The ground is still slightly wet with dew at 9 in the morning, but the deck is dry enough for me to put down a bean bag and have my morning meeting outside.

An actual, real concrete truck turned up today, for pouring the upper retaining wall. I’d expected the guys to be stirring concrete in buckets or something. It’s not like this wall requires a truckload of concrete. But I guess a sufficient number of small retaining walls all taken together will add up to a truckload of concrete, and with some planning and coordination it works out.

Two years ago we had to replace the incoming water pipe. The trench for the pipe went through both the retaining walls on that side of the garden, leaving ugly gaps in them.

Apparently (or so the builders told us) it’s not a good idea to build a wall on top of soil that has been newly dug up to such a depth, because the soil needs time to settle and compact properly. In these climes you ideally want to wait out at least one solid freeze-and-thaw cycle, to ensure that you don’t end up with a wall that gets deformed by shifting soil.

Last year there was no proper winter. So then we waited another year. For two years now we’ve had to live with broken retaining walls in that part of the garden. Luckily this winter we had some actual winter. And if this had been another crappy winter we would have gone ahead anyway. I am so fed up with looking at a broken wall.

Today the builders finally came to start working on the walls. This will be so great! I can start planting things above the upper wall, next to the house! And I can replace the ground cover plants around the hedge, because I know the ground won’t be dug up yet again. Hopefully.

It’s seven o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting in front of my work computer and wracking my brains. I was asked a few weeks ago if I could hold another talk for tretton37 and, eager to please people, I said yes. Now the bill is coming due. I need to actually come up with a topic, so that the talk can be scheduled and marketed and whatnot.

The talking is never the hard part. The hard part is finding something to talk about. I’m not working on anything new or exciting. It feels like everything I can think of has already been talked about. I keep second-guessing myself.

I used to think of this corner of the garden as a difficult one. Tucked in between a west-facing wall and a porch, it is dry, and in shade much of the time. I planted bergenias here not because I like them much (I don’t – they’re loud and somehow vulgar) but because they were among the few things I could think of that would survive here.

In the spring sunshine (not yet shaded by the large cherry tree nearby), teamed up with daffodils and with the red, still-nude branches of a dogwood bush, they actually look really good. A bit brash and vulgar still, but whatever.

I went back for more cherry trees. Today with less rain and wind, and more sunshine.

Yes, that branch of blossoms was literally hanging there against an evenly overcast sky, like it was posing for me.


The blossoms in these photos belong to two different varieties of cherry trees. The ones with the lighter double blossoms and green little leaves line the main street in Spånga; the ones with simple blossoms and dark leaves are a trio of trees off to one side. And soon the trees in our own garden will be flowering as well. What a luxury, to have all these wonderful trees around me!

These new socks are growing on me. I wasn’t too impressed with them when I had just finished them, but now I rather like them.

They pair well with all sorts of clothes because of the speckled colour mix. They go well with yellow, or brown, or blue-and-white, or even dark purple.

And the brioche knitting makes me feel them more than normal socks. I’m conscious of them when I walk around in them on bare feet. It’s almost like a tiny foot massage.

My desk feels more and more like a place of work. Work stuff fills almost all of it, both physically and mentally. I rarely sit there with my private laptop these days, unless I’m doing something administrative that’s almost like work. (Like installing OS updates, or backing up my stuff.) Instead there’s one corner of the living room sofa that has become “mine”. I’ve got my knitting and mending baskets there, and my Kindle, and a pillow or two. And now I’ve even splurged on a second charger for my laptop so that I don’t have to crawl under the desk move the one charger between the desk and the sofa.

This was the fifth hail shower in a week.

In English there’s a saying about April showers bringing May flowers. In Swedish the saying is simply “aprilväder”, “April weather”, which is unpredictable and unsettled.