He literally rolls around in the dirt, on the sun-warmed, bare ground. And then comes in and asks for cuddles.

Cherry trees flowering in Spånga, last week. I took the photos and then for some reason posted something else that day. But I can’t just not post cherry blossoms.

It’s ant season. Every spring, for about a week or ten days, tiny ants invade the house. I’ve read that they do this in the beginning of their season, when they’re awake but not yet finding enough food out in nature.

For that brief period, there’s no way to completely keep them away, no matter how much of an effort I make. I keep the counters clinically clean. I wipe up the smallest spills. I scrub the floor around the packaging recycling. I leave no tuna out for Nysse. I empty the kitchen compost bin twice a day and run the dishwasher daily. And still they find some minute trace of something somewhere.

Years ago we used to try and fight them with poisons and whatnot. Now that I know how temporary it is, I don’t feel the need to be quite as aggressive about it. Which doesn’t mean that I don’t kill them – I do, but I just squish the ones who are in the house, and wash away the pheromone trail they’ve created while I’ve looked the other way. (They can get a lot done overnight.) But I don’t feel any need to poison the rest of them.

Today some of them have decided that they really want to get into the top kitchen cabinet above the dishwasher. There is nothing there for them! There’s no food in that cabinet, just dishes and kitchen tools. There hasn’t ever been any food there. And still they congregate there.

When I’ve noticed trails of ants, the camera has been the last thing on my mind, which I now regret. I think the invasion is winding down. There may be ten ants on the wall, which feels like a lot when it’s in my kitchen, but there’s enough distance between the individual ants that I can only fit one at a time in a photo.

Continuing with my tetraptych of organza over hand-printed green fabric. Trying out different ways of layering the organza. The first one was a flat layer of organza over printed silk; on the second I tried folding the organza; on the third one I bunched it up and stitched it down more randomly. Photos really don’t do that one justice.

I think the silk needs to make a come-back in the fourth one, to bring it all together, and the purple could be more present in #2 and #3, for the same reason. And they all need a bit more in general (possibly with the exception of the first one).

Many sweater knitting patterns suggest an even rate of decreases from just below the armhole to just above the wrist. On close-fitting garments, that often makes the sleeves too tight for me around the biceps. Instead I tend to knit straight until just above the elbow and only then start decreasing.

That bit worked well this time, as expected, but I wasn’t happy with the decrease rate afterwards. Too steep. Rip it up and do it again.

With a slightly thicker yarn and a slightly looser knit than I generally tend to choose, the cardigan almost knits itself. And when I change my mind, unravelling and re-doing a section is a piece of cake. With loose-ish stitches, there’s room for me to insert a thin cable needle in a row further down in advance, before I even start ripping it up. No need to painstakingly find and pick up the stitches afterwards. Re-knitting it takes an hour at most.

The many-hours hand-crafted pasha mould liner did its job well. Didn’t wrinkle or sag, drained well, and made the relief pattern stand out nicely.

The household needed buttery poppy seed rolls. After the bun fiasco I didn’t have high expectations but they came out absolutely perfect – fluffy and delicious. So there’s nothing wrong with my general ability to bake bread and buns.

Easter in Uppsala with my mum, as per tradition. She and the kids all like traditions and doing things the way they have always been done; makes me kind of restless to change something but I don’t really mind.

Herring and devilled eggs for lunch.

Pasha for dessert. We each have our own version, and while we all each both (because more pasha is always better) and like the other’s, we do think our own is just slightly better.

Lemon merengue pie after dinner.

And the painting of eggs, of course. Note which generation has been taught to straighten up and stop slouching, and which one hasn’t.

Ingrid, who’s the only one among us to regularly practise her craft, makes intricate little paintings.

Adrian focuses on fun designs. Body parts, and blue caterpillars.

My designs this year were inspired by the Desigual dress my mum was wearing, with black circular designs with eightfold symmetry.

It’s pasha season, but the cloth I used to line the pasha mould with went with Eric. (It was part of a juice strainer.) We can’t have Easter without pasha, so it is time to make a replacement.

Cordon Bleu, the kitchen goods store on Vasagatan, had not one but two kinds of muslin/cheesecloth. There is more of a market for this than I thought. I bought the smaller variety, 100% cotton, and my project for today was to sew a liner for the pasha mould.

It took forever. Literally hours and hours. It’s such a small thing – but that just means it has many small fiddly seams, and an awkward 3D shape. And all the seams needed to be enclosed, because we do not want bits of cotton thread in our food or between our teeth. And I must still be doing something wrong with my sewing machine because several times I did something that mucked up the tension on the bottom thread, and had to untangle it and re-do the seam.

But! Now I have a liner. I will be using it until the day that I die, to make it worth the effort. And then my children and my children’s children will be obliged use it until the end of their lives as well, until the cloth falls apart.

The pasha itself went much faster and easier.

Ingrid and I saw 1984 at Stadsteatern.

During much of the performance, sound was provided through headphones. It felt odd and kind of gimmicky at first, but it also worked. Winston’s quiet musings and diary entries could be delivered quietly, intimately. And the subtle hints of there being someone else there, prompting him and asking questions, also worked because these sounds could be subtle, barely there. A whisper is no longer a whisper if it is delivered through a loudspeaker, or by an actor projecting his voice through a hall.

Otherwise: intense, minimal, true to the original. (To the extent that I remember the original, which I last read, oh, thirty years ago?)