Wednesdays are office days and errand days, and regularly turn into yarn shopping days. I took a different way home from the yarn shop, walking across Söder to Slussen, which is all a giant construction site.

We supplement Nysse’s dry food with tuna, and occasionally with fancy wet food from little plastic sachets. He eats all of it with gusto – I’m not even sure if he has any preferences.

The best thing about the dry food is how easy it is to handle. We have a plastic container in the pantry which we occasionally top up from a 10 kg bag in the basement. When it’s time to feed Nysse, we just scoop up a reasonable-seeming amount into his bowl. No fuss, no mess. The least good thing about the dry food is its smell.

The best thing about the tuna is that it feels, psychologically, like real cat food. Cats did not evolve to eat dry pellets. It’s a bit messier because of all the cans, and because Nysse doesn’t eat an entire can in a single meal so the rest has to be refrigerated.

The best thing about the fancy wet food is that it looks and smells like actual food. The worst thing about it is the sachets. It’s really hard to get the food out, and despite all my squeezing, I can always feel lumps of food still in there. The lumps are the meatiest parts, so throwing those away feels like such a waste. I’ve ended up cutting the sachets open all the way around and “serving” them to Nysse on his little place mat. Once we run out of these, I might look for something more user-friendly.

I got a better explosion photo today. That’s the only good thing I can say about them.

I try to hold back with the knitting posts because I imagine you all get tired of them, but now I see the last progress photo of the cardigan was six weeks ago, so I can get away with one.

I had planned a colour fade which looked good when the yarns were still in hanks, but now that I’m knitting it, there is less gradual fading than I had hoped and more of a striped effect.

The fade is much softer and, you know, actually fade-y, on the reverse of the fabric. I’m starting to understand why so many of the knitting patterns that incorporate a colour fade are made in reverse stockinette or garter stitch. But I still like the overall impression of the right side much better – the colours look more brilliant and the yarn more lustrous. So I guess I’ll have to deal with the stripey fade.

Nysse is willing to sleep on any softish thing on a flattish surface. Sofa, someone’s lap, carpet, a fleece hoodie thrown somewhere, even a newspaper. I put a folded-up quilt on the sofa table for him, to make him leave my Saturday newspaper alone.

The only thing he completely refused to sleep in was the soft, pretty cat bed that I bought for him. I ended up giving it away because he wouldn’t even give it a chance. Perhaps it smelled wrong?

The explosions are pretty annoying. Or rather, the explosions themselves are kind of cool but everything around them is annoying. The loud alarms before and after – and then the horrible clatter of large rocks being thrown into a metal container. The latter goes on forever. One single explosion makes for a lot of rocks to be cleared away.

The neighbours clearing their yard for building a house are about to start blowing things up. Red things that I associate with explosions are sticking up from the rock in their yard.

An inspector of some sort came by earlier this week to inspect our house and install some kind of device to measure vibrations. Apparently we’re close enough to be in the danger zone for vibration damage, theoretically.

Board game night at work (Urb-it, not tretton37). I brought a bunch of games and we ended up playing Robo Rally, Dixit and Dream On. Robo Rally was chaotic because everyone was distracted. We played a bit, then someone got a phone call, then we played some more, then the food arrived, then we played more… Towards the end of the night we picked Dream On, which people were quite sceptical about because of how simplistic it sounded. And they played like Adrian did when we first got the game: throwing out cards more or less randomly, aiming to get as many cards played as possible. Which led to a miserable but entertaining failure when it came to remembering the cards afterwards.

From mice and baby squirrels, Nysse has moved on to birds. He carried in a dead bird and set about to play with it, like with the squirrel. We did not want dead bird all over our floors, so we separated Nysse from the bird (despite his protests), took them both out into the garden and closed the door. Once he got his trophy back, he stopped fighting us and started playing, swatting and pouncing. When he tired of it and came indoors again, it didn’t take more than a minute for a magpie to pick up the leftovers.

I have very mixed feelings about this. I hadn’t expected quite this much killing. But I’m also not prepared to lock up the cat and let it live in misery the rest of its life.

I dropped my macro lens and now it doesn’t focus properly any more. :-( I hope it can be repaired.