I got a lovely fuzzy wool blanket for Christmas last year. Much softer and warmer and more colourful than the threadbare one from IKEA.

I use it all the time during the cold season. So does Adrian, who loves this corner of the sofa.

And so does Nysse. When we get up from the sofa and leave the blanket in a heap in the corner, it of course gets turned into a cat bed. And then we come back and want to curl up under the blanket, but can’t, because it’s got a sleeping cat on it.

The blanket is mine, and I’m not going to let Nysse just annex it, by the power of his cuteness.

The new deal is that tidy up after myself when I get up. I fold the blanket and put it up on the backrest of the sofa. (Or sometimes just throw it there.) No more cat bed – and I get the blanket for myself.

Then I felt sorry for Nysse for taking away his cosy spot. I understand him so well – a wool blanket is the best thing on a chilly winter evening. Now I leave the old blanket on the other end of the sofa for him.

Sunset at three o’clock in the afternoon.

The tracks of a Billy bookshelf, after it’s been standing in one place on untreated pine floors for about a dozen years.

The rectangular shape is the footprint of the shelf itself. The triangular area to the left, a teensy bit less pale, is where the shadow of the shelf has fallen.

Eric and the kids will mostly have brand new furniture for their new apartment.

A lot of what we have here has been bought specifically for these rooms. They’re the right size and shape and colour for their places. It wouldn’t make sense to move this sofa elsewhere and buy a replacement for it here, or the kitchen table, etc.

Bookshelves are an exception. The IKEA Billy is the quintessential bookshelf in Sweden, and unless you’re splurging on something custom-built, it rarely makes sense to get anything else. It’s just a matter of choosing between oak veneer or white.

Since we’re divvying up the books, we’re doing the same with the bookshelves. I helped Eric move half of ours to the new apartment today, along with the first batch of boxes.

One last Christmas fika at tretton37. Not cheerless, per se, but melancholy and lackluster.

Every time we get together, we can’t help talking about who have left and who will leave, and at some point inevitably someone wonders out loud why we aren’t getting any information about what management is up to and what the company’s situation is like, and then we force ourselves to change topics.

Finished my embroidered ATC, put it in the pile for ATCs for a blind swap, and came home with a different one.

I didn’t intend for it to come out quite as dark as it did – I thought the red would stand out more.

Got a fresh haircut today. A colleague’s first, spontaneous reaction when he saw me in a Teams meeting was that I looked like a five-year-old boy. I chose to take that as a compliment: clearly I look youthful and playful.

Also, here’s a splash of afternoon sun.

Wet, heavy snow, quickly followed by freezing temperatures, and then a bit more snow on top of that. Now everything is covered with very picturesque agglomerations of snow.

Everything, including the car, which was properly iced over when Ingrid wanted to practice driving. There wasn’t even that much snow on it – it was just frozen hard and had to be scraped off with much force. Three of the four car doors were impossible to open, but with a bit of yanking, Ingrid got in through one of them and could turn the heating on.

Took a detour in the morning on my way to the train station, to get rid of some cardboard boxes. Got an unobstructed view of the rather pretty sunrise.

On the one hand, sunrise, nice.

On the other hand, the sun barely being up when I leave for work, not so nice.

Over two months to go before the days are of decent length again. Whose idea was it that humans should live this far north, anyway?

Adrian gets an advent calendar with Christmas toffees. Ingrid has a store-bought Moomin-themed one with tea.

I’ve struggled to find a good place for the calendar in the past, especially with Nysse around. This year, after we’ve moved some furniture, I could hang it high up on the chimney wall. Well out of reach for the cat, well in reach for Adrian.

The chimney has been unfinished since we renovated the house, over ten years ago. Initially we dithered about maybe opening it up again – it’s been bricked up since the 1970s – and installing a fireplace of some sort. Of course if we were to do that then there was no point in wasting time and money on finishing it. We never made a decision, and then it sort of just sat there, mostly forgotten. I guess I should do something about it.