Struggling with a design for the next “black, white and a colour” exercise. For the first time, this doesn’t feel like effortless play. I don’t have designs just flowing out of my brain, through my fingers, straight to the paper.

“Make a design with five squares/rectangles (four-cornered shapes), four circles, and three triangles.”

They don’t fit! Especially the triangles. I could easily and effortlessly throw out sketch after sketch consisting of rectangles and circles. But then trying to find a place for the triangles… just didn’t work.

I could pair up rectangles with circles, both of them full and convex.
I could pair up rectangles with triangles, with angles everywhere.
I could pair up circles with triangles, playing with the contrast between sharp angles and round shapes.

But with all three in the same design, it felt like they were working against each other.

In the end I blew up the triangles and hid them in the background. Still not entirely satisfied, but I can continue tweaking things when I interpret this with fabric and yarn.

Adrian usually joins me in my corner of the sofa when it’s time for him to do homework. If his homework is reading, we read side by side. If he’s doing something more active, like practising his French vocabulary, that tends to collide with my reading, and I knit instead. Today his homework was knitting, so we actually knitted together.

Ran into a giant hunk of concrete or something like it in my digging around the elderberry bush. I ran into it from three different angles and thought it was three separate rocks but then it turned out to be one giant one. I can wiggle it a bit, but it is too heavy for a human to lift, and too heavy and awkward to even lever or roll it out of where it is. So I’m going to end up burying it again. Damn it.

People who bury construction waste in a garden deserve to rot in a special kind of gardening hell. May they get mould in their lawns and may deer eat all their bushes.

“Black, white and a colour” embroidery course, exercise #3. To get our creative juices flowing, we painted on newsprint with Indian ink, painted on fabric to recapture the feeling of newsprint, and then finally used paper in our embroidery.

The design:

The painted fabric:

Putting it all together:

And just like for the past two exercises, I wouldn’t mind making another variation of this design but with different stitches and materials, and I have several more designs that I would also like to stitch, and actually I wouldn’t mind doing the whole exercise all over again.

The teacher’s design exercises really suits me perfectly. There’s just enough guidance and constraints to push me in directions I’d never have gone before, and still enough freedom to make the design my own. I get more ideas than I know what to do with, and I’m loving the outcomes. And the teacher’s feedback and our group discussions give rise to even more ideas.

Someone, probably deer, have already been chewing on the baby plum tree I planted this summer. It’s not even winter so they’re not doing it out of hunger. I guess plum tree bark just tastes good. This happened to the last tree as well, and I’m not letting it go any further. The tree is getting caged in. (Using material from the cage that housed Nysse a year ago.)

Another misty morning, this time seen along the Tranebergsbron bridge.

A beautiful misty morning. (View from the tram bridge towards Stora Essingen.)

The mornings are cold now, just barely above zero. I’m taking these chances to cycle to work because I feel very conscious of the fact that the end of the cycling season is near. Yeah, it’s technically possible to cycle all winter, but I don’t have the equipment for it and I don’t enjoy cycling in the dark.

Eric and I are divorcing.

We agreed to do this about a month ago. Now that Ingrid and Adrian, our families, and closest friends have been informed, I can write about it here.

It’s been a long time coming. We did counselling a few years back, but it didn’t make any real difference. We just can’t reach each other any more. We both want/need things from each other that the other isn’t able to provide. There is always a tension of underlying dissatisfaction. It can be unnoticeable for a while, but keeps coming back.

There are no signs that we can ever “fix” this. I see no common foundation to build upon. After years of vain effort, everybody will feel better if we stop struggling and let go.

I have been vaguely considering the idea of divorce for a long time. At first as a scary worst-case scenario – what if we can’t make our relationship work and have to divorce? – that led me to do everything possible to avoid it. Then as a possible, but still scary outcome. Finally as a practical solution. Now that we have agreed to go ahead with it, the feeling is one of relief.

Ingrid and Adrian were initially very shocked but are, I believe, getting used to the idea. They both have multiple friends with divorced parents, and though a few have very rocky co-parenting relationships, most manage it without drama.

The shock was, in my eyes, a good thing. If we had gotten to a state where dissent was obviously visible even to children, then we’d have been well past the point where something needs to happen.

Now we can do this in a civilized, even friendly way, without drama. Figure out all the practicalities together; sort out all the admin. We sent in the divorce papers yesterday, but probably won’t have separated our households before the end of the year. Eric has bought an apartment with a move-in date in November, and then he’ll need time to furnish it. I’ll be keeping the house; today we started the process of getting it valued.

Every autumn the indoor temperature takes me by surprise.

Outdoors, the average temperature mostly follows a nice curve. Warm summer, gradual decline into cool autumn, continuing into a cold winter, and then a corresponding curve back up in spring.

Intuitively I expect the same indoors. Warm in summer, cool in autumn, cold in winter. But that is not what happens. Instead it is warm in summer, cold in autumn, then the heating turns on, and we have the same cold all the way through to late spring when we can turn off the heating again. It wasn’t necessarily always like that, but it’s been our reality since Sweden’s electricity prices spiked in 2021.

This means that there is a very short season for medium-warm clothes: long-sleeved jersey dresses, thin jersey tops, things with lacy sleeves. Half of August maybe, all of September, and that’s more or less it. After that it’s all layers of wool.

A bunch of folks from tretton37 went on an evening walk after work, on Järvafältet.

On the plus side: going for a nature walk after work was very relaxing. We saw the hairy cows at Väsby gård, and got some lovely evening light. And the company was good.

On the minus side: I was tired and starving when I finally got home, a good hour and a half later than I had expected.

What I thought would happen is that we meet up at 17 at Akalla, walk 4.5 km, and end up at Häggvik from where I can take the train or the bus home. Home by 19.

What I didn’t take into account was, firstly, that those 4.5 km didn’t start at Akalla station – we first had a 15-minute walk to the starting point of the hike. And the hike itself was maybe more like 6 km rather than 4.5. And there would be fika afterwards. And the hike didn’t actually end at Häggvik station, but only in its general vicinity (another 25-minute walk).