It started snowing heavily yesterday and kept going all night. The weather service issued red alerts due to heavy snow and heavy wind, telling people in some areas to avoid driving completely. Not just “stay home if possible” but more like “stay at home because emergency services won’t be able to reach you”. Up to 50 cm of snow was promised in some places, and with strong winds it will pile into deep drifts that you just can’t drive through.

The worst hit parts were two or three hundred kilometres north of here – not that far on a Swedish scale. Down here it didn’t get that bad (we only got yellow warnings, later upgraded to orange) but we still got plenty of snow.

It’s a giant hassle for everyone who needs to get to places, and for those who need to clear the streets, but I love it. I don’t mind shovelling the snow. I love the way the world is bright and light all of a sudden. It feels like real winter, instead of that dreary gray limbo we had in December.

And it’s brought so many more birds to our feeder!

It’s been a year now of me living a single/divorced life. It has been a good year.

I don’t miss Eric, and I don’t miss our relationship. I can miss what we had some twenty years ago, but the thing we had towards the end was not worth keeping on life support. It was broken, which is so obvious now when I see it from some distance, even though it took me years to realize when I was right in the middle of it. The decision to divorce was absolutely the right one for me. I feel so much better now.

The bi-weekly lifestyle suits me excellently. Every other week I have Adrian and Ingrid for company – someone to cook for, to watch movies with, to talk about our days. Every other week I am on my own – nobody to cook for, peace and quiet, and plenty of time to get things done.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed having significant stretches of time for myself. When I have the house to myself, I can breathe out and relax in a way that just doesn’t happen otherwise.

Cooking and buying groceries for three persons every other week, instead of four persons every week, is a lot less work. And it usually leaves me with leftovers and enough groceries for the other weeks, so those weeks I barely need to do anything. I feel like I have so much more spare time than I used to. And that’s even though I’m working 100% instead of the 80% I used to.

On the negative side: being solely responsible for everything, big and small. No chore just disappears because someone else noticed it and stepped in before I got around to doing it. There is no one to share the big, scary decisions with – I have no sounding board.

Also, of course, I have less money. We used to be two breadwinners, me with a really good salary and Eric with an excellent one. Now I still have many of the same fixed costs but only one salary. There is much less left for discretionary spending.

I worry quite a bit about money these days. Less income, larger loan, narrower margins, smaller reserves, no backup. Should I lose my job and end up long-term unemployed, things could get very bad. Not, like, starving in the streets bad, but definitely lose the house bad. The labour market in Sweden is shaky, especially for those who are older; there are scary articles in the newspapers about highly educated specialists losing their jobs and not being able to find a new one despite hundreds of applications. I am still working on finding a balance between worrying and saving for an uncertain future, and allowing myself to spend now.

Nysse was snuck out just as we came in from looking at all the fireworks and didn’t come home all night. I was worried.

Then at like four o’clock in the morning someone started yanking on the front door, loud enough to wake me. What kind of idiot tries to break into a house at this time? Some drunkard who’s gotten lost? No, Morris the neighbour cat. He knows how door handles work, and had the door not been locked, it would have opened for him.

The noise annoyed me enough that I let him in. In the morning he went out but later came back again and actually stayed for cuddles. Maybe his family is away celebrating New Year elsewhere?

Cirkus Cirkör with Ingrid and Adrian, at Dansens Hus. Tipping Point involved a lot of climbing and balancing on teetering structures of steel pipes. I liked the tensegrity-based designs a lot.

The most stunning part was a trapeze number, both visually and in terms of skill. Had I been their official photographer, knowing the programme and the timing in advance, being able to position myself optimally in the hall, I know exactly what moments I would have tried to capture, and what angles. It was so obvious that I went to their press photos looking for that obvious best shot – and it just wasn’t there. Obviously what was obvious to me was not obvious to others.

Picture this, but with plenty more space below them to show the height, and shot from further to the right so you get the artists more clearly in profile for that pure and elegant graphical curve:

My first year after the divorce. That deserves a post of its own, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Adrian and Ingrid are here every other week. The move on Sunday evenings is a bit of a hassle for everyone, but in general I think we’ve all settled in well into the new routines.

The divorce was a trigger to cleaning out stuff in all kinds of corners of the house, from old CDs to decades-old phone bills. Cleaning out the basement came with bonus infestation of mice.

2025 was also my first year at Active Solution, after seven years at tretton37, which imploded spectacularly, ending in a bankruptcy last January. Active Solution as employer is as similar to tretton37 as I could find, and I brought Sortera with me as a client, so the change was much smaller than it could have been. Since I don’t actually work with any of my colleagues, it’s taking time for me to get to know them and feel like I’m part of the gang.

The two company conferences have been most beneficial in that aspect: actually spending time together, talking about coding, getting to know each other. First an amazing trip to Monte Isola in April (day 1, day 2, day 3), and in the autumn a weekend sailing to an island in the archipelago.

Other travels included the usual trip to Estonia, which was as it always is: meeting friends and family, having fun. New for this year was my first ever time on a SUP board.

In August Ingrid and I had a long weekend in the Stockholm archipelago (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4). The archipelago is almost too close to home – I’ve never spent any significant time there. This was a great introduction and I plan to do more of it in the future.

During autumn break, Adrian and I went to London. It’s important to me, one of my favourite places in the world, and I have so many memories from there, that I wanted to share it with Adrian. (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4).

I also did two four-day hikes on the Sörmlandsleden trail, one from Hälleforsnäs to Katrineholm (stages 23 to 27) and the other from Kolmården to Katrineholm (32 to 27). I think I’ve done about half of the entire trail now. Might be done before retirement if I continue at this pace, haha.

Other hobbies were mostly craftsy. Mostly I knitted a lot, unsurprisingly. The larger projects this year were one orange sweater, one red cardigan, and one white dress (of which I haven’t been able to post a final photo because of my broken laptop). In between there were socks and hats and such, as well as a pair of slippers (notable because they were my first intentionally felted item).

At my embroidery club, the highlights include me finishing the Stockholm scene as well as our textile printing workshop.

I baked more than I’ve ever done before. Bread, karask, cakes, buns, Christmas goodies. Eric was always the baker in our house – he was both more interested and (as a result) more experienced. I am not willing to go without all the good stuff so I’ve learned. Cakes are not a challenge – just follow a recipe and you’ll be good. But breads and buns require technique and timing and experience. Mine have all come out OK, most even really good, with one or two notable exceptions. I don’t feel confident about my bread-baking skills at all, so every success feels like a major win.

In the garden, I finished planting the area in the front corner.

In other news, I switched to stronger glasses – and should probably upgrade again, I suspect.

Of the wider world, the one thing worth mentioning is the proliferation of AI everywhere.

Ingrid got her driver’s license and finished gymnasium and celebrated it with garden party. She’ll be doing military service starting in March and filled in most of the gap with a 4-month paid internship at Transdev.

Adrian did a week-long work experience “thing” at a pizzeria and started his last year of primary school.

My felted slippers didn’t even last a year before getting big holes in them.

I could make new ones – I even have an idea about what I might want to change to make them felt better and last longer – but that seems wasteful. Instead I bought a needle felting kit and some raw wool to patch them up.

I’ve never done any needle felting, and with the waxing experiment fresh in my mind, I was leery of the project. It turned out to be super easy and I was done in no time. The first mend was a bit lumpy but the next ones were better, and even the lumpy one evened out after I walked on it for a bit.

Buying yarn for a new pair of slippers would absolutely have been cheaper. But I’ve learned something new, and hopefully I’ll be able to use this stuff for some other mending project in the future. Or for these same slippers when they get new holes – the way the yarn has gone shiny on the sole, I can see it’s going to happen.

The knitted white dress is pretty much done! I set myself the goal of finishing it this year, and I’m going to make it. I only have the hem to finish now.

The skirt has curled up every time I’ve tried the dress on. It’s getting a folded hem and a lead weight cord (the kind that is often used for curtain hems) inside that to straighten it out.

I started sewing a winter skirt last season but then got sidetracked and never finished it. Now it’s cold again and I want something thick and warm and long and cosy to wear. Plus it will be nice to get that project pile off my sideboard.

I’m piecing it together from leftover fabric from the red skirt and the brown skirt and some new cream-coloured wool that I bought at the crafts festival last year.

I don’t have a clear idea of what the skirt will look like, but I found two pieces of red that are about the right shape and size for a yoke-ish part. While I ponder the rest of the design, I can get started on the pockets.

Nysse, as usual, had his own ideas of what a pile of wool fabric is good for.

The one thing on my Christmas wish list was a book with porridge recipes. I’m a fan of both traditional oatmeal porridge, and grain-based porridge-like savoury meals. The book seemed to have lots of inspiring ideas for broadening my porridge repertoire, for breakfast as well as lunch/dinner.

Here’s a luxury breakfast porridge mostly based on a recipe from the book, with caramelized banana and a peanut butter sauce. Somewhat simplified: you’re supposed to sprinkle a coconut crumble on top that you prepared in advance (I just replaced it with some coconut flakes) and the sauce was supposed to be made with tahini which I didn’t have so I used peanut butter instead.

The result looks fancy and tastes fancy but didn’t even take longer to make than an ordinary porridge. The banana caramelizes in minute or two, and the peanut butter sauce didn’t take longer either, so I got both done while the porridge itself was still cooking.

I like the taste of peanut butter but not the texture. It’s so thick that it’s difficult to distribute on the porridge. Mixing it with a teaspoon of water and another one of honey turned it into a sauce that was much easier to handle.

This is absolutely going on my breakfast recipe shortlist.