Adrian is stepping up, now that it’s mostly just him and me in the house. (And Nysse, of course.) Getting groceries and cooking three or four meals per week.

Most days I enjoy cooking; even on tired weekdays I don’t mind it. But it is really nice to be surprised, to eat something that has been cooked based on someone else’s ideas, based on someone else’s tastes.

I bought oyster mushrooms for dinner today. Mostly the supermarkets here sell button mushrooms/common mushrooms, which for some reason are called champinjon in Swedish, but today there were locally-grown oyster mushrooms at a good price. I’ve eaten them before but usually “diluted” with the cheaper common mushrooms, and I don’t think I’ve ever cooked or prepared them myself.

The body, the core lump of it, was surprisingly dense and firm. I was reminded of the fact that mushrooms, while common in vegetarian cooking, are not actually vegetables but a kingdom of their own, perhaps even closer to animals than to plants. But they don’t have anything that I recognize as consciousness so I eat them.

At a friend’s 60th birthday party.

Ingrid is home for a whole ten days. It’s not a week of leave but a week of theoretical studies at home – a 500-page dense brick of a book about “Soldiership in the field” (which you can actually get as a free PDF online), a thinner one about anti-tank grenade launchers, another about working as a security guard at restricted-access sites.

It’s not a week of leave, but at least she can get home-cooked food and pet a cat while studying.

Unpicked all the stitches I made at the last embroidery club session, because I really didn’t like working with this fabric. I don’t know if I’ll ever want to use the fabric for anything, but I want to reuse the thread for a new attempt.

I forgot to book a time for the annual car inspection and got a very firm and official letter informing me that the car was now banned from driving. It would have been nice to get a letter a week before the deadline, but then again, why would they. Anyway, I booked the first available time (7 o’clock the next morning) and here I am.

Different place than last time. This one had comfy seats and a coffee machine (not that I cared about that) and was fully protected from the weather, rather nicer than the cheap plastic chair in a cold space at the last place.

All green this time.

I went to see Liljevalchs’s spring art salon together with Adrian and Ingrid.

I’ve always moved through the rooms in a counter-clockwise direction, because that’s the direction that’s straight forward from the entrance. That’s put the room with the under-eighteens’ works as the first one. Ingrid and Adrian confidently steered us in the opposite direction, because that was obviously the right way to go in their mind. It does actually make more sense this way, because now we started in a spacious hall of eye-catching sculptures and large paintings.

The works at the salon are all for sale, at a price set by the artist. Some, I think, price them so as to be almost sure that they won’t sell. Others are very affordable. Some look expensive to me but then turn out to have been sold nevertheless. (There’s a board in one of the rooms with sticker dots marking what’s been sold and what hasn’t.)

One of glass sculptures above, which I rather liked, had been sold for a sweet 95,000 SEK.

This one-metre sculpture of a submarine was made of metal and wood, and had been aged underwater for three years, according to the label. (Nils Lagergren, “Belgravia”.)

I wonder how this work of neon tubes and black paint on the wall was even presented to the jury, and how it can have been transported here. (Josefin Eklund, “Mysterious goats and geometric heads”.)

There were of course not just weird sculptures but also paintings of all kinds. I liked this pair of very realistic but dreamy views of a spring forest. (Mats Nörle, “Ekbacken om våren”.)

Ingrid taught me about underpainting, and how it is often done in red or orange. (Anna-Christina Eriksson, “Picnic With a Red Cadillac”.)

I’m always curious about textile works – there’s almost always some embroidery and textile sculpture, sometimes weaving or crochet or knitting. The embroidery works usually tend to be concrete depictions of people or stories, which, yeah, I know other people like, but it’s not my thing. This year I liked this Sami-inspired piece of embroidery on tulle. (Yvonne Larsson, “Blodsband”.) There were, in general, quite a lot of Sami-themed works.

This piece was pleasing in its geometric simplicity. It looked like embroidery at first, but was acrylic paint on fabric. (Juanma Gonzalez, “Död ved ger nytt liv _ ad#07”.)

There were several intricate, lifelike bronze sculptures, including these coltsfoot flowers. (Vera Burkhalter Zornat, “Tussilago”.)

Finally, someone had painted a view of the exact same pillars of the Årstabron bridge that I photographed yesterday.

I am making active efforts to meet new friends.

I’m an introvert but, it turns out, not a hermit. With no more husband and now mostly just one child every other week, I feel a need for more company. And more outside impulses: it’s not just talking to someone that I miss, but going to places I wouldn’t think of going on my own, trying new things.

My colleagues are fun but I don’t know that I’d want to spend even more time with them. My childhood friends are far away. I’ve grown apart from most of my friends from my student days and don’t feel that I have much in common with them. My hobbies are such that I only meet retired ladies, and I really don’t feel that I’m one of them. I don’t want clones of myself, but there needs to be some common ground for me to enjoy someone’s company.

Now I’ve joined an online friend network-ish site – not a dating site but just a place to meet people – and had two great “friend dates” today. Fika with one, and a long walk with another. We tried a new café, and walked along paths that I’ve never walked before, and had great conversations.

The plan for the walk was agreed a week ago, and even yesterday the forecast for today was “partly cloudy” and around 7 degrees. What we got was windy, overcast, and with intermittent sleet. We looked at the sky, looked at each other, considered cancelling, but went ahead anyway.

At one point we passed a small sauna next to a pier, and there were four brave people on their way into the water for bathing. Not running from the sauna into the water and back out again, but leisurely walking towards the water or even just standing around in their swimsuits. Meanwhile I was wearing four layers of clothing.

The photo is a view of Årsta bridge between Södermalm and Årsta. I wonder what the graffiti painters have stood on for painting those designs. Canoes? Ice?

Easter Sunday, with all its traditions. None of the traditions can be changed at all. Which is a bit boring, but I’m OK with that. Who knows how many more Easter celebrations I will have before Ingrid goes off and starts her own traditions.

Things that can be varied: What kinds of herring to serve. What topping to use to decorate the devilled eggs. What design to paint on the eggs. What pattern to use for piping the merengue on the pie.