New plan: join the two pieces with a metal buckle ring, and then use snaps to adjust their lengths.

I was not surprised at all to not find any buckle rings of a size I wanted in any of the crafts or hardware stores I tried. What are the odds that anyone would want exactly 3.5 cm rectangular buckle rings? Instead I got a roll of 2 mm galvanised steel wire and made my own.

Even the smallest DIY project requires so many tools. The household toolbox went with Eric, and I have the bare minimum. That toolbox was built up over decades and I am now replacing it bit by bit with every new DIY project, trying to not bankrupt myself in the process. I bought wire cutters just a couple of months ago (for replacing the cable of a lamp with a longer one) but I don’t have any round-nose pliers. Not going to buy them just for this, either: I just bent the wire around the rounded handle of a table knife.

2 mm steel wire turned out to be pretty hard, and difficult to bend into a small, precise shape. The result looks distinctly wonky and not particularly rectangular. Good thing the pretty ribbon will hide all its imperfections.

Even a teeny bit of snow, that we all know isn’t here to stay, brightens everything.

(View from the lunch room at Sortera towards Liljeholmen center.)

Cut my finger by just a tiny amount. No blood, even. You can barely see it. But the miniscule loose flap of skin is too small to properly cut off and sticks out and has been annoying me all day. It gets caught on everything. Clothes. Gloves. Toilet paper. Knitting. Towels.

Also: my hands look old. Not old, old, yet – but definitely not young like they used to. They’ve always had a very distinct structure to the skin, and my palm creases have been deeper than other people’s, but now they’re actually getting wrinkly.

A cold snap hit all of a sudden, and everything is frosty.

The sun doesn’t reach down to most streets. For my lunchtime walk I head to Starboparken which is a wide enough space to catch some actual sun.

Another concert in the baroque series. Händel’s oratorium Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno. And I just could not get into it.

It may not technically be an opera, but it sure walks like an opera and it talks like an opera, apart from lacking a story. I have never learned to enjoyed operas. That way of using the human voice has something about it that just grates on me. I can admire it from an intellectual angle, but I cannot actually enjoy it.

In the interval, I realized I was steeling myself for the second half. That is not a good frame of mind to be in for a concert. I admitted defeat and walked out, feeling like an uncultured philistine.

It gets dark so early. The shift to winter time didn’t help. Already at half past three in the afternoon, I take a circuit around the house and turn on all the lights.

At six o’clock it feels like night. Several times now I’ve found myself thinking “well, time to start winding down for the night” only to realize that it isn’t even dinnertime yet.

Three months to go before it gets better.

Nysse doesn’t need or like brushing; he keeps himself very clean on his own. He sheds what seems to me like a normal amount (a pet hair remover for the living room carpet is a must!) but sometimes he also loses entire tiny tufts of hair. Small clumps of hairs come loose, but also not entirely – they stick out a few millimetres from the rest of his fur and mar the sleek look of it. They stand out in a way that I can’t ignore. A very gentle tug loosens them fully, and he looks all smooth and pretty again. At those time I feel some kind of kinship with all those chimpanzees who are so often pictured grooming each other.

Lovely ribbon, pretty and sturdy. Thick and wide, which is great for comfort, but I hadn’t quite thought through how that would affect its behaviour. I want the strap to be adjustable so I can wear it either around my waist or cross-body over a shoulder. I thought I could just leave the ribbon ends quite long and tie it differently. When I tried it out with this actual ribbon, the result was bulky and visually way too much. I felt like a gift-wrapped parcel with the large bow that it made. Or maybe a flower girl. A new plan is needed. Maybe snaps?

I’m making a sweater out of (five of the) six recycled yarns. A ribbed raglan sweater in crazy stripes.

This is not the kind of thing I normally wear. There is nothing in my wardrobe even remotely like it. I have been doubting my design decisions about this thing all the way. Then again, I had strong doubts about the last crazy sweater I made, and it still ended up among my favourites.

Even if it does end up not worn much, it’s been a useful learning experience. I’m experimenting with different rates of raglan decreases for the shoulder section, which I haven’t done before. You can do all the calculating and measuring you want, but the only way to really see if the numbers work out, is to knit the thing.

It’s also been surprisingly fun to knit. For the stripes, I bought a commercial pattern (Free Spirit) to follow, because fiddling around with those did not sound like an enjoyable task. This pattern does a good job of mixing up the colours in clever ways, much better than any attempt of mine would have been. It doesn’t try to keep all five going all the time – it focuses on, say, three of them for about eight or ten rows, then swaps in one of the others, etc. It’s still an awful lot of colour changes, and the inside is a mess of yarn ends and needle ends, but there won’t be an end to weave in for every single row.

The 3×1 ribbing is a constant mental challenge. I am so used to 2×2 ribbing for sock legs that I revert to that as soon as I lose focus. I can watch or listen to something while knitting this, but it’s far from mindless knitting.

It’s the time of the year when I really feel my energy flagging and have to make a concerted effort to keep going. Going out in the middle of the day to get some daylight is an important part.

Today I was working from home so I spent my daylight therapy session in the garden with my camera. A surprising number of brave little flowers are still flowering – outliving their wilted comrades, tucked away among dead leaves.