On weekdays, I simply knit. Sometimes I have more attention to give to the work, sometimes less. But I generally don’t deal with complications, like measuring or making important decisions. Those are for weekends.

Yesterday I blocked this half-done cardigan to see if it might fit. The gauge swatch I knitted relaxed a lot when wetted, so I wanted to check this one before continuing with fiddly bits like buttonholes and sleeves. Seems OK, although I’m not sure about the neckline construction, or the width of the sleeves. I have to finish the neckline before I can reasonably evaluate it, though, and same for the sleeves.

I invested in a set of foam mats for blocking, instead of pinning things to folded-up bath towels. Felt very nice, much more stable and easy to work with.

There are KnitPro foam mats you can buy for about 400 kr. You can hear from the name alone how pro they would be. Or you can buy a children’s play mat, identical in size and material, for half the price.

Swapping to winter tyres. The streets aren’t icy yet, but the ground in the garden is crispy instead of soggy and muddy, and the mornings have been frosty for a while. Don’t want to be taken by surprise.

The actual swapping is a one-person job. We can’t exactly remove two tyres at the same time. But there are enough side tasks – jacking up and jacking down, putting away the summer tyres and rolling out the winter ones – to keep a helper busy almost all the time. Except for a few pauses for photos.

As a birthday present to myself, I gave myself a dinner at Minako sushi, one of the absolute best sushi restaurants in Stockholm.

We’d reserved a table for an evening two weeks after my birthday, but that very day Nysse came home with broken bones, so the dinner never happened. Then there was Nysse’s convalescence, and then me trying to recover my energy after 6 weeks of near isolation, and then the kids’ birthdays, and suddenly it was November.

Now, though, we made a new reservation and there were no emergencies of any kind, so we had wonderful sushi. Eric, Ingrid and I had sushi at Minako, while Adrian, who isn’t as fond of sushi, ordered dumplings and spring rolls from a local place in Spånga and got the house for himself for the whole evening.

The omakase (chef’s choice) dinner consisted of 7 courses, if I remember correctly. Already the first one, with marinated octopus and seaweed, was incredible. I almost never order octopus because it always feels like rubber, but this one was only delicately chewy.

There were a few plates of nigiri, common in shape but uncommon in the choice of fish. Salmon, yes, but also rainbow trout and arctic char. And cod, which – like octopus – I never like in any cooked form, but was perfect here. Every time I eat really excellent sushi one of my main conclusions is that this is how fish should be eaten. Cooking mostly just destroys it. (Except for very lightly cooked salmon that is just barely not raw.)

My favourite pieces were these futomaki rolls. There was daikon radish in there, and something to do with pumpkin, and tuna, and a leaf that tasted like a cross between mint and coriander, and some other thing that I can’t remember. It all came together into a taste explosion where everything balanced and complemented everything else, and every bite brought out something new.

Ingrid took a picture of me while I was out walking the cat.

Our recent walks just go around half the house – out on one side and in on the other – but even that can easily take ten to twenty minutes. There is a lot of stopping, either for Nysse to dig a hole to pee in, or just to watch things. Warm socks (for me) are essential, because I can’t stand around for long without getting cold feet.

I’ve been feeling cold all the time, even when the temperature seems reasonable. Wearing layers upon layers, at least two of which are wool or polar fleece.

A hot meal always warms me up. Sometimes I have no full meals among the boxes of leftovers in the fridge. On days like those, I’d much rather have an odd but warming meal – like this combination of spaghetti with sweetcorn soup, or perhaps sweetcorn soup with spaghetti – than something like sandwiches or tortellini.

The green sock on the left is my last sock with a standard-shaped toe. The gray sock on the right is one of my many socks shaped after my own foot.

After quite some time of use, the green sock has stretched to fit the foot decently well. But it never feels quite as comfortable as the custom-shaped ones. There is extra material where none is needed, while other places are stretched. It’s quite visible: the stitches are stretched thin over the big toe, which is where I’m sure the sock will wear out first, and the vertical columns of stitches lean.

I keep the green pair out of some kind of nostalgia, and sometimes I put them on because I like the colour, but they can’t compete with the better socks, so they mostly remain in the drawer.

During one of today’s walks with Nysse, I found his previous boot, which he “lost” – totally by accident, I’m sure – when we last let him out on his own. It lay just behind the house, not far at all.

What I don’t understand is how he managed to get it off. The boot is whole and in one piece. The leather lace still has its knot, nice and tight. Even the sock we had inside to prevent rubbing is there, inside the boot, with the strip of adhesive bandage to keep it in place. Everything looks untouched, as if he had just magicked or teleported his paw out of it.

He doesn’t enjoy wearing the boot, and he doesn’t enjoy going out on a leash, but he also can’t be let out without it because it immediately leads to him losing the boot and licking his toe again.

He is depressed and frustrated. Doesn’t enjoy life as much as he usually does, and spends more time sleeping than usual.

He takes out his frustration on the cat tree and on various cardboard boxes, which he attacks with claw and fang.

Our baby cousin’s second birthday, and he got a magnetic construction toy that entertained guests of all ages.

Adrian was most proud of this pentagonal prism with inverted pyramid bottoms.

I happened to read a horror story on a knitting forum from someone who had knitted a whole sweater and then discovered that the yarn relaxed a lot when it got wet, so their sweater grew over 10 centimetres in size in both length and width. They were desperately looking for ways to rescue it, with ideas ranging from just ripping it all up, to forcing it to shrink by tumble-drying it, to cutting off 10 cm from the sleeves and knitting new cuffs.

Theirs was knit in a superwash merino yarn, and I am also using a superwash merino yarn for the sweater I’m knitting, and one that’s unfamiliar to me so I’m not entirely sure how it will behave when washed. I think my knitting is tight enough that it can’t possibly grow by as much as theirs did, but I don’t want to end up with an unwearable garment. So I wet blocked the yoke that I’ve knit thus far, just to be on the safe side.

It grew in width from 31.5 cm to 33, which is a rounding error in my eyes, so all is good. Phew.