The plants in the window in my home office corner are outgrowing their space. I bought them for my large window niche at the tretton37 office, where they would have plenty of room. Now they’re squeezed onto a narrow window ledge. And since my home office is in the same room as our bedroom, we pull down the blinds every night, so the plants can’t be allowed to spread outside their narrow space. I’ve already had to move one to a different window because it grew too large. Others will soon need to follow. If not now, then in the spring, when the nights will be lighter and it will no longer be enough to pull down the blinds until they just touch the tops of the plants.

Not that their disappearance here would make much of a difference. I can barely see them behind the huge monitor that takes up much of my field of view.

The home office still feels like a semi-temporary solution. Or 25% temporary perhaps. OK for another year, but not for 10 years. I’d want to make more adjustments if this were to become permanent.

It’s hard to know how long to plan for. The coronavirus situation will resolve itself one way or another – vaccines are on their way, even if not within touching distance yet. But how much time will I be spending in an office after that?

For a very brief moment around 11 o’clock, there was sunshine. By the time I had gotten my camera and put on shoes, it had disappeared, but there was still a thinner patch of clouds and the day felt light.

The brown things are hydrangea flowers. The round thing is a poppy seed pod. And the flowering thing is a flowering quince, confused by the unseasonably warm weather.

When I had come about halfway on the first sock, I ripped up all I’d done and started over. And then I did it again when I had done two thirds of a sock. Today I started on my third try and finally it feels right.

It’s just a pair of socks, how hard can it be! It’s not like I haven’t knitted any before. And it’s not like I don’t have a pattern to follow. But getting the fit right with a new yarn still takes some trial and error.

The first time the ribbing around the calf looked ugly when stretched out.

The second attempt with more stitches looked better but fit worse – it was way too loose around the heel and ankle. (The socks are not for me but my feet are the closest so I try them on my own feet anyway… The difference in width isn’t huge.)

For the third attempt I am using the lower stitch count again, like the first time, but 1×1 ribbing instead of 2×2 – and now I’m happy with both the fit and the looks.

With my previous attempts I kept guessing and trying it on and hesitating. I kept putting the knitting away because it didn’t feel quite right. Now that there is a feel of rightness about the whole thing, progress is fast. Although I started from zero today, after an evening of knitting I’m back where I was yesterday evening.

My favourite socks are ready for wear again. One hole and one very thin place are now properly darned. That thin place could have done with a slightly larger mend but as usual I underestimated how much yarn I would need and ran out a bit too early.

The workout action selfie series continues. There isn’t much else that is photo-worthy in my life just now. And even that’s setting the bar for “photo-worthy” quite low: someone is doing something in daylight.

Adrian needs to practise his times tables. He knows them, mostly, but not fast enough, and sometimes he still gets some of them wrong.

So we do some maths every day around dinnertime. At first we did it orally – I came up with problems one by one and he told me the answer. The talking slowed both of us down, though, so recently we switched to written practice. I fill a sheet of paper with problems and he then does them as fast as he can.

Initially I made up problems more or less randomly but with extra focus on the ones I knew he knew less well. But now he wants to see if he gets faster, so I need to make the exercises more consistent. I make sure to cover the entire table from 2×2 to 9×9 evenly. But I also want each day’s sheet to have a different order so he doesn’t just learn them by heart by order – “18, 24, 25, …”

My algorithm for making up his worksheet has evolved. The first iteration was a simple one. I drew up a 10×10 square on a piece of scrap paper, randomly picked an unused square (such as 4×5) and put a dot in it when I wrote down “4×5” on Adrian’s sheet.

This was time-consuming and fiddly. My second algorithm was to take the previous day’s sheet and shuffle it. Take three problems from the top of the first column, then three from the bottom, then from the top of the second column, etc. I was hoping this would be faster because I can just follow along, but it was easy to lose my place and forget which row I had just copied and where I should continue.

My third algorithm was the opposite of the first one. Instead of filling the sheet top to bottom with exercises in random order, I went through the table top to bottom (2×2, 2×3, …) and wrote each combination in a random place on Adrian’s sheet.

At this point I noticed that I must have made mistakes in my first algorithm. When I was done with a sheet using the third algorithm, I noticed that the finished sheet had fewer problems than the previous sheets. I double-checked, and apparently I had previously inadvertently included some duplicates. To keep the worksheets consistent in length, I now have to repeat my previous mistakes intentionally and add some random duplicates.

This task is of course just crying out for automation. But then the results would need to get from computer to paper somehow and I don’t have access to a printer. Perhaps at some point I’ll get sufficiently fed up to automate it anyway and cycle to the office and print out a few dozen variations.

Today’s workout was also today’s photo session. First I finished my workout and then I did at least 5 minutes of extra swings out of pure vanity, or perhaps out of my pride as photographer, to get decent photos. Action selfies are difficult! Getting the timing right required a lot of attempts.

Adrian made chocolate chip cookies, all on his own.

He likes both baking and cooking. Baking, I think, suits him a bit better, because there is less multi-tasking involved. You just follow the steps in order at your own pace, and then you’re done. With cooking, there’s often more time pressure – you need to keep an eye on whatever is on the stove while working on the next thing, and you can’t always queue them up after each other.

The one thing Ingrid wished for her birthday and Christmas was a proper gaming computer. She has a laptop but it’s starting to show its age, and it’s just not enough for the games she plays these days.

She’s spent weeks on research, comparing different graphics cards and processors and other components. Now finally she’s made her choice and put in the order. The delivery arrived a few days ago. Ingrid made a brave attempt at putting it together on her own, but then had to ask for more expert help. Eric and Ingrid spent all of yesterday evening figuring it all out. After a good while they realized that some of cables that were already attached when the case arrived, had been attached incorrectly. That didn’t exactly help.

Finally around midnight I heard them exclaiming happily that all the fans were spinning and all the lights were lighting up and synchronized with each other. Yay!

My mother-in-law was buried today. Lots of flowers and beautiful singing, as she herself had wanted it to be. Had she been there to see it, she would have liked it.

Afterwards the bells rang not with the sonorous, melodious sound that I love but with harsh tones that were almost painful to hear. I don’t know if it was due to these particular bells or my state of mind, but it felt fitting.

If my funeral were to be arranged to my wishes (which is not a given, because a funeral is for the sake of those who are there and not for the one who isn’t!) mine would not look like this, regardless of how lovely this was.

Most importantly, it wouldn’t be a religious funeral. I’m not a member of the Church of Sweden and that is a very conscious decision. I don’t have the least bit of Christian faith in me. No prayers, no benedictions, no sermons about how I will now be in a better place, no psalms.

Organ music is beautiful, though; I can enjoy all of Bach’s chorals despite their Christian origins. Still, for my funeral I’d rather have, say, Thea Gilmore’s Sol Invictus, or perhaps Helen Sjöholm’s Då väntar jag vid vägarna. Maybe I’ll win the lottery and die filthy rich and then you can get Thea Gilmore to sing at my funeral.

If I could choose, I’d die in the middle of summer so the service could be outside, in the sun, in some green and flowering place. Instead of princess cake, how about a chocolate mousse cake?

Afterwards it would be rather nice to simply be rolled up in a shroud and then buried somewhere in the woods just like that, to be eaten by worms and all the other little creatures. Or perhaps cremated and spread with the winds and the waters. I would not want to be shut in a coffin, if it was up to me.