One part of adulting that I still haven’t fully learned is allowing myself to spend money on nice things. Even when there is no doubt whatsoever that I can afford it, and I know it to be useful and believe it to be beautiful, there is still a twinge of guilt.

It took an effort to spend 700 SEK on this useful and beautiful lamp.

These days I usually manage to recognize this feeling and sometimes decide overcome it. But frugality is easier for me than splurging, and asceticism comes more naturally than indulgence.

On the plus side, this means that I spend much less than I earn and there is always money left over at the end of the month, and unless I do something spectacularly stupid in the future, I won’t have to worry about running out of money when I’m old. Maybe I’ll learn to splurge when I’m ninety.

Today was my second day on the new project. The new team takes a bootcamp approach to inducting new team members, with back to back intro meetings all day. Quite exhausting.

And then during my lunch hour I’m watching live-streamed meetings at tretton37, all of last week and all of this one. The company is making major organizational changes and setting out a new five-year strategy right now, and informing everyone thoroughly. My longest actual break today was 15 minutes.

Anyway, one my tasks in the new team was to set a profile picture for myself in the various communications tools we use. And the instructions were specifically that everybody’s profile pictures had to be actual pictures of themselves. My standard profile picture since many years, a close-up photo of a Chihuly glass sculpture, was not approved. I couldn’t find any suitable recent photos of myself so yesterday I took 10 minutes to take a fresh one. Too proud to use a phone selfie.

There are so many photos of people these days. Everybody has their phone with them and keeps snapping away – photos of themselves, their friends, their family. But there are so few good photos of most people. Few of us go to an actual photographer to get professional-looking portraits taken.

I notice it in the obituary pages in the daily papers. There is often a portrait at the top of the obituary, and often a bad one. Low-resolution snapshots, slightly blurry phone photos, awkward crops of larger photos. Family and friends really want to include a photo in the obit but can’t find a good one.

It’s my last day on my current project and I am in fact spending most of my time preparing for the next one. The new project utilizes technologies that I’ve never worked with (Docker and Kubernetes) so I’m getting familiar with them at least in theory.

I find video tutorials difficult. I get bored and lose focus. (I also never watch Youtube videos for fun, or TV series – I only do that as a mostly social activity together with Eric or the entire family.)

The biggest problem with video lectures and all other videos is that they happen at someone else’s pace. When I read, I decide how fast I go. I read fast most of the time, and slow down to re-read bits that are important or interesting.

Luckily this platform had controls for playback speed so I could do the same here. I started out at 1.25x speed, quickly moved on to 1.5 and then settled at 1.75. The speedy delivery, combined with knitting to keep my hands busy, got me through the day quite productively.

(Source: XKCD.)
The strategy here labelled “chaotic neutral” is exactly what a half-full egg carton looks like, if I’m the one to make it half full. In my mind this is clearly the best layout: the weight is evenly distributed so the carton is easy to handle, and it is aesthetically pleasing. It appears that people somehow find this egg layout unnatural or unusual. They are weird.

Catching the last edge of daylight in the west-facing window, while engrossed in a good book.

Quite often I want to read a book with a certain kind of feeling – not a particular genre, nor type of plot. But book recommendations are all based on genre and plot elements and other such parameters that are easy to evaluate but not relevant to me. I could easily find, say, standalone books in the fantasy genre by female authors, and with some reasonable effort narrow it down to, say, books that have or don’t have magic/romance/battles/mysteries/fairy-tale inspiration etc. There are blog posts and recommendation lists galore, on Goodreads and elsewhere.

But I often want books where the mood is of a certain kind, and the writing style is like that, and I can’t even really describe that mood and that writing style very clearly, so it’s very much hit and miss. I’ve come to love the “sample” feature on Kindle and often go through many, many samples before actually buying a book.

That might be the feature that ends up converting me to preferring e-books: browsing physical books has to be done in a book store and there’s a limit to how many hours I can stand in a shop, sampling books, before I get hungry and tired.

But right now I have stumbled upon a series of books that hit just the right spot so I’m glad I have several more days to enjoy them before going back to work.

Is there even a point to writing a review for the year that ended? I thought. But what is obvious and top of mind for everybody right now, won’t be as obvious a few years from now.

2020 was the year of the coronavirus and its associated disease, covid-19. It became a topic during the last week of February in conjunction with winter break, when many people go on ski trips either in the Swedish mountains or in the Alps. (We went to Åre: day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6, day 7.)

There were plentiful reports of lots of people being hospitalized with covid-19 in Italy but the Swedish authorities still thought it unnecessary for tourists returning from the Alps to self-quarantine. Just two weeks later the situation had deteriorated enough for the authorities to recommend working from home. People were stockpiling toilet paper, fearing a full lockdown, which never came. The summer was a bit better (the virus being less active during the summer, just like other coronaviruses such as the common cold) but in autumn it all went downhill again.

Some countries managed to contain the virus and limit its spread but Sweden plainly didn’t, and the situation now is worse than ever. Hospitals are nearly full and people are dying in record amounts. 8727 deaths thus far in Sweden, which is about 870 deaths per million people – ten times more than Norway (80 per million) and Finland (100). The authorities keep trying to redirect comparisons towards the worst-hit countries instead and of course we could be up there with France, Italy, Spain and the UK (1000+ deaths per million) or even Belgium (near 1700) but given that we are closer in all ways to our neighbouring countries, this just looks like a futile effort to deflect blame.

I started working from home on March 13. While things were calmer in the spring and summer I made a handful of trips to the office for workshops and retrospectives, but I haven’t been there at all since early September.

Working from home felt unfamiliar at first. Then during summer I quite enjoyed it. It’s more flexible than working in the office: I could have lunch outside in the sun, or work in the garden. I dug and planted bushes behind the house as well as a new flowerbed. Not commuting saves me at least an hour and a half every day – I’ve never been so little stressed about times and schedules. And I am mostly more productive this way.

Now during the dark, dull half of the year I am enjoying it rather less, especially with all the extra restrictions.

Eric has been working in the office mostly (or sometimes at a customer’s office) but commuting by bicycle. Ingrid and Adrian’s daily lives have been least affected. Adrian’s least of all; Ingrid would be hanging out at the movies or McDonald’s or a gaming centre with her friends, if it wasn’t for the virus.

All trips abroad for the rest of the year were cancelled and most domestic trips as well, some before booking and some after. We were forced to cancel our annual trip to Estonia. We replaced our usual summer hiking trip with a week in Gotland, just before the larger crowds got there. (Day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6. I missed my ski tour in Norway and my autumn hike in Jämtland, but replaced it with two lowland hikes (Kinnekulleleden day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, and Sörmlandsleden day 1, day 2, day 3.)

And of course we have been to no concerts, theatre, dance performances, museums, or other culture (apart from one movie, with two empty seats between each family group for distancing, back when the cinemas were still open) since March. No visits to gyms or swimming pools. No scout camp. No birthday parties and no Christmas celebration with the extended Bergheden family. Only a funeral.

For the past month or so I’ve started to really chafe at the restrictions. I used to get fresh air, exercise and at least a little bit of variety from cycling on small errands in the middle of the day, but since November all that is also strongly discouraged. I feel locked in, and I struggle to find ways to fill my time at home. Reading, knitting, blogging, cooking, etc… All nice activities, but I would enjoy them more if I could choose them freely, rather than doing them because I cannot do much else. Reading a new book is still just more reading. I want out.

Even though vaccines are on their way (and the first doses have arrived) covid-19 will be with us for many months still. But I’m about to start working on a new project at work in a few weeks: something new in my life! And the days will become longer, and January and February are usually colder than December, so perhaps we will get freezing weather and firm ground so that I can go walking without wading in mud.

PS: other notable events or achievements for this year include developing my Sonos companion app which I am quite proud of, and finally finishing my green cardigan.

I also made two skirts, one scarf, two pairs of socks and two pairs of mittens.

This was also the year of the wasp invasion in Ingrid’s room.

We had Christmas gifts, somewhat too much Christmas food, and a new batch of gingerbread cookies.

I enjoy the run-up to Christmas more than Christmas Eve itself. Advent has all the good stuff – the lights, the decorations, the baking and then the eating of the baking – without the nearly hectic, keyed-up quality of Christmas itself. Christmas is tiring. Adrian is over-hyped about presents. My mum needs entertaining all day long, so I must keep up an even stream of activities and conversation, but only talk about topics that I don’t really care about because the odds are that I’ll get a snippy negative reply back.

(Ingrid took this photo.)

I sit too much. The daily exercise is enough to keep actual back problems away, but if I spend too much time in the sofa in the evening, I start feeling it in my lower back.

I’ve discovered an alternative way of reading in the sofa. I sit on the floor, prop up the Kindle against the back of the sofa or an armrest, and then lean on the seat. The carpeted floor is firm without being hard, and with the support of the sofa I can still relax.

Everything is still gray and dripping.

I am so fed up with this. When we next get a day with actual daylight, I will drop everything (short of Christmas Eve), cancel all meetings and go out for a hike somewhere.

I went for a walk today instead of a more energetic workout. I feel slightly off-colour, sluggish and tired, and just didn’t have the energy for anything more.

It’s funny how corona-adjusted my brain has become. As soon as I see someone on the pavement ahead of me, I adjust my trajectory and step out onto the roadway to pass them at a safe distance, without even thinking about it. Unless they do it first. It has become so normal to stay away from people.

Sometimes I even do it at home, out of habit.