarily beat them back, and then I forget to follow up and they multiply again. They’re just an eyesore – I don’t see the plant suffering at all – and mostly on the underside of the leaves, rather than the blossoms, so it never feels particularly urgent.

For some reason those flies are not spreading, either. The pot with the other cyclamen is on the same windowsill, within arm’s reach, thus logically also within wings’ reach, but it doesn’t seem to tempt them at all.

Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent and it’s time to get the Christmas mood going. Tomorrow is also going to be rainy, so I’m starting with the outdoor lights today.

The thuja in the garden is perfectly placed for Christmas lighting, nicely visible from the whole living room and at just the right distance. What it is not, is perfectly shaped for hanging Christmas lights. It’s very much directed upwards, not like a spruce or a fir with rounds of nearly-horizontal branches, and its boughs are quite delicate. I’ve figured out something of a technique that doesn’t bend the branches and gives an aesthetically pleasing result. It’s a hassle, involving a stepladder which I need to move several times, and a garden fork as an arm extender to allow me to hook the lights over the branches, and even then it takes me several tries for each loop.

When I had done all the work and was all sweaty and a mixture of pleased and frustrated, and put the plug in, I discovered that only about half the garland was lighting up. The rest was dark. It’s daylight, you can’t see the lights very well in the photo, but there are eight vertical lines and only four of them are lighting up.

I had plugged it in while it was still in the box, specifically to avoid wasting my time hanging up something that was not working. But the top layer in the box looked good, and enough of it lit up to give the impression of everything working, and I thought it would be an all-or-nothing situation, so I didn’t even think to check further in.

Now I had to take everything down again, do research to find a new garland, drive somewhere to pick it up, and go through the whole ladder-fork-cable exercise again. Because the alternatives – having to look at sad, broken Christmas lights, or having to put up the new ones in the rain tomorrow, or not having any lights at all for the first Advent Sunday – were even worse.

Got it done in the end, with much huffing and sighing, so now Christmas can start.

The process would be a lot easier if I had more arms. Or maybe if I had a different tool. The garden fork is big and heavy and requires two hands. If I had something lighter, I could have one in each hand, which would make it much easier to put the garland where I want it to go. With one extended hand, I’m just sort of half-shoving, half-throwing it up and hoping that it will catch on a bough. With two, I could maybe actually shape it into an arch. Hmm.

It’s the time of the year when I really feel my energy flagging and have to make a concerted effort to keep going. Going out in the middle of the day to get some daylight is an important part.

Today I was working from home so I spent my daylight therapy session in the garden with my camera. A surprising number of brave little flowers are still flowering – outliving their wilted comrades, tucked away among dead leaves.

While I was away in London, the cherry trees dropped all their remaining leaves. Really, I could have raked them last weekend, if I had had time, but there was the crafts fair and then trip prep and a concert.

The leaves are well past the crisp and colourful stage, now all brown and wet and sticky. Still reasonably easy to rake together.

I missed my chance to mow the grass one last time when summer was over – the weather got wet before I got around to it – so now it lies flat. Other people may have manicured lawns; I have well-combed grass.

It’s more or less dark when the working day is over. Plain old digging can be done in lamplight at a pinch, but planting requires daylight, so I took a gardening break in the middle of my work-from-home day today.

I had put some Aquilegias at the front of the new planting, but the deer ate them within a week or so. I’ve now moved them to the slope on the other side of the garage, where I think the deer are unlikely to go, and put other stuff here.

It struck me today that my choice of plants is heavily skewed towards the beginning of the alphabet, because the garden centre at Ulriksdal arranges their plants alphabetically within each section, and A is closest to the entrance. In place of the Aquilegias I have Astrantias and Asters. Next time I need to select plants, I’m going to walk all the way to the far end and start at Z.

An “open loop” is a term that David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, uses to refer to unfinished commitments – anything that needs to be acted upon, finished, or decided. Most people have most their open loops in their heads, but they can also be physical things. Every time you walk past it, it reminds you – oh, right, I should really be doing something about this.

Somehow I had accumulated a lot of physical open loops recently. Every room in the house had several piles of things that I really should be doing something about, but don’t have the time or energy or resources to address right now. They were stressing me out and annoying me. I dislike clutter, and I particularly hate ugly, messy clutter.

I may not be able to close all those loops immediately, but at least I could gather them all into one place. Now I have a pile of boxes and bags and smaller piles in my bedroom, but I can move through all the other rooms without stuff constantly nagging at me. David Allen would certainly tell me to identify all the tasks in this pile and write them down, but for me this pile acts as a physical to do list. Yeah, you’re supposed to only have one list of tasks and this clearly isn’t it, but it’s good enough for me.

While sorting through the basement this summer, I found an old lava lamp. Unpacked it recently and put it up, thought it might be fun to look at. Maybe swap out the firefly lamp for a while.

The lava lamp turned out to not thrive in the temperatures that are normal for this house. In early September it wasn’t doing too badly, but now the colder it gets, the less fun the lamp is to look at. On the cooler evenings, he lava just doesn’t flow – it melts and sort of undulates, but never bubbles up. The lamp underneath is not hot enough to keep the whole thing warm in our cool living room.

Looking at a sad lava lamp does not make me happy. I think it’s time to re-home it.

Bought a few more houseplants, and pots for them. Plants from IKEA, which has turned out to be a surprisingly good source, and pots from Tradera.

I know you’re “supposed” to put your plants in a pot with drainage, but I don’t like it. I don’t like the look of the terracotta pot + saucer combo, especially with the build-up of minerals that always comes after a few years. That look works out in the garden, but indoors it’s too scruffy for my taste. And a plastic pot inside an outer pot is ugly in a different way.

I just plant the plants directly in what’s supposed to be an outer pot. You’re not supposed to do it that way, but it seems to work for me. I haven’t managed to water anything to death. Just pay attention when watering, and you’re good. In fact, I find it easier to control the amount of water that each plant gets this way. Several plants that I took over the care of and re-potted in the last year are doing better than ever. Actually growing and thriving instead of just surviving. So I’m going to go on doing it my way.

I bought this Philodendron back in January or February. I don’t think its changed in appearance at all since then. The same leaves in the same position, nothing growing, nothing unfurling. I’d almost suspect it was fake, if it wasn’t so un-artificially strange in its shape. It’s like it’s frozen in time.

The internet says it might do better in more humid air, so now it’s moving from the living room window to the bathroom. It remains to be seen if that makes a difference. I take short showers to begin with, and most of them take place at the office after I’ve cycled there. Maybe Ingrid’s and Adrian’s longer showers every other week are enough to matter.

A cat path has appeared between our deck and the gap under the wire fence, where it’s easiest to cross from our yard to the neighbours’.