No, there is no bingo square to “read under the table”. I think this is for “read after dinner” – the spot under the table must simply have been cosy.

The bingo challenge requires 15 minutes of reading per day. Adrian has already finished the book they read for school and had to find something else to continue reading. He loves comic books but is otherwise not much of a reader – but halfway through the book he told me “this wasn’t so bad”.

Adrian’s class got homework of sorts for their Christmas break, in the form of a reading bingo. Five by five squares, with reading challenges like “read on a Monday”, “read in bed”, “read while eating something nice” etc.

But then they get odder. “Read under a tree” in the middle of winter? Well… I guess it’s doable with some planning, although turning pages with mittens can be quite fiddly.

“Read in swimming clothes”, though? What?

Adrian’s solution was to stick one of his legs through his swimming trunks. But I do wonder if the teacher was lazy when doing her part of this project and just copy-pasted a summer reading bingo without actually reading the squares.

Adrian enjoys both cooking and baking. When he bakes, it’s always something chocolate-based: a mud cake, brownies, or chocolate chip cookies. This time it was cookies.

Mixing the sugar and room-temperature butter took him over half an hour, but he didn’t give up and got it done all on his own.

Catching the last edge of daylight in the west-facing window, while engrossed in a good book.

Quite often I want to read a book with a certain kind of feeling – not a particular genre, nor type of plot. But book recommendations are all based on genre and plot elements and other such parameters that are easy to evaluate but not relevant to me. I could easily find, say, standalone books in the fantasy genre by female authors, and with some reasonable effort narrow it down to, say, books that have or don’t have magic/romance/battles/mysteries/fairy-tale inspiration etc. There are blog posts and recommendation lists galore, on Goodreads and elsewhere.

But I often want books where the mood is of a certain kind, and the writing style is like that, and I can’t even really describe that mood and that writing style very clearly, so it’s very much hit and miss. I’ve come to love the “sample” feature on Kindle and often go through many, many samples before actually buying a book.

That might be the feature that ends up converting me to preferring e-books: browsing physical books has to be done in a book store and there’s a limit to how many hours I can stand in a shop, sampling books, before I get hungry and tired.

But right now I have stumbled upon a series of books that hit just the right spot so I’m glad I have several more days to enjoy them before going back to work.

The usual pattern repeats itself. After a week of hanging around at home and eating too much, we’re restless, so we go out walking. Eric and Adrian went geocaching in Ursvik for a few hours. It was all muddy and slippery and started raining towards the end of our walk, but it still felt pretty good.

You know what is more frustrating than having to rip up several days worth of knitting because you got the gauge wrong?

Having to rip up several days worth of knitting because you used the wrong yarn.

I made swatches with several different yarns and then picked one combination and ordered enough for a whole cardigan. Unfortunately the alpaca yarn I left in the knitting basket was not the one I had decided to use. And I discovered this when I had knitted most of the first ball of yarn.

The ceremonial smashing of the gingerbread house.

With all the Christmas scarves, socks and mittens done (yes, the scarf was also a gift) I can start a new project, which will be the black cardigan I’ve been wanting to have for many months now.

Starting a large knitting project is scary. Despite all the measuring and gauge swatches, I have no real confidence in my ability to get the sizing right. Gauge swatches are so much smaller than cardigans that every measurement error gets magnified by a factor of 10.

It takes a long while for the errors to become really apparent in the real thing. Right now the cardigan is just a curled-up ribbon of knitting. If I gently pull at it a little bit in one direction, or another, its size can seem completely different.

Keep knitting and hope for the best.

Winter, you say? Nah. We don’t seem to be doing winters any more.

This thing has been flowering since July. We’ve had a very few frosty nights, but not enough to kill the flowers.

I finished the Christmas mittens in time. Now that they have been unwrapped, I can safely post full photos here!

Raspberry red for Adrian, black for Ingrid.

Funnily enough both of them like the same colour combination but with different emphasis. Adrian picked out the red and blue yarn (without knowing what they were for) and Ingrid happened to show me her favourite desktop wallpaper which was mostly black with details in the same cool red and blue tones.

Adrian immediately started using his, even before I had woven in all the yarn ends (which I didn’t do in advance because I wanted them to try them on). Ingrid hasn’t worn hers yet. Perhaps she thinks she doesn’t need mittens any more. In which case I guess hers will become Adrian’s in a few years.