Working from home, I wear woollen socks a lot more. Working in the office I’d wear indoor shoes instead but socks are so much comfier. Which leads to a lot more darning.

A nice thing about hand-knitted socks is that I can fix a hole before it actually becomes a hole. The yarn wears thin but still retains the knitted structure, and I can use duplicate stitch to reinforce it. On this sock my reinforcement even covers up an earlier, less-than-expert darning.

Store-bought socks have their benefits but they are usually made of such thin yarn that duplicate stitching them would take a magnifying glass and one of those surgery robots that repeat your hand movements in miniature.

This, of course, assumes that I notice the soon-to-be hole in time, and don’t procrastinate about fixing it until it does actually become a hole.

There was no hope we would get a white Christmas this year, but it did actually start to snow late on Christmas Eve. The snowfall continued today and by the evening there was enough for Ingrid to go out with her friends for sledding and a snowball fight. It was lovely to see. The world was so much brighter.

It’s almost like back when we lived in London. Whenever it snowed (which it did a handful of times during our nearly 8 years there) there was always a big hoopla – “come look, bring your camera, it’s snowing!” I guess this might be the new normal here as well.

Some people try to make climate change seem like a good thing for Sweden – a longer growing season, and who wants all that winter anyway. But even if you don’t want all that winter snow and ice, a warmer climate won’t make our winters any sunnier, or the winter days any longer. Stockholm may get the winter temperatures that London currently has (or whatever continental city the forecasts point to) but climate change will not magically move Stockholm to London’s latitude. Instead of bright snowy days we will have more dark wet days.

We had Christmas gifts, somewhat too much Christmas food, and a new batch of gingerbread cookies.

I enjoy the run-up to Christmas more than Christmas Eve itself. Advent has all the good stuff – the lights, the decorations, the baking and then the eating of the baking – without the nearly hectic, keyed-up quality of Christmas itself. Christmas is tiring. Adrian is over-hyped about presents. My mum needs entertaining all day long, so I must keep up an even stream of activities and conversation, but only talk about topics that I don’t really care about because the odds are that I’ll get a snippy negative reply back.

(Ingrid took this photo.)

The first gifts have materialized under the tree, and Adrian can barely contain his excitement. Or rather, he cannot. He can not shut up about the gifts, to the point that I am getting very fed up with it.

Two of the gifts have his name on them, and he is guessing at what might be in there. He set a rule for himself that he today can only look at the gifts, not pick them up to weigh them or shake them. That’s only allowed on Christmas Eve.

But he allowed himself to hold up other things to the wrapped packages to compare their sizes. Look, one is suspiciously similar in size to a Nintendo Switch game sleeve (and Pokemon Sword is at the top of his list), while another matches a series of comic books where we have books 1 and 2, and book 3 has recently been published.

Guess who hasn’t finished the knitted Christmas presents yet…

I finally finished the napkin project I started in July! One batch I embroidered already back then. The other batch I intended to decorate with prints. I ordered a nice stamp from Etsy. And then I waited. I think it took over two months for it to arrive by snail mail from somewhere Russia. In September I was busy with other things so I put the stamp away and then more or less forgot about it until now.

Now I realized that it’s time to finish the work if I want them for Christmas and New Year’s dinners. So I finally did the stamping, and then spent the rest of the evening ironing the napkins to fix the paint.

The instructions for the textile paint said to iron the fabric for 5 minutes with the iron set to “cotton”, so that’s what I did. But afterwards the fabric was yellowish where I had ironed it. (You can’t see it here because I took the photo before ironing.)

I can’t use any bleaching agents on these and the textile paint can only be washed in 40°C so I really hope the yellow goes away with just a gentle wash… Otherwise I guess we’ll call it a halo or something. A feature, not a bug.

We have mixed feelings about gingerbread houses. They are fun to make and decorate, but afterwards nobody really wants to eat them. They get dusty and stale. And the store-bought gingerbread doesn’t taste very good to begin with.

Well, we can just see this as a crafts project where the materials happen to be nearly edible. You wouldn’t eat paper crafts even though you technically can, right?

We have a tree. The house immediately feels more festive.

We haven’t had a clear sky for weeks on end now, but today there was some! https://www.reddit.com/r/sweden/ was filled with jokes about “what is this mysterious blazing orb I am seeing in the sky”.

I wrote back in February about my Raspberry Pi and the plans to use it for a music rating and recommendation app.

Well, I actually wrote the app, and it has been running “in production” since before the summer. I’m really pleased with it – I achieved exactly what I had hoped. It often helps me rediscover music that I had forgotten we had, and listen to old favourites that I would probably have not remembered otherwise. And because it logs all the music we listen to, including music that Eric puts on, I also discover entirely new music.

The app shows me what is currently playing on our various Sonos devices so that I can rate these albums. I can also rate recently played ones. And based on those ratings I can ask for recommendations. I get a list of suggestions with albums I have rated highly, and another list of albums I have not rated yet (to gather more data).

I’ve been thinking of adding more smarts to it. It could suggest albums that we haven’t listened to recently (forgotten favourites, rather than all favourites). And maybe show some “flashbacks” like the blog has – “your most listened album last year” etc. Maybe a project for the Christmas break.

From a technical point of view, I learned more Vue.js than I knew before, and played around with flex layout in CSS. My CSS is mostly hacks piled on other hacks, but in a tiny project like this that’s fine!