1. The vet says Lily can have the painkillers long term: she started on them for a sore throat but they helped her sore joints more and they’ve made her a bouncing puppy dog again :)

2. We have kippers with poached eggs and potato cakes for lunch – yum!

2b. And curry for dinner – double yum!

3. I find the wool floating under the water to be slightly surreal but very beautiful: its halo of fluffiness floating free and shimmering with the slightest movement.

3b. I spun the wool quite tightly but it blooms as it dries, until it looks and feels much softer. I hate the smell of washing new wool but it’s worth it for these transformations.

4. I shift around the ceramics that have set up home in the dining room: moving my new favourites into prime position and putting bad older work away in a box. I find two sets of small wall plaques/tiles that now seem nicer than I originally thought and remember how much I like some of my simple coiled pieces from the start of the year.

5. Rather than leave it on the stairs for us to trip over for the next week, I take the laundered bedding up to the top room – and am rewarded with a Kaufman, stretched out on the bed. (I have a sneaking suspicion that whenever we think the cats are outside, they’re really just in the top room, having a break from us annoying humans and the bumbling dog.) I curl up around him and use him as a purring pillow.

5b. Later, Kaufman has relocated to our bed. When I look in on him, he’s in the deepest sleep I’ve ever seen with his tongue hanging out just a little bit.

5c. So the others don’t feel left out: Tilda going into winter mode and reclaiming the hammock after a summer elsewhere. And Strange is, as always, in strange mode, burrowing between my legs and under my laptop then popping up between me and my screen. She also blocks the frame when I try to take a photo of my sketchbook: I’m evidently just kidding myself if I think I want a photo of my ideas more than one of the cat.

Not a bad day per se, but just about everything went a little bit wrong.

1. The pattern slowly rises away from the base.

1b. The circles, in two small groups, look just right. For once I have the confidence to leave it at that.

1c. I swap the flat circular for little cubes and oh my, it looks so much better.

2. I can see a flicker of movement behind the fence near the chickens and brace myself for a rat – but then Strange’s little head pops up. Much nicer!

3. The perfect trainers for me, reduced to half price.

0. To have the pleasure of being kept awake by a twit-twooing owl.

1. One of our lovely neighbours puts out our forgotten recycling bins.

2. The bed is a warm brown, rather than the hard cracked weedy grey it was earlier. One hundred onion sets neatly set out in five rows of twenty.

2b. A courgette ready to take home – and more that should make it before the frosts.

2c. The sun on the distant hills.

3. It’s on the verge of being too spicy – but not quite. (Well, not for me anyway.)

1. I play with fonts for a logo design. I find one I like and tweak it to make it cleaner – then add a little smiley face for good measure. I always smile when I type smiley face emoticons :)

2. Tilda is in a terrible playful mood. I pull her around the floor on the bathmat while she rolls on her back and grabs at the air.

3. The dogs grow bored as R and I grasshopper-chat about ancient preservation, bleeding edge technology and everything in between. Around us, the world grows dark.

4. I wind the yarn onto a niddy noddy and count up the threads: about 350m of between 2- and 3-ply in a lovely, textured sea blue tweed.

1. We both wake up from deep sleeps.

2. I’d got out of the habit of warming chocolate muffins but after having one at my mum’s last week, I stick my Sunday afternoon treat in the microwave. After 15 seconds, it’s perfectly gooey.

3. The collared dove sits on the bird feeder, alert to our approach. It flies away as we continue down the path but we obviously don’t look that scary: two more doves circle and land on the feeder before we’re passed it.

4. The black dog runs to us in the banana-style that Lily adopts when she’s very happy.

1. After the ones in Southport last weekend, John has an obsession with bacon butties. He gets up to make them for breakfast before I have to leave for my meeting.

2. My £10 cashback comes in the form of two fivers.

3. The setting sun shines softly on the cow’s field but in the wing mirrors, it glows an intense gold.

3b. “Why don’t we get two aubergine pizzas?” There is some disagreement of whether or not we need that much but when it arrives, it’s nearly all hoovered up and everyone has their fill.