I received a notification yesterday that I could book my third covid shot, and had the great luck to find an open slot already for this morning reasonably close by. Someone must have just cancelled their booking.

For future me, here’s the covid status as of now. The omicron variant is taking over and now accounts for 90% of all sequenced cases in Sweden. It leads to less severe symptoms but spreads faster than the previous dominant variant, delta. The vaccines are much less effective against it, but a third vaccine dose probably gets the efficacy up again.

Meanwhile covid is spreading everywhere. Right now half a million Swedes per week are estimated to get infected, out of a total population of 10 million. In Stockholm, 22% of staff in the city’s schools are home sick, and 19% of pupils. The authorities have been forced to relax quarantine rules (for people who have a covid infection in their household) so that essential activities such as water and power supply, police and public transport etc do not get disrupted due to lack of staff.

Public events are limited to 500 persons and require proof of vaccination. Restaurants have to close at 23 and groups are limited to a maximum of 8 people. Travelling actually seems mostly possible right now, and I still have hope that this year I might actually get my spring ski tour.

I got my previous two doses at Kistamässan, a shiny, large convention hall. Today’s appointment was in a scruffy school gym. The school itself appeared to be closed. The post-shot waiting area at Kistamässan had carefully spaced chairs with ropes to ensure that people keep their distance, and a large clock to help people stick to their 15 minutes, and staff keeping an eye on people. Here the waiting rooms were barely signposted (the first room slightly too full because the second one was not very discoverable) and haphazardly furnished.

The clinic was short-staffed (you can guess why!) so there was a longish queue. I’m glad I had an early spot – the queue was about 30 people long when I got there (in advance of my appointed time) but had grown to twice the size when I finally got out, an hour later.

Watching the roe deer in the garden and probably wishing he was big enough to take them on.

I made grilled cottage cheese sandwiches for lunch. I guess a sandwich in English maybe needs to have two slices of bread, but for me the Nordic, open kind of sandwich is also a sandwich.

Ingrid and Adrian both tend to wrinkle their noses at these, while I love them. They both like other types of grilled sandwiches, especially with cheese – cheese and apple, cheese and tomato, cheese and pepper, banana and curry. But not with cottage cheese. “It’s like pizza bianca,” they say, as if that was a bad thing. (They do not like pizza bianca either.)

For me these sandwiches are childhood nostalgia food. To be really right, there should be dill in the topping, instead of the basil that I used today. If you want to make these at home: mix about 500 grams of cottage cheese with 1 egg, a pinch of salt, and chopped dill. Spoon generous amounts of the mixture onto buttered slices of toast and grill them until they look good. Don’t skimp; if there’s too little of the cheesy stuff, the result will be too dry.

There are other meals I remember from my childhood that I feel no desire to recreate. Milk noodle soup, for example, which is exactly what the name says – cooked noodles in milk. I remember eating this with gusto, but I don’t think I’d enjoy it now.

I had thought this was some Soviet-era invention but apparently it’s a traditional German recipe that’s existed for far longer than the Soviet Union. I stumbled upon a digitization of an Estonian cookbook from the beginning of the last century that has not just one but two recipes for milk soup with pasta, one using macaroni and one using noodles:

Piimasupp nuudlitega
3 toopi rõõska piima, tükike värsket võid, natukene soola
ja teelusika täis suhkrut keedetakse üles. Nüüd lisatakse sinna
juurde 1 nael katki murtud jõhv-nuudlid või 1 nael stern-nuud-
leid ja keedetakse kuni pehme on.

Drove Ingrid to Mall of Scandinavia for some clothes shopping, first thing in the morning to avoid the crowds.

Ingrid had scoped out a pair of trousers online. They turned out to not fit her – too tight over the thighs. Welcome to the club, girl… This is just the beginning of an eternal struggle to find non-baggy trousers that actually fit. So many women’s clothes are made for twig-legged skinny girls, and so few for more athletic legs.

A squirrel visited the bird feeder and gorged itself on sunflower seeds. An upside-down working position allowed it to stuff its face with barely any breaks.

Nysse was watching like the hunter he is. Poised, focused, all attention on the squirrel, tail twitching and swishing. In fact his sudden attention was what made us notice the squirrel at all.

Here’s the yarn I was looking at yesterday. Hand-dyed soft merino wool in all sorts of beautiful colours. Suddenly I’m very motivated to finish the cardigan I’m knitting.

I feel like I’m going to go crazy soon if I sit locked up in this house much longer, without anything happening, without anything new to see or hear or do. So I treated myself to a trip to town for some retail therapy at a yarn shop.

Bought some crazy sock yarn. Longingly looked at some merino wool that I want to use for something but I don’t yet know what. Maybe a cardigan, after I finish the black one.

I’ve almost forgotten what it is like to be in town. When you walk from a shop to the train station and there are OTHER SHOPS in the street that may also be open and may have things you also want to buy (like cat toys! or clothes!) without first having made a plan and then searched for them online, hoping that what you get is what you thought you would get.

And restaurants! There are restaurants in town. That you can also just, like, discover. And go inside, and eat food that you haven’t eaten repeatedly before, or cooked yourself. I ate Arctic Char and a Belgian chocolate cake and had a glass of Sauternes. The whole meal felt like therapy.

All these covid recommendations are making me paranoid. Even when there is no actual crowding, I am very aware of every other body in my vicinity, and I can’t really relax. I wouldn’t have gone inside if the place hadn’t been nearly empty, but luckily it was.

It used to be that we could just leave food out in the kitchen. Not any more. Unless you’re OK with eating cat-licked food. Which I’m not.

When, say, Eric is working a bit later than usual and doesn’t make it home by dinnertime, but is close enough that it would make no sense to pack everything away in the fridge and then unpack it for him again, someone has to sit in the kitchen and guard the food from the starving, wild creature in the house.

It’s like baby-proofing except the things you want to secure are totally different.

For a brief while in the middle of the day, the sun clears the roof ridge of the neighbours’ house, but not all the way across yet.