healthy (?) steps taken

1. I sent an email to the cat behaviorist!

I wrote my proposed text on a piece of paper and handed it to Wax with a red pen. Then I typed and sent her revised version (she fixed my Finnish and wrote a better concise description of what our problem is about).

I managed to do that because Sipuli suddenly decided to be an escape artist after weeks of not much interest in sneaking through the door when we come and go, and she chased Tristana up the stairs and hissed at her. So on the minus side: she followed and she did hiss back at Tristana's hysterical hissing. But on the plus side, she didn't attack. She was doing that thing where they lift up one paw as a threat, but not coming too close. And even better: Tristana was a lot less scared. She didn't pee on anything, she didn't stay hiding under the bed, and she came back downstairs just about twenty minutes later and slept on my lap the rest of the evening like normal.

2. I asked my local friend and my work friend from Turku - in other words, my only two real life friends - if they would like to meet up soon. Sissela and I had tentatively decided on this weekend but had to put it off because she had to go to her parents' and Wax and I had to do errands. And I'm going to hopefully meet Ella for coffee in a little over a week. It's never easy for me to make plans to go out and see people, but I'm looking forward to it.

3. I guess that was all actually. Well, except I did do a little meal planning and cooking by myself, but that started several weeks ago. Wax is still too depressed to do it with me, and I can't manage a plan for every day by myself, but we haven't run out of sandwiches on the days between yet.

I could use that much basil in one week, easily

In Finland dried oregano is shaken like a topping over finished pizzas the way you might put extra salt on your movie theater popcorn. There are giant oregano shakers available for this purpose, the way you have ketchup or hot sauce bottles in some restaurants in America.

(In Finland you rarely find ketchup bottles even at places that serve burgers. They do put the ketchup on burgers generally, but they do it in the kitchen. However, this doesn't stop ketchup from being a common Finnish plebe/redneck alternative to spaghetti sauce.)

Anyway, the point I was coming to was this: we have two supermarkets in town, and the largest quantity you can buy dried oregano in are little milk carton packages that hold about half a liter (2 cups).

But this does not extend to any other dried herbs, even the to my mind equally or more important basil. The largest amount of dried basil I can buy in town is a little envelope that contains about two tablespoons.

Of course I can still get dried basil - there's bigger supermarkets in the next town and in Turku, and you can have an order from the big supermarket delivered for pickup to its local little sister in the same chain, so I could have all the deli delights stocked in the Turku region delivered if I wanted to go to the trouble to make the online order. And in fact I can order bigger quantities of spices by weight from one of those specialty spices shops, which I started doing during the pandemic and found to be quite convenient, which is how I happened not to notice that I'd finally run out of basil.

But if I've just noticed today that I accidentally let myself run out of dried basil, which I usually keep in a mason jar on the lowest shelf because, unlike Finland, I use it and dried oregano in more or less equal quantities... well, then I have to just fill the cart with a bunch of little envelopes. I wouldn't mind so much if the envelopes weren't plastic, like all the other unnecessary and excessive packaging in our lives.

The other puzzling thing Finnish people put on pizza is fresh arugula (rocket). They put it on after the whole pizza is cooked, like a garnish, so by the time it gets to the table it's all wilted and pathetic.