This weekend was going to be a scout hike for Eric and Adrian, and a long overnight hike for myself as well. A weekend with good weather at the end of September is not to be wasted. But then Adrian fell ill and our plans all fell through. He’s much better today than he was yesterday, so I could go out for a day walk at least, and complete the Stockholm Signature Trail.

On Gärdet I saw an interesting apartment building that I’d heard and read about. It was less green in reality than in marketing photos, but was still quite striking. If I had to live in an apartment, I wouldn’t mind having one here.

Kaknästornet is a contrast to its surroundings. It was built as a TV tower in the 1960s and is still in active use for telecom. The top parts used to house a restaurant and viewing platform, but those were permanently closed about five years ago due to security concerns.

Djurgården hosts a pet cemetery. Sweet and sad. The oldest gravestones date back to the 1930s.

At the eastern tip of Djurgården I felt like I was out in the archipelago already.


Djurgården is full of expensive villas with double security gates and private piers.

Southern Djurgården had lots of lovely sculptures. Old and new, whimsical and classical. Wooden sculptures of various kinds around Rosendals Trädgård, and modern, playful sculptures towards the northern side.

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.

Embroidery club. We explored the herringbone stitch.

I wish I had taken photos of some of the others’ samples. We didn’t know in advance what stitch we’d be working with, so everyone used whatever materials they had, and the choice of fabric and thread made a huge difference. Herringbone stitch is often used to fill in an area, but that didn’t happen at all with my thin thread on light fabric. My stitches hover ethereally over the fabric, like lace, instead of covering it. Some of the others had much thicker thread and their herringbones made a completely different impression.

Went to the office to meet my colleagues and collaborate with my teammates. It was nice, but also quite unproductive due to all the noise.

Back in my days (haha) or even back in our previous office, people used to go into a meeting room or a phone room for longer online meetings. Now everyone was just doing their meetings out in the open working area. At one point I was literally surrounded by meetings, sitting in the middle of a triangle of meetings, plus there was one person who was listening to music on speakers. Like of course everyone wants to hear your music while they’re trying to work. And when people have got their headphones on, they’re usually even louder than when talking to someone right next to them, probably because they don’t hear themselves. It was like trying to work at a train station.

I wish I could use headphones but they give me a headache. And in my mind it’s the people making the noise who should adjust their behaviour in an office environment, not the ones who want some quiet.

I feel like an old curmudgeon. It’s not like I can tell everyone to just please keep it down, people are working here. Although I kind of wanted to.

It was very nice and quiet after five, though, when most folks had gone home.

Nysse had his six-week post-surgery follow-up today. He got his gait and other movement assessed, and his legs and hips stretched and squeezed and prodded. Everything looked very good, he’s moving well, but he has lost some muscle mass on the right side.

There was no X-ray, which is what they had told me before was what we’d be there fore, but I guess that’s only good. The half-hour consultation already cost 2000 SEK so I don’t even want to think about what an X-ray would have cost.

The vet’s advice was to gradually increase Nysse’s activity levels, but to keep him on a leash still outdoors. The idea is to not let him out on his own until he is strong enough to e.g. defend himself or run up into a tree in case some other cat (or dog, or fox) attacks him.

Both of these seem like good advice at first glance, but are also entirely unrealistic. Take increasing activity levels, for example. According to the vet, a cautious rehab schedule would increase activity 10% a week, but since Nysse is looking strong, we can do 20%. How on Earth are we supposed to measure his activity levels, and estimate a percentage increase? Nysse is not a human whom you can ask to take 20% more steps per day, or 20% more reps of a rehab exercise. He is a cat; his activity is about running and pouncing and climbing. Hey cat, can you please pounce just about 20% harder this week? Can you please stay out for no more than two hours?

The same goes for getting him strong enough to climb trees. The only way to practice his tree-climbing muscles is to climb trees. It’s not something he can train indoors, or while on a leash. (Although he did try the latter a few days ago, when he suddenly started climbing a tree while we were out on a leashed walk. That was a bit scary. I wasn’t afraid of him falling, but of him pulling the leash from my hand and climbing up high and then getting the leash tangled up in the branches.)

I guess all we can do at this point is trust him to more or less know his own limits. So we’ll be letting him go out again during the day when someone is at home and awake to let him back in when he gets tired and comes back. Hopefully he won’t overdo it.

There’s work ongoing in and around the electricity cabinets at the corner. A couple of months ago one of them was damaged somehow – possibly hit by a car. It looked all dented and crooked and got fixed up temporarily with webbing straps. Now I think they’re fixing it for real. But also there is a ditch on the other side of the street so maybe this is something to do with the newly built house there.

In any case, we will have no power for 4 hours in the afternoon, which makes WFH a bit complicated.

With Nysse occupying my sewing materials yesterday, I didn’t finish the quilt, but I did sew a top instead.

Just like the previous thing I sewed, this started with the fabric. I like bold, warm colours, and bold, soft patterns, but current fashion is mostly about stripes and small print if there’s any pattern at all. Luckily there are shops that ignore mainstream fashion and go for different niches.

Sewing a basic jersey top is just like sewing a basic dress, which I’ve done several times since this summer. Not difficult at all. I should have tried this years ago.

We’re letting Nysse roam freely inside the house, to gradually get him used to more movement again.

I’d forgotten what it was like to have a cat running free in the house. I was working on replacing the wadding in a quilt and had, naively, spread out the materials on the floor, that being the largest flat surface at hand. Nysse of course immediately occupied the felt as a cat bed. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, but I had lost the habit of thinking about what I’m doing in terms of “how will Nysse react to this”.

Sometimes Nysse cries and cries to go out of the house, and when I take him out, he just goes and sits somewhere.

Sometimes we don’t even get further than the front staircase before he decides that he’s “out enough” and happy there, and stops to wash himself and lick his toes.

We have somehow acquired an infestation of fruit flies in the bathroom – on the bathroom mirror, more precisely – and I can’t seem to get rid of them.

There’s a glass of red wine vinegar to attract and kill the flies, and every couple of days I pour out the vinegar with a few dozen dead flies on the bottom, and they never seem to get fewer.

I don’t understand what they eat, and I guess that’s the problem, because as long as there is something here for them, they’ll keep multiplying. I’ve thoroughly cleaned the floor drain, removed the small garbage bin, removed the ecosystem-in-a-jar that they might find nice with its humid air. I’ve removed the head of Adrian’s electric toothbrush, which I’ve seen the fruit flies land on occasionally – maybe for the fruity-tasting toothpaste. I can’t think of what else it could be.