The very first daffodils in the garden are flowering, along with the last and largest of the crocuses.

Those are both large and bright and catch the eye amidst all the dead grass. But the flowering currants are prettier than either of them. The leaf buds have opened, and from each one a dark pink, downy cluster of flower buds emerges, alongside a barely-open new leaf, also edged in pink.

I’m guessing we might get a stricter quarantine soon, and I’ve tried to think about what that might mean for us. Boredom, of course, and cabin fever. We’re well equipped, with Netflix and Kindle and PlayStations and board games. But just in case, one of the things we did today was to buy the Nintendo Switch that Adrian has been saving up for, and letting him spread out the rest of the cost over the next six months. Just in case.

And we went quarantine shopping. If we get a quarantine, we might end up with the same kind of shopping routines that they have in the UK: strict limits of how many people are allowed to be in a supermarket at the same time, and hour-long queues outside. If this happens, it will probably be at its worst at the very beginning, so we stocked up with enough basic groceries to last us a week. No canned ravioli or meat soup or other panic food; just normal basics like pasta, rice, canned tomatoes and beans, and frozen vegetables, that we’ll eat anyway, with or without quarantine.

I made a list and Ingrid and Adrian immediately volunteered to take care of it, and seemed to have fun doing it. Meanwhile, Eric and I did the normal shopping for this weekend.

What we saw in Bromma confirms Google’s statistics. The parking lot wasn’t as packed as it would be on a normal Sunday, but it was more full than empty. Not much staying at home going on here.

I had a chocolate cookie for today’s online Friday fika, ending our third week of remote working.

I’m sort of getting used to it, settling into this new reality, and finding solutions to make it a sustainable way of working. Our team retrospective today was also all about adapting to working 100% remotely and compensating for not being in the same room.

How do you check if your teammate is available for a quick chat, or deep in the middle of a tricky problem and doesn’t want to be disturbed? In the office you say their name, and if they’re busy, they can reply and tell you to go away, without breaking that thread of concentration. Remotely, you ping them on Slack, and then sit and wonder if they didn’t reply because they just forgot to check Slack or because they’re really busy.

I’m not getting out very much now that I am working at home, even though there is no actual quarantine keeping me indoors. There’s always some reason I don’t do it, and by the time I get around to it, it’s too late.

Today, for example. I looked out through the window around lunchtime and noted the beautiful weather. Considered going out for a walk, but decided that I could do that later, and just worked out for a while instead, ate lunch and went back to work.

By the time I was done working, the weather was also done being nice, and around dinnertime there was a full-blown storm. Strong, gusty wind and heavy rain, and later on thick snow flying almost horizontally.

I only went out for a very brief moment, in a short lull between the rain showers, to right our bird feeder stand which had blown down.

For the first time since this WFH semi-quarantine started, I exercised. At home and on my own.

I much prefer group exercise. I like having a scheduled time that gives me that extra push. I like having someone else pick the music and plan the session. And I really, really like having someone shout encouragement at me.

But none of that is happening now. The gyms are still open but I really can’t see how that’s a good idea.

I’ve made some half-hearted attempts to work out at home but they all fizzled out. Today I think I found a key to making it happen: pretend that I’m doing it for real. Don’t just walk away from the computer – lock it. Don’t just take off the sweater – change into proper workout clothes. Put on workout music; bring out the dumbbells.

This felt good.

Various reasons took me to the office today.

1.
An appointment with an optometrist with Ingrid, a few blocks from work, which unfortunately got cancelled just before, because the optometrist was off sick. She’s been waiting for that appointment since we first discovered her vision problems in December 2018, and it already got postponed once, so this was rather a disappointment. And probably all that the optometrist has is a slight cold.

2.
A job interview with a potential new hire at tretton37. While we generally work from home, the candidates get the choice between remote and face-to-face interviews. Today I had one of each.

The remote one was my first remote technical interview, and it was a bit of a challenge. We always do these in pairs, and a surprising amount of coordination between myself and my co-interviewer apparently happens wordlessly. The most noticeable difficulty was in taking turns – signalling when I wanted to jump in, or seeing whether my colleague was waiting to say something. In a room, three people naturally sit in more or less of a triangle, and it’s very obvious whether I’m facing the candidate or my colleague. When we’re on screens, they are both right in front of me, separated by a hand’s breadth. I am inevitably always facing both.

3.
While I was there anyway, I brought home more of my things, especially the plants. The things I need for work I already carried home two weeks ago. Now came the turn for the things that need me, i.e. my potted plants. They had all survived two weeks without water, but probably wouldn’t last much longer than this. Right now I can still go there occasionally to water them, but who knows what the situation is like two weeks from now?

The windowsill in my home office nook is quite full now. I just barely managed to squeeeze in the jade plant and dracaena and others from the office between my African violets.

An unexpected side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: badly chapped hands.

Adrian (and all the other kids) are constantly reminded at school to wash their hands. Before meals, after breaks, after going to the loo of course, etc. And with plenty of soap and a lengthy scrubbing of course.

He has somewhat dry skin to begin with, and all this washing is affecting his hands quite badly. His knuckles are constantly chapped, red and rough. On bad days, it spreads to his wrists as well.

An “ultimate strength” hand salve is his constant companion through the day, and among the most important things he packs with him to school every day.

Ingrid is also back at school now. Her post-whooping-cough-coughing has finally subsided so she won’t be scaring people any more by her violent coughing attacks.

The chocolate I chopped for yesterday’s cookies.

The best way to chop dark chocolate is not to actually chop but to stab it with the tip of a small paring knife. Dark chocolate is so brittle that it will split neatly where stabbed. If I try to chop it with the edge of the knife, I end up with lots of shavings and crumbs instead of evenly-sized distinct chunks.

That technique doesn’t work at all with milk or white chocolate. They are so much softer and stickier that they need to be actually chopped.

Adrian wanted to bake chocolate chip cookies. We made a batch a few days ago, but had to tweak the recipe a bit. It called for dark, milk and white chocolate, and we only had dark chocolate at home. Today we made a new batch, with all three kinds, as it should be.

And as before, the part that Adrian likes best is weighing ingredients. The rest can all be good fun – the mixing, and the cracking of eggs, and the tasting, and the rolling of the balls of dough. But weighing is where his enthusiasm lies.

When we cook, there usually isn’t much to weigh. But baking is full of weighing, especially in the “prosumer” recipe books that Eric has.

Toilet paper, pasta and canned soup are not the only quarantine shortage items. You know what else is? Webcams.

I decided to buy a web camera yesterday. The cheapest model of any brand will do, I don’t care about the image quality, I just want something that shows a picture of my face.

And there were none to be had anywhere in northern or central Stockholm. I searched the web sites of all electronics chains I could think of, or find on Google Maps, and they were all completely sold out of web cameras. Elgiganten, MediaMarkt, Teknikmagasinet, Webbhallen, Kjell & Co, Clas Ohlson, NetOnNet… All sold out in their central warehouses as well as all their physical shops. Expected back in stock: 10 days from now at best.

In the end I found one model in one NetOnNet shop in Veddesta. About twice as fancy and expensive as I had intended to buy but this was not a time to be picky. I reserved it and cycled there immediately to get it before someone else buys it. It may not have been quite the last one but it was close – when I checked again this morning the stock level was down to zero.

My desk is packed so full of computer equipment now.

I tried making do with the laptop keyboard but it just wasn’t working out for me for coding, so I had to add a full-sized keyboard.

The conference microphone quickly became a must as well. The Dell laptop’s built-in microphone sucks. At first I kept the microphone in a drawer and just took it out when I needed it, but now it’s permanently there.

The camera at least takes no space, perched on top of the monitor as it is. All it adds is another cable.