I proudly present to you these holes I drilled all by myself! I’m rather pleased with my drilling precision, given that this is my first time with metalwork.

The drilling was rather less straightforward than the sawing and filing. My first attempt with a standard metal drill bit failed. After a long struggle, I had nothing more than a tiny divot to show. (This is a trial hole in one of the sawed-off pieces, hence why it looks so sloppy.)

The weekend after I went off to Bauhaus and bought drill bits made for high-density stainless steel. This weekend I put them to use, and the difference was immediate. With them, it was no struggle at all to drill through the steel pipe.

Spring!

March weather continues to be its disappointing self, with cloudy skies and near-zero temperatures, and actual spring nowhere in sight. Every year I remind myself that March is not actually spring, and every year I let myself get tricked by those first few warm days into believing that this year is different.

No, it’s not.

Here’s a photo of hellebores from a week ago. What’s out there right now does not deserve to be photographed.

Continuing on my purge journey, I am most of the way through our two filing cabinets.

The label on that folder says “1 year of bills” which indicates the original intent, but not the current reality. Firstly, it has multiplied from one folder into three – whenever one filled up, a new one just got added behind it. It has bills going back to when we still lived in London. Other folders have even more ancient content, such as phone contracts from 2001, and Eric’s rental agreements from before we even met. Thirty-year-old paperwork!

Eric was more fond than me of keeping paper copies of things. The utilities and services I had signed up for, I paid by e-invoice or automatic payment; the ones he signed up for, we got paper bills for – and they all ended up in the folders. But in the end, when push came to shove as he moved out, very little of it was important enough to bring with him.

Now the vast majority of all of it is going out. I threw out two large paper bags full of old papers today – around 20 kg and thousands of pages.

With the archives much reduced in volume, I can fit what’s left into one of the filing cabinets and get rid of the other one. That cabinet has been tucked away in one of the built-in wardrobes, which will then have room for my clothes instead, so I can sell or give away the free-standing wardrobe in the bedroom, which will in turn let me rearrange the rest of the furniture and figure out what kind of new bed will fit the new space. It’s a whole chain.

We’ve barely seen any birds at the feeder this year. And it’s not that the birds are there but we’re not, so we just don’t see them. Last time I filled up the feeder was just after New Year’s, and it’s still more than half full.

Too warm, too little snow? First hints of an ecosystem collapse? Better offerings elsewhere?

My desk used to be my home office, for everything from reading, to blogging, maintaining my to-do lists, paying the bills, to piling up books and magazines that I hoped to get around to.

Then covid came, and all of us switched to working from home all of the time, and my desk also become my WFH desk. I got properly equipped with a large monitor etc, which was a necessity for productivity but made my desk quite cramped. Plus, when I spent all day at the desk, working, it became strongly associated with work in my mind, and I didn’t like the feeling of going back there after dinner. My blogging and online reading migrated to the sofa; home admin got squeezed into a small corner of the desk, battling for space against all the work equipment.

Now I have inherited Eric’s work nook, which gives me the luxury of separating my home office from my work-from-home office. The desk in the bedroom is for private stuff; the desk under the chair is for work. Both activities get more space, and they don’t get mixed up with each other. And my back and hiops will be happier about spending less time in the sofa.

I needed a chair for the work nook, so I went to Blocket. Black chair, black chair, gray chair, black chair… boring, boring, boring… red! And the seller thought the red colour to be a potential problem. “Säljer en riktigt skön stol, som i färgen kanske inte är alla i smaken, men den är fantastisk på alla sätt o vis!” – “Selling a very comfy chair that might not be to everybody’s taste when it comes to colour, but it’s fantastic in all ways!” I’m glad that I like colour when everybody’s tastes lean towards black. This chair had been for sale for a month and a half, and nobody wanted it. It’s an RH Logic chair that cost around 15 000 SEK when new, and I got it for 600 – because the fabric is red and, to be fair, slightly faded along the front edge. Such a beauty, and such a great deal.

It’s very blowy and snowy outside. The worst of the wind passed us during the night, blowing down string lights and driving snow into odd corners. Now there’s tons of fresh snow everywhere. Luckily the temperature stayed just below zero, so the snow was easy to work with. The last dump of snow, earlier this week, was immediately followed by rain and a thaw, which wasn’t enough to not actually melt all of the snow – just long enough to make it really wet and heavy. And then freezing temperatures the next night, so I had one evening to clear it all away, or deal with thick clumps of ice on all the stairs and driveways.

The municipal snow ploughs have cleared the streets, but haven’t had time to remove the snow, so it’s all piled up along the sides of the streets. And since I have a sturdy retaining wall towards the street, whereas the neighbours across the street have a lilac hedge, the snow ploughs – very reasonably – push most of it to our side. Now I’m running out of space where to put the snow.

Clearing everything after a decent-sized (but not extreme) snowfall takes about an hour and a quarter. That covers the staircases (upper and lower), the landing between them, the landing towards the street, the spaces in front of the mailbox and the rubbish bins, the car, the driveway, the wooden deck, and the stairs down from the deck to the driveway. A good workout.

The snow pusher is still great – and not just for the driveway. I’ve figured out a technique to use it on the lower, concrete stairs, too. Hold it parallel with the stairs, as close to vertical as possible, and I can push the snow down from one stair to the next. Two such pushes is enough to clear an entire step in no more than twenty seconds. And then I have a pile of snow on street level, where it is easy to clear. So I replace lifting and shovelling with pushing, which is much easier on the back and arms.

Eric finalized his move on Friday. I have the house to myself until Sunday afternoon/evening, when the kids will come for their week here.

The quiet feels particularly calming after the stress of last week. Like breathing out, and putting down a heavy weight. A lightness.

I don’t think I’ve quite settled into this new reality yet. It feels temporary.

My to-do list is massive. There are things to buy replacements for, closets and shelves and drawers to sort through, decisions to make. Good thing I have more time and more energy than in a long time.

Eric and I had two single beds put together, because we preferred mattresses with different firmness, with a double-width mattress topper on top. Now we detached them from each other and took one each.

It only took me one night to discover that a single bed feels much narrower than half of a double bed. I have to take care all the time to not lose the blanket over the edge of the bed. (I feel like there’s some kind of metaphor in there, for the end of a relationship.)

My plan was to make do with a narrow bed for a few months, until I have time to figure out how I want to furnish my bedroom in the longer term. Get a feel for the space, consider what else I might want in here.

That’s a bit of a chain of projects, though: before I invest in a new bed frame, I want to see the rest of the room as it will be. That means getting rid of the large double wardrobe in the middle of the room. For that to happen, I need to move my clothes into one or more of the built-in closets on the other side of the room. And that in turn requires me to sort through the stuff that is currently there, so I can make space.

I’m reconsidering that plan, though, because this is not very comfortable.

I declared Christmas finished today. Packed away the decorations and took out the Christmas tree, washed and ironed the party tablecloths and napkins. By my estimations, I ironed roughly 8.5 square metres of linen tablecloth. That took a while.

Eric is moving over his stuff to his new apartment, and odd gaps are appearing in the furnishings here. (The half-empty bookshelves looked particularly sad, until we moved the empty shelves as well, and consolidated what was left into a smaller space.) Now it was time for the houseplants. Many of them were more his “babies” than mine, so it made sense for him to take them with him. And overall he’s leaving so much more than he’s taking, so anything he is even remotely interested in, I’m happy to let him have.

(I know I have photos of what this space usually look like, but no idea how to find them.)

I took a trip to IKEA for some completely unrelated things, but realized that they have a decent houseplant department, and for the usual great IKEA prices. Nothing fancy, but that’s exactly what I wanted.