We made the bedroom into a safe room for a convalescent cat. He has appreciated the effort, and uses the sofa-cushion platform to get up on the bed and the window sill.

He really doesn’t agree with the need to avoid high jumps and to stay on low, stable surfaces. I did my best to block off the dresser, and he did his best to overcome the obstacles put in his way.

I’ll take that as a sign that he’s feeling strong, and that his healing is going well.

One week to go until Nysse’s post-op follow-up vet visit. Two weeks ago it felt like an eternity, but one feels manageable.

Since Nysse doesn’t even know that there’s an end to this caged life to look forward to, I’m the one who’s most excited about it, and looking forward to the freedom it will give us.

Adrian and Eric made a birthday cake for Adrian’s birthday yesterday, using the same recipe as two years ago. It’s delicious, again, but also huge, again. If it gets made again, we’ll use no more than half the amount of frosting in the recipe.

PS: When we had eaten half the cake, I weighed the rest out of curiosity – and it was 1.5 kg, making the whole cake a whopping 3 kg. That’s a heck of a lot of cake.

Adrian’s one an only birthday present this year – which is also his Christmas gift – is a new gaming computer. Just like for Ingrid’s computer three years ago, Eric did all the choosing and ordering, and almost all the building and assembling. It went smoother than the building of Ingrid’s computer – by the end of the day, Adrian had a shiny, colourful new computer.

Following time-honoured tradition and wrapping birthday presents late at night. These required a lot of paper and tape.

My hands, and myself, are starting to feel restless in meetings again. I haven’t done any meeting knitting for months, but now I feel the need again. I take it as a sign that I’m settled in at my new project, no longer flailing around and struggling to keep up. Things feel stable and safe.

I want to knit a dress, and some more cardigans for the winter wouldn’t hurt, but those require planning and designing, neither of which I have the mental energy for right now. I just want to knit. So it’ll be a shawl. Large enough to keep me busy; interesting enough to be fun; simple enough to work as a background task.

I find it tricky to plan a knitting project. If I pick a pattern first, I might not find a suitable yarn for it. If I pick a yarn first, I don’t know how much to buy. I want to see the yarn colour in person, and touch it, before making a decision. If I pick a pattern and then swap out the yarn for something close enough, I’ll need a different amount than what the pattern specifies. So I end up trying to keep a whole bunch of patterns in my head while looking at all the yarns, and trying to choose both at the same time, and struggling to make any decision at all.

Shawls are easier than most projects because the sizing really doesn’t matter much. I went to my favourite local yarn store, browsed for a yarn that looked nice and felt nice, found one that was on sale, and bought a bunch, assuming that there were bound to be shawl patterns that call for two colours of yarn. Ravelry didn’t let me down, and now I’m knitting a nice two-colour brioche pattern.

The Multiverse pattern is really clever in its simplicity. After the first few setup rows, it’s just brioche, but with 2 increases (branchings) on each right-side row with the leading colour, wherever you like. There’s no pattern to read, which makes it perfect for background knitting, but there are always decisions to be made, which keeps it interesting.

I really like the subtle tonality of my yarns. Looking at the knitting you almost can’t see that there are two colours – it just looks like light and shadow. But the shadowed parts would not look as shadowed at all if they were also knit in the lighter yarn.

Continuing on my extra-everything skirt decorations. For this blue piece I’m echoing the printed silk fabric in embroidered wool. Mostly satin stitch, with borders in back stitch. I have no violet yarn in the right colour and quality, but I felt the design wouldn’t be complete without the violet, so those are small applique pieces.

We’re subscribing to Linas Matkasse meal kits again, since spring/early summer, and liking it a lot. The whole setup is very convenient. Cooking an entire dinner with no planning and no shopping is such a time-saver.

Each week there are a lot of recipes to choose from, and we never struggle to find things we like. It’s fun to cook and eat recipes that we otherwise wouldn’t think of. We like some of them more than others, but haven’t disliked a single one. We’re saving a lot of the recipes for later reuse. A few have ingredients that might be hard to source elsewhere – such as dry falafel mix, or pre-prepared korma spice mix – but most only use stuff you can find in any supermarket.

The one thing that doesn’t always work out well is the heat level. Lina’s chefs like a lot more chilli in their food than we do. They send us these little sachets of chilli flakes, one teaspoon each. The recipes sometimes use the whole teaspoon, sometimes half. We use half at most – but more likely none, and replace it with sambal oelek. Flavour-wise it’s not quite the same thing as the flakes, because it’s got that vinegary touch, but I like it better in most dishes. Because the chilli in it is crushed, it makes for a smoother, more even result, with fewer fiery explosions in the mouth.

As a result, the little baggies of chilli flakes keep piling up, to the point where I’m struggling to find space for them in my spice drawer. I think I might take them to the office and try to give them away to people.

Embroidered embellishments for a wool skirt.

I was originally aiming to let the embroidery on each curved piece follow its shape and contours. For the larger pieces, I thought latticework would be a better way to fill the surface. And now, when I was starting this latest large blue one, I couldn’t let go of the idea of echoing some of the dotted pattern from the silk fabric. So my originally quite contained design is now sprawling all over the place. Extra everything.

I hope, but I’m not entirely sure, that it’ll work out when I assemble it all. Hopefully the colours and the similar shapes are enough to keep it all together – or maybe it’ll be a messy jumble of disparate parts. Maybe it’s time to try it out, even though not all the parts are finished.

The good thing is that it’s all entirely modular, and I should be able to easily get more of the fabrics, if needed. If I don’t like it, I can discard any parts that don’t work – use them for something else – and make new ones with a different design.

The Lego version of the Taj Mahal isn’t quite as detailed as the real thing, but is pretty darn intricate and cleverly designed.

Credit: Zorka Sojka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Ashish2403, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Zorka Sojka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons