Our street got repaved today. It’s been in poor shape for years but apparently not poor enough to be prioritized until now. Actual potholes got filled in, but the whole thing was an uneven patchwork of mends on mends on mends. Kind of OK to walk or cycle or drive on, but not pleasant – and almost unusable for kids on kick scooters or skateboards.

Now the surface is so smooth and even – especially since the winter gravel also disappeared overnight – that my feet feel lost. It doesn’t feel like my street any more. Bizarre.

The contractors working here did a great job. The seams around the manholes and other access pipes are impressively even. That turned out to be a very manual and very precise task. The big machine ran an even layer of asphalt over everything. As soon as it passed over a manhole, a bunch of guys immediately swarmed over the spot, dug it out before the asphalt cooled, raised up some ring or collar just enough to shovel hot asphalt under and around it, and then packed it all down with a plate compactor. Within minutes. And with just the right amount of loose asphalt to make the end result be completely flat and even.

They took equal care with the joins between the road surface and all the driveways. I was fully prepared for them to just lay down a straight strip of asphalt and leave all the gaps to homeowners – “your driveway, your problem” – but they joined each individual driveway to the road and made the joins look super tidy. If this is where my taxes go, it’s money well spent.

The libraries in Stockholm have been in covid mode for the past year. Some are closed, some just discourage visitors. And no late fees have been charged.

I’ve had an overdue children’s book at home all this year. The library in Spånga has been closed and I just haven’t bothered finding an alternative one to return it to.

I got an email telling me the grace period ends on March 31st, so I got off my backside and cycled to Vällingby to return the darn thing. It was a relief to finally get rid of it.

Vällingby felt mostly deserted.

Look who visited our bird feeding station: the friendly neighbourhood rat.

Obviously one doesn’t really want rats around one’s house, but I’m coming to accept their presence as more or less inevitable. The advice for keeping rats away from your house and garden all seems infeasible. Avoid tall grass, get rid of fallen fruit, make sure there are no places for them to hide, don’t feed birds. So we could get rid of rats if we got rid of all that makes the garden lively: the tall grasses and flowering perennials near the house, the apple tree, the wooden deck, the bird feeder. And then covered the ground with concrete all around the house where the rats tend to dig their entrances into the foundation. I can only hope that all the neighbourhood’s outdoor cats do their job and don’t let the rats multiply too much.

But it actually looks cute, doesn’t it?

Fresh wet snow on the frozen ground makes for slippery slopes in Spånga.

I read an article in a magazine recently about the history of advent stars, starting with the Moravian stars in Germany in the late 19th century and spreading into Sweden, among other places. The article quoted an ethnologist who commented on the current habit of hanging several such stars in one’s home and described it as a sign of wastefulness, wanting much of everything, and as an American ideal leaking in. As opposed to proper Swedish, Lutheran culture where thou shalt not have any fun, I guess.

Vårt välstånd gör oss mer slösaktiga, kanske vi kan säga. Just nu vill vi ha stjärnor och ljusstakar både inomhus, i trädgården och på balkongen. Det amerikanska idealet sipprar in. Vi befinner oss fortfarande i slöseriet och vill ha mycket av allt. Frågan är hur och om det kommer att förändras.

Perhaps the ethnologist lives in a lit-up inner city. Out here in the suburbs the evenings are dark. Heck, even the afternoons are dark, and sometimes there is not much light even in the middle of the day. (Stockholm has seen zero hours of sunlight thus far in December, which is not normal and not fun. This video (in Swedish) by SMHI will tell you more.) And we hang up advent stars and string lights and other kinds of Christmas lights to battle the darkness and bring some light into our lives. So that ethnologist can take her snobbish views and go get stuffed.

The windy front has blown past with its sleet and clouds, and the sky was blue almost all day today.

This also brought colder temperatures. I’ve gotten used to the +10°C November we’ve had and the cold took me by surprise. I should have worn a warmer hat.

I don’t understand how some people can walk around in freezing temperatures with no hat. If I ever go out without a hat, it’s not just cold I feel, but that my ears hurt and feel as if they are about to fall off. Those other people’s ears must be fundamentally physiologically different somehow.

I was feeling lazy today and didn’t want to go out cycling in this wind, so I went for a walk instead. Several layers of clouds went scudding across the sky and the weather changed all the time. I had clouds, I had sparse but heavy rain drops, and I had brief, bright flashes of sun.

I woke up to a picturesque foggy morning.

That’s nothing uncommon, especially this time of the year. I’ve got numerous photos of foggy mornings.

What’s less common is the fact that the fog never lifted or even thinned. Even in the middle of the day, I could barely see the houses closest to us, and nothing at all of the houses behind them.

In the afternoon the fog got even thicker. I cycled to Vällingby and back for some errands, and kept stopping to take photos. In some places it was like the world ended a hundred metres from me.

When it got dark and street lights turned on, the more distant parts of the world became visible again, but in a rather spooky manner.

How fitting it would have been if today was tomorrow and Halloween.

One of our neighbours, two houses away, is a builder. He and his family moved in a couple of years ago and since then he’s transformed his house and garden so that it is barely recognizable. The facade of the house, which used to be dark brick, is now white plaster. Most of the ground in front of the house, which used to be grass, is now paved. I don’t know what he’s been doing behind the house, but there’s nearly always something going on.

His latest project involves removing a lot of rock. I guess he’s probably flattening out some part of the garden – the area around here is all rocky and hilly, and quite a lot of people seem to prefer flat gardens. (The garden of another of our neighbours is effectively a sunken den: a lot of earth and rock has been removed to make it as flat as possible, but of course they cannot do anything about the plots next to them, so part of their garden is now surrounded by steep rock walls.)

Last week he was blowing things up. Well, possibly not he himself, but there were explosions going on in the direction of his yard. When construction workers blow things up in Sweden, there’s a warning signal first (a series of short beeps for a minute or two), then a big bang, and then a longer beep to signal that they’re done. Those signals are a pretty good idea because otherwise I would probably have called the police upon hearing explosions in my neighbourhood.

This week he is removing the rock he blew up last week. He scoops up a pile of rock in a wheel loader, drives it to a large skip that stands in the crossing between us, and dumps it in the skip.

And it makes the most god-awful racket you can imagine. Picture a literal tonne of rock, if not more, hitting the metal bottom of a skip, and the sound then resonating through that skip, right outside the window of my bedroom-cum-office.

It’s not so much the loudness of it that bothers me – passing a jackhammer working in a street can be much louder – but the way it comes with no warning and just booms through the house, almost making me jump in my seat.

He’s been at it all day, at intervals. Sometimes an hour passes between two dumps, sometimes five or ten minutes. I hope he doesn’t have much more left.

The world looks gloomy, but still mostly green.