Christmas gifts all bought! Online shopping + one trip to IKEA. (If you’re one of the people hoping to receive a gift, don’t worry, there’s more outside the frame.)

I didn’t take a photo today, so here’s one from earlier, from when we actually had snow on the ground.

A bright-eyed little squirrel feeding from the bird feeder, using its tail to stay balanced.

We brought home a Christmas tree this weekend, and immediately it feels like Christmas is actually near.

As usual, the tree looks lovelier in real life than in a photo. When I am in the same room with it, it has just the right amount of glitter and bling on it – but in a photo, it still looks somewhat bare. Probably because I’m unconsciously comparing the photo to the over-decorated trees in stock photos, whereas the tree on its own has no such expectations to live up to.

It’s secured against tipping by climbing cats, as usual, and has no fragile ornaments on the lowest boughs. Nevertheless Nysse managed to knock down and break a plastic bauble on the first day.

Ingrid is practising for her upcoming driving test.

She started last autumn, took a break last winter, started it up again in spring, and has now been amping up the intensity during the fall. Eric and I have both been driving around with her for what is starting to feel (to all of us) like forever. She can drive, and has been a decent enough driver for a while already, but the tests are really nit-picky and you have to do everything perfectly to pass.

I’ve complained about the cost of international postage before, and it just keeps getting worse. In the five years since 2019, the price has increase by 70% – and another increase coming up in January will bring it up to over double what it was back then.

This is what you get when essential services are privatized and expected to “compete” on the market. We don’t expect the military to make a profit, or the road network, but somehow the postal service needs to.

Now I only have the golden-brown interiors of the sunflower blossoms left.

This is the first jigsaw puzzle where the “sky” is easier to finish than the motif itself. The sunflowers are all the same colour and have no distinguishing features, no lines. So it comes down to the shapes of the pieces – but also to the brushwork. I’m learning where van Gogh has slathered on the paint thickly, where his brushstrokes are long and even, and where the canvas peeks through.

Party #1. The old one. Farewell fika at tretton37 for the twelve (!) people who will be leaving the company around the end of the year. And that’s just for the Stockholm office. Someone likened it to a funeral feast. Usually these events have an element of excitement, because the person leaving is going to something, but now we’re all going from something.

My last day isn’t until the 31st, but this feels like an ending.

Party #2. The new one. Christmas party at Active Solution, with a “Wild West” theme. (The symbolism of photographing a pair of doors closing behind me and another pair in front of me was unintentional when taking the photos, but it fits rather well.)

Nice people, relaxed atmosphere, good vibes, decent food. One obvious difference to tretton37 is the higher average age here. At tretton37 I am older than the majority, and I believe there are few who are older than me. Here, I feel that wasn’t the case.

For a “Wild West” theme party, you could get by with just a pair of blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and wouldn’t need to buy anything at all. Assuming you own blue jeans and a plaid shirt, neither of which is present in my wardrobe. I tried on five or six pairs of jeans at a charity shop, and one of them fit me like a second skin, which is a very rare thing with trousers, so I might actually keep these! I don’t wear blue during the cold season, not out of any master plan but because it just happens, but I can see myself using them in the summer. The plaid shirt… eh, maybe. It has weird epaulette-type things that I’m not too fond of, but on the other hand it is very soft. The suede waistcoat will probably go straight back into the circular economy. It’s done its job.

Hourly power prices above 1,000 (one thousand) öre per kWh, for the first time ever, as far as I know.

Too little transmission capacity between the north and the south of Sweden, and high demand from Germany, and lack of wind. Plus a price model that allows the marginal cost of that power sold to Germany to affect the electricity prices for households.

There won’t be any baking of lussebullar or running the tumble dryer during those hours, for sure.

Adrian took up drums again this year. He tried five years ago but lost interest. Now he’s re-found it.

The end-of-term concert was quite a bit longer than I had expected, and a lot of it sounded better than I had expected, too. I guess my expectations were partly still stuck in 2019.

Adrian played the bass drum in a drumline (which was my favourite piece of this evening), the standard drum set in a rock song, and the marimba for Jingle Bells.

If the photos look weird, it’s because I’ve blacked out other kids who were in the frame.

Adrian came home with a gingerbread house from the Spånga Christmas market this Saturday. It collapsed under its own weight.