When I first converted to making and wearing hand-knitted socks, I aimed for colours that would harmonize with other things I was wearing. Then I threw in just a couple of colourful pairs because the yarns looked amazing. For wearing at home, or perhaps to the office on Fridays.

Over time I’ve come to love the crazier socks more and more. The pink ones that at first looked garish now don’t even stand out any more. The more colour, the happier they make me. (These are made with Zauberball Crazy.)

There’s a brand of socks called Happy Socks; Adrian loves them. Mine are even happier.

And I realized after a while that nobody at work cares about the colour of my socks, so now I wear the colourful ones to the office as often as the mood strikes me, without thinking twice.

Sometimes I eat ice cream late at night. Not because I’m trying to be secret about it, but because I can enjoy it in a different way when the house is all quiet and nobody is talking to me.

Chocolate ice cream will always be the best kind.

Nysse is out all night doing whatever cats do at night. Comes home in the morning, eats, sleeps like a log. Making the most out of summer.

I’m also tired. Work is mildly chaotic – we’ve lost our project manager, so a lot of her duties have fallen onto me. And we’ve got a lot of front end work but not a lot of front end developers. Only one, actually. But the work needs to get done, so I’m also wearing a front end developer’s hat. Which is no heavier than my normal tasks, per se, but I have to google everything and test my work after every small handful of changes, and I never get into an actual flow where it feels easy. I make it work, but by the end of the day my brain is exhausted.

I’m eating as much I used to, and barely getting any exercise (because commuting) but suddenly I’m hungry. I can barely make it home after work before. Today I didn’t; I was twenty minutes from home when I just couldn’t deal any more and had to buy myself a banana. The brain is supposed to use a lot of energy, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s all the intense learning I’ve been doing.

Bought and planted some spring flowers for the porch, for the first time in several years, in yet another step to getting back to the way life used to be.

The first truly warm day this spring. Short sleeves, sandals, and lunch out in the sun. And several hours of spring cleaning in the garden.

Spring is not complete without a photo of Viburnum flowers.

This is the season when not a day goes by without me passing some part of the garden and being amazed about all the beautiful things emerging there. Truly the best time of the year.

(Photo by a colleague.)

Attended a workshop about facilitating workshops, with activities about activities. Quite meta.

One of the activities was to practise visual collaboration, so we wrote and drew our ideal working days.

In our small group, we all agreed that a good foundation for an ideal day is predictability. Knowing roughly what to expect from the day, in general.

All four of us then wanted to work mostly on our own most of the day. I had expected more people to want to pair program or do collaborative work, thinking it was just my preference to be left alone to get work done.

We did all want some social interaction, though. Opinions diverged on how.

For me an ideal day would involve helping others somehow – either delivering something that users find useful, or helping someone in my team with something. I was alone on this one.

The others in the team instead preferred to socialize after work, with some alcohol, which I have no interest in at all. In fact after-work events are more of a chore for me than actual work.

Rauhelleren to Mårbu, 20 km.

The day was overcast, windy and warm. The snow was warm and squeaky, sticking to my skis until I applied glide wax. Glide wax is one of those things that I make sure to pack every time, but don’t know if I will actually use, and then sometimes think that maybe I should just leave it at home – until the moment when I need it and realize that doing without would have been really, really inconvenient. Just like climbing skins, which we also only used on a single hour-long occasion during this trip, but which were absolutely necessary at that time.

Back-country skiing in the mountains is a monotonous activity. Not much changes around me from one minute to another. It’s not like hiking, where there are new trees or streams or mushrooms or flowers with every step that you can pay attention to.

Instead I can be mindful of two simple things: myself, and the snow around me.

I make sure to pay attention to how my body feels. Are any parts too cold or too warm? Am I distributing the work well – should I take it easy with the poles for a while to let my upper body rest? How do my feet feel – am I moving them in a way that causes pressure from the boots at any point? Is the pack well-balanced? Do I need to drink more water? How is my blood sugar level?

The ski tours I go on are not extreme (especially when compared to the people skiing across Antarctica and whatnot) but the temperatures and distances are still such that small misses can compound into large problems. People get blisters, pull muscles, get dehydrated or hypothermic – sometimes just enough to cause problems for themselves, other times so much that they affect the whole group. I’ve managed to avoid all of those issues, and I like to believe that it’s not just down to luck but also to awareness.

I pay attention to the snow because it is everywhere around me, and – apart from myself – the only thing nearby that I can pay attention to. Theoretically I could pay attention to the other people, but they are often not close enough for that. Also, the snow is more interesting.

The snow can be soft or hard, icy or glidy or grippy. With practice you can see the difference at some distance, and avoid the soft drifts that suddenly stop your smooth descent – or the icy patches where you lose all grip. The weather can make all the difference: if the sky is overcast then sometimes instead you lose all depth perception and can’t even see whether you’re going uphill or down.

The winds in the open landscape smooth everything out on the large scale. Where the ground is uneven in the summer with rocks and bushes, in the winter it’s a mostly featureless plain. But the on the small scale, the snow blows into dune-like shapes called zastrugi. Sometimes they’re just millimetres in height and you can barely see them except when the sun is low; sometimes they measure in decimetres and you have to watch where you aim your skis. If I was doing this on my own, I’d want to stop a lot to to take close-up photos of all the snow and ice formations.

And then there are all the sounds that the snow makes. It can squeak and creak; it can crackle when icy; it can shush when you sink into soft snow. It can hum when you go across it at speed. The poles make a particular sharp sound when they go through the crust of ice on top of older snow, and then a different one when they cut through the crust as they tilt with my forward movement. Today at one point when I was going downhill through really wet snow it vibrated so strongly that I felt it through all my bones.

We had an early start again today to get the best weather we could, and reached the hut by lunchtime. Lunch on Norwegian ski tours, by the way, is sandwiches that you make yourself with materials from the breakfast buffet. I am getting just a little bit tired of cheese sandwiches by now. Boiled eggs are a good complement when I know we’ll eat lunch at a hut, like today, but harder to manage en route.

In the afternoon the weather got even warmer, until the eaves were all dripping and it was raining outside. This hut had a lovely seating nook by the entrance where we established ourselves for the rest of the day. There was no network connection, not even a paid one supplied by the hut like at the previous place. But they did serve waffles and I had books downloaded, so it was pleasant.

After my illness, I suddenly don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to read, I don’t want to knit, I don’t want to blog, I don’t want to work out. All of it seems worse than pointless.

In fact, not just passively “not wanting”, but actively “wanting to not”.

It’s like the virus or whatever flipped a depression switch in my brain. I observe the feelings and fully realize that this isn’t normal, this isn’t me – but even knowing that, when I try to gently push myself, I almost feel revolted by the idea of doing any of it.

I guess it will go back to normal with time. It’s just been a few days.