Half of our fridge door is covered in marketing leaflets that Ingrid has been receiving from universities. They all want her to study Industrial Engineering and Management. That’s a programme combining business and economics (which, together with law, has been the focus of Ingrid’s high school or gymnasium studies) with engineering. There’s a looming shortage of engineering graduates in Sweden in the coming decades, so I guess schools are now trying to push suitable students from other areas towards engineering.

The first few were flattering – commenting on her excellent results on the general university admission test – but didn’t affect her more than that. But as they kept piling up, she started vacillating. What if they’re right? What if that would be a good move? Looking back, though, the only STEM subject that she’s enjoyed at school is maths. Chemistry, physics, technology – mostly “eeuw, I really don’t want more of that”. Law, business, psychology, philosophy – “yes please”.

She’s now applying for a paid trainee programme for business students considering engineering, because why not, but I’d be surprised if her future lay in engineering.

(Actual university studies are two years off for her, because she’ll be doing 15 months of military service starting next March. The trainee programme would be a time-filler for this autumn.)

Ingrid’s class had their studentskiva today. It’s a dinner for the graduating students and their parents, that turns into a normal teenage party after the dinner ends and the parents leave. The seating plan had us sitting next to the families of Ingrid’s boyfriend and another close friend of theirs, so we had good company all evening.

This was nice. I don’t often have reason to dress up, and there’s a definite shortage of dinner parties in my life.

Ingrid looking all grown-up and elegant.

Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

Ingrid and I saw 1984 at Stadsteatern.

During much of the performance, sound was provided through headphones. It felt odd and kind of gimmicky at first, but it also worked. Winston’s quiet musings and diary entries could be delivered quietly, intimately. And the subtle hints of there being someone else there, prompting him and asking questions, also worked because these sounds could be subtle, barely there. A whisper is no longer a whisper if it is delivered through a loudspeaker, or by an actor projecting his voice through a hall.

Otherwise: intense, minimal, true to the original. (To the extent that I remember the original, which I last read, oh, thirty years ago?)

Ingrid and I went to the movies and then for a sushi lunch afterwards. We also bought a saucepan for 30 kr at the flea market on Hötorget and browsed fun shops like Sostrene Grene, and Sudd & Kludd.

We saw Flow, the animated movie about the cat in the flood. It was the first time for Ingrid and the second time for me – I saw it in January, catching it just as it looked like it was ending its run in the cinemas, and liked it enough to be happy to watch it again.

I liked how the animals in the movie are very clearly still animals, even though they’re more intelligent than normal animals – unlike many children’s movies where animals are just humans in other shapes. The dogs here can’t help chasing things, the cat is mesmerised by things swinging back and forth in front of it. The cat makes small meep sounds when distressed, even when nobody is nearby, just like real cats do.

The animals are intelligent enough to understand each other somewhat, even though they don’t have language. I also understand them somewhat, but mostly not all the way. It’s difficult to interpret an unfamiliar animal’s body language. What does the capybara actually think is going on? No idea. Are the other dogs bullies or just clueless? Don’t know. Why are the birds so bothered by one of them helping the cat? Who knows.

A lot of stuff has clearly happened in the world where the story takes place. I wonder how much of an actual back story there is in the creators’ heads, and how much of the world-building is hand-wavy “it just is that way”.

The cat in Flow looks quite similar to Nysse so I couldn’t help imagining Nysse in all those distressing situations. It was a bit like watching movies where kids get hurt, but not quite as bad. (I really struggle with that since having children.) Worse the first time; now at least I knew that it wouldn’t get hurt for real.

Sushi, by the way, is horrendously expensive these days. As is all eating out, really. I thought it was bad when a sushi lunch went up to 130 kr a couple of years ago. Now we’re at 160 for lunch and 200 kr for a la carte. My salary has not gone up 50% in the same time period.

First thing in the morning: IKEA, to start looking for a new bed, and to buy clothes rails for my built-in closets. Visiting IKEA on a Saturday can be a nightmare, but not if you’re there right when they open. Plenty of space in the parking lot, and no crowds inside, either. By the time I was ready to leave, the situation in the parking lot was rather different, with cars hunting for free spots.

Next up: a trip to the city to buy embroidery yarn, which was also this season’s inaugural bicycle trip. My 30-day travel card ran out yesterday, and today was a bright, sunny day, which seemed like a clear sign that it was time to dust off the bike, pump up the tires, and start pedalling.

The sun is warm, but the air isn’t. And at this time of the year the sun still doesn’t reach very high in the sky. Even at two o’clock in the afternoon, long sections of the cycle lanes from here to the city are in full shade from the houses that line them.

In the evening: party. Eric, Ingrid and Adrian had a housewarming party at their new apartment. They’ve got all the essential furniture in place and have settled in. The living room sofa is large enough to fit Adrian’s entire band of friends at the same time!

And then later in the evening, Melodifestivalen with Ingrid, while Adrian was watching it with his friends at the apartment – we preferred a quieter evening. Much of the music is pretty boring – artists trying to repeat their wins by replicating previous hits – but the winning song, a catchy and humorous Swedish-Finnish song about saunas, was actually fun.

Exhaustion and bedtime after that.

Happy forty-seven and a half to me!

For my birthday this summer I wanted to go out to have a nice restaurant brunch. I was going to wait until September so the brunch places in the city would open again after the summer. But then it was the kids’ birthdays, and the divorce, and Christmas, and more divorce, and it never happened.

Today Ingrid, Adrian and I finally went for my birthday brunch at Kelp, a very local restaurant, just five minutes’ walk from home. We all ended up ordering the same things: scrambled eggs, sourdough bread, single-variety Swedish apple juice, and French toast with a home-made berry compote. And then, while Ingrid and I were bemoaning how full we were, another serving of French toast for Adrian, who is in that teenage bottomless phase. Very nice.

High school students in Sweden write a diploma essay, a kind of a research project, during their third year. It follows an academic process, so part of the work involves disputation of someone else’s work. Ingrid is reading through someone’s essay and has strong opinions about their subpar writing skills, and how much harder that makes it to read and understand the essay. Using fancy words to sound sophisticated while not really understanding those words; being sloppy with commas; losing track of where your sentence construction was going. I tell her to pity her poor teachers who have to read this kind of writing all the time.

Ingrid works extra at Spånga konditori, a local café-patisserie-bakery. When she works the closing shift, she brings home all sorts of leftovers. Sourdough bread that’s too old to sell; buns that are too misshapen or have been baked slightly too dark; cakes that to my eye have nothing wrong with them at all but for some reason are unsellable. Tons more stuff gets simply thrown out.

I take a sourdough loaf to work on most Mondays and drop it off in the lunch room. Sometimes Ingrid drives round to a bunch of her friends to deliver day-old pastries. Sometimes the friends are narrow-minded philistines and say no to delicious chocolate and almond pastries, because they’ve never eaten those particular ones before, and I get take a whole box of them to serve for fika at Sortera.

Sometimes I get fancy pastries all to myself. This weekend I got a mini lime pie, a vegan brownie, and a mango/passion fruit pastry. They were all absolutely delicious.

I totally forgot to post on Wednesday – Ingrid got approved on her driving test!

This was her 2nd attempt. On the first one, the instructor was a stone-faced guy who said almost nothing during the whole session, and then said that Ingrid wasn’t aggressive enough. So we practised being more aggressive, even though I disagreed with the verdict. It’s not like Ingrid was dawdling or being so slow that she’d get in the way of other drivers; she just wasn’t taking every last opportunity.

This time she had a friendly instructor with whom she chit-chatted all the way, so she didn’t even have time to be nervous, and at the end there was no hesitation when she got her approval. I think a more friendly instructor made more of a difference to the result than Ingrid’s intention of being more aggressive.

Now we’re done with the driving practice!