Streets and bike lanes have been gravel-free for some time already. Now men with blowers are cleaning out the gravel from the bicycle parking at Spånga station.

Spånga has been spring cleaned – all the heaps of gravel, left over after the heaps of snow melted, have been cleared away. It feels nice to walk on clean streets, and to not have to stop and pick out gravel from my shoes. And the greengrocer is setting up for the season!

Morning light over railroad tracks towards the big city.

My commute is almost too convenient. A ten-minute walk to the train station, two stations by train, two by metro, up the stairs and in through the front door and up the stairs again and I’m in the office. I barely have time to notice the weather, even.

After the recent heavy snowfall, there are teams of workmen on the roofs in the city, clearing the snow before it freezes and falls on someone’s head. They do wear safety harnesses of sorts but don’t seem to find them particularly important; I often see the harnesses sitting badly and almost falling off. If I was climbing around on an icy, slippery roof at the height of six or seven stories, I’d want to be pretty securely attached…

The sun won’t rise until after I am at work. It’ll be another month until sunrise happens before I leave for work. But even now at least there is some light at the edge of the sky.

We had our office Christmas party today. A bus was supposed to take us all to the venue. This bus stopped right outside our office… we were rather disappointed when this turned out to be not our bus.

The party was pleasant enough. Decent julbord, and I was lucky with the (spontaneous) seating and ended up between interesting people. (I am no good at drawing people into a conversation when they don’t take any initiative themselves and respond to my questions with single sentences.)

More city lights. Hötorget (“haymarket”) and a cinema.

Shopping for some last-minute advent calendar fillers. Even though December has already started. All sparkly and shiny.

November has zero redeeming qualities.

And now we have 5 more months of this grayness to look forward to.

This is my little green corner in the office. The plants in the big pots are company plants, the small bonsai tree belongs to the colleague who sits opposite me, and I take care of the two small ones.

I rescued the two small black flowerpots from our old office, when everything left behind was going to get thrown out. One of them had an aloe plant in it, near death. I had hoped to bring it back to life but it died during the summer holidays. So I started over with two baby plants: a cutting from a jade tree we have at home, and the smallest plant I could find at the garden centre. They may have arrived a couple of months after us, but to me they are symbolic of moving in here.

Behind the plants is the air vent. It’s much smaller and less green than the plants, but at least as noticeable. There is almost always chilly air coming out of it. We complain occasionally, the landlord sends a guy who checks and says all measurements are good, and we continue to shiver.