After two crazy weeks, during which I was skipping both workouts and lunches, my days at work are settling down again. It feels good.

Ingrid is also getting into a workout habit. But whereas I do mine around midday, I can hear her working out near midnight instead. She says it feels nice to wear herself out before she goes to bed. To each her own.

This weekend I finished assembling the little bag that I decided to use my embroidery sample for. Instead of a pretty but useless piece of embroidered wool, I have a usable bag.

Each individual part came out well, and the bag feels pleasingly solid. But the overall result is not what I had hoped for. The embroidery looked better when it lay sleek and flat. Forcing it into a three-dimensional object inevitably made it bunch and bend. If I decide do more of this, then I need to find a design that keeps the embroidered parts more separate from the fussier parts of the product, all the zippers and corners and such. Maybe by framing the embroidery with plain fabric?

Several of the games that Adrian plays have a mechanism where you can collect things that don’t matter much for the main game play. In Animal Crossing there are collections of bugs and fish and fossils. In both Zelda BOTW and Pokemon Sword, there are (among other things) recipes to collect to fill your recipe books. Inspired by an apple curry in Pokemon Sword, Adrian wanted us to make one in real life. I would never have thought to make an apple curry, but it turned out quite nice. Adrian even decorated his portion to match the picture in the game.

Adrian decided that he wanted to learn programming in a real language, not just dragging and dropping coloured blocks in Scratch. He’s figuring out his first steps in Python, making text appear on the screen.

With all the meetings this week, my sock production is off the charts. I’ve already finished one pair for myself, and started on another pair for Adrian.

This is the first time I use this kind of patterned sock yarn. It’s a really clever idea: the first half of the ball of yarn has exactly the same pattern or colour gradation as the second one, and there is a short marker section in between in a totally different colour. This way you can very easily get two identical, fun socks from one ball. I like it.

This pair I haven’t even properly finished yet – I still have the ends to weave in – but I wore them anyway because today’s outfit, with a green skirt and dark green tights, called for green socks.

The snow is all melting away again. It’s back to rain and slush.

Today was my second day on the new project. The new team takes a bootcamp approach to inducting new team members, with back to back intro meetings all day. Quite exhausting.

And then during my lunch hour I’m watching live-streamed meetings at tretton37, all of last week and all of this one. The company is making major organizational changes and setting out a new five-year strategy right now, and informing everyone thoroughly. My longest actual break today was 15 minutes.

Anyway, one my tasks in the new team was to set a profile picture for myself in the various communications tools we use. And the instructions were specifically that everybody’s profile pictures had to be actual pictures of themselves. My standard profile picture since many years, a close-up photo of a Chihuly glass sculpture, was not approved. I couldn’t find any suitable recent photos of myself so yesterday I took 10 minutes to take a fresh one. Too proud to use a phone selfie.

There are so many photos of people these days. Everybody has their phone with them and keeps snapping away – photos of themselves, their friends, their family. But there are so few good photos of most people. Few of us go to an actual photographer to get professional-looking portraits taken.

I notice it in the obituary pages in the daily papers. There is often a portrait at the top of the obituary, and often a bad one. Low-resolution snapshots, slightly blurry phone photos, awkward crops of larger photos. Family and friends really want to include a photo in the obit but can’t find a good one.

What is it about guns and weapons that fascinates boys of a certain age? Or maybe boys of all ages, I don’t know.

Adrian doesn’t have even a smidgen of violence in him. Even in his most angry periods he’s never hit or kicked or otherwise tried to hurt anyone. No sibling fights.

And still he loves guns, or rather the idea of guns. A vast majority of his Plus-Plus constructions are guns of various kinds. Handguns, sniper rifles, machine guns, hand cannons, grenade launchers… The terminology comes from computer games, mostly Fortnite. He doesn’t even really understand the differences between them all, apart from the looks, so he makes up unlikely hybrids such as “sniper pistol”.

The cardigan has reach a point where I need to measure and make critical decisions to get the fit right, so I am procrastinating and avoiding the anxiety of all those decisions and knitting some socks instead. I’m trying out a new stitch for reinforcing the heels, called the Eye of Partridge stitch. A funny name for a very pretty-looking stitch!

Knitwear sizing is still hard. I knit gauge swatches and I measure and I calculate, and it still feels like hit and miss. Often the knitting behaves differently when there is more of it. With the ribbed cuff of a sock, there’s no point in making a decision about fit before there’s at least 5 or 6 cm of it. With these socks I made three starts (despite first making a swatch!) and still I’m not 100% happy with the fit. The next pair will be larger. My plan is to establish a good base pattern for this yarn weight and then just make variations of it – yarn colour, ribbing type, decorative details etc.

I thought I could give these slightly too tight socks to Adrian, who loves wool socks. It turned out that his ankle is as thick as mine, and his instep maybe even higher than mine. The only dimension where our feet differ seems to be length – his are about 2-3 cm shorter. So I guess I’ll keep these after all and wear them directly on the skin, rather than as an extra layer on cold days.

And I get the definite feeling that cardigans get narrower the longer I knit. I measured the black one when I had knit 10 cm and it was slightly loose. I put it around my waist again when I had 20 cm and it felt noticeably tighter. Perhaps the yarn’s own weight pulls it down?

The cold and snowy weather has finally brought some birds to our feeder! It’s been nearly empty until now. I can’t remember a winter with so few birds to look at.

Today I saw a hawfinch here for the first time. The Swedish name stenknäck means “stone crusher” and the Estonian suurnokk means “big beak” and there’s no doubt that the names fit! According to my bird book it eats cherry pits, after crushing them with its beak. The book says it visits feeders to eat hemp seeds, but here it seems to prefer sunflower seeds.

It’s clear that there is a power hierarchy among different breeds of birds. Sometimes it correlates with size. Most smaller birds avoid jays and magpies; blue tits and great tits avoid nuthatches. But not always: the hawfinch barely needs to turn its head, and blackbirds flee.