Adrian making “juicy water”. This is a mealtime drink that we came up with years ago, that’s now become a staple that we always have available. One part apple juice, 6 parts (ish) water – just enough juice to give the water some flavour, but not so much that the drink becomes sweet.

The best apple juice by far for this drink is Coop’s own label juice. Tropicana sort of works as well. Coop’s apple juice is on par with milk, eggs, butter and cheese – there should always be some in our fridge.

Somehow this drink got named josavatten, which is a total grammatical abomination, but the name stuck, so that’s what it is called.

For years, we all drank “juicy water” with dinner, daily. Then Eric got a Sodastream machine as a gift and switched to carbonated water. Ingrid then discovered the sugar-free flavourings that can be added to carbonated water and switched as well. Neither Adrian nor I like bubbles in our drinks, so we still drink our juicy water.

Celebration! Ingrid was accepted to the school she most wanted.

Solhemsskolan only has grades F to 6, so Ingrid will be attending a different school next year. There is a fair amount of choice, both run-of-the-mill schools run by the city, and “free” schools with various profiles.

Several of the more promising-looking “free” schools accept children based on a queue and we would have needed to sign Ingrid up shortly after she was born to have any chance to get into those. We weren’t planning quite that far ahead…

Luckily the school closest to us – even closer than the kids’ current school, which is just a five-minute walk away – is also one of the best city schools this side of town. And even better, that school has a special class with a math/science focus. Ingrid is very much into those subjects, so she applied to this class, and was really hoping to get a place there.

Normally kids get allocated a place at a city school based on distance only – not necessarily at the nearest school, but optimizing so that no child has to walk more than 2 (?) kilometers to school. But because this class has a specific profile/focus, students wanting a place need to have good grades in the relevant subjects and also to attend a group interview where they discuss math and science-related topics. (At an info meeting at the school we heard that most years, students with As in both math and science would be guaranteed a place, but there were more applicants with double As this year, so even with her great grades Ingrid was not 100% sure to get in.)

The interview was a good while ago and Ingrid has been anxious to find out the results.

Yesterday Ingrid got the great news that she was accepted.

Today we celebrated with Ingrid’s most favourite food ever – sushi, of course.

Happy day! Finally, finally, after more than a year, I got a second monitor at work. The company is very sensible and progressive about most things but for some reason the standard setup only includes a single monitor. I think it may be because most of the developers who sit in the office are between projects, and those who have a project are mostly at the customers’ offices, using whatever equipment is there. In fact this is so non-standard that the desks barely fit two monitors.

Other important things on my desk:

A pad of sticky notes.
A Pilot gel pen. (Ballpoint pens are abominable.)
A “Red – Green – Refactor” TDD pyramid.
A mouse pad with wrist support. I’ve had it for so long that I can’t even remember when I got it. It, and the mouse on it, have been following me from office to office since 2008 at least.
A Valrhona chocolate bar.

We’re getting ready to play Just Dance – going through the fiddly process of connecting all the controllers to the base station.

Spring snow on daffodil shoots.

My non-digital, paper-based GTD system, consisting of sticky notes on cardboard. Plus small piles of loose papers and post-its on top for quickly getting things out of my head and onto paper. Still going strong after more than twelve years!

Eric and Adrian are making chewy chocolate cookies.

Even though it feels like not-winter-not-spring is dragging on forever (although I should know better by now than to expect anything else from March), spring is coming.

More greens. And again they looked strong on paper but wrong in the kitchen in broad daylight. Needs more colour!

(This is the last one, I promise.)