I had a long online meeting this morning and knitted a good 15 cm of my scarf. Now that I’ve internalized the pattern, it requires so little thinking that I can easily do it while focusing 95% of my attention on the meeting.

As the scarf is getting longer, I have to keep most of it rolled up while I’m working on it. Otherwise it gets all twisted and tangled. Socks, hats and cardigans don’t do that.

And I haven’t had to rip up anything at all for weeks, since I figured out the root cause of my repeated mistakes!

Birthday boy opening his birthday presents, early in the morning, before school.

A much needed “new” phone to replace his old one which is not working so well any more. A Lego Ninjago set, a Sorgenfresser plushie, and socks with food patterns.

No, he did not get a bottle Glenlivet. We have a family tradition of reusing good-quality boxes for wrapping completely unrelated presents, especially hard-to-wrap ones. The Glenlivet box held the phone; the Sorgenfresser came in a box made for an iPad Air.

You have to be a little bit careful with this so you don’t send out misleading signals that lead to disappointment and tears instead of joy. A plushie in an iPad box only works if you’re quite sure that the giftee does not actually expect that box to hold an iPad.

4th grade brought a lot more homework for Adrian. Now he has extra work to do, to catch up after being at home for a week. He dutifully gets it done but I can see the effort it takes him to sit and focus on something so boring as pages and pages of multiplication.

He loves company for the most boring parts. Shared boredom, like shared sorrow, is half boredom.

I rarely take off my rings, but I do do so when I work out. I once damaged one of them when working in the garden, carrying rocks I imagine. Since then I take care when lifting or carrying hard, heavy things, such as rocks. Or kettlebells.

My workout discipline is still so-so. I don’t push myself nearly as hard when I am doing it alone. I will be badly out of shape by the time this social distancing ends. But something is better than nothing.

I’m enjoying the season’s plums that I buy daily from the vegetable stand at Spånga torg. I am so pleased that they exist! (Both the plums and the veggie seller.) I think the plums and some of the apples they sell must be local – the plums are so juicy and ripe that it’s hard to imagine them surviving any kind of long distance transportation.

The inside of a plum looks almost like I imagine the inside of a body, with its fleshy surface threaded through with veins.

I’m determined to plant a plum tree of my own this year. I started digging today in the spot I had planned for the tree, where the kids’ playhouse used to stand. Cleared away the brush and weeds, started digging down… and hit a flat rock almost immediately, less than a spade’s depth down. Shifted to one side and then to the other and realized that the rock extends in all directions. Not a boulder but bedrock, then.

There are large bushes and trees growing on all sides of this spot. I dug closer and closer to the stump of an old dead damson tree, thinking that surely if this tree could grow here then there must be deeper soil here – but no. The same flat bedrock all the way. I guess the nearby trees are all lucky survivors that have managed to put down their roots in crevices in the bedrock and managed to hold on there. Or not, given that the damson tree was actually more or less dead when we moved in.

I’m giving up on this spot and will have to find a plan B.

You’d think that in a garden of 1000 m² there should be plenty of space for a little plum tree. But with all the things already growing here, and the space taken up by the house, and the ever-present bedrock, and the shade from all the large trees in the neighbours’ gardens, there really isn’t.

The school term has started and so has the scouting season. Today we had a meeting/workshop for the leaders and functionaries. In a normal year this meeting would have taken place in the scout group’s own building. Now with the coronavirus, we were outdoors on the meadows near Gåseborg. Slightly less convenient perhaps, but much more pleasant and energizing. Fresh air and greenery and standing meetings instead of rows of wooden chairs – and lunch in the sun with views over Mälaren.

The first leaves are turning red.

My mouse gave up the ghost. I can’t remember when I bought it but it was years and years ago. Logitech is reliable.

I think what finally killed the mouse was near-constant bending of the cord where it pushes against my stack of magazines. It started disconnecting and then immediately reconnecting at random intervals, which made the computer go ding-dang-dong and then dong-dang-ding each time. That was a bit of a bother but not too bad, until the behaviour changed to disconnecting but then not reconnecting on its own.

With some experimentation I figured out that wiggling the cord would make the mouse come to life again so I got another few days of use out of it, while I researched mouse models.

Web shops list all kinds of specifications and measurements for mice – dpi and weight and battery life and sensor technology and what not. What they mostly don’t say much about is the shape of the mouse. I specifically wanted a mouse with an ergonomic shape that slopes down towards the little finger, like the old one. The web sites do not make it easy to find such mice. The shape of the mouse is usually not part of the description. There are photos, of course, but if those aren’t from the right angle, they don’t help much either.

The old-school way – asking people – worked much better. I asked at work what ergonomic mice people liked, got two or three models recommended, and just picked one of them. (Another Logitech model.)

The new mouse is wireless. I like the reliability of wired mice, but on my small desk a wireless one will be more convenient. That cable won’t be hitting my magazine stack any more.

I wonder how many years this one will last. There’s a chance that I won’t find out: I’m letting work pay for it, so it’s possible that I will switch jobs before the mouse dies (although I have no plans in that direction).

Adrian decided to do some cleaning and arranging in his room. His collection of Funko Pop figures gets pride of place but they are unstable and keep falling over, so now he put them all in place with sticky putty under their feet.

Groot, Gandalf, Drift, and Mugman – and Cuppet out of view. An eclectic collection.

Adrian is at home with a cough since Friday. Since it’s getting close to a week since he could go to school, I thought it might be good for him to start catching up with schoolwork so he doesn’t have too much to make up when he is back at school.

Getting any kind of information or support from the school has been like pulling teeth. They have no preparedness for this at all. I tried calling the main administrative office. They only had an answering machine; didn’t call me back when I left a message; didn’t have any information when I finally got hold of them. The teacher didn’t even acknowledge that she had received my email. (I understand that she might not have time to write a detailed reply, but an “I’ll get back to you” would have been appreciated.)

In the end I just walked to the school and got hold of Adrian’s main teacher during a break. I got some of Adrian’s school books home at least, and some vague instructions.

How can the school be so unprepared for this, and have no plan and no co-ordination in place whatsoever? Surely it cannot come as a surprise to them that plenty of kids will now have to stay at home for extended periods due to minor cold-like symptoms.

Meanwhile, here’s a nice rainbow from this afternoon.