These past weeks I have been exercising irregularly due to clashing commitments, and I’m feeling the effects. I am irritable and restless when I don’t get enough exercise. And the irregularity itself is giving me a bad case of restless legs. I was tossing and turning in bed yesterday night, trying to calm down my legs so I could sleep. Today I couldn’t even sit still in the sofa without my legs twitching. At ten o’clock, when both kids were in bed, I went for long and energetic walk, and felt much, much better when I got home (and got a good night’s sleep). (I’m posting this a few days later, not at half past midnight!)

Nighttime is not a bad time for walking. You don’t get much of a view, true. But the streets and parks are relaxingly empty and quiet.

We have Nälstafältet nearby, a kind of meadow-ish area that the city mows occasionally, with a few trees, a stream and footpaths crossing it here and there. I like to walk there occasionally: it’s near enough that it’s easy to get to, but far enough and large enough that walking to its farthest end is a proper walk. And right now it’s frozen and covered with a thin layer of snow, so it’s really pleasant to walk on: firm, but softer than asphalt, and uneven enough to feel good for the feet.

Shrove Tuesday and its buns.

The semlor are usually so large that it is more or less impossible to eat them with your dignity intact. Once one of them got whipped cream on their nose, both gave up all pretense of table manners and rocked their creamy noses.

Speaking of cake lasting for weeks… we still have cherry cake in the freezer from last summer. We just don’t eat much sugary stuff, despite my loving photos of chocolate pralines and writing about dessert.

The kids’ sugar intake and other potential addictions are most easily regulated by simple, somewhat fuzzy rules. I myself chafe at rules. So when the family is away, I celebrate by breaking rules.

I eat lunch late, when I am truly hungry, rather than at an hour that suits everybody’s schedule. I read a magazine while eating. And I have a piece of cake afterwards.

(Meanwhile I still miss having a proper camera, and the way the small one never makes things look the way I want is seriously annoying me.)

For no particular reason other than that I felt like it, I cooked a three-course meal for dinner. Toast with a tomato and avocado topping, veggie hamburgers, and no-bake raspberry cheesecake.

I like eating dessert, but I rarely make one. Mostly because it usually doesn’t feel like it’s worth the time it takes, no matter how delicious it turns out. A cake or a batch of cookies lasts us weeks, but dessert that takes half an hour to prepare is gone in five minutes. If I was ridiculously rich, I’d hire a dessert chef or order catering desserts every weekend.

Adrian’s homework for this week was to write a couple of sentences about what games his parents played during break time at school.

I recall playing hopscotch. And kummikeks or elastics, which I loved but wasn’t good at. And Human knot, and chanting and clapping games. Other than that, I cannot remember any.

I also remember spending a lot of break time on the sidelines. I wasn’t quite bullied, but a few of the girls in our class decided early on that I was not to be a part of the group, and that was that. Sometimes, as an act of charity, I was let in from the cold for a while.

Seeing Ingrid and Adrian at school now, the difference is immense. The teachers here/now have a very strong and conscious focus on encouraging decent behaviour and teaching children to be nice to others. They have much closer contact with the children, a relationship of mutual trust and caring. Kids can actually talk to teachers as fellow humans, even friends, whereas in my days we were subordinates. I don’t think any teachers cared about the social aspects of children’s time at school, as long there was no actual physical fighting going on.

I love persimmons. They’re a perfect combination of juicy and sweet and tangy. They’re like a winter version of plums.

They’re also making me switch supermarkets.

Coop, one of the two local supermarkets, almost never has them (and when they do, the persimmons are hard and nearly flavourless) while the other, ICA, reliably stocks perfectly juicy and ripe ones.

For years, I was a loyal Coop customer with a membership card and everything. When we first moved here, I always chose Coop because their store has enough space for prams. ICA was very cramped – with a pram I was always blocking someone’s way, or vice versa – and the store felt kind of grotty, too.

Now all kinds of circumstances have changed and I’m on the cusp of switching my loyalty to ICA.

Pram-friendliness is obviously not relevant any more. ICA has redesigned their store so it feels much brighter and tidier and more spacious. But the main thing is that nobody at Coop seems to know or care about fruit and vegetables, whereas someone at ICA obviously does.

I do much less shopping in the supermarkets nowadays, anyway. I buy much of our groceries online, but I don’t trust the online shops with fruit and veg. Carrots and onions and apples are easy. (Although I was once delivered a bag of apples that were so unripe they were basically inedible.) But when it comes to produce that needs to be carefully handled or chosen, or to be just ripe enough, even many physical stores fail. (Such as the Coop store here.) The odds of some anonymous picker at the online shop getting it right are slim to none. I do not want unripe bananas or hard pale tomatoes. So ICA gets most of my custom from now on.

Half of that floor I scrubbed yesterday, plus Adrian.

We spent today helping Eric’s brother and his family prepare for the upcoming sale of their house. I scrubbed stone floors with stinky chemicals; Eric helped carry and transport stuff to storage and recycling; Ingrid helped pack things and remove old anti slip tape from a staircase; Adrian kept us company.