Half past one, and most of the roofs are out of reach of the sun.

Last Wednesday when I was in town I happened to walk past Riddarfjärden and see the City Hall across the water, with a spectacular light show. I guessed it was connected to the Nobel week festivities. When I later googled to check, I found out that it was a whole thing, with light installations at at least twenty places around Stockholm. I wish I’d known about this before – I’d have tried to see more of them. The City Hall probably got the most impressive installation, but I’m sure the rest were beautiful and interesting.

I’ve had this long, fluffy, woolly skirt for at least 16 years, because I know I bought it at Spitalfields Market when we still lived in London. It was love at first sight: I love the look and the feel of the fuzzy material, and the skirt itself is constructed in a unique and interesting way. And it has pockets!

Despite its awesomeness, I haven’t been wearing it more than a few times every winter. It’s warmer than I usually need when I’m in an office. And I’m also aware that its hairy look is rather eye-catching, and I don’t want to be “the crazy lady who wears a fuzzy blanket all the time”.

This is the winter the skirt has been waiting for. With the cold (–8°C) and the electricity prices (around 5 SEK/kWh) right now, the best thing to prevent both bankruptcy and freezing is to dress warmly in multiple layers of wool. And I’m working from home, so the only person seeing my hairy skirt all day is me.

Nysse seems to have feelings about this skirt as well. He never reacts to any of our clothing, except Ingrid’s shoelaces, which he likes to play with – and this skirt. I get the impression that he’s curious and maybe puzzled about it, and sometimes almost seems to think it’s alive, so he bats at its edges when I walk past him.

Gingerbread cookies are an essential part of Christmas. We made this year’s batch this weekend.

We have a whole pile of cookie cutters. I’m a traditionalist and prefer the Christmas-themed shapes: the Christmas trees, stars and hearts and angels, and the traditional gingerbread man and woman. Pigs have a very decoration-friendly shape, and so do mitten-shaped cookies.

The stranger shapes include a set with tiny animals and a boat, which I believe is Noah’s Ark, kind of thematically appropriate – but it also a train engine and a car. This set gets used a lot because the small shapes fit so nicely in between the larger cookies.

Another set has more animals, which for some reason includes a crocodile and a shark. Who hasn’t heard of Christmas crocodiles? Adrian especially likes the shark and the crocodile, so we usually end up with a lot of those.

We played Exit, the card game. For the second time, and I really thought I’d blogged about the first time, but now I can’t find any posts about it, so maybe I didn’t.

Exit is an escape room game to play at home, with the same kind of cryptic clues, and the same kind of three-digit codes that are frequent in physical escape rooms. The less imaginative escape rooms can sometimes feel like one never-ending collection of combination padlocks; more interesting ones have more physical solutions like physical keys, magnets, etc. The card game is obviously limited in what it can do, so three-digit codes it is.

There’s a whole bunch of different games in the Exit series, with different difficulty levels. We did one at level 2½ (out of 5) the first time and found it just right. Now that we know how the games work, we could up the ante, I thought, and bought one at level 3.

That turned out to be overly ambitious. The four of us (myself, Ingrid, Adrian, and my brother) struggled for two hours and had to use several hints before we finally made it to the end. And we were quite done in by that time. A couple of the hints just gave us a missing detail when we had gotten almost there (like giving us the right measurement units for a puzzle) but with one of the puzzles, once we saw the answer, we truly felt that there was no chance we would have figured it out on our own.

If we played another at the same level in the next few weeks or so, we’d do better, I’m sure. We definitely learned things, like that mistake we made about measurement units, which was relatively obvious after the fact. And we should have taken a proper break in the middle to rest our brains. Also, don’t let one person be in sole charge of any piece of the game equipment, because then everybody else learns to ignore that piece, and important details about it may end up being missed by everybody.

Who knows how much of this we’ll retain until next time, if it takes more than a couple of weeks. But we’re definitely not moving up in level!

We’ve had the opportunity to borrow a giant Lego Taj Mahal set – larger than we’d be willing to pay for ourselves – and now we’re building it. Mostly Adrian, but I’m also helping out.

Mostly I help by sorting pieces. There’s something satisfying about it. Both about the sorting itself, and about the end result, and about knowing that Adrian has a good point to start from.

Beige; yellow; all other colours. Mid-sized white pieces (at least three units long and full height), small white pieces, flat white pieces, large stick-like white pieces, and a whole separate bowl with dozens of turntable pieces for the tiled floor.

We found a bottle of last year’s glögg in the pantry. I don’t believe in best-before dates too much, so we opened and tried it.

Last year’s glögg flavour was mojito: glögg with a flavour of lime and mint. Quite a bizarre combination, since there is no overlap in ingredients between mojito and glögg. Well, apart from the sugar. And their flavours don’t match or complement each other, either. Mojito is fresh and cold and tart; glögg is warm and round and spicy.

The idea of mixing the two was not a good one. We tried it; I was the only one to want to taste it twice. Then we poured it down the drain.

Marketing people want everything to have “this season’s variety”. Clothes, shoes, Christmas gifts… and glögg. There’s rarely a point in having a favourite model of sandals, or even of socks, or of glögg, apparently, because when the old ones have run out and you want more, your favourite has already been retired in favour of something newer and shinier.

We leave a space on the windowsill for Nysse where he can sit and watch the birds and dream of hunting them. The twitch in his tail is a clear tell.

On the one hand, it’s 15°C in the living room.

On the other hand, we’re paying around 500 SEK per day (that’s 50 EUR for you Europeans) for electricity right now. Heating more would cost even more.

So I guess I’ll just get another blanket.

18°C used to be the point where I would turn up the radiators. With these prices – and with the visibility we have from our new electricity contract – I’ve had to learn to frame things differently. Heating is something you do at night when prices are lower. During the day you just dress warmly. Three layers of clothes is normal. At least two of the layers should be wool-based, preferably.

Which is why I’ve ordered more warm woollen sweaters and undershirts. Buying second hand, I could literally get a sweater or two every week with the money I’m not paying for more heating. And then at least I get a sweater out of the deal, instead of feeling like I’m just burning money.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll also be getting a heat exchanger installed. Which will unfortunately cost quite a bit more than a few sweaters, but on the other hand will do more to keep us all warm for longer. I’m counting down the days.

In the meantime, the next ten days will be the worst in sight. The weather will be really cold; Sweden’s largest nuclear power plant will be undergoing emergency maintenance; hydropower plants will be running at reduced capacity to let ice form on the rivers; wind power will be limited because it’s less windy than usual.

The book with knitting patterns had some with cats, so I had to make another Christmas ball.

Slightly glittery yarn in red and white seemed suitably Christmassy, but now that the ball is done, the cats look like demons with blood-red eyes and bloody paws.