Cimorene

It's been cold, -11 to -16° C (3-12° F), for a week now, and the bird feeders are extremely active. We have a seed feeder hanging in the front apple tree with peanuts, sunflower seeds, oats, raisins, and dried worms in it, and a ball feeder down in the garden with those lard balls full of seed, plus a giant pinecone coated in lard and seeds back in the other apple tree. There are more birds every day! Jackdaws and sometimes magpies at the ball feeder, and a mixed flock of little birds with great tits and blue tits and some blackbirds frequently at the seed feeder. But the bullfinches have been showing up there more and more too, and now there's a whole flock of them and a European greenfinch mixed in. Love those guys.

Snookums has been exploring the yard on a leash being cautiously adventurous the last few days of sunny warmth. The healthiest apple tree is in magnificent bloom, and last night at 11:30 we started digging out the overgrown pavers that make several paths through the yard and this tiny patio (it was cool and dim but not dark, perfect working conditions if one didn't have to be awake in the morning). It turned a bit archaeological as they are all much larger than we realized, so there's going to be more time devoted to digging them out than anticipated.

There was a really noisy hooded crow looking over our yard and the neighbors' when we came outside today, and it was talking so loud I started imitating it immediately after, like an annoying sibling or cousin, yes, but I have precedent! I do this all the time to the cats, so it's habit! Anyway, my crow noises are MUCH lower quality than my cat noises, but I was recognizable enough that the crow was reacting with... curiosity, I think; it fluttered about, moved from spot to spot inside the tree, and tried out different sounds with some spaces in between before flying away, croaking the whole time. Then a while later what I think was a different crow appeared and started talking again, but from farther away, so it was perhaps not really related. But I like to think the crow went and got someone else and brought them to witness the imitator.

The R-kioski that is the central/default package pickup location for regular mail and several other delivery options (eg the slightly cheaper domestic freight inside long-distance buses... which weird that they're still doing that now I think about it?) has restricted their hours right now, closes at 7 pm on weekdays... that is truly shocking. Not really a problem though. It's in easy walking distance and I could go at any time, but I waited for Wax to be done with work yesterday and we walked together and picked up a new box of insulin pen needles for Snookums.

We still have several more packages to pick up in the near future: bunny kibble (brand is important because dwarf angoras have higher protein requirements than other bunnies, from both the dwarfism and all the extra fur they grow) from Musti ja Mirri, tea tree oil from The Body Shop, a plastic soprano recorder from Thomann.

We also have to buy more fresh greens for bunny salads. Fresh greens just do not keep very long and there's nothing that can be done about that (short of building the greenhouse). We might order them for pickup later, but it doesn't seem necessary yet.

We should probably stop leaving out birdseed soon; the birdsong is changing already and the crocuses are in bloom, even though there's a bit of snow on the ground now and it may still snow this year. I didn't know this before, but Wax says it makes wild birds unhealthy if they eat it through the season when their natural foods are plentiful. I don't want to stop seeing birds through my window though, so when that happens I will have to put a birdbath of some kind out. Maybe I can attract them to nesting materials? I could put tufts of wool and angora fuzz out on the branches near where the feeders are now. Does one make a birdbath or buy one? What does one make it out of?

In the last few days the magpies have been by more often, and three days ago Wax spotted two new species for the first time, the Eurasian siskin (Finnish: Vihervarpunen, lit. green sparrow; Swedish: Grönsiska, lit. green siskin), which is... really yellow and not green, although it has a greenish tinge to it, like... chartreusey yellow, like a new birch leaf perhaps?; and the brambling or mountain finch (Fi: järripeippo - peippo is finch, järri is absent from my dictionary; Sv: bergfink), which is notably very orange. I've seen at least two mountain finches every day since then, plus larger numbers of bullfinches - up to five males at a time. (There's still a mixed flock of great tits and blue tits nearly all the time, so much so that we've taken to referring to the window as Tit TV.)

( Portraits of the new stars )

Also, partly because sunset is now before 4 pm, I would love to hang up string lights both indoors and out as well as the... I think... five? pierced brass six-pointed star window lanterns (I now have more star lanterns than windows unless you count the bathroom), but completely lack the energy and executive function (XF???) to arrange this. We definitely don't have the kind that go outside at all anyway, but I think even finding hooks and extension cords and lightbulbs for the indoor ones is beyond me at this point.

Our household (or... Wax and I) have descended into a kind of fug. Since we failed to find all the documents the lawyer wanted a couple of weeks ago there's been no developments of any kind (and I thought Wax found them all but she didn't): discomfort, misery, uncertainty if we will even be able to keep this house all remain up in the air; winter is leeching all the energy out of us, the sun is going down before 4 pm daily, and the hundred euros of catfood I ordered specifically to be delivered by an alternate carrier got switched without asking us to the postal service which is currently on strike and not delivering anything possibly until January, so we had to buy the same stuff at a Turku petstore (except costing significantly more).

Doing anything looks either impossible (the stuff that's important isn't within our power to change) or pointless (because it has no effect on the important stuff). For example, we've both been mopey and listless as well as stressed and anxious and now it's untidy enough here that I need to tidy, basically, everything. But this too feels pointless because the tidiest it's possible to make our current residence still looks like a disaster because there isn't room in here for all our stuff. It's not actually pointless anymore because at this point we're at increased risk of tripping on things or breaking them or whatever, but even after I'm done I know it's going to continue looking an anxiety-causing level of chaotic. We can't even put up bookshelves in the finished rooms on our side to hold stuff because, apart from the drywall and assembled kitchen cabinets and pipes and plumbing fixtures and power tools everywhere, baseboard electrical wiring still has to be installed which means all of the walls will need to be got at.

At its tidiest, the kitchen still doesn't have enough space for baking unless I temporarily move the kettle and toaster and recycling and a box of catfood that doesn't fit in any cabinets out into the hallway in order to fold out a leaf on the table. (I'm not a stress baker, but I have been known to bake things for comfort. Especially cookies around the armpit of the year, which we're now entering.)

Some things that haven't changed are that Snookums is still preventing me from sleeping through the night by waking me for food or because he's bored about one day in three, and the BB and Snookums are still regularly but unpredictably refusing to eat their food, or willing to eat only each others' food. This fills me with anxiety because he's ingesting carbs from her food and he's supposed to have none, and she's ingesting phosphorus from his food that she's not supposed to have and not getting the phosphorus binders that she needs. But their health doesn't seem to be affected by this, at least.

Actually the only thing that really has changed is probably that I got around to hanging up two birdfeeders on the corner of the gazebo outside the window by our computers, and humans and felines alike are enjoying seeing a huge quantity of great tits, blue tits, willow tits, and bullfinches, plus periodic visits from the pair of magpies I'm a fan of. No crows or jackdaws have visited the feeder yet, but there are plenty of both in town, so my fingers are crossed for that.