Adrian still likes us to read him a good night story. We’ve left children’s books behind a while ago already. We just finished an old Estonian translation of Karel Čapek’s Nine Fairy Tales. I can make myself speak Swedish to my children when others are in the room, so as not to exclude anyone, but good night stories just have to be in Estonian.

We’ve run out of suitable books in Estonian. I usually buy piles of books every time we visit Estonia, but we’ve had to skip our annual trips for two summers in a row, so we had a bit of a book crisis. I’ve got a few boxes of children’s books we haven’t read yet, but we probably never will – Adrian has outgrown such stuff.

Luckily my mum still has many of our old books, some from her childhood, some from mine. I called her, and here’s what she lent us to read next: an old Estonian edition of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

In the Soviet planned economy, things had fixed prices. This book cost 7 roubles, according to a printed price on the rear cover. That was before the 1961 currency reform; book prices were in kopeks (1/100 of a rouble) when I was a child.

The front cover has a dramatic scene of a dinosaur threatening a man wielding a firebrand. Clearly drawn in a different era, when artists’ knowledge (along with everybody else’s knowledge) of dinosaur anatomy wasn’t what it is today. That dinosaur holds itself like a large human in a dinosaur costume. It will be interesting to look at more illustrations – and to see what kind of mental picture Sir Arthur had of dinosaurs, pterodactyls and other prehistoric creatures. I haven’t read this book for a good 30 years at least.

Adrian is still home with a cough even though he is basically all well. I take him out with me when I go for my daily walks, so that he also gets some daylight and fresh air.

There is so much talk in him, about just about everything. When I come back from a walk of my own, my brain is clear and rested. After a walk with Adrian, work feels like rest.

We talked about daylight savings time and time zones, among other things, because he asked what I’d done at work thus far. (Time zone conversions.) In this day and age with international entertainment everywhere, like live streams on Twitch and special events in games, even an eleven-year-old is well aware of how time zones work. I certainly wasn’t, at his age.

It’s dark not only when I go to and from work, but already when I still have several hours of work left. This is not my favourite time of the year. But on the other hand – there are only six more days to go until things turn around.

Ingrid still has long, painful-sounding coughing attacks, but is otherwise back up on her feet and not feeling too unwell. Perky enough to try on all the shoes she’s ordered. She desperately needs winter shoes, gym shoes, and running shoes.

We’ve arrived at that magical moment where Ingrid, Adrian and myself all have more or less the same shoe size. 39 is the magic number. We could all borrow each other’s shoes – if we didn’t have entirely different taste.

Ingrid wears classical sneakers like Vans and Converse, both low and high, mostly in black and white but sometimes also sky blue. She’s interested in shoes in a way the rest of us aren’t, and would gladly buy more shoes only because she likes them, not because she needs them.

Adrian also likes sneakers but values ease of use above other things (except comfort) so he can wear any brand as long as they have a velcro closure and no laces. In practise he ends up wearing black.

I choose shoes in soft leather in warm, deep colours.

Eric is the odd one out with his size 42 feet. Soft leather, like me, but usually black.

Although Adrian is surely bound to end up there as well in a few years. Ingrid’s feet may actually be near her final size, which would be practical because then we could stop buying new winter boots every single year.

Today was a very Christmas-themed day.

From shortly after lunch I was helping prepare for the Urb-it Christmas-ish dinner – fetching and carrying and shopping and setting the table etc. In the afternoon I walked over to tretton37 for a Lucia gathering with singing and glögg and lussebullar etc. Then back to Urb-it for the dinner itself.

I’m still amazed by the luck that put the two companies within a hundred metres of each other. I’m glad I didn’t have to choose between the two parties – and it was incredibly convenient I could use the tretton37 office for storing the party materials, because we only had access to the Urb-it office from midday. I had so much stuff – tableware and decorations and snacks and what not.

Urb-it today feels somewhat like the tretton37 Stockholm office felt like when I joined in 2017: small-scale and DIY. We ordered our own food. Someone brought a speaker from home for the party music, while someone else brought table runners, and a hotplate for the glögg, and so on. tretton37 has grown and become more professional: we have people who fix these kinds of things so the rest of us don’t have to. But the home-made spirit is still there – the singers were a self-organized group from among ourselves. I hope we manage to keep it.

A lussekamel, to join all the lussekatter

We’ve pretty much decided now to get a cat of our own. The neighbourhood cat’s visits have convinced me. Ingrid has always wanted a cat, Adrian is generally positive to pets, and Eric doesn’t mind. So here we are.

It won’t be a kitten, though, despite Ingrid’s pleas. I don’t want a baby in the house again, regardless of species. I’d much rather skip the mess and chaos of a kitten and get a cat that’s had some time to settle in its character and find its footing in life.

As soon as we had decided, Ingrid went on a Blocket spree and came back with a shortlist of suggestions of cats she liked. I contacted a few of the sellers, and reached a tentative agreement with one. So we might be cat owners a week from now – if, after meeting the cat, we think he would be a good fit for us.

Today I went shopping for essential cat equipment: a litter box and a crate. Our potential adoptee cat lives in the countryside now and is used to being outdoors, and mostly doing its business outdoors. He will definitely be going outdoors here as well – with the way we keep our doors open in the summer, it would be impossible to keep an animal inside. (Sometimes it is impossible to keep them outside.) But for the first few weeks after moving, while he’s still settling in, he’ll have to remain inside.

The stacks of litter box pellets were quite unphotogenic. And the cat food and water bowls were downright tasteless – golden with little paw prints, or pink with cartoonish fish skeletons. I don’t want any of those in my kitchen. The most interesting-looking thing in the pet shop was this shelf of dead tree branches, for terrariums I guess. Of course there’s a market for pretty-looking dead branches.

I knit socks during meetings where I’m mostly a passive participant, to help me remain focused and not just zone out or get distracted by reddit or something. At one point I told my teammates, in case they were wondering about my unusual movements.

One of them jokingly said something about knitting a pair for him next. Size 46. Well, joke’s on him, because he’ll be getting a pair of woollen socks for Christmas, in a nice self-striping yarn with a goodly proportion of dark Urb-it green in it.

Size 46 is huge. It’s going to be hard to get the sizing right because I have no feet of that size available to try the socks on. Eric has size 42 and that’s what a pair of normal adult male feet look like in my mind. The step from his feet to size 46 is as large as the step from Adrian’s 11-year-old feet to Eric’s.

Of course I’m doing this rather last minute as usual. But I’ve got the entire weekend ahead of me still.

Both kids are, quite synchronously, sick since yesterday.

Adrian has an incredibly runny nose and is going through toilet paper by the roll trying to clear it, but is otherwise perky and feeling well.

Ingrid is totally knocked out with fever and a headache, subsisting on water and ibuprofen and half a small bowl of yogurt.

I very much hope I don’t catch whatever they have because I have a Lucia thingy with tretton37 on Monday as well as a Christmas dinner with Urb-it. I feel hopeful because it wouldn’t be the first time, by far, for the kids to be sick while Eric and I escape with no symptoms. Our immune systems have had a few extra decades of practice, after all.

Worked in the office today. And ran some errands in the city afterwards, like it’s 2020.

Being in the office actually felt normal today. Working from home feels more normal, still, but I didn’t catch myself thinking “wow, I’m here” or “I’m actually going on the train” or “gosh, look at all this city around me”.

It’s taken me two and a half months – since late September – to get to this point. Just as I got here, though, covid-related restrictions and recommendations are being tightened again. By just a tiny bit, and they’re all still expressed in weaselly language like “if possible” and “where appropriate” and “to some extent” but I guess it’s meant to be a signal of what might be coming.