Mirror selfie.

The back of the neck on this cardigan is too tight, like I suspected. Rip up and redo.

Yes, Eric offered to take a photo if it for me, but this was more fun.

I bought a pair of “barefoot” shoes before the summer, and now they are my favourites.

A few months ago a colleague, who was curious about barefoot shoes, asked me if I had noticed any downsides to them at all. The only thing I could think of was the looks. Nobody would describe these as stylish. They’re not exactly ugly, and in comparison to some current shoe fashion, they’re pretty OK. At least they don’t look like a lumpy, swollen blob of rubber and plastic like too many sneakers do these days.

Otherwise they are perfect. Insanely comfortable – lightweight, flexible, soft. It’s like I’m wearing socks, but with some protection for the sole. I can walk in them all day and by the end of the day still not wish that I could just take my shoes off. I forget about them; they don’t even register.

Now that winter is coming, I’ve found their only downside: they’ve spoiled me for standard-shaped shoes. Since May I have barely worn any other footwear other than these or my sandals. Hiking boots, when needed, and rubber boots, but no other shoes. And now there will be snow and ice, which these shoes are not made for, so I need to start putting on winter boots, but I DON’T WANT TO.

Do I squeeze my feet into narrow boots for the hour or so that my commute takes, every day? Do I throw out my still-perfectly-good sheepskin-lined winter boots (that took me ages to find) and invest time in hunting for new ones?

Ingrid took a picture of me while I was out walking the cat.

Our recent walks just go around half the house – out on one side and in on the other – but even that can easily take ten to twenty minutes. There is a lot of stopping, either for Nysse to dig a hole to pee in, or just to watch things. Warm socks (for me) are essential, because I can’t stand around for long without getting cold feet.

This sweater is knitting up unbelievably fast.

October came, and with it, colder weather, as if it was following the calendar. A frosty morning, and a chilly afternoon. It’s time to turn on the heating.

It started with needing glasses for sewing with black on black in bad light, and now I actually wore reading glasses for reading for the first time.

The text was sharp with glasses, but somehow vaguely distorted. Perhaps it’s time to get something better than the generic off-the-shelf glasses from the pharmacy for 349 SEK.

One week to go until Nysse’s post-op follow-up vet visit. Two weeks ago it felt like an eternity, but one feels manageable.

Since Nysse doesn’t even know that there’s an end to this caged life to look forward to, I’m the one who’s most excited about it, and looking forward to the freedom it will give us.

My hands, and myself, are starting to feel restless in meetings again. I haven’t done any meeting knitting for months, but now I feel the need again. I take it as a sign that I’m settled in at my new project, no longer flailing around and struggling to keep up. Things feel stable and safe.

I want to knit a dress, and some more cardigans for the winter wouldn’t hurt, but those require planning and designing, neither of which I have the mental energy for right now. I just want to knit. So it’ll be a shawl. Large enough to keep me busy; interesting enough to be fun; simple enough to work as a background task.

I find it tricky to plan a knitting project. If I pick a pattern first, I might not find a suitable yarn for it. If I pick a yarn first, I don’t know how much to buy. I want to see the yarn colour in person, and touch it, before making a decision. If I pick a pattern and then swap out the yarn for something close enough, I’ll need a different amount than what the pattern specifies. So I end up trying to keep a whole bunch of patterns in my head while looking at all the yarns, and trying to choose both at the same time, and struggling to make any decision at all.

Shawls are easier than most projects because the sizing really doesn’t matter much. I went to my favourite local yarn store, browsed for a yarn that looked nice and felt nice, found one that was on sale, and bought a bunch, assuming that there were bound to be shawl patterns that call for two colours of yarn. Ravelry didn’t let me down, and now I’m knitting a nice two-colour brioche pattern.

The Multiverse pattern is really clever in its simplicity. After the first few setup rows, it’s just brioche, but with 2 increases (branchings) on each right-side row with the leading colour, wherever you like. There’s no pattern to read, which makes it perfect for background knitting, but there are always decisions to be made, which keeps it interesting.

I really like the subtle tonality of my yarns. Looking at the knitting you almost can’t see that there are two colours – it just looks like light and shadow. But the shadowed parts would not look as shadowed at all if they were also knit in the lighter yarn.

Adrian appears to have outgrown Legos. For now – it’s happened before, but then he became interested again.

We borrowed a large Lego set to build a model of the Taj Mahal, back in January. Adrian was engaged at first, but the build has languished for months. I’ve even tried to encourage him by pre-sorting the pieces, but even that didn’t help.

The completionist in me can’t tear down a half-finished build, so I took it over from him a few weeks ago. It was a good distraction while I was at my most worried about Nysse. Now I don’t need the distraction any more, and it’s not my favourite pastime, but I still want to finish it.

To make things more interesting, I’ve challenged myself to build ambidextrously. It’s interesting to see how naturally the right hand does the work while the left one stays still. I’m holding a tiny piece in my left hand, attaching it on top of a larger piece in my right hand – and unless I specifically focus on doing the opposite, it’s the right hand that moves the larger piece in place while the left hand stays passive, holding the little piece still and waiting for the right one to do the job.

Walking with Nysse I end up in places in the garden that I would never choose to walk through otherwise. Such as the space under the huge philadelphus bush. Plenty of space for a cat; full of scratchy branches at chest and face height for a human.

One can find interesting things this way, though. Like the remains of long-dead birds.

I like skeletons. Especially when the local wildlife have kindly picked them clean.