For about half an hour at mid-morning, the sun hits my favourite corner of the sofa.

Look who visited our bird feeding station: the friendly neighbourhood rat.

Obviously one doesn’t really want rats around one’s house, but I’m coming to accept their presence as more or less inevitable. The advice for keeping rats away from your house and garden all seems infeasible. Avoid tall grass, get rid of fallen fruit, make sure there are no places for them to hide, don’t feed birds. So we could get rid of rats if we got rid of all that makes the garden lively: the tall grasses and flowering perennials near the house, the apple tree, the wooden deck, the bird feeder. And then covered the ground with concrete all around the house where the rats tend to dig their entrances into the foundation. I can only hope that all the neighbourhood’s outdoor cats do their job and don’t let the rats multiply too much.

But it actually looks cute, doesn’t it?

For my lunchtime workout today I went out and shovelled snow for 50 minutes. A total body workout in fresh air and sunshine, and for a meaningful goal. What could be better?

The pile next to the driveway reaches up to my waist now.

Even with the snow and the cold, there are very few birds at the feeder. Mostly fieldfares and blackbirds, and the occasional blue tit or nuthatch. I wonder where the swarms of redpolls and goldfinches are this year, and all the great tits and blue tits we’ve seen in the past.

A thick layer of new snow makes the world look fresh and bright.

After two crazy weeks, during which I was skipping both workouts and lunches, my days at work are settling down again. It feels good.

Ingrid is also getting into a workout habit. But whereas I do mine around midday, I can hear her working out near midnight instead. She says it feels nice to wear herself out before she goes to bed. To each her own.

This weekend I finished assembling the little bag that I decided to use my embroidery sample for. Instead of a pretty but useless piece of embroidered wool, I have a usable bag.

Each individual part came out well, and the bag feels pleasingly solid. But the overall result is not what I had hoped for. The embroidery looked better when it lay sleek and flat. Forcing it into a three-dimensional object inevitably made it bunch and bend. If I decide do more of this, then I need to find a design that keeps the embroidered parts more separate from the fussier parts of the product, all the zippers and corners and such. Maybe by framing the embroidery with plain fabric?

Several of the games that Adrian plays have a mechanism where you can collect things that don’t matter much for the main game play. In Animal Crossing there are collections of bugs and fish and fossils. In both Zelda BOTW and Pokemon Sword, there are (among other things) recipes to collect to fill your recipe books. Inspired by an apple curry in Pokemon Sword, Adrian wanted us to make one in real life. I would never have thought to make an apple curry, but it turned out quite nice. Adrian even decorated his portion to match the picture in the game.

Adrian decided that he wanted to learn programming in a real language, not just dragging and dropping coloured blocks in Scratch. He’s figuring out his first steps in Python, making text appear on the screen.

With all the meetings this week, my sock production is off the charts. I’ve already finished one pair for myself, and started on another pair for Adrian.

This is the first time I use this kind of patterned sock yarn. It’s a really clever idea: the first half of the ball of yarn has exactly the same pattern or colour gradation as the second one, and there is a short marker section in between in a totally different colour. This way you can very easily get two identical, fun socks from one ball. I like it.

This pair I haven’t even properly finished yet – I still have the ends to weave in – but I wore them anyway because today’s outfit, with a green skirt and dark green tights, called for green socks.