Sorry for the unannounced blog silence yesterday - the little cat gave us a not-so-little health scare, and that ate the weekend and my extra brain capacity yesterday.

Fortunately she is much better again, and it was not something utterly serious like a tumour, but "only" a very severe eye infection. 

And yes, you are getting a cat pic.

The vet confirmed our estimate that she must be around 20 years old now, so we always hear the clock ticking softly in the background. For now, though, she is mostly back to her normal self, keen on food (more than would be good for her), often up for a cuddle, and moving slowly and with care - no wonder, as she's almost blind at this point.

Well. Nothing utterly new, or such things. I'm more or less trying to prep the next event (a workshop for a volunteer group at a museum), get the image database updated and finally transferred to the new system (fingers crossed nothing will explode there), and try to get more done on the other open or have-to-be-maintenanced things.

Yesterday evening was mainly spent on preparing a new batch of cat food, so Madame can go on having food she enjoys (a little too much, at times), and we spent part of our lunch break today outside photo-hunting insects and obsidentifying them.

Have I mentioned that app before? It's what we use these days to identify plants or animals that we don't know. It's usually quite good and quite reliable - sometimes there are hallucinations, but these are typically easy to catch. The app is called "Obsidentify", here's the website with information about it, and by using it you become a citizen scientist (or, in this case, more a citizen science minion) helping to track species and, via that, climate change and other changes in habitats.

We now know that there's a special kind of aphids hanging out on willows. In our case, that's also the meeting place and orgy location for a lot of Asian Ladybugs... or, as we call it, the "Ladybug Swinger Club".

The little hedgehog is about ready to roam free again - with continued support in form of food offers. (There's just too few insects out and about for them to find enough food when just foraging. Feel free to google about the loss of insect mass in the last years, but sit down before you do.) So we built a cat-safe hedgehog food station and it had the first trial run yesterday.

This morning, when I went to take out the food bowl, I found this: 

I had not thought that hedgehogs were such scathing restaurant critics! Good thing the little prickly lady does not have internet access, or we'd probably have found a zero star google review as well.

(Hedgehog station told me that they quite like to do that. I guess it's no problem when you are roaming and just drop your thank-you where you ate the bugs, but dropped in a plate, it does have a defintitive comical value.) 

Here I am, back at work, the cat hanging out on the desk (over my arm, of course), and me catching up. Not quite at a snail's pace - but then, they actually are not that slow when they want to get somewhere. 

We have quite a lot of grapevine snails in the garden, to our delight. I'm not so fond of the slugs, but the snails are all welcome. (It probably helps that we don't have a lot of things growing that are attractive to snails and slugs, and/or so delicate they will get eaten up.)

This one here is clearly on the way somewhere. Maybe to some snail meetup - a few days ago, there was a group of three of them very close to each other...

We have a red and a red-grey squirrel in our area, with both of them rather frequently seen on the trees in the surrounding gardens... and the red-grey squirrel also in our garden. It not only tries to hide nuts there in the autumn, it also sometimes visits the compost heap, as you can see in this slightly blurry and also not very good photo: 

The reason for this is an old, bleached bone lying on top of the heap. The squirrel goes there to gnaw on the bone (you can clearly see the tooth marks) - we think it might be for the calcium. We had a bone on top of the heap a while ago, by chance, and realised that it was a squirrel snack, so when one re-appeared in the compost (after being buried for a bit) I pulled it out and moved it up top. 

Where it was almost instantly appreciated.

Sorry for yesterday's blog silence - I was travelling, and I was all out of internet when I tried to post something to the blog. (In theory, there was wifi on the train - but the connection was very sketchy and not enough to load a single site.)

Apart from the very helpful pro tip in the title, here's something nice and fruity among all the current doom and gloom: Tasting history has taken a look into Nostradamus's book and came up with... a cherry jelly recipe. 

So if you'd like something to brighten up your toast... here you go. In case you prefer reading to watching, you can also take a look at the backstory, and the recipe, on the Tasting History website.

It does sound really nice! Now our little cherry tree only has to deliver next year...

I've had a wonderful, if quite short, time in Uppsala at the Material Literacy workshop. It was planned as a rather short stint, but ended up being even shorter due to a massive train delay. Fortunately I could follow the part I'd have missed otherwise on Zoom! 

It was wonderful to meet some old friends and colleagues again,  and meet new people. There were fruitful discussions and lots of looks in detail at wonderful textiles. Hopefully there will be more on the topic of material literacy - I think it's a very helpful term for being able to read objects, and having some properly structured, thought-out lessons or schooling on that will surely be very useful for many people.

We finished with a little excursion into the church museum, and I was very happy to see the Golden Gown again.. It's been so many years since I was there last.

On the way back, there was time for a short stroll through Stockholm (well, some of it!) and a bit of food shopping before going back in the night train. I managed to find a nice small Christmas market there, so back at home, we were able to enjoy some freshly imported ostkaka:

I had not heard of that before coming across it on the Christmas market, but I got to try it there, and it was very nice. It's served warm, with the option of adding whipped cream and jam or something fruity, which we did when we had it here. Definitely recommend it!

The way back had just a little delay overall, so I was home in the afternoon, one hour later than planned originally. Now there's no travel until the end of the work year... which is also nice. There's a stack of things waiting to go to the post tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to doing some maintenance work during the winter break. The cat also approves to have her cuddle spot on the desk appropriately staffed again!