Ingrid found out this weekend that one of the friends she hangs out with is unwell, and his mother has tested positive for covid-19. And now she is sick as well. It started with a slightly sore throat, and then continued with headache, tiredness, mild fever, and a general feeling of being unwell and achy.

The current procedure is that everyone with symptoms of possible covid-19 infection should get tested. In Stockholm you can either make your way to a drive-in testing station, or get a DIY test delivered home. We went the home testing route.

The process was very smooth. You book online, and a few hours later a test is delivered to your door. You get 15 minutes to take the test, and then the courier comes back to pick up the little test tube with your sample.

Ingrid took the test in the middle of the day and late this evening she already got the result. Negative.

It’s an odd coincidence that she would get some other respiratory infection just as she has been exposed to someone who has been exposed… or perhaps this was a false negative. Who knows. But lacking any other information, I guess we’ll have to trust the test.

And now my own throat is feeling a bit sore. We’ve been trying to keep Ingrid at more of a distance than usual, but we’re still in the same rooms, breathing the same air, so it’s hard to not infect each other with whatever it is.

Adrian made this rhino sculpture, liked it but had no use for it, so he gave it to me. Now it sits on my desk because I also like it but have no real use for it.

Part of the role of a parent is to accept gift of random crafts, apparently. Drawings and paintings, embroidered pieces of cloth, pin cushions, decorated candle holders, miscellaneous objects made of paracord or steel wire or wood…

I guess the rhino can stay here until it gets replaced by the next thing.

Adrian is home from school because of a runny nose, but essentially not the least bit sick. So when the sun is shining bright, we can go for a walk in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday.

This spring’s very first crocuses.

Sörmlandsleden stage 17, back and forth, 6 + 6 km.

Today’s walk was mostly just to get out of the house. With nothing going on in life, I’ve gotten used to nothing going on and lost the habit of doing things, of planning and making things happen. Planning something feels like so much effort. So it’s a good thing that my slow-burn Sörmlandsleden project makes it so easy to get out. Just take the next stage on the list.

12 km is far from a full day of walking, but with the driving there and back and a leisurely lunch + book break in the middle, the whole outing took over 8 hours anyway. Sörmlandsleden stretches many miles away from Stockholm and the point that I have reached is currently about one and a half hour’s drive from home. And it’s only going to get further and further away. Stages 18, 19 and 21 are all just over 10 km, so they’re also doable back and forth in a single day, albeit a long one. Stage 20 I’ve walked already.

It was a very quiet walk. There was no wind and none of the rustling or whispering sounds of wind. No birdsong. No sun, with its brightness and shadows. I met a single other person on the trail. He was running and doing the same as me, back and forth, so he ran past me twice.

The ground was not as muddy as I had feared. In many places, what looked like soggy ground turned out to be still frozen. There were patches of grainy old snow here and there. The small lakes were all fully iced over, but the larger ones had open water.

I heard a black grouse sing. I didn’t know what it was; I don’t think I’ve ever heard one before. I walked closer, hoping to get a look, but it took flight. I got enough of a glimpse to see that it was like a large dark hen, which means it was some kind of grouse. Google and Fågelsång.se helped me figure out which one.

This is the inside of a hollow dead oak.

Mello is Melodifestivalen, a Swedish song competition where the winner gets to represent Sweden in the Eurovision song contest. Ingrid used to be a fan but has outgrown it, while Adrian still cares.

I wouldn’t say I hate it, and in these pandemic times I can’t even say I have better thing to do with my Saturday evenings, but I don’t much enjoy it either. But Adrian really wants company – watching TV on his own is just no fun – so I sit there and knit and follow the competition just enough so I can converse with him.

Today was the finals, which Adrian celebrated a Mello-pink donut. (The previous, less important shows only merited pink Mello smoothies and sometimes just fruit snacks.)

Adrian’s favourite breakfast is a cherry tomato omelette. I make one for him and me almost every weekend. Eric is not that fond of eggs for breakfast, and Ingrid we rarely even see before 11 on weekends, so it’s just Adrian and me.

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of proper French omelettes, which you are supposed to keep stirring all the time. When I do that, I end up with scrambled eggs… which we also love, but not when we want an omelette. The fact that our omelettes are made of at least 5 eggs probably doesn’t help. My omelettes are more like the Spanish and Italian ones: thick fluffy ones, filled with stuff, slowly cooked under a lid. But with tomatoes instead of potatoes.

Cherry tomatoes are on the “must always have at home” list only because of these omelettes.

The weather is abominable. Winds are howling around the house, sleet is being whipped around and drips down the windows. The air vents in the bathrooms clatter in the wind. The dead Christmas tree that we put outside on the deck after Christmas (because we’re lazy, and we were going to chop it into pieces in the spring when the weather is nicer, and also because it actually looked somewhat decorative at a distance) has blown down twice, and then we gave up righting it and let it lie. I’m glad I don’t need to go outside.

I made no forward progress on the cardigan today because all the time I spent on knitting today went towards fixing an earlier mistake. The lacy pattern has cables, and three pattern repeats ago I twisted half the cables the wrong way. Not a big deal, and it probably wouldn’t even be visible – but if I don’t fix this, I’ll be confused each time I come to the cables, because I won’t be sure which ones are the correct ones.

Fortunately the pattern is made up of rectangular blocks that don’t interfere with each other. I could unravel a vertical column, four stitches wide, fix it, and repeat the process for the other wrongly-twisted cables.

Eric already jokes that half the work of knitting cardigans is about ripping up and starting over. Indeed. Perhaps I should try to do with cardigans as I do with socks: decide on a base pattern and only make minor modifications in it. I would certainly be more productive that way.

My reason knows that it is not sensible to expect a few warm days in early March to mean that spring is here. But I still hoped, when I saw the first flowers. And now we’re back in snow and wind and cold.