I like the Viburnum I planted a couple of years ago. Last year when I planted the hedge, I added two more (of hopefully the same variety) to keep it company.

The first one has had a few years to establish itself, and it shows. It prepares by putting out flower buds in winter already, and when spring comes, it’s all ready to go.

The second one is clearly playing catch-up and is only just budding now.

The third one seems to have died during the winter; I guess I’ll have to replace it.

Pasha is an Estonian Easter dessert of Russian origin. When I was a child, we always had pasha for Easter – it was as much a tradition as eggs. Somehow we lost that tradition for many years, but now we’ve picked it up again. We usually go to Uppsala to my mum’s for Easter so she makes the pasha, but recently we’ve concluded that one or two days of pasha just isn’t enough, so we made another batch when we got back home.

The bulk of it is sweetened quark, fluffed up by adding whipped cream, but much of the flavour and texture comes from all the other ingredients: lemon peel, chopped nuts, finely chopped chocolate, raisins, candied orange peel etc. You mix it all up, spoon it into a mould, and then let it stand for a day to drain out some of the liquid. After a day you turn the finished pasha out of the mould.

I have a lovely hand-made wooden pasha mould with decorative designs cut into it. Did I take a photo of the beautiful pasha with relief patterns that came out of that mould? No… because we attacked it like a horde of hungry locusts, and before I could think of bringing the camera, there was nothing left to photograph. This photo is of the other pasha, made of the mixture that didn’t fit in the nice mould and that I put in a sieve instead. The photo doesn’t do it justice, although to be honest, pasha does taste better than it looks in real life as well.

The team has been working on a large project since February, and today we finally deployed the first part of it. Mostly we do no-downtime deployments but this time we made such deep-going changes that we would have to shut down the system for the deployment. The client absolutely would not accept any downtime during normal working hours, so we deployed at 5:30 in the morning. By the afternoon (when we celebrated with some cake) we were pretty knackered, and the celebration wasn’t exactly lively.

Cherry trees are blossoming in central Spånga.

Long weekend, beautiful weather – I went for a full-day hike, and Ingrid came along. Last weekend’s outing was nice, but there was a lot more sausage grilling than walking going on.

Normally the Sörmlandsleden would be my first go-to trail, or maybe something in Tyresta. But due to the long weekend, engineering works were underway and there was no train service from Spånga station, so most trails south of the city (including Sörmlandsleden) were unreachable. So we went for something completely new and different and walked the Lovö trail instead. 17 km around the island of Lovö, mostly hugging its coast, easily reachable by bus.

Another reason for picking the Lovö trail was that I hoped it would have more than just the usual rock and pine and blueberry forests that are everywhere near Stockholm – perhaps some deciduous forests or open fields. I wanted birdsong, and while pine and spruce forests can be lovely in other ways, they usually don’t harbour much birdlife. I remember coming back from a long walk last spring, having heard nearly no birds, only to finally hear them on my way back through a park near the train station.

Lovö did deliver on that. The trail was quite varied, and while much of it was pine forest, there were some pleasant leafy forests along the southern and western coast, with both birdsong and boggy patches that seemed to promise flowering irises soon.

Spring flowers were blossoming here and there, but overall spring hasn’t come very far yet even though it’s warm, so from that point of view the pine forest was good to have, too – at least it was green. I’d like to come back here and see what it looks like in summer and autumn as well.

I stopped for photos, Ingrid stopped for sketching.

The path was well marked and in that sense easy to walk, but it was quite rocky and uneven, and there was a lot of up and down. We were walking slower than usual and the 17 km felt longer than I had intended. Towards the end Ingrid was quite tired and even I felt that I had had enough, so for the last 3 km or so, we left the trail and walked back along roads instead.

Luckily Lovö is so criss-crossed with trails that if we ever want to come back, we can mix and match and come up with a shorter walk. Not only for the kids’ sake.

Our traditional Easter egg hunt.

By now the sweets in the eggs aren’t that important – the hunt itself is what the kids look forward to. I’d forgotten to buy candy to fill the eggs with. Luckily we had some leftover candy in the cupboard that Ingrid distributed in the eggs.

Ingrid hid Adrian’s eggs, I hid Ingrid’s eggs, and then the hunt began.

Easter in Uppsala. Ingrid and my mum bonded over cooking, of which we did a lot. And we painted plenty of eggs.

The corydalis are flowering, and visited by bumblebees.

It’s spring, for real. 18°C in the shade in the afternoon and warmer in the sun, and even the nights are above zero. Perfect cycling weather! Not too cold, not too hot. Even the ground is warm enough to walk barefoot in the garden.