A squirrel visited the bird feeder and gorged itself on sunflower seeds. An upside-down working position allowed it to stuff its face with barely any breaks.

Nysse was watching like the hunter he is. Poised, focused, all attention on the squirrel, tail twitching and swishing. In fact his sudden attention was what made us notice the squirrel at all.

Here’s the yarn I was looking at yesterday. Hand-dyed soft merino wool in all sorts of beautiful colours. Suddenly I’m very motivated to finish the cardigan I’m knitting.

I feel like I’m going to go crazy soon if I sit locked up in this house much longer, without anything happening, without anything new to see or hear or do. So I treated myself to a trip to town for some retail therapy at a yarn shop.

Bought some crazy sock yarn. Longingly looked at some merino wool that I want to use for something but I don’t yet know what. Maybe a cardigan, after I finish the black one.

I’ve almost forgotten what it is like to be in town. When you walk from a shop to the train station and there are OTHER SHOPS in the street that may also be open and may have things you also want to buy (like cat toys! or clothes!) without first having made a plan and then searched for them online, hoping that what you get is what you thought you would get.

And restaurants! There are restaurants in town. That you can also just, like, discover. And go inside, and eat food that you haven’t eaten repeatedly before, or cooked yourself. I ate Arctic Char and a Belgian chocolate cake and had a glass of Sauternes. The whole meal felt like therapy.

All these covid recommendations are making me paranoid. Even when there is no actual crowding, I am very aware of every other body in my vicinity, and I can’t really relax. I wouldn’t have gone inside if the place hadn’t been nearly empty, but luckily it was.

It used to be that we could just leave food out in the kitchen. Not any more. Unless you’re OK with eating cat-licked food. Which I’m not.

When, say, Eric is working a bit later than usual and doesn’t make it home by dinnertime, but is close enough that it would make no sense to pack everything away in the fridge and then unpack it for him again, someone has to sit in the kitchen and guard the food from the starving, wild creature in the house.

It’s like baby-proofing except the things you want to secure are totally different.

For a brief while in the middle of the day, the sun clears the roof ridge of the neighbours’ house, but not all the way across yet.

Morris is back to feeling comfortable enough to wander around the house and even nap here.

With Nysse being outside more, I’ve been leaving the garden door ajar so that he can get back in when he wants. Now that Morris is also getting bolder, it’s difficult to keep track of which cat is where. I don’t want to lock Nysse out, or lock Morris in overnight. And Adrian doesn’t want any cats in his bedroom when he sleeps. I’m starting to consider GPS trackers – but I can hardly put one on a cat that doesn’t even belong to us…

Also, what kind of a pathetic life do I live, when the only news worth mentioning are about the movements of cats? I need to get a life, but I don’t know how, when everything is on pause or off-limits.

I knitted nine pairs of fine wool socks in a variety of colours last years. Together with a few pairs from other sources, this is enough for sock-sufficiency. I can’t remember the last time I wore a pair of cotton socks.

The yarn for the pink ones at the top of the pile was a bit of a wild card. It looked different in the photo – the yellows and whites were more prominent – and when I saw it in reality, I wasn’t even sure if I’d use the yarn at all. On a whim I still knitted up a pair of socks, because why not. Now they’re one of my favourites. Well, many of them are my favourites, but the pink ones are my happy socks. They look like candy, I thought at first, but I’m not that much into candy really. So now I think of them as the colour of summer flowers – dahlias and cosmos.

The diseased tiger socks are still weird but they’ve grown on me as well.

There’s still room for more. I wouldn’t mind a few more variegated yarns, and a proper red. Maybe a pure orange as well. I had my eyes on some beautiful hand-dyed yarns on Instagram but then I realized that they’re all made in Britain. With Brexit, I’d get hit with VAT and customs fees and what not, and the yarns are not worth that. Damn Brits and their silly Brexit.

Here I was, pleased that Nystagmus quickly learned how to signal that he wanted the door to be opened so that he could go out. Nope – he wants the door to be opened, all right, but often not for going out but just so that he can sit there and watch and sniff and listen. We clearly have different opinions about the value of keeping the heat inside. The warmer seasons are going to be so good for him, and we should probably start looking for a cat door.

When he comes back from one of his walks – which have now grown from five minutes to fifteen and twenty – he’s all full of energy. Comes inside, races back and forth through the house, play-attacks my feet. Even if he doesn’t go all the way out, just after sitting at the door gap for a while he’s more playful and energized. I guess this is what he was missing. Not made to be an indoor cat, clearly!

Adrian, with his eyes glued to TikTok.