Cherry blossoms against a cloudy sky.

Nysse has rediscovered the birdhouse outside the kitchen window. He climbed on top of it and wouldn’t leave. Not a behaviour I want him to get comfortable with, so I poked him with a broom until he jumped off. When he went there again, Eric sprayed him with water.

Unfortunately, his displeased jump-off was forceful enough to knock down the entire birdhouse. Fortunately, the inhabitants had all left. There were neither eggs nor birds in there.

Nysse’s climbing skills being what they are, there’s no cat-proof place to hang up the birdhouse. No tree branch is strong enough to support a bird house, but small enough to deter a cat. But we can hang it up more securely for next season, and maybe add a larger roof that will block him from reaching the opening.

The space to the right of the front stairs is complicated. If it was just a rectangular patch of ground, I’d have no trouble filling it – a few bushes, ground cover under them, perennials between and in front, maybe some spring-flowering bulbs here and there. But there is the access hatch to the crawlspace under the house, to begin with. We don’t need to get in there often, but we also cannot block it off completely. And there is the water tap, which needs to be even more accessible.

Ideally I’d have have something pretty and green growing in the entire space. But I don’t know of any shade-tolerant ground cover that would stand up to frequent trampling, so for the sake of practicality I’m putting paving stones in the parts where I think we’ll want to walk the most. Wall-to-wall (that is, house wall to retaining wall) in front of the tap, and a shallower bit in front of the hatch, that I’ll hide behind some greenery. To keep the overall impression natural, rather than sleek and paved, I’m leaving gaps here and there between the stones to fill in with ground covering plants.

Laying out irregularly shaped paving stones in an aesthetically pleasing way is hard. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, where each piece weighs several kilos. The balance between “pleasantly irregular” and “sloppy” was tricky. It took me three hours of work, and I was knackered by the end of it.

It’s wood anemone season, and the woods in Hägerstalund are always flooded with anemones. Ingrid and I went for an anemone walk in the spring sun.

It’s amazing how they carpet the whole ground.

I found a dead moth of some sort on the stovetop after cooking dinner. I imagine it got killed by the steam rising from the pots and pans. Sort of like a human paragliding over an active volcano, or over the reactor in Chernobyl.

There used to be a convenience store on that corner where the construction machinery and builders’ barracks stand right now. Apparently it wasn’t a real building but one of those removable ones that you lift with a crane onto a giant truck and suddenly it’s not there any more.

More apartments are being built in various places in Spånga, and I’m sure they’re making room for another one here.

Several large buildings with student apartments have been built (and more are on the way) in the other direction, and another one a few hundred metres to my left. And the buildings behind that tall one (barely visible at the right edge of the photo) got two storeys added to the top a few years ago; that’s why they’re a different colour.

Cherry blossoms, down at central Spånga…


… and pink hepatica flowers in a little grove nearby.

My current embroidery project is a glasses case. I don’t need my glasses often at all but they still deserve a nice case.

The starting point was a technique I saw posted on Instagram, called stacked running stitch. It looks like satin stitch at first glance, but builds up very differently. Instead of making one branch at a time, the yarn goes all the way across the motif, building up all the branches simultaneously, a millimetre at a time.

Instead of something purely abstract, I did the stitching in the shape of a coral.

It sounded interesting, and was definitely interesting to work with. It took a lot more concentration than I had thought. The running stitches had to be kept straight (probably easier on a fabric with visible threads) or the lines would start to lean or curve. And I also had to think about the branching all the time, to make sure they didn’t run into each other, or all end at the same time, or all split at the same time.

The end result is perhaps technically impressive rather than beautiful. It was an interesting experiment, though. I think it might have worked better for a purely abstract design after all.

The motif on the rear is also a coral, but a quick and simple one in feather stitch. In all its simplicity I think it looks better than the laborious one on the front.

Bushes and perennials that take a long time to wake in spring make me anxious. The buds on some bushes are barely visible, while others have new leaves the size of a finger joint. Some perennials are already knee-high, but others haven’t even broken through the crust of the soil. It makes me worry that maybe they’ve died over the winter.

In my eternal project of removing lawn and replacing it with better things, I’ve now tackled the bit just in front of the house, to the right of the stairs. It’s a hassle to mow, with rocks peeking out of the ground along the edges as well as a large rock just at the corner. And it’s really boring to look at. For a spot that we walk past every time we come home, it really isn’t well utilized.

First step: remove the lawn. I was expecting this to be relatively arduous, based on past experience. The soil here turned out to be light and dry, not at all like the clay to the left of the stairs, and the grass is thin and weak. So I got all this done much faster than I had thought.

Next step: figure out what to plant. I had this spot marked as deep shade in my head, but it was full sun while I was digging this afternoon. But of course that’s because the cherry tree is bare right now, and will change in just a few weeks.