Active Solution, my employer-to-be, invited me to participate in a workshop (about networking in Azure). I have a ton of unused vacation days and flex hours at tretton37, so I said yes. The workshop sounded useful, but mostly I just wanted to start getting to know people, and for them to be at least slightly familiar with me by the time I start.

The workshop was a disappointment (for everybody who was present) but it was very nice to meet my future colleagues. I am somewhat face-blind so I can only connect maybe four or five names to actual faces (two of which were women, handily distinguishable from each other by their hair colour, so that’s like two freebies) but it’s a start.

The wooden deck outside is frequented by the neighbourhood cats, and the French doors allow us to see them. Probably the cats visit our porch as well, and other houses’ decks and porches and verandas, but if there’s a closed door in between, nobody knows, and no contact occurs.

If a cat visits a deck and nobody sees it, did the visit even happen?

Here, though, we see the cats and the cats see us, and we let them in for a visit. This long-haired beauty is new to the neighbourhood, and very cautious, almost scared. S/he put one paw in through the gap, pulled it back, put it in again, watched, then cautiously entered. Wouldn’t move as long as there was a human within two metres. Fled when there was a slight noise from the kitchen.

S/he has a sibling as well: this one’s fur is a mixture of browns; the other one is very similar in both looks and behaviour but its fur is a mix of grays. And they wear identical GPS trackers around their necks.

Morris, meanwhile, is back to his stand-offish, churlish ways. He comes in; Nysse sees him and approaches with gentle happy chirps. Morris responds by batting at him with his paw. Nysse backs away and sits, looking longingly at his friend.

The bathroom exhaust fan stopped working all of a sudden. A new one costs a few thousand kronor and needs to be installed by an electrician, and I was already adding it all up in my head. Being a homeowner on a single salary for the first time ever has made me very cost-conscious.

I brought up a stepladder from the basement to at least poke at the fan a little bit, without much hope to solve anything. But my poking uncovered a power button that was in the OFF position. Pushing it to ON brought the fan to life. How this can possibly have happened, when the whole thing is just under the ceiling and the power button is tucked in behind the edge of the front cover, I have no idea. But a welcome surprise nevertheless.

Every week there is a leaving fika for yet another coworker. Or two. Or three. Today was the leaving fika for our head of talent acquisition, the person who recruited me, among many, many others, and pretty much made the Stockholm branch of tretton37 into what it was.

Most days, there are no more than two or three developers in the office. We only come here to say good-bye to yet another beloved colleague.

The CEO is clinging to the hope of turning things around. But what’s left now to build upon? The people, who made this company into what it was, are leaving. The culture has been smashed into pieces. The Stockholm office has no managers left (except one freshly appointed one who has never held a managerial position before).

We had something wonderful, and now it’s been destroyed, and it’s such a sad sight.

It’s barely past four o’clock in the afternoon, the workday isn’t even over yet, and already it’s dark. I do not like this.

It’s that time of the year where my energy levels dip, almost no matter what I do. I’m trying to get into the habit of going out in the daylight every day, even when it’s all gray and I don’t feel inspired at all.

Today was a sunny day, for a change, so I went for a longer walk after lunch. My half-hour circuit takes me to Starbo park; today I walked onwards to the Nälsta fields. This sculpture in the fields by Lena Lervik is titled “Venus and Nerthus biding their time”. Everybody knows Venus; this sculpture taught me that Nerthus (Nertus, Njärd, Njǫrðr) is a Germanic-Nordic fertility goddess. Here they’re both enjoying the last rays of the autumn sun, before it sinks below the trees in the west.

Ingrid’s third year at high school revolves around the upcoming graduation.

Back in my days, graduation involved one party (dinner and disco) for the students and their friends, then a champagne breakfast in the park on graduation day, and a reception for family and friends.

Over time, more and more has been added to this, and all sorts of enterprises want to get part of the cake. Ingrid’s classmates have been working and saving up since their first year.

At some point, being transported home from the graduation ceremony in a slightly fancier borrowed car mutated into studentflak, riding around town on the back of a lorry, while tooting the horn and playing loud music and spraying beer over everything and everybody. That was clearly a winning concept, so it went from an informal “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if” to an entire industry.

There are parties all year long. Ingrid’s school has a 200-day-party as well as a 100-day-party. There are graduation cruises.

Student caps/graduation caps have come to be individualized and commercialized beyond belief. Not only are they embroidered with your name, you can customize every part of them: material, shape, extra features. You can literally get LED lights on the front of your cap. And every time you pick a cheaper option, the site prompts you: are you sure you don’t want this popular extra? You’re missing out! Predatory marketing tactics towards young, inexperienced buyers, for products costing thousands of kronor. Eugh.

Anyway, Ingrid has gotten through that frustrating process, and now has her cap.

The first visitor to the bird feeder this season was a lovely woodpecker.

Sorting through a long-ignored pile of stuff in the living room, I discovered a box of CDs. Not just any CDs, but the ones that the kids used to listen to.

I find it harder and harder to refer to Ingrid and Adrian as “kids” but back then they truly were kids. Judging from the years printed on the covers, this would have been about 10 years ago. Not quite before Spotify, but at a time when Spotify hadn’t completely conquered the market and CDs were still a thing.

All the “Absolute Hits” and “Hits for Kidz” were in constant use in the car, together with a rotating selection of child-friendly hit CDs from the likes of Queen and ABBA. The “hits” CDs usually had a lot of songs from Melodifestivalen, the Swedish local equivalent to Eurovision Song Contest, but also such wonderful creations as Crazy Frog.

These days it’s all Spotify in the car, when we all listen to something together. Or individual headphones with whatever they all choose to listen to. But the “Hits for Kidz” are associated with so much nostalgia that we couldn’t just throw them out. Now they’re carefully packed away in the basement. Nobody will ever listen to them again, but maybe I’ll bring them out twenty years from now and show them off to my grandchildren. “Back when your mum/dad was your age, this is how you listened to music.”

A somewhat delayed eighteenth-birthday dinner for Ingrid, at Berns Asiatiska, by her request. Her boyfriend Albin also joined us, for the first time.

Berns Asiatiska was Stockholm’s first Chinese restaurant back in the 1940s, and it still has and old-school luxurious interior, reminding of days gone by, with crystal chandeliers and wood panelling. Very festive.

The sound level was very modern, though, actually making it difficult to talk to people across the table. We all kept having to ask each other to repeat our words. So there was more focus on the food and less on the conversation.

Ingrid, of course, ordered sushi. So did Eric and I.

She chose Berns because they serve not only excellent sushi but also excellent Asian fusion dishes for those who aren’t fond of seafood. (Like Adrian and Albin.) Adrian had a giant serving of tonkatsu, while Albin had Korean barbecue chicken. Both were happy with their dishes.

My dessert was a bit of a disappointment. Titled “Cherry and lime”, it led me to expect an explosion of flavours. But the cherry sorbet(?) barely tasted of cherry, and the fluffy, creamy lime was also very delicate in flavour. Not bad, per se, but after eating sushi with wasabi and soy sauce, this felt very tame.