The vegetable stand at Spånga Torg is my source for fun fruit and vegetables. Right now the best thing is plums and mangoes. They have five or six kinds of plums, where ICA might at best have two. And some are clearly relatively local, and sourced from a small-scale grower: they are so tender when ripe that they can’t have been grown with long transport in mind.

Nysse has caught a mouse and is now playing with it. Batting it around, occasionally letting it run about a little bit so that he can capture it again. Sometimes he almost gets distracted and looks away and then cannot find the mouse again unless it moves. (When it’s still, it’s very invisible.) The mouse doesn’t even look like it’s been hurt – I think Nysse has learned that he can get more fun out of his toys if he is careful with them.

I have very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this feels cruel. On the other hand, I am all for exterminating rodents living in or around the house.

Doing a bit of digging in the new planting area to be. The ground is hard as concrete and I’m barely making any progress. Despite that, I am finding earthworms and earthworm passages way down in the ground. Somehow earthworms manage to get through soil that I seriously struggle with.

Also, the fact that they tie themselves in knots never ceases to amaze me.

Eric and Adrian and I went to the movies to see Deadpool & Wolverine. We watched the first two Deadpool movies at home, and thought that the third one deserved to be seen on a big screen.

When the movie came up in conversations at work (people talking about their weekend plans) two separate groups expressed their surprise that I’d watch Deadpool. And I can see their point – I don’t watch comedies much. Many comedies get their laughs out of putting some character in embarrassing situations, and I can’t find anything enjoyable about second-hand embarrassment. At all. But the humour in Deadpool is the opposite – he’s so unashamed, so proud of his crudeness and ass-slapping, that it’s liberating.

That being said, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the last two. The first one had the best writing; the second one leaned into its ridiculousness; this one just felt repetitive and nonsensical. Barely any of the characters’ decisions made sense, apart from Deadpool himself. The studio decided to “waste” less money on writers, I guess, and spent the budget on actor salaries and special effects instead. I rather enjoyed the running gag in Deadpool 2 about the studio not being able to afford all the X-men.

Movie theatre popcorn, by the way, is ridiculously expensive. 75 SEK for that bucket of what is mostly air!

The reverse side of the Stockholm embroidery, with all the loose thread ends. I could have fastened them or hidden them or something, but decided to leave them as-is. It’s working out decently well, although they are in the way a little bit.

What would life even be if I didn’t have a knitting project underway?

This is the third basic sweater I’m doing from the same pattern, Sweatrrr by Åsa Söderman. I don’t agree with all the details (and indeed the first one is getting less use than it could because I dislike the hem and cuffs and neckline) but the fit and shaping around the shoulder and neck area is so perfect that I keep coming back to it.

The first one was in a grayish speckled yarn from MadelineTosh, and the second one a speckled greenish yarn from Apmezga. This latest one also looked mostly speckled at first but turned out to be more variegated than that, and now the sweater is coming out striped. The subtle, thin stripes towards the top were nice, but then as I started decreasing for the waist, the colours pooled more and more and I was getting strong tiger stripes instead. Not the look I was going for! I introduced a second ball of yarn and alternated between the two balls on every row, which mixed up the stripes, but also didn’t look anything like the top section. And then the first ball ran out, and the second ball on its own gave thick stripes again, but by that time I was doing hip increases and the stripes evened out after a while.

It all looks like a haphazard patchwork of different kinds of stripes and I am really not satisfied with it. The only way around it is to rip it up and reknit it without the waist shaping. Do I want a straight, boxy sweater? Preferably not… but I guess it might be better than this.

I know I started on this jigsaw puzzle once before, and gave up before I finished it. It’s a based on one of Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers, and there is an awful lot of yellow. I love sunflowers and I love the colours of this painting but it is rather challenging.

You might think that jigsaw puzzles, being very much an indoor activity, are best kept for long winter evenings. But I’ve realized that the subtle differences in all the yellows of this puzzle are even harder to distinguish in lamplight, so I only work on it during daytime hours. If my last attempt was in wintertime, I can understand why I’d give up. Now it remains to be seen whether I can get far enough before the days get too short.

A year ago, Nysse got badly hurt, probably by a car. He underwent surgery and was on cage rest for many weeks. But his bones mended and he recovered. A few months later he was moving like normal, and was not at all inclined to take it easy like the vet thought he should.

(If you’re a pet owner, do make sure to get insurance for them. I don’t even want to think about the decisions we’d have had to make if Nysse was uninsured.)

For months after that he was very scared of loud, rumbly car engines, and it took a while before he was fully comfortable walking around outside. It also took a surprisingly long time for all his fur to grow back. Even half a year later when, at a glance, the shaved area looked normal and furry again, it still didn’t have the same fullness and sheen as the rest of his body. Now, though, you can’t see any sign of it.

Nysse is back to enjoying his life as a cat. Chasing small critters, begging for food, occasionally asking for cuddles, and sleeping on every possible surface.

My current meeting knitting project is a pair of socks. Socks are great background knitting. But this last pair is not moving along. I knit a bit here and there but they’ve been underway for a long time without getting done. I’m almost avoiding picking them up to work on them. What is going on?

I realized today that I don’t much like the feel of them. I use standard sock yarn of 70% wool and 30% nylon for all my everyday socks. Or that’s what I thought, because I hadn’t paid attention to how different the quality can be. Today I touched the green half-done socks just after handling another pair and it struck me immediately. The wintery ones were soft and smooth; the green ones had fuzzy fibers sticking out here and there and felt rough in comparison. Even when I hadn’t consciously realized it, I felt it.

The green yarn is the leftovers of the first thin sock yarn I bought when I had just started producing socks for everyday use. (I hadn’t even discovered asymmetric toes yet.) Some cheap thing, bought online, sight unseen. I switched to small-scale hand-dyed sock yarns soon after, for prettier colours, but never compared the two side by side.

I’m three-quarters done with the second sock in the pair so I’m not going to give up now. I’ll power through and get these done, especially now that I know what my hang-up is. My feet probably won’t even feel the difference once the socks are finished. But my hands most definitely do – I’ve even given up on a yarn due to the feel. I’ll have to be more careful with my yarn buying in the future.

Late-summer weather is unpredictable and not quite as summery any more. Heavy showers, windy afternoons. But when we’re lucky, we can still enjoy meals outside.

After-dinner ice cream (Eric’s home-made stracciatella ice cream). And there was a rainbow in the background. I wished I could somehow capture the combination, but even though I could see and enjoy both at the same time, the camera couldn’t.