I walked Ingrid to her scout meeting. Their ordinary meetings are on Tuesday evenings, but this weekend they’re having a sleepover in their “base” or whatever scouts have.

The fresh snow makes the kids want to do all kinds of things with it but the snow is too cold and does not stick together at all. Ingrid’s attempts at snowballs disintegrated before they left her hand.

(Spånga scouts are housed in a lovely building that used to be a church in a previous life.)

View from St. Eriksbron towards the city.

The world is gray and brown and dull and wet. The colourful part of autumn is well behind us: the leaves have not only fallen but also been trampled into brown mush. I’m glad for the little staghorn sumac that still has its bright leaves.

PS: The links below this post reminded me of a post from our first autumn here in Spånga, about how the city leaves leaves on the ground and waits with cleaning them away until they’ve been well trampled into slippery, disgusting sludge. They still do it this way. My current theory is that this way it’s easier to clean the leaves up with street cleaning machines, so they need fewer staff for the job.

All of a sudden it actually feels like autumn outside.

In Malmö again today. This is the house across the street from the Malmö office.

The office is right in the middle of Malmö, a few hundred metres from the train station where I get off and on the airport shuttle bus. So I the only part of Malmö I see is the centre, the pretty cobbled squares, the pedestrian streets with nice little shops. In my mind’s eye that is what all of Malmö is like.

Another trip to Malmö to spend a day in our Malmö office. Another too-early morning, another day of mostly waiting to be transported. A day of sitting in a narrow space, a space that is not mine. A day of following someone else’s schedule.

A day that was long and tiring but felt half-wasted.

So tiring that I went to bed at the same time as Ingrid, about two hours before my normal bedtime.

We flew home from Malmö today.

Bromma airport is not very far from where we live. The approach path passes quite nearby and we can see all the aircraft fly past. We live just far enough so the noise doesn’t bother us; a few blocks closer to the airport and it’s much noisier.

And since we can see the aircraft, the aircraft can see us as well. We didn’t quite fly over our house, but nearly. There’s my house! There’s the kids’ school! All there. I wished I could shout to the pilot to slow down so I can take pictures. Now I couldn’t, so the pictures look like crap, but it was fun anyway.

It reminded me of the balloon flight Eric and I took over London. (That was before I started blogging so I never wrote about it or posted any photos.) That flight also passed almost straight over our home as well as our workplaces, and I remember that same feeling of wanting to slow down to really get a good look at our home from above.

Balloons fly over Spånga, too. On several occasions they’ve passed so close by, and so low down, that we’ve waved to the passengers. I wonder how predictable the flight path is – if a fly-by of our home was highly probable, it would be fun to do it.