Lemon poppyseed cake, going straight into the freezer.

I think of lemon poppyseed cake, along with Estonian oatmeal cookies, as my “fingerprint” cakes. I wouldn’t say that either is my absolute favourite. They’re up there, but I want different cakes at different times, and no one cake is better than everything else. But if you asked me to list, say, five or ten favourites, these two would be there. And they’re cakes that I think I like more than most other people do. In Sweden, I imagine that most people’s list of favourites would be things like cinnamon buns, princess cake, chocolate chip cookies. If you then clustered people by their favourites, you could probably pick me out from among all of them. Sort of like device fingeprinting but with cake. Am I Unique?

Cut my finger by just a tiny amount. No blood, even. You can barely see it. But the miniscule loose flap of skin is too small to properly cut off and sticks out and has been annoying me all day. It gets caught on everything. Clothes. Gloves. Toilet paper. Knitting. Towels.

Also: my hands look old. Not old, old, yet – but definitely not young like they used to. They’ve always had a very distinct structure to the skin, and my palm creases have been deeper than other people’s, but now they’re actually getting wrinkly.

Adrian and Ingrid, playing Cuphead together on one of their Switches.

They speak Estonian to each other these days, when they’re here in the house. Not all the time, but a lot. Even when I’m not in the room; even in situations and about topics that take me by surprise. Like, how did they even get the vocabulary for that?

It makes me feel very warm and fuzzy feelings inside.

I found a lost card wallet in the street when I was on my way from the office to the tube station, right in the middle of the pavement. Bank card, driver’s license, everything. With a name and a date of birth, and the help of Sweden’s lax regulations about people’s personal information, I was able to find the person’s address online. It was roughly in the direction I would be going anyway, so I changed my travel plans slightly and headed that way. Meanwhile I tried to get hold of the person on social media. Found them on Facebook, sent a message, and got one back within ten minutes. They hadn’t even noticed the loss of the wallet. We agreed to meet up at the tube station nearest them, so that I could hand it back to them. I sent them this selfie so that they’d be able to find me. (I, of course, already had a photo of them, on their driver’s license.)

Was woken at 3:15 this morning by a fire alarm going off. False alarm, there was no actual fire.

Somehow we all instinctively reacted as if it was a false alarm. Nobody hurried, much less panicked.

I had walked all the way through the house and up the stairs, located the alarm, walked away, come back with a chair, climbed up, taken down the alarm, and was in the process of disconnecting the battery, before Ingrid or Adrian even got out of their rooms (right next to the blaring alarm).

Hopefully it was due to good instincts – no smell of smoke, no heat – and not just laziness. Hopefully we would react differently if there was an actual fire.

An “open loop” is a term that David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, uses to refer to unfinished commitments – anything that needs to be acted upon, finished, or decided. Most people have most their open loops in their heads, but they can also be physical things. Every time you walk past it, it reminds you – oh, right, I should really be doing something about this.

Somehow I had accumulated a lot of physical open loops recently. Every room in the house had several piles of things that I really should be doing something about, but don’t have the time or energy or resources to address right now. They were stressing me out and annoying me. I dislike clutter, and I particularly hate ugly, messy clutter.

I may not be able to close all those loops immediately, but at least I could gather them all into one place. Now I have a pile of boxes and bags and smaller piles in my bedroom, but I can move through all the other rooms without stuff constantly nagging at me. David Allen would certainly tell me to identify all the tasks in this pile and write them down, but for me this pile acts as a physical to do list. Yeah, you’re supposed to only have one list of tasks and this clearly isn’t it, but it’s good enough for me.

My childless weeks are my “getting things done” weeks. I have more time and more energy. I love spending time with them, but I’m an introvert, and spending time with people inevitably wears me out.

When I’m alone in the house, there is always the temptation to just spend my evenings reading and knitting. While that is nice, I do want and need to do more than that. A trick that really helps me stay out of the sofa trap and actually get something done is to commit in advance. On office days, I use my bicycle commute home to decide on what I’ll do in the evening. Just sort of mull my options over and pick something that I feel I’d be in the mood for doing on this particular day. By the time I get home, I’ve had enough time to let the options roll around in my head that one or a few of them have come out top and then settled there, solidly enough that they feel like a promise.

Today’s commitment was to drive to the big recycling station with the last junk from the basement clean-out and a pile of plastic pots from all the plants I bought recently. Normally I’d leave this for the weekend, but really a weekday evening after rush hour is the perfect time for this errand. Traffic isn’t bad and the recycling station is desolate.

Had I come home, eaten dinner, sat down in the sofa, started thinking about whether I should do something… I know for sure that I would never have found the energy to get up again for an hour-long errand. But now I was already in motion, so it wasn’t such a big deal.

My reading glasses broke yesterday evening, without provocation. It’s a good thing that it only happened in the evening, because life is hard without them. I made do without glasses for the first hour in the office today and headed out to Liljeholmsgallerian as soon as the shops opened, to get myself a pair of new ones.

I still can’t be bothered to spend the time or money to go to an optometrist for a proper assessment. Just trying on a few different pairs of reading glasses at a pharmacy and buying the ones that feel best is totally good enough.

Apparently my eyesight is getting weaker. I’m now at +1.5; the previous ones were +1.0. Suddenly close-up things are almost shockingly sharp. Downside: while I wear the new glasses, everything at a distance gets even fuzzier than before, so I can choose between getting almost dizzy while walking, or pushing the glasses up and down all the time. I guess I’ll get used to it, like I did with the previous pair.

It is, not surprisingly, rather difficult to focus on the rear screen on the camera without the glasses. I can’t see whether the photo is in focus or not. Which is why it isn’t.

There are all sorts of half-forgotten odds and ends in the pantry and the fridge. Ingredients needed for a single recipe, two-thirds of the package left over afterwards. Things that sounded interesting and were tried once and turned out to be so-so but not bad enough to be thrown out. Stuff that Eric liked more than I did so they’re never my first pick.

I prefer not to throw out food that there’s nothing wrong with. I’d rather find some use for it, if I can. Sneak it into a meal together with something else, a little bit at a time.

It might be a hopeless project – it’ll take me forever. Every other week there’s just me here, and I just don’t need an awful lot of food, and I’m also not spending all my time eating the forgotten stuff. Most of the time I’d rather eat something I really want to eat. But occasionally I remind myself to look at the odds and ends and pick something and do something with it.

It’s taken me until now to finish this cereal that’s been lying around since Eric left the house. It’s the most boring cereal I’ve encountered. Doesn’t taste bad, just… really boring. But with fresh fruit and a sprinkle of nice granola over it, it’s OK.

Is it silly to not have thrown it out? Probably. I chose to eat it anyway.

The embroidery club started up today. I had considered continuing with some of the ideas from an embroidery course I did a year ago, or maybe with one of the printed fabrics from the workshop this spring, but I haven’t had time to look at what I have or what I want to do. Instead I picked something where I could just get going.

This brown cardigan is great but also not. It fits me well, the yarn is soft and warm, the colour is nice, the knitting is tidy. But: I made it an awkward length that I’m not happy with. It is unflattering on me, and I find it more and more difficult to ignore that. I already have a relatively long torso and shortish lower body; a too-long cardigan emphasises that even more. And the bottom hem hits right where I am broadest, which makes me look even more unproportional.

The way it’s constructed, I can’t just unravel the bottom and make it shorter. The next best thing is to redesign it to make it look shorter, by breaking up the long vertical with something horizontal, and to draw the attention away from the hips to the waist. Hence, a discretely colourful waistband.