We did something wild and crazy today and bought a new kind of pasta. Eating it was such a ridiculous experience – we literally spent most of dinner laughing and joking about the pasta – that I had to memorialize it.

Bucatini is what happens when spaghetti begets children on macaroni. Long like spaghetti, but slightly thicker, although not quite as thick as macaroni, and with a hole in the middle. It turned out to have all the bad sides of both.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that they don’t fit into a normal pot. Spaghetti softens after just a minute, though, so you can push them down into the pot and they’ll soon be submerged in the boiling water. Bucatini take a much longer while to soften, by which time the bottom ends have already had time to stick to each other, while the top ends are still hard. So one half of each ends up softer than the other half.

Like spaghetti, the bucatini are so long that you can’t just fork them into your mouth. Unlike spaghetti, though, they’re too thick and stiff to be wound around a fork. We next tried cutting them in pieces but then they were too narrow to easily stab, and too long and stiff still to easily scoop up. Whatever we did, it was awkward. It’s like the bucatini are not designed to be eaten. I’m sure there is a trick, because must be a reason for their existence, but I don’t plan on ever trying them again.

Another type of pasta that looks better than it works is orecchiette. I’ve tried cooking them several times and every time they stick to each other. They’re shaped like little hats, and they stack as well as hats, too, and then they stay that way. I tried turning the heat up higher so the water would boil more vigorously; I tried using more water; I tried stirring more frequently; I even tried adding oil to the water. Nothing worked, and I always ended up with clumps of orecchiette. So I’ve given up on them.

Last year I got a book with traditional Scandinavian knitting patterns as a gift from a colleague. I had already been thinking of reciprocating with something knitted, based on a pattern from that book. Now that this year’s Christmas gift is “something hand-knitted”, I just have to. Except he already got a pair of socks from me last year, and repeating that would be too boring. And other garments and accessories are hard to gift when I don’t know what he needs. I couldn’t come up with anything better than a Christmas ornament, so I knitted a ball. It came out nicer than I had hoped for. I like the concept and I think I might make more, for other people and perhaps also for our own tree.

Stockholm Early Music Festival, Christmas Edition.

I’ve been on SEMF’s mailing list for years, but never actually made it to any of their concerts. The main festival is usually in the beginning of June and clashes with the end of the school year. And early December of course is always a busy time. This year, though, Eric and Adrian were away on a scout hike, so we couldn’t do anything family-Christmassy anyway, so I could take the whole afternoon and evening for concerts.

The German Church is a lovely concert venue with beautiful acoustics. Isn’t it wonderful that we humans have evolved the capability to appreciate music, and the capability to make music ourselves, and also to construct buildings to make the most of both?

The mini-festival consisted of three concerts (plus an optional extra late-night one which I skipped).

The first one, with Finnish Ensemble Gamut, I found incredibly boring. I’m glad I bought tickets for the whole afternoon because if I’d just heard this one I would have been utterly disappointed. It was just an endless drone with little variation. There were instruments, and there was singing, and it definitely had a melody – but apart from the songs with elements of Finnish runo songs, they all sounded so same. The only way I knew that one song ended and another started was because the ensemble all switched instruments. And the singer’s mannered way of singing really didn’t suit my taste. I was nearly falling asleep and had to take out my knitting to keep awake.

The second concert, with The Nordic Baroque Band, was much better. All instrumental music, with baroque versions of violin, viola, cello and flute. (Today I learned that the baroque violin is held differently from the modern one – not squeezed between chin and shoulder but just pressed against the shoulder. And the baroque cello is held between the legs, without an endpin.)

The third one (Nordic Voices), in contrast, was all-vocal, but equally good, if not better. Their repertoire ranged all the way back to medieval polyphonic liturgies (Olavsmusikken). Beautiful, enchanting, soaring, intimate.

13|37 Christmas party at Lux on Lilla Essingen. Great food, nice venue, and I was lucky with the company at my table, so it was a great night.

The advent calendar is up, filled with Lego.

There was a lull a few years ago when Adrian wasn’t that interested in Lego, but now he’s building regularly again. His entire wish list for Christmas was filled with Lego. So naturally that is also the theme for his advent calendar.

I bought an actual Lego advent calendar once, but it was pretty boring. Each day had pieces for a tiny little build, or a minifigure, which Adrian found underwhelming. I guess it was aimed more at playing than building – which is the opposite of what he’s interested in.

This year I bought a normal Lego Creator set and made a DIY advent calendar out of it. Printed out a copy of the instructions, divided them into 24 more or less equal parts, sorted out the pieces for each day (which took Eric and me a good chunk of an evening) and wrapped them in the printed pages. Now he gets to build a part of the set every day, and on the last day I’ll bring out all the instruction booklets so he kind of gets a gift for free. The Creator sets are nifty that way: they use the same bunch of pieces to build three completely different things with the same theme.

Ingrid asked for an advent calendar from Pen Store. Sketchbooks, pens and pencils, modelling clay and other art materials. We haven’t tried this before; we’ll see whether it’s a way to discover new fun stuff or just a way for the store to offload things they wanted to get rid of.

I visited the 13|37 Borlänge office today (and will be staying until tomorrow) to hold my multi-tenancy talk again. I did it live in Stockholm twice when it was fresh, and streamed it once during the quarantine years – you can watch it on YouTube if you’re interested. It’s a few years old but the content hasn’t aged at all; the architectural questions and choices are all still valid, and even the code examples are still fresh. The audience seemed to agree, because the feedback this evening was almost embarrassingly complimentary.

The deer are cleaning up after the birds, eating spilled seeds. Surprisingly unbothered by me standing two metres away with a camera. I guess they’ve learned that humans can’t walk through walls.

I’m halfway through my post-lunch walk, and the street lights have already switched on. Admittedly I’m a late luncher and this was probably around three o’clock, but still.

If we had no children in the house, I’m not sure we’d bother with a Christmas tree. But I’d definitely still want Advent lights.

I seem to have inherited a keyboard.

It used to be that Ingrid and Adrian inherited Eric’s and my old electronics – laptops, phones, cameras, etc. That was when it was exciting to have any kind of laptop that was their own. That they were trusted to use, that wasn’t borrowed, that they could use without having to wait for when I didn’t need it. Performance didn’t matter, and neither did OS versions.

Now we’ve come full circle and I may end up inheriting Ingrid’s hardware. She upgraded her gaming keyboard, utilising the Black Week sales to get a great deal on a really good model, and asked me if I wanted her old one.

I have actually been thinking of replacing my keyboard, because the keys on the one I have feel a bit “mushy” and indistinct when I type. Plus it’s noisy enough that I have to turn off my conference microphone if I want to type during an online meeting, or my colleagues will complain about the noise.

Ingrid’s old keyboard turned out to be as noisy as mine, so that’s not going to be any improvement, but it does have a nicer feel.

It also has LED backlighting.

I guess I can understand the appeal of colourful backlighting if you’re trying to set the mood for gaming, but I’ve literally never felt any desire to have the keys on my keyboard light up when I type, or to have all the colours of the rainbow constantly rotate across the keyboard. But I had to try out all the effects after I had plugged it in – if not for anything else, then to see just how crazy they were. The Wheel was truly almost nauseating to my old brain.

The Breathing effect was actually kind of nice, though. A pleasantly slow swell of a single colour colour, that softly ebbs away again. I liked it well enough that I didn’t immediately turn it off.

So now I’m doing my work on an RGB keyboard. With colour effects. For real.