I’ve been thinking of seeing I Follow the Sun at Artipelag since the summer. Was hoping that Ingrid would find time to join me, but she’s been working at least one day every weekend, so I ended up going on my own.

This was my first time at Artipelag. With a new museum, you never know what you’ll get. I came fully prepared for a small provincial art show with a couple of big-name works padded out with unknowns, and was blow away by the whole exhibition. I’ve really been missing out!

The exhibition was a lot larger than I had hoped for. There were works of Fernand Léger, Emil Nolde, Carl Larsson, Ai Weiwei, etc, and beautiful works of contemporary Nordic artists. No actual Van Goghs, which is understandable. I read in the book accompanying the exhibition that the concept for the exhibition had started years ago with the idea of borrowing Van Gogh’s paintings, but withered away when it turned out to be impossible. The museum staff pivoted and made something different happen instead.

But his paintings are the quintessential images of sunflowers, impossible to avoid. They’re on jigsaw puzzles, mouse pads, mugs, aprons, shopping bags, towels, and everything else you can imagine. I wonder what he would say about how his works have been used.

And he was here as well, in the shape of Vik Muniz’s works. He has recreated Van Gogh’s works with pieces of coloured paper. You’re looking at a digital copy of my photo of a print of a photo of a recreation of a painting. How many layers of indirection is that?

There were very soft, romantic sunflowers, and harsh, stylized sunflowers. (Clara Gesang-Gottoft and Tal R.)

There were works by artists who have made sunflowers their “thing”, and by others who have said that flowers are the worst thing you could possibly paint but then couldn’t help themselves after all.

There were sunflowers carrying a heavy load of symbolism, and sunflowers reduced to abstract shapes. (Carl Larsson and Fernand Léger.)

There were colourist sunflowers and pointillist sunflowers and naïve sunflowers.

I loved these simple ink paintings by Anna Bjerger.

There were also photographs. What struck me about those was their timelessness. A photograph of a sunflower from 1920 is mostly indistinguishable from one taken in 2020.

Eric is packing for his move, and there are moving boxes in half the rooms, and I feel like I’m in the way wherever I am, while in reality of course it’s the boxes being in the way. And I just feel so done with this. I am counting down days until this is over. Except there is no fixed date, it’s “just after New Year’s”, so I don’t even know.

I try to read or knit and I keep getting interrupted. I want to use the Christmas break to do something actually relaxing or fun, but there is no room for fun and no peace and quiet to be had, so this feels like the worst and most wasted Christmas break ever. And it’s +8°C and a drizzle out there, to top it all off.

I am breathing my way through the days. I am annoyed by things that would normally not bother me the least, and I resent the heck out of the situation.

What a difference love makes. And how obvious it is that love is an active choice more than a feeling that just happens. When I actively chose to love Eric, if there was some little thing he did that could be perceived as annoying, I could decide to not view it as such. I loved him, and he had his foibles, and ignoring those foibles was a part of loving him. And they truly did not annoy me, because in the grand scheme of things, they were nothing. Leaves the toilet lid up when flushing? Puts apples in the fruit bowl without rinsing them? Cuts up everything on his dinner plate so he can shovel it all up with just a fork? It was nothing.

Now it is not nothing.

Sweeney Todd at the Royal Opera. Technically a musical, which is nice, because it made the whole thing sound more pop-culture-ish and got the kids to join, but really, what makes this a musical rather than an opera?

I was most impressed by the work of the dialect coach, because Ms Lovett sounded as British as could be, and so did the others.

Ingrid building her new computer.

For both Ingrid and Adrian, computer games is their main hobby, so a second gaming computer each was more or less a must-have for their split living situation, on par with a bed, a desk and a wardrobe. You can’t cart gaming computers, monitors etc back and forth every week.

It’s Christmas Eve!

Knowing Nysse and his habit of attacking wrapped-up gifts, with all their play-friendly paper and ribbons and shiny bits, we didn’t leave the gifts out overnight. But when he’d had his breakfast and gone out, we put the gifts under the tree. He managed to attack one of them – luckily the one where the inner layer was a sturdy cardboard tube, and thus hard to damage and easy to re-wrap – but after that I kept my eye on him all the time and chased him away twice, after which he was almost afraid of even going near the tree, so there was no more damage.

Lunch was devilled eggs, pickled herring of three kinds (flavoured with blackcurrant, apple and curry, and mustard, respectively) and a citrus and gravad lax salad. Plus potatoes and vörtbröd, a Swedish Christmas bread.

Ingrid piped and decorated the eggs, and folded the napkins.

The citrus and salmon salad was a new entry on the menu. Tasted good!

Then it was time for presents. With everybody so grown-up, there’s a lot less cheering and jumping up and down than there used to be!

Nysse, when he woke up, attacked the rolled-up Santa hats as if they were fluffy little animals, and for some reason really enjoyed licking the little olive wood bowl that I gave to Eric.

Ingrid and I went grocery shopping for all the Christmas meals we’ll be having tomorrow. Herring and gravad lax and brussel sprouts and potatoes and all that.

I always mix up the Stora Coop shops near us. I know that one of them has a deli counter that sells their own pickled herrings, but I forget which one it is. (Note to future self: it’s Coop Bromma Blocks.) This year, without a helpful note from past me, we started at Coop Vinsta. While it didn’t have the good herring, it had plenty of parking space and almost no queues, so it was rather nice to get the bulk of the shopping out of the way here. Then we headed to Coop Bromma Blocks for herring. And for julmust, because Coop Vinsta didn’t have the good stuff there, either.

Neither did the other Coop, as we discovered. Usually they all have several brands, sugary and sugar-free, large bottles and multi-packs of small bottles, but this year it was just this single variety, and that was that. We thought we must have walked past them, so we searched, even asked the staff, but no, that was it. Ingrid remembered seeing at least the sugar-free kind (which she prefers) at our local, small Coop, so we ended up going there as well, and finally got the julmust we wanted.

None of the three Coop supermarkets had cranberries, though, and neither did our local ICA. Some years ago I know I bought fresh American cranberries at one of the large Coop supermarkets, and then after that at least there were frozen Swedish ones. (Different species, and they behave differently when cooked, but they taste similar enough.) But I guess there’s not enough demand. We’ll have to make do with some kind of lingonberry-based sauce instead.

Is there any more depressing weather you could have at Christmas? The skies are gray and the ground is wet and muddy, and half-frozen so the water can’t drain.

A Christmas day with my brother.

I picked him up by car in Uppsala as usual. What was not as usual was the thick slush coming down from the sky. I also hadn’t accounted for today being the first day of Christmas break and thus large crowds heading out of town to their cabins in the woods or wherever. The roads were slippery and full of snow and a lot more traffic than usual for 7:30 on a Saturday morning. The drive there and back usually takes me an hour and a half, but took two and a half today. For a good chunk of the way, we were all driving at 40 km/h behind a pair of snow ploughs.

Anyway, I managed to not become a statistic (and we saw no cars on the side of the road and no cars with sirens on) so all is good.

Then we baked. More lussebullar in all sorts of shapes, because after a while we all become bored with the traditional ones. There were lusse croissants and doodles and swirls and twists, and even a lusse snow lantern.

And then we made a batch of mince pies, too, because those are delicious and everyone should have access to mince pies at Christmas.

Visited Active Solution, my new employer, today for an intro session and to pick up my equipment. Time reporting, intranet, door tags, here are the office supplies, here’s the printer, etc etc.

My new computer threw a tantrum during the setup phase and got sent back to IT support, so I didn’t actually get access to any of these systems, but I did come home with a new phone. Same brand and series as the old phone, but four years newer and a slightly higher-end model.

It definitely wins over the old one in the “most camera lenses” category – as well as in “fewer smudgy fingerprints”. Samsung appears to have switched to a more sensible material for the phone body.

Reviews say the Samsung Galaxy S24 has a great camera, and I’m hoping that with the four lenses, this phone might replace my pocket camera for everyday use outside the house. (For any planned, more serious photography, I’ll still be using the Olympus, of course.) The little Sony camera I have is nine years old and some bits are starting to wear out. It would be nice if I didn’t have to buy a new one – and a lighter handbag wouldn’t hurt, either. My old phone (four years old) took decent photos in good light, but in low-light conditions the results were pretty horrible, and it had no optical zoom so any attempts at zooming in were likewise atrocious.

We celebrated the end of a great year with the developer team at Sortera. Dinner at a Bengali restaurant (Mowgli’s kök, delicious food, wide range of veggie options, indifferent service, 10/10 would recommend) and then indoor mini-golf.

I’m usually bad at hitting or throwing balls – with or without equipment – and making them go where they’re supposed to, but I finished in shared second place. I also had the most uneven performance of us all, being responsible for both the most holes-in-one and the group’s singular 7-pointer.

Here’s me hitting a hole-in-one at the last hole.