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.

I didn’t take a photo today, but here’s one from last Wednesday’s city trip.

The last weekend in January, BirdLife Sverige has a bird counting event. I’ve been participating for the last five years.

This year we had an absolute invasion of Eurasian siskins during the counting weekend. The largest group swarming around and below the feeder was about thirty birds strong. We also saw goldfinches, blackbirds, and a lonely great tit.

Apparently this year is a siskin year. The Eurasian siskin is number three in the aggregate statistics as of now, and didn’t even make it into the top ten last year. According to the internet, siskins tend to stay for the winter when alder seeds are plentiful.

Blackbirds have been the most consistent visitors at our feeder over the years – they’re the only species I’ve reported every single year. Great tits, blue tits and goldfinches are in shared second place, each seen four out of the five years.

The cardigan has reached the point where all the pieces come together and make up a cardigan-shaped object, albeit incomplete. The end goal is not quite in sight yet but sort of on the horizon at least. And the part that is finished actually fits decently well!

This is, unfortunately, also one of those points where difficult decisions need to be made regarding size and gauge and adjustments, because reality is annoyingly not matching up with the pattern. I love the knitting but I really hate those times where I know that taking the wrong route may lead to frogging weeks’ worth of work and then spending an hour swearing while I try to get the stitches back on the needles.

I’ve now learned about the concept of lifelines which will reduce that swearing at least. So now my work is a complicated tangle of all sorts of components: not only the cardigan itself, the two balls of yarn and the needles, but also the lifeline, temporary holders for underarm stitches, and stitch markers. Just getting it all out of my basket and unbundling it all is a bit of a project, every time I pick it up to start working on it.