When Eric moved out, we split our shared property evenly in value, but unevenly in kind. I got most of the things, he got most of the money. I believe we both wanted it this way.

Now I have the mismatched drinking glasses, the chipped bowls, the incomplete sets of crockery, while he has brand new everything.

That’s the way I like it. Had I ended up in the opposite situation, I could probably have found my way to accepting it, found a way to make myself see the positive in it, but it would have hurt. When we agreed to divorce, one of his first comments was “we’ll need to sell the house” while my first thought was “what do I need to do to keep the house”. Was keeping the house an economically sound decision? The jury is still out on that, but I need to at least try.

I get attached to things. I mend things that, from a utilitarian point of view, are in no way worth the effort, like old towels and shopping bags. The mere fact that I have owned something and used it for years gives it an inherent value of its own. I feel a responsibility to my things – to value them, to take care of them. To hold on to them.

Continuing on my purge journey, I am most of the way through our two filing cabinets.

The label on that folder says “1 year of bills” which indicates the original intent, but not the current reality. Firstly, it has multiplied from one folder into three – whenever one filled up, a new one just got added behind it. It has bills going back to when we still lived in London. Other folders have even more ancient content, such as phone contracts from 2001, and Eric’s rental agreements from before we even met. Thirty-year-old paperwork!

Eric was more fond than me of keeping paper copies of things. The utilities and services I had signed up for, I paid by e-invoice or automatic payment; the ones he signed up for, we got paper bills for – and they all ended up in the folders. But in the end, when push came to shove as he moved out, very little of it was important enough to bring with him.

Now the vast majority of all of it is going out. I threw out two large paper bags full of old papers today – around 20 kg and thousands of pages.

With the archives much reduced in volume, I can fit what’s left into one of the filing cabinets and get rid of the other one. That cabinet has been tucked away in one of the built-in wardrobes, which will then have room for my clothes instead, so I can sell or give away the free-standing wardrobe in the bedroom, which will in turn let me rearrange the rest of the furniture and figure out what kind of new bed will fit the new space. It’s a whole chain.

Morning sun over the bay at Liljeholmen. And me.

I’ve had the same analogue paper-based organizer since 2006. If it was a human, it would be an adult now.

It’s literally the same sheets of cardboard as I started out with, getting slightly worn around the edges now. Each one has a small sticky note with a title at the bottom left, and even several of those survived until very recently. The oldest two categories are the original ones from the Getting Things Done method: “Actions” for general to do items, and “Projects” for larger items, which yield a stream of smaller steps that go into “actions”. Over time I’ve added “Info/think” for tasks where I need to either make a decision or find information to make a decision, and “Buy” for things to buy.

More recently I allocated one column of a sheet solely to things to “Clean out”.

Stuff tends to accumulate. The house is large enough that we could just let it do so. Sorting out unnecessary stuff was never a high enough priority for us to take time together to do it. Now that decisions only involve a single person, it’s going to be a lot faster. And I have tons of free time every other week.

I’ve only just started with the easiest ones. The closet with the least stuff in it; the laundry room; the hat and mitten storage. It looks like this can keep me busy for months.

One unalloyed benefit of the divorce for me is improved sleep quality. I literally haven’t slept this well in decades.

Eric snores. Has snored for years, and not done anything about it. I on the other hand have been a light sleeper since Ingrid was born – the gentle click of the bedroom door handle used to be enough to wake me when the kids were toddlers. Probably still is. Instinctually I know that I am needed, so I wake up.

I used to bulk buy earplugs to try and deal with the snoring. A little bowl for my earplugs was a permanent fixture on the bedside shelf, next to a lamp and an alarm clock. It worked so-so. Inevitably my ears were quite close to the source of the noise. I just got used to the fact that it could take me over an hour to fall into proper sleep.

No more! I go to bed, and I fall asleep. I wake up in the morning, and I am well rested despite spending fewer hours in bed than ever.

For a few years, until recently, I didn’t use an alarm – I just woke naturally some time between 7 and 8. Early enough to get to work at a reasonable time. Now I have an alarm set for 7:00 every morning. On weekdays I need to get up to wake Adrian, but I have the alarm on weekends, too. It works well for me to get up at the same time every day. (He is of course absolutely able to get up on his own, but school mornings are dreary enough without having to go through them all alone, so I get up to keep him company.) Ingrid’s hours vary, with work and school, so she manages her own wakings.

It didn’t take long for Nysse to figure out what the morning alarm means. Breakfast!

I feel guilty for leaving him alone as long and as often as I do these days, so I keep the bedroom door ajar for him in case he wants company at night. Sometimes he does, and he comes and sleeps next to me or on my legs. That also means that he has access to me in the morning. He used to come and bother me about breakfast – mrouwing in my ear and nosing at my face – at whatever hour he woke, but now he knows that it’s pointless. The moment the alarm goes off, though, he’s in there.

On the one hand, during the weeks when the kids are with Eric, I have more free time than ever. I could go out to concerts or jazz clubs or all sorts of places.

On the other hand, for those weeks I am the only person taking care of Nysse. If I’m gone from early morning to late night, he’s going to be alone and hungry and cold. (I’ve tried waiting around in the mornings to see if he’ll come in again after I let him out after his breakfast, but he doesn’t.) So I feel less guilty if I book an evening activity for when Ingrid and Adrian are staying with me, even though I am then leaving them alone. Poor Nysse got the short end of the stick in the divorce.

The orange sweater is done.

Like almost all the sweaters I’ve made, there are things I like about it and things I don’t.

I like the fit and the construction of the Sweatrrr pattern, which is why I’m using it for the third time. It fits me perfectly around the neck and shoulders.

Just like last time I only used the basic construction and skipped the design elements. I used a simple 1×1 ribbing for the hem and cuffs and neckline this time. These came out really nice and tidy and look great.

The yarn is Monoceros by Apmezga, 100% hand-dyed merino. The overall colour is lovely, and the yarn feels very soft. It’s going to feel very comfortable to wear.

I’ve got mixed feelings about the yarn in the context of this sweater, though. The variegated colour worked out so-so. It led to ugly striping at first, and I did end up ripping back the body all the way to the start of the waist shaping and re-knitting without shaping. It fit better than I had expected; it drapes well enough that the boxier fit looks good on me.

The narrower, more even stripes on the re-knitted body aren’t bad. But because they’re not in sync with the width of the body, the stripes “travel”, so they end up looking slightly slanted. When I look at the sweater straight on, it looks like I’m not wearing it straight. I’m not sure what I think of that. And I’m not very fond of the abrupt transition from wide colour blotches on the shoulders to the super narrow striping on the sleeves.

Even though all four hanks of yarn were from the same dye lot, one was slightly different. It’s missing the smallest, darkest specks of brown. I didn’t see it before using the yarn – only when I switched from one hank to the next near the bottom of the sweater. Alternating two hanks didn’t help because it was not the abrupt transition that was problematic, but the fact that the skeins just didn’t match. I ripped that back and used the deviant hank for the sleeves, and now I can barely see the difference even when I’m looking for it.

My desk used to be my home office, for everything from reading, to blogging, maintaining my to-do lists, paying the bills, to piling up books and magazines that I hoped to get around to.

Then covid came, and all of us switched to working from home all of the time, and my desk also become my WFH desk. I got properly equipped with a large monitor etc, which was a necessity for productivity but made my desk quite cramped. Plus, when I spent all day at the desk, working, it became strongly associated with work in my mind, and I didn’t like the feeling of going back there after dinner. My blogging and online reading migrated to the sofa; home admin got squeezed into a small corner of the desk, battling for space against all the work equipment.

Now I have inherited Eric’s work nook, which gives me the luxury of separating my home office from my work-from-home office. The desk in the bedroom is for private stuff; the desk under the chair is for work. Both activities get more space, and they don’t get mixed up with each other. And my back and hiops will be happier about spending less time in the sofa.

I needed a chair for the work nook, so I went to Blocket. Black chair, black chair, gray chair, black chair… boring, boring, boring… red! And the seller thought the red colour to be a potential problem. “Säljer en riktigt skön stol, som i färgen kanske inte är alla i smaken, men den är fantastisk på alla sätt o vis!” – “Selling a very comfy chair that might not be to everybody’s taste when it comes to colour, but it’s fantastic in all ways!” I’m glad that I like colour when everybody’s tastes lean towards black. This chair had been for sale for a month and a half, and nobody wanted it. It’s an RH Logic chair that cost around 15 000 SEK when new, and I got it for 600 – because the fabric is red and, to be fair, slightly faded along the front edge. Such a beauty, and such a great deal.

Eric finalized his move on Friday. I have the house to myself until Sunday afternoon/evening, when the kids will come for their week here.

The quiet feels particularly calming after the stress of last week. Like breathing out, and putting down a heavy weight. A lightness.

I don’t think I’ve quite settled into this new reality yet. It feels temporary.

My to-do list is massive. There are things to buy replacements for, closets and shelves and drawers to sort through, decisions to make. Good thing I have more time and more energy than in a long time.

Eric and I had two single beds put together, because we preferred mattresses with different firmness, with a double-width mattress topper on top. Now we detached them from each other and took one each.

It only took me one night to discover that a single bed feels much narrower than half of a double bed. I have to take care all the time to not lose the blanket over the edge of the bed. (I feel like there’s some kind of metaphor in there, for the end of a relationship.)

My plan was to make do with a narrow bed for a few months, until I have time to figure out how I want to furnish my bedroom in the longer term. Get a feel for the space, consider what else I might want in here.

That’s a bit of a chain of projects, though: before I invest in a new bed frame, I want to see the rest of the room as it will be. That means getting rid of the large double wardrobe in the middle of the room. For that to happen, I need to move my clothes into one or more of the built-in closets on the other side of the room. And that in turn requires me to sort through the stuff that is currently there, so I can make space.

I’m reconsidering that plan, though, because this is not very comfortable.

Eric is packing for his move, and there are moving boxes in half the rooms, and I feel like I’m in the way wherever I am, while in reality of course it’s the boxes being in the way. And I just feel so done with this. I am counting down days until this is over. Except there is no fixed date, it’s “just after New Year’s”, so I don’t even know.

I try to read or knit and I keep getting interrupted. I want to use the Christmas break to do something actually relaxing or fun, but there is no room for fun and no peace and quiet to be had, so this feels like the worst and most wasted Christmas break ever. And it’s +8°C and a drizzle out there, to top it all off.

I am breathing my way through the days. I am annoyed by things that would normally not bother me the least, and I resent the heck out of the situation.

What a difference love makes. And how obvious it is that love is an active choice more than a feeling that just happens. When I actively chose to love Eric, if there was some little thing he did that could be perceived as annoying, I could decide to not view it as such. I loved him, and he had his foibles, and ignoring those foibles was a part of loving him. And they truly did not annoy me, because in the grand scheme of things, they were nothing. Leaves the toilet lid up when flushing? Puts apples in the fruit bowl without rinsing them? Cuts up everything on his dinner plate so he can shovel it all up with just a fork? It was nothing.

Now it is not nothing.