We’re subscribing to Linas Matkasse meal kits again, since spring/early summer, and liking it a lot. The whole setup is very convenient. Cooking an entire dinner with no planning and no shopping is such a time-saver.

Each week there are a lot of recipes to choose from, and we never struggle to find things we like. It’s fun to cook and eat recipes that we otherwise wouldn’t think of. We like some of them more than others, but haven’t disliked a single one. We’re saving a lot of the recipes for later reuse. A few have ingredients that might be hard to source elsewhere – such as dry falafel mix, or pre-prepared korma spice mix – but most only use stuff you can find in any supermarket.

The one thing that doesn’t always work out well is the heat level. Lina’s chefs like a lot more chilli in their food than we do. They send us these little sachets of chilli flakes, one teaspoon each. The recipes sometimes use the whole teaspoon, sometimes half. We use half at most – but more likely none, and replace it with sambal oelek. Flavour-wise it’s not quite the same thing as the flakes, because it’s got that vinegary touch, but I like it better in most dishes. Because the chilli in it is crushed, it makes for a smoother, more even result, with fewer fiery explosions in the mouth.

As a result, the little baggies of chilli flakes keep piling up, to the point where I’m struggling to find space for them in my spice drawer. I think I might take them to the office and try to give them away to people.

Embroidered embellishments for a wool skirt.

I was originally aiming to let the embroidery on each curved piece follow its shape and contours. For the larger pieces, I thought latticework would be a better way to fill the surface. And now, when I was starting this latest large blue one, I couldn’t let go of the idea of echoing some of the dotted pattern from the silk fabric. So my originally quite contained design is now sprawling all over the place. Extra everything.

I hope, but I’m not entirely sure, that it’ll work out when I assemble it all. Hopefully the colours and the similar shapes are enough to keep it all together – or maybe it’ll be a messy jumble of disparate parts. Maybe it’s time to try it out, even though not all the parts are finished.

The good thing is that it’s all entirely modular, and I should be able to easily get more of the fabrics, if needed. If I don’t like it, I can discard any parts that don’t work – use them for something else – and make new ones with a different design.

The Lego version of the Taj Mahal isn’t quite as detailed as the real thing, but is pretty darn intricate and cleverly designed.

Credit: Zorka Sojka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Ashish2403, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Credit: Zorka Sojka, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adrian appears to have outgrown Legos. For now – it’s happened before, but then he became interested again.

We borrowed a large Lego set to build a model of the Taj Mahal, back in January. Adrian was engaged at first, but the build has languished for months. I’ve even tried to encourage him by pre-sorting the pieces, but even that didn’t help.

The completionist in me can’t tear down a half-finished build, so I took it over from him a few weeks ago. It was a good distraction while I was at my most worried about Nysse. Now I don’t need the distraction any more, and it’s not my favourite pastime, but I still want to finish it.

To make things more interesting, I’ve challenged myself to build ambidextrously. It’s interesting to see how naturally the right hand does the work while the left one stays still. I’m holding a tiny piece in my left hand, attaching it on top of a larger piece in my right hand – and unless I specifically focus on doing the opposite, it’s the right hand that moves the larger piece in place while the left hand stays passive, holding the little piece still and waiting for the right one to do the job.

Walking with Nysse I end up in places in the garden that I would never choose to walk through otherwise. Such as the space under the huge philadelphus bush. Plenty of space for a cat; full of scratchy branches at chest and face height for a human.

One can find interesting things this way, though. Like the remains of long-dead birds.

I like skeletons. Especially when the local wildlife have kindly picked them clean.

Nysse has a list of exercises we’re supposed to be doing with him, to strengthen the muscles around his pelvis and hips. It’s going so-so.

He is really, really not interested.

One of the exercises is to have him walk over low obstacles, like cavaletti for horses. Ingrid and I made him a course out of coffee mugs and rulers, and tried to tempt him to walk over them by holding food in front of him (and of course giving it to him when he steps across). Our tiny course had three bars, and we managed to coax him back and forth twice. On the fifth crossing he turned his head away and was not interested any more.

Today I tried with his favourite luxury wet food. Same result. Normally he gobbles the food down like a starving animal, but when he has to walk over obstacles at someone else’s prompting, it’s not worth it.

The other exercises are no more fun.

He’s going to have to get his exercise the natural way. It’s a good thing that he’s interested in going outdoors, getting off and on beds and stairs, balancing on the edges of planting boxes, etc.

We take leash walks. Nysse leads us to sunny spots in the garden, to the gaps in the fence where he hopes to get through to the neighbours’ garden, to the food tin to signal that he is hungry, and to random tufts of grass that are clearly superior to other similar-looking tufts of grass.

And he leads us to the kitchen table, so that I can lift him up and let him to drink from his favourite plant saucers. I’ve reached the point where I’m considering moving one of the flowerpots to his cage, to see if the plant water is better than clean drinking bowl water even when they are side by side.

He is such a sloppy drinker. It always ends with a puddle next to the saucer. I saw somewhere on the internet that cats learn to drink effectively from other cats. Perhaps Nysse’s parents never taught him proper lapping technique.

Yeah. Not that much walking. I’ve now learned to bring reading material with me on my walks with Nysse. But hey – I can read the morning news standing in the garden just as well as sitting in the sofa.

The slugs have eaten the dahlia, and left mere skeletons of the martagon lilies I planted, but they’ve mostly left the toad lily alone, so I’ve got something flowering there at least!

Nysse and I are now taking physio-approved leashed walks. Walking a cat is, well, not like walking a dog. There is not very much walking involved, really. Initially Nysse toured a part of the garden, perhaps to check that no other cat had taken over his territory. But then he saw a squirrel in the neighbours’ yard, and that was that. The rest of the “walk” he spent crouching in the bushes, watching the squirrel, dearly wishing he could go there and show it who’s boss.

We’ve both had to learn how to handle the leash. I’ve learned to keep slight tension in it when needed, to remind Nysse that it’s there, so he doesn’t suddenly pounce. He’s learned that there are places where we will not go. Like under the neighbour’s fence, for example.

All in all, it’s going pretty well. He’s happy about it, and not pulling on the leash as much as he initially did. And he much prefers peeing outdoors to using the litterbox, which of course makes life easier for me as well.