Lots of snow, no clearing of the streets, and repeated thaw-and-freeze cycles have turned all the roads around here into fields of ice. It’s almost like the city has given up on maintaining the roads at all. No ploughing, no sanding, just whatever. The only bits that are walkable are the ones where the ice has melted down enough to reach older layers of gravel from, like, last year. I toddle to the train station like Bambi on ice. Because I am on ice.

Crunchy snow, crisp air, dark sky. Very wintery.

We had the tretton37 Christmas party tonight, at Moderna Museet. Very modern food, too: the meat-eaters got everything from deer heart to chicken liver mousse. The herring and the vegetarian mains were delicious, and I hear that those who got past the shock of the menu all enjoyed the food as well.

Party photos are not my thing, and posting photos of other people here without their consent is even less my thing, so here’s a view of the Christmas tree in Gamla Stan across the water.

–16°C and the air is full of ice crystals. Every light at the construction site in Spånga is giving off light pillars.

Loads more snow today, and – in a nice coincidence in timing – they lit the lights on the spruce on Spånga Torg. It felt like Christmas even though there’s a whole month to go still.

Piano concert at the Stockholm Concert Hall, with Arkadij Volodos playing Aleksandr Skrjabin and Franz Schubert.

The concert leaflet describes Skrjabin as innovative and boundary-breaking. To me it just sounded dissonant and chaotic. I read that the brain releases dopamine both when it hears things in music that it recognizes or predicts, and when it is surprised. With Skrjabin, I felt there was nothing predictable at all so there was nothing to hang on to. No melody line to follow, no recognizably recurring phrases. It was like… stuff just happening, all the time. Music that’s a hundred years old, and it’s still too modern for me.

Schubert is always Schubert, though!

Volodos also played several extra pieces after the official programme, and the third of them was such a glorious piece of music that I didn’t even hang around to see if there might be more. There was just no way he could top that. Konserthuset kindly publishes updates to the concert programme after the fact, so I now know it was his own arrangement of La Malagueña, a flamenco piece originally written for the guitar I’d guess. You can see a somewhat blurry video of it here. There’s just… fingers absolutely everywhere, and I can’t see how could possibly hit all those notes with any kind of control, but clearly he does. Absolutely magnificent.

Speaking of Schubert, the last concert in the chamber music series that Eric and I go to together also started with Schubert. An octet by Schubert, and followed by another octet by Jörg Widmann, who wrote it as a tribute to Schubert’s octet. And my opinion here was the same – liked the Schubert, but Widmann’s octet was too un-melodious for my taste.

Today was so wet and windy that I couldn’t even put our jack-o-lantern outside. I even lit the candle and put the carved pumpkin over it indoors, but the moment I tried to take it to the porch, the wind blew the candle out. So here it is, looking down at things from a hall window.

I wasn’t expecting many trick-or-treaters at all. Partly because of the weather, but also because they’ve been fewer in recent years. Families going away for autumn break, perhaps. Still, Ingrid bought some candy just in case, enough for the ten or so kids I expected.

In the end, we got over twenty trick-or-treaters. I ran out of Halloween candy, and dug through our cupboards for any kind of sweets that kids might eat (except Adrian’s Aladdin pralines). There’s no point in offering them dark chocolate, or candied ginger… They got my Skotte hiking snacks, and our Valrhona white chocolate buttons, and some leftover dammsugare. The last ones walked away with very measly handouts. Had there been any more of them, I’d have been forced to give them biscuits or baking chocolate.

The Nordic Museum had posted an invitation today, on their 150th birthday, to share memories of this day, in words and pictures, for the future. I’m posting here the photos I submitted to their collection as well.

The morning was gray and windy, just a few degrees above freezing, but there were glimpses of sun breaking through as I got to Spånga station.

Normally during rush hour the trains here are supposed to go eight times an hour, but the company currently running the commuter train service hasn’t managed to deliver that for quite a while. At least you can generally count on a train once every fifteen minutes. The train this morning was quite crowded but not too horribly crammed full.

I got off the train at Stockholm Central and walked from there to the tretton37 office in the Waterfront building. On the way I stopped by Coop at the lower floor of the station to buy lunch, because I was all out of leftovers at home.

I got a small green smoothie for breakfast 29 kr and a bouillabaisse for 79 kr, for a total of 108 kr.

Many supermarkets have replaced most of their manned checkouts with self-checkout stations. I like it when I only have one or two things to pay for and can get it done quickly, but their occasional random checks really annoy me when they happen.

The entrances to the Waterfront are all automated doors, just like the entrance and exit to the train stations and the supermarket.

The office was relatively empty today. Even though it was almost 9 o’clock when I got there, almost all desks were still empty and I could choose whichever seat I liked.

I didn’t even think of photographs or much else around me during the day as I was working. Then I stood up at five-ish and realized the sun was going down already, glinting off the skyscrapers next to Hötorget.

This street, Klarabergsgatan, used to see a lot more traffic. It has now mostly been closed off for everyone except public transport, and the pavements have been widened.

The folks in the office were gearing up for a Halloween-themed after-work event, with people dressed up as anything from kings to bananas, and a monthly company meeting. I was out of social energy and went home, and will watch a recording of the meeting some other day.

A blip of the SL Access card to take the train home. Costs me 39 kr for a one-way trip. After the most recent price hike, a monthly card costs 970 kr so it is generally not worth it if I only go to the office twice a week.

I got a seat on the train back to Spånga so I could crochet on the way. Much better than randomly scrolling social media. This piece of lace has been my travel project for literally years. I’ve gotten tired of waiting for it, so now I’m working on it more frequently during meetings and such so that I can get it done.

One of the station entrance doors has been broken for the last few days, and for some reason the staff has elected to leave it in the closed position, rather than having it always open. All the people getting off the train clump up in front of the entrance.

On Spånga Torg, the second-hand ladies’ wear shop has filled their windows with warm coats. The florist’s show windows are an odd mixture of Halloween, and pink for breast cancer awareness month.

The first to do when I got home was to feed Nysse.

Then to feed the rest of the family. They would not like pellets from a tin. I made a meal from a Linas Matkasse meal kit – a vegetarian bibimbap.

Reduced the amounts of all chillies and such by a factor of three or four, and some of it was still super spicy. We didn’t manage to eat all the spicy cabbage salad.

After dinner, Ingrid disappeared to her room, while Adrian & Eric watched season 2 of Loki, accompanied by potato chips for Adrian and some leftover lemon merengue pie for Eric.

Beautiful sunshine right now, but with the wall of cloud approaching there, things will change soon.

It’s a beautiful autumn day, and I had a great day at the Sortera office with my colleagues, and we had a great lunch at a new restaurant nearby.