Asphalt is not a thing that normally makes me happy, but when it’s all newly cleaned after half a year of gravel everywhere, I do feel pretty glad about it. Look at all this smoothness.

Did you know that the backs of the petals of white anemones are a pale purple? I was hoping for better photos than this but the light was wrong.

As beautiful this year as they are every year.

The white anemones in the garden are flowering, so Adrian and I went to the anemone place in Hägerstalund, hoping they would be doing the same here. They were indeed.

I took photos, while Adrian gathered “sticks” (mostly larger than himself). And we climbed on things.

Still no sign of Nysse, so I went out looking for him. Saw two other cats, a squirrel, plenty of spring flowers, but no Nysse.

PS: He did come back, late in the afternoon! Phew. Now I’ve bought a GPS tracker for him. Both in case he does this again, and because I want to find out where he normally ranges.

Nysse is AWOL again. This time it’s been more than 24 hours, and unless he turns up in the next few moments, he’ll be gone for two nights.

Just like last time, it happened after he walked with one of us (me, this time) away from home and then at one point decided to not keep me company any more and run off on his own instead, and then apparently got lost.

I wonder how he can get so lost within a few hundred metres from home. Is he super distracted when walking with a human? Did we go so fast that he couldn’t pay enough attention to where he was going? Cats are supposed to have a great sense of smell – couldn’t he just follow his own tracks home? Cats are near-sighted compared to humans – is the other side of a street really so far for him that he doesn’t recognize it? And has he truly never been that far from home on his own?

I’m worried because he’s been gone longer than ever before. But I’m also not worried because he came back last time. He’ll probably be really hungry when he gets back.

The whole area where the neighbours intend to build a house is a giant rock. It’s kind of hard to see from this angle (and I’m not going to go on the roof for a better photo) but the area that looks like a bunch of large white worms is all rock, and there’s more under the ground around it. I guess there will be noisy work coming up soon.

Nysse came home with a hunting trophy today. He’s brought home a mouse before (when I was away and couldn’t take photos so I only have second hand info about this) but this time it was a dead baby squirrel.

I’ve heard that some cats show off their catches to their families. Nysse didn’t. If anything, I got the impression that he didn’t want me to get too close to it. He was giving off strong vibes of bloodlust mixed with playfulness. He took the poor thing to the kitchen and then batted it around among the chair legs for a long while. (It was very dead already.)

I had meetings all afternoon so I didn’t see what he did with it. Only afterwards I found the squirrel’s tail but not the rest of it. Either he took it out of the house again, or ate it without a trace, or hid it somewhere. I hope it’s not the latter. He doesn’t usually hide things, luckily.

Click here to see a photo. It’s not bloody or anything, but if you’d rather not see a cute dead animal, then don’t.