Nysse has a deep-seated rivalry with one of the neighbour cats. I think there is severe disagreement about territory. The other cat, who moved here relatively recently, seems to think that our garden is part of his territory, while Nysse of course does not agree.

They stand face to face and yowl at each other. Sometimes they swipe at each other; that’s when I think Nysse comes home with loose tufts of fur.

This morning they had a stand-off in the other cat’s yard, just across the street, loudly enough that I heard it through closed doors and windows while I was sitting at my work desk. I poked my head out to see what was going on, and saw the man in the house do the same through his front door.

Things must have escalated. Fifteen minutes later, Nysse came in, dripping blood on the floor from a ragged wound in one of his ears, and a dozen tufts of fur sticking out all over his torso. I had to wash it out in the bathroom, which didn’t make him any happier.

On the one hand I hope he won over the other cat, so that maybe he can have more peace in our yard without someone else muscling in. On the other hand, of course, I don’t want any cat to be hurt. I do wish they could just ignore each other. But if some stranger suddenly started hanging out in my garden and saying “it’s theirs now”, I wouldn’t give up without a fight either.

Here’s a photo of an earlier stand-off, from a couple of weeks ago, before the snow came.

For this past year I’ve been keeping track of my costs again. We did the same in the 2000s but then stopped at some point. Now I’m starting it up again.

The first couple of months were very tight. Then my financial situation improved for several reasons (including moving my mortgage to a different bank) but I kept going with the records. A couple of months’ worth of data is better than nothing, but many costs are unevenly spread through the year – a full year gives a much better picture of where the money goes.

By far the largest item is the mortgage interest, at 20% of the total. Electricity, homeowner’s insurance, water and sanitation together make up another 10%, so that’s a total of 30% on housing. Almost all of that is fixed in the short term. Even with the electricity costs, over half is a fixed fee.

Food 15%, the children 7%, and those few categories together already account for half of all my costs. The average Swedish household spends 13% of their income on food; I’m comparing to total costs and not total income so it’s not quite the same, but close enough.

Fees at 6% was a one-off fee this year for repatriating my British retirement account. I could have postponed it, I guess, but it’s got to be done sooner or later. It was fine as long as the UK was in the EU but now I run increasing risks of administrative fees, double taxation, currency swings, etc etc. Got to be done: a known expense now is better than decades of mess later when I’m retired.

Car ownership is an expensive habit. Repairs, insurance, inspection, new winter tires, fuel, parking. On average it costs me 100 kr (just under 9 EUR) per day. Do I get 100 kr of value out of it on most days? No, absolutely not. But on the days when we do need it, there is often no alternative. Even just the bi-weekly rides when the kids move with all their things from here to Eric’s apartment – how would we manage those without a car?

Still I feel like I could do so much more fun things for that money. For less than the cost of car ownership, I’ve paid for four vacations, including both travel and lodging, some of them for several people. Two weeks in Estonia for the three of us, an archipelago ramble for me and Ingrid, a long weekend in London for myself and Adrian, and an upcoming two-week trip for me (that I’m doing together with Ingrid but she’s paying her own share). I will definitely revisit the question of car ownership in the future: Ingrid is about to start on 15 months of military service, and that will change our collective driving habits quite a lot.

Media is another category of costs that I am very conscious of. A newspaper, several magazines, a streaming service, Spotify, altogether over 1200 SEK every month on average. While I could do without them, I would really miss every single one. Except for the streaming service, that’s really only for Adrian’s and Ingrid’s sake, but that’s not a very large part. Really, everything below “Car” has been well worth the money.

The smaller categories that are bundled up in “Other” in the chart are many and varied. I’ve somehow managed to spend almost 6500 SEK on kitchen equipment and utensils, and roughly the same amount on knitting stuff. There shouldn’t be so much need for more kitchen equipment in the future, I would think, but the spending on knitting will continue.

I’ve bought fancy chocolate for 2000 kr and clothes for 1300 kr. How’s that for priorities? Although that’s perhaps a bit misleading because that doesn’t include shoes for 2800 kr.

Other fun things include museum tickets for 2900 kr, potted plants for 1000 kr and birdseed for 427 kr.

Four days in a row of shovelling. The pile in front of the root cellar is a metre tall by now.

Snow ploughs have been by to sort of clear the street, but when there’s so much of it, it just ends up along the sides of the road. Normally the street is wide enough for two cars to meet; now it’s barely the width of a car and a half.

After several days of fresh snow with little wind and no melting, the garden is at its most “winder wonderland” look.

Boatloads of snow.

Nysse doesn’t have a litterbox (I decommissioned the one we had when he hadn’t touched it in months) and does his business outside. In this weather, he walked a few metres away from the stairs, dug a little hole in the snow, covered it up with more snow, and came straight back inside.

It’s not particularly cold, even. Just very, very snowy.

The least nice thing about the divorce is how much less money I have.

The largest cost is the house, since I had to buy out Eric’s half of it. Where before we had two salaries and a small mortgage, I now have one salary and a significant mortgage. Less than half the income, more than twice the mortgage. I am not quite “house-rich, cash-poor” but sort of tending in that direction.

I have considered selling the house and downsizing, but for now, as long as at least one of the kids is still living here, I’ve decided that it’s worth keeping, even with the cost. They’ve both lived here their entire lives (those first 18 months in London for Ingrid don’t really count) and I don’t want to yank that away. I am very attached to it myself as well – I’ve poured a lot myself into the design and decoration, indoors as well as outdoors – but I can imagine letting go of it at one point. Not yet.

For a good two decades we used to never have to worry about money. We didn’t have any particularly expensive habits or tastes – no fancy car, no exotic vacations, no interest in luxury brands. Whatever we wanted or needed in our daily lives, we could buy, without thinking about the cost. (Obviously excepting major purchases like a car.) Now I think twice about every expense, and keep postponing various major purchases because I can’t afford them. This is, of course, how the majority of people live. Really these twenty-plus years were the abnormality and I’m now going back to a normal state.

I have always been frugal by nature, and it could take an effort for me to splurge on something that I only wanted but didn’t quite need. Thus it hasn’t been difficult at all to switch to savings mode. Or rather, back to savings mode, I guess. We really didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up. I was working and contributing to rent at home when I was fifteen. As a student obviously money was always tight. It was only when I started working that I suddenly had more.

What’s different now is the time horizon and the scope of responsibility. As a child, I may have helped with money, but the responsibility for making it last was not mine. As a student, I lived in the here and now. I have money for this month? Great, that’s enough. Now I have children whom I am responsible for; a house that will surely need repairs at some point; a retirement to plan for. The challenge lies in finding a balance between today and the future – between saving, and allowing myself to enjoy things now. I think I need to build up more of a savings buffer so that I can be less anxious about it.

I was glad to still be invited to the Bergheden family Christmas, even though I am not really a Bergheden anymore.

I made puff pastry mini pies and an orange & saffron cheesecake. The first time in many, many years that I attempted a cheesecake. It took forever, cracked in the middle, but tasted delicious. When I offered Ingrid to decorate it, she jumped at the opportunity, and turned the crack from a bug into a feature.

For a day or two I had a new laptop. From the very start it was clear that the D key on the keyboard was misbehaving, and I would have to return it. I got a day or two with it, while the returns procedure was being sorted out, and now I am without again. The phone covers immediate, urgent needs, and the work laptop can be used in a pinch for some tasks where the phone just isn’t enough, but overall this is very inconvenient.

Ingrid and I still do the crosswords in Dagens Nyheter. This weekend we even took on one made by Håkan, whose brain works in strange ways and whose vocabulary is most weird. Normally we don’t allow ourselves any outside tools, but with Håkan’s we need more help. It’s OK to use the internet to confirm a word that looks to be the answer, if we don’t even recognize it as a valid Swedish word.

From today’s crossword we learned ten new words, including töva (= dröja), ami (= halsduk), eda (= strömvirvel), dat (= dåd) and ria (= torkhus).

Here is the white dress in all its glory.

It came out just the way I had envisioned it. Fits well, looks great. By far the most elegant thing I have created.

And the most labour-intensive one. I tried to roughly estimate how many stitches I knit, and came up with about 133 000.

I am very grateful to my friend in Estonia who gave me the yarn that started this project. It’s a lovely fine vintage wool yarn, probably hand-spun and unbleached. I don’t think I could have found anything like it from a commercial source. I held it double with a silk mohair, and the end result is soft and woolly, but still drapes well.

This is no superwash merino yarn, the kind that almost doesn’t feel like wool, and it definitely feels woolly against my skin. Not so that bothers me – just so that I am aware of it. Like a gentle reminder that it is there, and it is wool. (I’m writing this several weeks later, after I’ve had a chance to wear it to a family Christmas party for several hours.)

I had planned to add embroidery to the dress, to make it look less stark. Now that I have it in front of me, I rather like it in all its simplicity. I think I’ll hold off on the embroidery for now.