I found one last, forgotten gingerbread cookie in a jar in the kitchen. Christmas is not over yet!

It was all sunny and warm outside and felt like spring, even though it’s the middle of February. It isn’t actually spring, though, which became very apparent when I went out into the garden with the camera. The ground is frozen hard with just a thing soggy layer on top, and everything is still dormant.

Nysse on top of his scratching and climbing tree.

The climbing tree was a great buy. Nysse scratches it regularly, and almost never scratches anything else. We have a scraggly palm-like thing in the living room, and the trunk of it looks very scratchable, and Nysse has tried it a couple of times, but apparently it is not as satisfying as the purpose-built one.

The construction of this thing is not very stable at all. It is really quite wobbly, even. When Nysse first moved in, it toppled several times when he jumped off with some force. We discussed options for stabilizing it – anchoring it to the wall somehow, or finding something heavy to weight down the base – but the Nysse has solved the problem by learning to jump down more carefully, down rather than to the side.

We got a Venus flytrap plant for Christmas. It seems to be doing surprisingly well in our kitchen window, despite the lack of flies to catch this time of the year. The only thing it catches is dust. But it is nevertheless growing new leaves and even something that I think looks like a flower stalk.

The new leaves look different from the original, toothy ones. They’re longer and slimmer, and instead of one of those trap things, there’s just a bit of perfectly ordinary leaf at the end. Perhaps these leaves will go traps later, but it doesn’t really look like it. I guess since there are no flies to catch, it makes sense for the plant to not waste its energy on growing traps.

I fully admit that this is one of the ugliest photos I have posted here in recent years. But getting a decent picture of a balder patch of dark fur among all the other dark fur, on a cat that has no desire to sit still in decent light, is hard.

I discovered a bald patch at the base of Nysse’s tail a few days ago, and took him to the vet today. The vet shaved off some more fur around it so the bald spot is even larger now. Could be this, could be that – hard to know when the patient can’t say anything about whether it itches or hurts. But after much hemming and hawing and palpating, the conclusion was that he may have hurt himself somehow, so we went home with a prescription for a painkiller & anti-inflammatory thing.

Just like with visits to doctors for humans, there was a lot of waiting. Unlike visits to doctors for humans, this was expensive.

I only found odds and ends in the leftover section of the fridge today. None of them was enough on their own to make a proper lunch. I didn’t feel like eating a two-course meal – and doesn’t one large course feel more satisfying than two too-small ones, anyway? – so I ended up eating cream of cauliflower soup with a rice/tofu/banana/peanut casserole. One of my odder lunch combinations, but not bad.

Just a thin layer of fresh snow, barely a centimetre – but that together with sunlight is enough to brighten the world by a lot.