More city lights. Hötorget (“haymarket”) and a cinema.

A loaf of bread and an iPad is all you need for contentment. Maybe some butter as well.

Shopping for some last-minute advent calendar fillers. Even though December has already started. All sparkly and shiny.

Walking through a gray morning to pick up Ingrid from a scout hike.

One elbow patch done. Phew!

I like to imagine that if the designer of this cardigan had decided to add elbow patches, then they would have chosen to make them just like this.

We had a knowledge day at work today, with talks and workshops on various topics. I spent much of the day playing leethack, a game of coding puzzles (sort of like Advent of Code) using Go.

This was my first acquaintance with Go. I’d never used the language before or even seen it up close. But it turned out to be a pretty normal-looking language, and I put my Google skills to work, and got some puzzles solved. (See also: Essential Copying and Pasting from Stack Overflow.) I even won second prize and a chocolate medal by getting one last highly-scoring puzzle solved just 10 seconds before the end of the game.

I’d been curious about Go since it’s an up-and-coming language. I’m sure it’s great for the things it’s great for, but having tried it, I am less interested in it than I was before. I discovered that Go has no generics, and no functional features – no map and no filter, just loops. Having solved much of last year’s Advent of Code using F#, I’ve gotten used to functional thinking, and without generics I feel half crippled as a programmer. One can get used to most things and find workarounds… but I’d much rather use a language that allows me to be productive out of the box.

I worked late today because of an all-day workshop about applied machine learning. (Great workshop, had fun and learned a lot.)

How nice it felt today to have such big kids. Adrian went home from school on his own; Ingrid took care of grocery shopping and cooked dinner. By the time I got home, dinner was already halfway done. No need for me to leave the workshop early or rush home to sort out the practicalities.

Adrian reading a puzzle book (in English, no less) while perched on top of a garbage can.

How can that possibly be comfortable?

Adrian, inspired by Ingrid’s weekly dinners, now also wants to start cooking. For now he doesn’t quite have the skills to do it on his own – he can peel potatoes and chop things but that’s about it – so we’ll be cooking together once a week.

It’s not so much the cooking process that appeals to him. It’s the power to decide the meal.

Today we made mashed potatoes, and chicken nuggets for him and some store-bought veggie burgers for the rest of us.

It’s that time of the year again, when all the badges have to be sewn onto shirts. Ingrid is grown and independent and skilled enough to sew on her own, but not Adrian.

He’s inherited Ingrid’s scout shirt but the badges are his own. The shirt is like a palimpsest.