The neighbourhood cat who’s been visiting occasionally is getting more comfortable in our house. Previously it used to cautiously look around but stay at a distance from us. Now it’s OK with being touched and sleeping in our sofa.

Ingrid’s braces are in place and her whole mouth hurts and she cannot bite or chew. Ice cream, soups and smoothies are the only things she can eat.

I’m slowly getting used to being in the office one or two days a week. And commuting.

The commute in particular is a little bit annoying, but undeniably my days in the office are much more eventful, which is good for me. There are all these things that can happen, that never do at home or even in the streets of Spånga.

Meeting new dogs in the street.

Not being able to get inside the office building because they use an app for access (seriously) and the Android version is broken.

Going out for lunch to a restaurant I’ve never been to before.

Getting rained on. Not that it doesn’t rain in Spånga, but I’m never out long enough for rain to take me by surprise – whereas a lot can change between going out in the morning and coming back in the evening.

I finally found a use for the pouch I made in my embroidery course last winter. It had been languishing in a cupboard until now.

It turned out to be the perfect size for a crafts pouch, for bringing my sock knitting with me on my days of working in the office. It is just large enough for a 50-gram ball of yarn, a half-finished sock, and a circular needle. And it makes me much happier to look at than some industrially-produced packing bag, although one of those would probably weigh less and perhaps be more practical. So it is now part of my standard going-to-office kit, together with my mouse with its pad, a conference speaker/microphone, a web camera, and other assorted office equipment.

Someone has been eating my pumpkin. It looks quite deranged this way.

Rat? Squirrel? Bird?

I do technical interviews for tretton37 pretty regularly. I’m so used to doing them online now that I can’t even really remember what it felt like to do it the other way, physically in the same room with a candidate and my co-interviewer. Although I know for sure that that’s the way they used to be done.

I take notes on paper. Sloppily, sometimes missing the end of some words, because my main focus is elsewhere. There’s no way I could type while interviewing – it just gets too distracting. But afterwards I type up proper notes in a template we have.

My pre-interview prep includes setting myself up with 4 sheets of A4 paper, a pen, one large glass of water, and proper lighting. Two hours of talking – even though I’m not the one doing most of the talking, by far – is thirsty work.

Halfway through this interview I could already feel the lack of energy in the room, and see my colleague struggling not to yawn. A clear sign that this wasn’t going anywhere.

We do our pumpkins the opposite way to what most other people seem to do. Instead of cutting an opening at the top, around the stem, we cut a hole in the bottom. This makes it super easy to put in the light. Instead of trying to get a candle inside the pumpkin, we just put a candle on the ground, light it, and then put the pumpkin over it like a hood. (For fire safety reasons we have a heat-safe plate underneath if the pumpkin lantern is going to be on the stairs.)

We got more trick-or-treaters yesterday than today. Every year some people in Sweden get confused about what day Halloween is celebrated. (Come on, you could just google it.) In part it gets mixed up with All Saints’ Day, which is a moving holiday in Sweden and always falls on the Saturday before the first Sunday in November. But since that’s next Saturday, not yesterday, I don’t know what they were thinking of yesterday… I guess maybe some parents just find a Sunday Halloween impractical (with school the next day) so they just ignore the calendar and send their kids out when it suits them. Luckily for them we had gone out and bought candy yesterday, so we didn’t send them off empty-handed. Although I was a little bit tempted. But it’s not the kids’ fault that the parents make weird decisions.

We carved pumpkins.

Ingrid is the artistically inclined one in the family and has spent hours not just drawing and painting but intentionally practising both. Unsurprisingly she took this way more seriously than I did. She created something with actual artistic merit, whereas I just went for a low-effort design. But honestly I was mostly here to get the project started and provide some company. I think I spent more time with my camera than with the knife.

Adrian drew a toothy design that he then realized he wouldn’t be able to realize, which upset him. He went off to his room for a while to calm down and finished his carving later, on his own and in peace and quiet.

A ballet evening in three parts.

Jiří Kylián, Bella Figura. Lovely baroque music, but I never quite managed to connect to the dance. The movements were too intellectual, too artificial. I couldn’t relate. It was as if each movement was a signifier of something important but unknown, but they made no sense without knowing the significance of each one.

Mats Ek, överbord (woman with water). Seen it before, and it was as striking and compelling as last time. A woman and a table and a glass of water, and it is as if she is meeting both of them for the first time.

There was also a man, but he felt almost like an afterthought. He flitted through, dressed in a black suit, poured water for the woman, but didn’t feel like a part of anything. I see from the photos that he was there last time as well – I had completely forgotten him and even thought he was a new addition in today’s version of this piece.

Forsythe, In the middle, somewhat elevated. About ten dancers in green and black. Their movements and poses are classically strict and very athletic. Groups emerge, cohere and dissolve, merge and move apart. Mesmerizing and utterly compelling.

All photos (c) Kungliga Operan/Carl Thorborg.

I’m getting used to occasionally working in offices again. Wednesdays at Urb-it and Fridays at tretton37. It’s really nice to see old colleagues face-to-face again, and new ones I’ve never physically met. The commute is my least favourite part but I get through it by reading all the way.