The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is warm, and the cherries are blossoming. Can life be better than this? I love May.

There’s a new young cat in the neighbourhood. Looks like it might have been let out of the house for the first time: it’s exploring, discovering, cautiously but curiously poking its nose in all sorts of places. I had to shoo it out of the basement twice, and keep the doors closed to keep it out of the house.

We’ve seen its like before. One spring, a young cat out for the first time when its family had gone away from the day, came into our house looking completely lost and abandoned. So much so that we thought it might have run away and took it to a nearby vet to scan its chip and find out who it belonged to. He turned out to be called Sid, and lived just two houses away from us.

Sid and his family have moved away, but there are several other cats whom I recognize by sight. They are all older and feel more at home in the neighbourhood. They walk in a very different manner – more confidently and purposefully.

One thing the young and old cats apparently all have in common is a love of birds. Not our kind of love, but the kind that expresses itself in hunting and eating the birds. This kitty quickly discovered the bird nest box up in our cherry tree and decided to go fish for baby birds. Climbed up and poked its paw inside the box and tried to catch things.

When I had chased it down from the tree with a broom twice over, I had enough and decided to saw off the branch that seemed to offer it best access to the nest box. (It was mostly dead anyway.) I’m hoping that this will make bird-fishing less comfortable for the cat, so the cat will find some other fun activity and leave the box alone.

Breakfast outside. Me over here, the family over there.

Pink is not my favourite colour in interior decorating or in clothing. I don’t think there is a single pink thing in the house. I remember buying one skirt with pink flowers and giving it to charity because I barely wore it. But in the garden, I like pink. It contrasts well against all the green. I like all other colours in the garden as well, to be honest.

I finished filling the new planting boxes with fresh soil today. Well, soil, at least, but maybe not so fresh… I’ve had three-quarters of a cubic metre bag of soil sitting next to the driveway for at least two years. But it’s not full of weed roots, so that counts as fresh in a way. Now I’m kind of stuck, though, because I need fertilizer and strawberry seedlings, and that requires a shopping trip, and I’m not doing that while I have a sore throat.

Speaking of weeds, the Japanese sedge in the slope is spreading almost like a weed. But it’s not doing that in front of the house, so it must really love conditions on the slope. It spreads vigorously in all directions and tends to smother other plants. I had hoped that some taller things like alliums would be able to grow through the sedge, but they don’t, really. I guess they get too little sun in their early days and die before they get tall. Or maybe they just don’t like the slope as much as the sedge does.

Martagon lilies and bleeding hearts do like this spot, though, which makes me happy. And luckily the sedge has superficial roots and is easy to yank out around them.

Adrian is discovering the wonderful world of image editing.

He knows that photos can be “photoshopped” and has seen enough examples online. Today he discovered how that actually works.

One of the games on our PlayStation that we play together is called Ultimate Chicken Horse. It’s a multi-player platform game where you build the level together, as you go. The player characters are animals – a chicken, a horse, a sheep, a raccoon etc. To me the name of the game sounded like a chimerical animal, half chicken, half horse. When Ingrid heard that she made a chicken horse for me in ibis Paint, which she otherwise uses to draw anime-style pictures.

Adrian was impressed and wanted to learn how to make images like that. Today Ingrid gave him a quick intro to ibis Paint and showed him how to import pictures into layers, and erase part of a layer to make another layer visible. He was mesmerized and proceeded to create a chicken-headed, tentacled superhero out of parts he found in Google Image Search.

Social distancing in the sofa. Me in one corner, Adrian at a safe distance.

He misses cuddles and hugs more than anyone. He keeps coming to me because that’s what he does, and I keep having to tell him to back off. Which is no fun for either of us.

Ingrid also woke up with a slightly sore and phlegmy throat. Now the two of us have dinner in the dining/living room, while Eric and Adrian sit in the kitchen, so we don’t all breathe our potential germs at each other all the time.

It feels weird.

The soreness in my throat is so slight that several times during the day I thought I had only imagined it. Hypochondria, due to all the talk about covid-19. But occasionally it comes through more clearly, just enough to confirm that, yes, it’s there for real.

I woke up with a teeny-tiny feeling of soreness in my throat. Just a smidge, no more. Barely there

Whether what I have is a common cold or coronavirus or some other virus, I’m curious how I can have contracted it. I’ve barely been out among people recently, and always at a distance. Perhaps Adrian brought it home from school – I’m sure the kids at school don’t manage to keep a distance between them at all times.

So I isolate myself even further. No more grocery shopping. No more cuddling with the family. I ate my dinner separately, and I hung up a separate hand towel for myself.

The only other symptom apart from the sore throat is that I’ve been feeling slightly chilly all day. (Which could, of course, be due to the 15°C drop in the temperature outside. We even had sleet this morning.) Hence today’s photo, of my fluffiest, woolliest warm skirt.

Things are sprouting, not only in the garden but in the kitchen as well.

How does the potato know that it is spring? They don’t sprout like this during winter. They’re in a paper bag, in a dark cupboard. And still somehow they seem to know.

The old planting boxes are rotten through after ten years of sun and rain. I’m putting in place new ones, with fresh new soil and new strawberry plants.

Some kind of horrible weed had invaded several of the boxes with strawberries. It has thread-thin stalks and roots that break as soon as you try to remove it, so it’s impossible to get rid of. Replacing the soil will give the boxes a fresh start; maybe we’ll get a few years without that thing.

Adrian helped me assemble the boxes. Then Ingrid came out as well and they “helped” each other. There was so much monkeying around that there was almost no progress on the boxes… when they gave up and went in, it was almost a relief, and I could finally get the last boxes done on my own.