Ingrid’s school has an annual spring ball for the ninth graders. She decided to wear a dress, which also necessitated the purchase of suitable shoes (although she did consider just wearing sneakers with it, which I found completely bizarre, but hey, not my party, so whatever works for her) and a handbag. The dress needed shortening at the hem and I didn’t dare to machine stitch the delicate fabric, so I got to practice making very tiny, invisible stitches. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince Ingrid to pose for me when wearing the dress – and get a photo of it in actual daylight.

Mama pig at the animal husbandry school near us has been looking big and heavy for a long while now. Today Eric reported (on his way to the supermarket) that the piglets had arrived. Adrian and I went piglet-watching.

There’s six of them, and they all have different colouring. One very pale with stripes, one pale with barely-visible flecks, one beige with stripes, one pale with large dark spots, one brown with stripes, and one fully brown.

I’ve finally reached the sleeve divide, which means that I can try the cardigan on for real, rather than just draping it over my shoulders. And I’m super pleased to say that it fits pretty well.

This, in turn, means that I can finally cut all the annoying yarns across the chest!

The colour fade from yellow to orange meant a lot of switching between colours, and quite often the live end of the yarn I needed was on the other side of the knitted fabric. I considered just knitting from wherever the yarn was – purling if the yarn was on that side of the fabric, even though the pattern called for a knit row – but was afraid that that would make it too hard to keep track of all the increases. So I just let the yarn jump the gap to where I needed it. As long as I was unsure about the fit, I didn’t dare cut the yarn (wouldn’t want to end up with lots of small pieces if I had to unravel it all) so I had all these fiddly yarns going across the chest, from one edge to the other. Now I’m going to chop them all, which is going to make things a lot easier!

Last time Nysse was gone for a long time, I ordered a GPS tracker for him. Today was the first time we used it “for real”.

I’ve mostly been using it to get an idea of how far he usually ranges. It turns out that his usual territory is quite small – on a normal day he wanders maybe three yards away from ours at most. (That’s yards as in enclosed areas around houses, not as in imperial measurement units.) So when he followed me all the way to the school, that was way beyond his usual territory. No wonder he got lost and took forever to get back. The new house rule is to not let Nysse follow us away from home again.

He’s been away overnight on his own since those first times, but with nobody to lead him far astray, he’s always been back by morning. Seconds after one of us opening the doors, he’s come rushing in.

Today he didn’t appear. When I checked his location in the tracker app, he turned out to be further away than we’ve ever known him to go, far further than the occasions when he’s gotten lost – over a kilometre from home. We figured it would take him forever to find his way back from where he was, so we went looking for him. Unfortunately the tracker decided to act up just when we wanted it most and didn’t update his location very well, but it led us to the right area at least. With the help of the tracker’s ability to make noise on demand, and a friendly lady in the neighbourhood, we found Nysse after all – curled up under the lady’s front stairs.

I guess after some time he’ll learn the neighbourhood even better and won’t get lost any more. But in the meantime, I try not to let him out without it.

We have a four-day weekend for Ascension, and had been planning to go camping for two nights. Now there’s rain forecast, off and on, all the way until Sunday morning, so we had to cancel.

I tried to take photos of raindrops, because those are always pretty, but then I realized my lens is still broken and the photos all look weirdly off. I really need to get it repaired – I miss my macro lens.

The result of yesterday’s yarn shopping.

I’m reaching the point – or maybe I’ve already passed it – where I really, really don’t need any more hand-knitted socks. I’ve got a few yarns still waiting and I’m going to use those, because I can already picture the socks and they will all look so fabulous, but I do need a new plan for meeting knitting.

First up: a scarf to give away.

Wednesdays are office days and errand days, and regularly turn into yarn shopping days. I took a different way home from the yarn shop, walking across Söder to Slussen, which is all a giant construction site.

We supplement Nysse’s dry food with tuna, and occasionally with fancy wet food from little plastic sachets. He eats all of it with gusto – I’m not even sure if he has any preferences.

The best thing about the dry food is how easy it is to handle. We have a plastic container in the pantry which we occasionally top up from a 10 kg bag in the basement. When it’s time to feed Nysse, we just scoop up a reasonable-seeming amount into his bowl. No fuss, no mess. The least good thing about the dry food is its smell.

The best thing about the tuna is that it feels, psychologically, like real cat food. Cats did not evolve to eat dry pellets. It’s a bit messier because of all the cans, and because Nysse doesn’t eat an entire can in a single meal so the rest has to be refrigerated.

The best thing about the fancy wet food is that it looks and smells like actual food. The worst thing about it is the sachets. It’s really hard to get the food out, and despite all my squeezing, I can always feel lumps of food still in there. The lumps are the meatiest parts, so throwing those away feels like such a waste. I’ve ended up cutting the sachets open all the way around and “serving” them to Nysse on his little place mat. Once we run out of these, I might look for something more user-friendly.

I got a better explosion photo today. That’s the only good thing I can say about them.

I try to hold back with the knitting posts because I imagine you all get tired of them, but now I see the last progress photo of the cardigan was six weeks ago, so I can get away with one.

I had planned a colour fade which looked good when the yarns were still in hanks, but now that I’m knitting it, there is less gradual fading than I had hoped and more of a striped effect.

The fade is much softer and, you know, actually fade-y, on the reverse of the fabric. I’m starting to understand why so many of the knitting patterns that incorporate a colour fade are made in reverse stockinette or garter stitch. But I still like the overall impression of the right side much better – the colours look more brilliant and the yarn more lustrous. So I guess I’ll have to deal with the stripey fade.