The sleeves are all done and finished, and they fit. Now I’ve just got the bottom hem left – and all the ends to weave in. Almost there! I might be finished with the whole cardigan before the end of the year.

Usually we start piling up the gifts under the tree the day before Christmas Eve but Nysse was all over the presents as soon as they started turning up, with claws and teeth, so we had to hide them away in the bedroom behind a closed door and only brought them out last minute. Only one or two packages got slightly chewed in the corners.

I am kind of proud of how I managed to wrap a large potted plant for Ingrid without breaking anything.

Lunch was the traditional devilled eggs, served with herring and an orange-avocado-feta-pistacho sallad, and vörtbröd.

Ingrid made a cream cheese Christmas tree for a starter. I didn’t think of taking any photos of the rest of the dinner, which consisted of the bean balls I always make for Christmas, potato gratin, brussel sprouts and a lingonberry sauce. I had planned for a cranberry sauce but there were no cranberries to be had in any of the three supermarkets I tried, neither fresh nor frozen. Lingonberries with orange peel didn’t taste half bad either.

The crinkling and crackling wrapping paper was an excellent cat toy. Nysse got half a roll of cheap wrapping paper, left over from some scouting activity, all for himself. That paper was kind of ugly to begin with so this was a good use for it.

Adrian of course evaluated all the larger parcels by weight and size and proportions, and tried to deduce which of the Lego sets on his wish list might be in there.

I started a habit of exercising for at least 15 minutes a day, keeping it small and achievable to help make it happen. But the low target actually ended up being counter-productive. 15 minutes was so short that even an energetic walk to and from the supermarket was enough, and after a while I was checking the box even though I wasn’t even getting my pulse or breathing up.

New habit: at least 20 minutes of strength training on weekdays when I’m not in the office, or 30 minutes of brisk walking otherwise.

I’ve also been avoiding strength training for a while because the mere idea of stripping off my warm layers in order to change into workout clothes has been unpleasant. But now that I’m doing it again, I was reminded that the workout itself gets me nice and warm, and the effect stays with me for some while after the workout. Net net exercising makes me warmer, as long as I can get over the initial threshold. As with most “hard” things, I just need to get past that initial resistance, and remember how good it will feel afterwards.

One more last-minute knitted Christmas ornament to give away, this time with an elephant pattern.

These balls were really quick and easy to make, and quite a lot of fun. Just four pattern repeats, so I’m done with it before the work has time to start feeling repetitive.

Last year when we put up the Christmas tree, Nysse climbed right up into it. The tree toppled, the poor cat was shocked, and a couple of our ornaments were broken.

The tree may have seemed like a safe and familiar place in an otherwise scarily new house. At the time, Nysse had been with us for just a few days, and he used to live in the countryside before moving in with us. Or maybe it was the opposite and he climbed up there because it was novel and exciting with all the shiny, sparkling ornaments.

So either he’s going to be much less likely to climb it this year, because he’s no longer insecure and looking for a familiar place, or he’s going to be much more interested, because he is more inclined to go exploring.

We’ve got the tree secured to hooks in the wall in two directions, just in case, so it might remain standing even if there is some not-too-energetic climbing. It’s only been a few days but it looks like the tree might be safe. Nysse goes batting at some of the baubles on the lower branches, where everything is inexpensive and cat-proof, and licks water from the container, but hasn’t been trying to climb the tree at all.

Today an electrician did the last bit of work on our new heat pump and it is now fully operational. It is more discreet in both looks and noise level than I had expected, and it’s doing a great job at heating up the rooms.

It comes with an app – of course – in addition to the remote control. You can tweak the settings, set up a schedule for it, and, most interestingly, monitor its energy consumption. The numbers are incredibly low for the heat it outputs and I would almost question their truthfulness if I didn’t see our overall electricity consumption also take a steep dive, in the other app.

The snow is melting away. We had a white December, but will have bare ground for Christmas.

Today was a boring day and I didn’t take any photos, so here is one from after the snowstorm in November. Nysse needs and wants to be outside, but really doesn’t like deep snow. So when there is a lot of snow, I clear the deck for him, and the stairs from the deck to the street. When I’m done shovelling, I make paths for him in the garden. I make small loop to the tree, a larger one beyond that, and a fork to the left to the big rock underneath the thuja, where he likes to curl up and lurk.

I call them his catwalks. Naturally.

We decorated gingerbread cookies. Ingrid and I decorated hearts and trees and pigs. Adrian made bleeding sharks, stitched-up crocodiles, and Frankenstein’s monster with parts of different gingerbread men glued together.


Then he went on to even more innovative creations, like a two-headed giraffe, a tangle of teddy bears, and 3D dolphins.

In the evening we decorated the tree. Unpacking the decorations is the best part: “remember when we got this one!” and “oh, I’d forgotten about this one”.

So apparently 14°C is the point where my hands get noticeably cold.

Outdoors I normally don’t need gloves until the temperature gets to around 10°C – that’s my usual “hat and glove” point. But then I’m walking, moving my arms and moving the blood around, and not holding a cold piece of plastic like a computer mouse. Sitting still and mousing around feels much colder.

It’s 14°C inside and –14°C outside and that’s probably as cold as it will get here this winter – the weather will get warmer for sure (this is well below average for a Stockholm winter), the electricity prices will go down perhaps not to normal but to at least less painful levels, and we’re getting a heat pump installed today. But a pair of fingerless typing gloves could still be useful to have later as well.

I have a standard sock pattern that works well for my feet, and only needs minor adjustments for Adrian’s. It’s barely modified from a standard pattern that I found for free on the internet. I thought gloves might be the same – but the standard glove pattern that most websites have didn’t fit my hands at all. When I made the thumb gusset long enough to reach from the base of the thumb to the split between thumb and palm, the thumb itself came out ridiculously wide.

So it’s back to that most common of knitting techniques: ripping it all up and redoing it. The glove on the left is my second, better fitting attempt; the one on the right I just started ripping up.

I’m still puzzled about the patterns all being so off. When I asked for thumb gusset shaping advice on Reddit, the responders all unanimously said that what I thought was the standard, was not. I should increase on every 3rd round, they said, not every 2nd – which the websites and books all had told me to do.