It’s seven o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting in front of my work computer and wracking my brains. I was asked a few weeks ago if I could hold another talk for tretton37 and, eager to please people, I said yes. Now the bill is coming due. I need to actually come up with a topic, so that the talk can be scheduled and marketed and whatnot.

The talking is never the hard part. The hard part is finding something to talk about. I’m not working on anything new or exciting. It feels like everything I can think of has already been talked about. I keep second-guessing myself.

These new socks are growing on me. I wasn’t too impressed with them when I had just finished them, but now I rather like them.

They pair well with all sorts of clothes because of the speckled colour mix. They go well with yellow, or brown, or blue-and-white, or even dark purple.

And the brioche knitting makes me feel them more than normal socks. I’m conscious of them when I walk around in them on bare feet. It’s almost like a tiny foot massage.

My desk feels more and more like a place of work. Work stuff fills almost all of it, both physically and mentally. I rarely sit there with my private laptop these days, unless I’m doing something administrative that’s almost like work. (Like installing OS updates, or backing up my stuff.) Instead there’s one corner of the living room sofa that has become “mine”. I’ve got my knitting and mending baskets there, and my Kindle, and a pillow or two. And now I’ve even splurged on a second charger for my laptop so that I don’t have to crawl under the desk move the one charger between the desk and the sofa.

Ingrid decided she wanted to join a gym. They all have minimum age limits for unaccompanied kids (teens) and mostly those limits are too high for Ingrid to pass, but there is one chain with a 14-year limit and a gym relatively close to us. A parent needs to be there for signing up, though, so Ingrid and I cycled to that gym this evening.

I enjoyed the cycle ride. I haven’t been able to fit in much cycling recently. My current team does so much pair programming that I am nearly always in an online session with someone. I feel guilty about my long workout-plus-lunch breaks already because then the other person has to wait for me to come back before we can continue. Sure, they fill their time with something, but they still have to wait for me.

Those birches look like they are in autumn colours, don’t they? But it’s just the yellow leaf buds in the evening sun.

Sometimes the kids grumble over schoolwork and ask me whether I’ve ever needed to know the year when Gustav Vasa became king of Sweden, or some such thing. I must admit I haven’t.

Most of what I learned in school I’ve forgotten, except languages and some maths. Many parts of maths would probably come back if I ever made an attempt to refresh my memories, because it was more about doing than about memorizing. But all the fact-based subjects, from biology through physics to history, are mostly gone. The basic frameworks are there still, but none of the details.

Languages have been truly useful. English, of course, and French, and even the smattering of German I learned in university.

In a strong second place after languages comes basic geometry. Pythagoras’ theorem is good for all kinds of everyday problems, from shaping the sleeve of a knit cardigan to estimating the length of steel flowerbed edging. And the relationship between the radius and the area of a circle comes in surprisingly handy for estimating the size of a pancake pan, and hence the right amount of batter. If the radius of the large pan is about 50% larger than that of the small pan, then the amount of batter will be 100% larger. 0.5 dl for the small pan, 0.7 for the medium, 1 whole dl for the largest one. I could of course reach the same result with trial and error, but that’s less fun.

All of a sudden the weather is really warm. Sandal season is here!

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I dislike shoes. But. Switching to sandals is always a pleasure. And being able to walk around barefoot indoors without getting cold feet. My extremities tend to be cold so I can’t do this in winter. But now the rooms are warm and the floor is warm and I can ditch the woolly socks most of the time.

I like feeling the wooden floor planks, and all the different rugs. I like feeling the difference between the old floor in the old living room, and the new floor in the new living room. I even like the feeling of the glow-in-the-dark anti-slip tape on the edges of the stairs.

I am so bored with my life. Nothing happens, and nothing will happen, and it’s just the same house and the same work, and the same neighbourhood to walk in. The most exciting thing in my week is a walk to the recycling containers in central Spånga.

The lack of any external stimuli drags my energy levels down. I don’t even want to do any of the things I usually enjoy. I cook dinner without really enjoying it. I knit without really enjoying it. I blog without really enjoying it. The only thing I do is sit in my corner of the sofa and read silly, fluffy, unchallenging books: fantasy romances and werewolves and such.

The good thing (which is maybe also slightly a bad thing) about reading on digital platforms is that I can always just click to get one more. I don’t even need to make the effort of ordering a book and waiting for it.

My cardigan project is still in need of measuring and fitting, and I need to check my pattern notes for my ongoing sock, and I just haven’t like doing either of those. But by now I am completely addicted to knitting during long meetings, or while waiting for some sluggish deployment process to complete. Luckily I remembered my travel crochet project, nearly pocket-sized and super easy to pause and pick up at any time. Phew.

I really need to get on top of the knitting, though. Soon.

I’ve reached middle age and become lactose intolerant. Sharing the symptoms with you would probably be TMI, but suffice it to say, they’re not fun. I can still eat small amounts of dairy without any problems, but a few days eating, say, pasta in a creamy sauce will really mess up my stomach.

So I’m now buying lactose free stuff, somewhat reluctantly. It doesn’t quite taste like the normal stuff. Lactose free butter and cream cheese both taste kind of blander and sharper. I guess my taste buds miss the sugar. I guess I’ll get used to it.

What bothers me more is that there are so few organic lactose free products. I want my milk and butter to come from happy cows who are not pumped full of antibiotics and who get to spend their days outdoors. But I also still want my butter to be butter, not an artificial alternative.

I was happy to see that at least when it comes to heavy cream, there is an organic lactose free alternative. Too bad it’s one of those semi-fake ones, with a thickening agent compensating for the lower fat content (36% instead of 40%). Organic, thickener free, lactose free: choose any two out of three.

I’m fed up with my vague symptoms and almost-unwellness, so I ordered a covid test. It involved poking a tickly stick at the back of my throat, and up my nose, which was distinctly unpleasant. Now the results are in a tightly closed tube, wrapped in a sealed bag, wrapped in another sealed bag.

I’ve been participating in a crowdsourced study of covid-19 since last summer. Or maybe longer, I can’t remember. Every day (when I don’t forget it) I report whether I have any symptoms that might be related to covid-19. The list started out quite brief but has grown with time. Now there are four pages of checkboxes: from fevers and chills and aches, through rashes and purple lesions on toes, on to tiredness and lack of appetite – and so on and on. I’ve never been observing minor symptoms of disease in myself as closely and curiously as I am now.

I’m checking more and more boxes on that list, but none of them severely. And not the really specific ones like loss of taste or smell. The same with Ingrid, who is still not really well either but not really sick either. I’m focusing more on the sneezing and tickly throat side of things, while she has more aches here and there.

What I notice most now is the tiredness and lack of energy. I tried working but felt after an hour that I really had no energy for anything that required concentration or active effort. I spent the rest of the day lying (not even sitting) and reading in the sofa, and then moved to doing the same in the bed because it was flatter and had a better pillow.

I got up for lunch and dinner, and while my body had no problem doing it, my brain was constantly telling me how much I wanted to lean the weight of my head on my elbow, and how heavy the cutlery was, and what an effort it was to move the food to my mouth. Couldn’t someone invent some kind of thing to do the work for me. Ingrid agreed.