I am making active efforts to meet new friends.

I’m an introvert but, it turns out, not a hermit. With no more husband and now mostly just one child every other week, I feel a need for more company. And more outside impulses: it’s not just talking to someone that I miss, but going to places I wouldn’t think of going on my own, trying new things.

My colleagues are fun but I don’t know that I’d want to spend even more time with them. My childhood friends are far away. I’ve grown apart from most of my friends from my student days and don’t feel that I have much in common with them. My hobbies are such that I only meet retired ladies, and I really don’t feel that I’m one of them. I don’t want clones of myself, but there needs to be some common ground for me to enjoy someone’s company.

Now I’ve joined an online friend network-ish site – not a dating site but just a place to meet people – and had two great “friend dates” today. Fika with one, and a long walk with another. We tried a new café, and walked along paths that I’ve never walked before, and had great conversations.

The plan for the walk was agreed a week ago, and even yesterday the forecast for today was “partly cloudy” and around 7 degrees. What we got was windy, overcast, and with intermittent sleet. We looked at the sky, looked at each other, considered cancelling, but went ahead anyway.

At one point we passed a small sauna next to a pier, and there were four brave people on their way into the water for bathing. Not running from the sauna into the water and back out again, but leisurely walking towards the water or even just standing around in their swimsuits. Meanwhile I was wearing four layers of clothing.

The photo is a view of Årsta bridge between Södermalm and Årsta. I wonder what the graffiti painters have stood on for painting those designs. Canoes? Ice?

View from Traneberg bridge. The high point of my morning bike commute, literally and metaphorically.

The temperature was a couple of degrees below freezing this morning, and that’s the limit of my clothes and equipment for cycling. It was just a bit too cold for the first 20 minutes or so, especially for my fingers, until I got to Brommaplan and into the sun.

Another brilliantly sunny day, another brief post-lunch walk near the office. The ice in Liljeholmen is still looking very thick and solid, but can it really be? It makes me want to throw rocks at it, or climb down and poke hard at it.

Lunchtime walk in Liljeholmen by the water. Brilliant sun, warm-ish air, but the ice is still thick in the bay.

Bye-bye winter. This is the last snow for this season. It’s +5°C now at seven in the morning and will stay that way throughout not just the coming days but also the nights.

This morning I took the next train after my usual one and got to the office fifteen minutes later. Also, not having been to this office in almost a month, I’d lost my routine and got off at Stockholm Central instead of Odenplan, which is slightly closer. This had me walking past Adolf Fredrik church two minutes past eight o’clock instead of a quarter to, so I got to hear the church bells in the morning sun.

More potential inspiration for the possible underground-themed embroidery project.

The Hötorget station is probably the one I’ve used most, in the last decade or so. Tretton37 had their office there, and then their next office as well, and so did Urb-it. The Stockholm concert hall is there. Active Solution is one stop to the east, but if I have any errands to run after work then those often take me to Hötorget.

This station doesn’t have any art on the walls that I’ve noticed. It’s one of the oldest stations, from the 1950s, before the city decided to start decorating them. It’s like a blue-tiled bathroom, very utilitarian. It only got its own art in the late 1990s – a light sculpture in the ceiling.

Wall art at the southbound red line platform at the T-centralen station.

The suggested common theme for our embroidery group this term is “art in the Stockholm underground”, or maybe it morphed into the slightly broader “the Stockholm underground, but no train network maps, and no actual trains”.

With my and Ingrid’s upcoming trip I will miss the next two sessions, and I’m not yet done with last term’s project (which grew from one piece into a triptych because I enjoyed what I was doing). Maybe I’ll have to give this a miss.

Even a teeny bit of snow, that we all know isn’t here to stay, brightens everything.

(View from the lunch room at Sortera towards Liljeholmen center.)