Now

I'm on parental leave at the moment. Work has receded accordingly. It consists of checking my email extremely sporadically to see if there are any interesting social events happening at the office to find any errant messages that are someone else's problem for a time. Still, very much looking forward to seeing Strömmingen, the big residential project in Täby that I've worked on for a couple of years, coming up out of a hole in the ground in the very near future. I've left it in good hands.

I'm also keeping up a bit with the workplace union since I'm into my third straight year as an elected union representative, a position of trust and an honor I'm very proud of.

• Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman.

Set in 1348 during the Black Death. Apparently a deadly pandemic wasn't horrific enough for Buehlman, so he had to write in horror elements as well. And genre-wise it's clearly not fantasy, rather historical horror. In many ways a classic road movie through the French countryside where we follow a disgraced knight, a gay priest, and a possessed girl from one jaw-dropping and horrific set-piece to the next. Still has a couple of chapters to read through, but I'd say it's getting quite dark.

"Then a monkey came from beneath the stands, a monkey of the same sort as the three that had been roasted for supper, and began to pick from the sand and eat what had flown from the man’s head. When he had gotten all there was to be found on the sand, he scampered up the horse and up the armored body of the half-headed German Frenchman, and began to eat directly from the bowl of his remaining head."

Since I'm (still) weaning myself off social media, I promised to make myself a space of my own on the Internet, where I can share my thoughts on my own terms. So this site is a personal priority of mine.

Other than that, I'm still rediscovering old routines from my previous parental leave. It's an amazing boon to be able to do this. Sure, it's hard work in its own way, but it leaves me far more cognitive energy in the evenings, which I'll try to spend thoughtfully on a couple of tiny projects over the coming year. (And I really mean tiny. I've done this before. I know my limits.)

I've just started a ham radio course at SKØMG (Stockholms Läns Radioamatörer) and I'm still trying to figure out why. I'm having a blast, but I've never really been interested in radio. I think it is just perfectly placed in the Venn diagram of many other interests I have. Synths, filters, communication, aviation, self-hosting, electronics. And of course I'll get a cool callsign. If all goes well, you'll soon have a new way to contact me.

"CQ, CQ, CQ, Calling all stations…"