We’re letting Nysse roam freely inside the house, to gradually get him used to more movement again.

I’d forgotten what it was like to have a cat running free in the house. I was working on replacing the wadding in a quilt and had, naively, spread out the materials on the floor, that being the largest flat surface at hand. Nysse of course immediately occupied the felt as a cat bed. Which shouldn’t have surprised me, but I had lost the habit of thinking about what I’m doing in terms of “how will Nysse react to this”.

Sometimes Nysse cries and cries to go out of the house, and when I take him out, he just goes and sits somewhere.

Sometimes we don’t even get further than the front staircase before he decides that he’s “out enough” and happy there, and stops to wash himself and lick his toes.

We have somehow acquired an infestation of fruit flies in the bathroom – on the bathroom mirror, more precisely – and I can’t seem to get rid of them.

There’s a glass of red wine vinegar to attract and kill the flies, and every couple of days I pour out the vinegar with a few dozen dead flies on the bottom, and they never seem to get fewer.

I don’t understand what they eat, and I guess that’s the problem, because as long as there is something here for them, they’ll keep multiplying. I’ve thoroughly cleaned the floor drain, removed the small garbage bin, removed the ecosystem-in-a-jar that they might find nice with its humid air. I’ve removed the head of Adrian’s electric toothbrush, which I’ve seen the fruit flies land on occasionally – maybe for the fruity-tasting toothpaste. I can’t think of what else it could be.

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.