We had some hours of free time today, which I spent walking Riga’s Old Town lengthways and crossways.

Among all the pretty buildings, I ran across a bakery that sold a great variety of goods that immediately reminded me of Estonian baked goods. None were quite like Estonian pastries and cakes, but there was nevertheless a kind of similarity there, that immediately made the cakes feel familiar, and much more appetizing than most Swedish cakes. I bought both spinach pastries and curd cake, which turned out very useful later, given the rather lousy packed lunch we got.

Note for any future visits to Riga: Andreass Bekereja in Turgonu iela.

Yesterday was all full of knowledge. Today was a teambuilding day, with social activities and a nice dinner at the end. There were multiple activities to choose from. I opted for kayaking, and got to see the parks around the canal again, from a different angle.

We started out in the Daugava river itself, among waves and big boats. This part was quite challenging, especially when it came to steering – the waves and wind and the flowing river seemed to always be conspiring to push us off course. The canal by comparison was placid and easy.

Much conferencing during the day.

The best part by far was a web app security workshop where we got to hack a web app with a bunch of vulnerabilities built into it. It was a lot of fun; I’ve always wanted to try this kind of thing – SQL injection and script injection and accessing other users’ shopping carts and so on.

During our free time before dinner I went for a walk through the little parks along the canal. I don’t know about the rest of Riga, but the parks were lovely. More than just green spaces, they had sculptures, fountains, colourful plantings etc.

There is something magical about the combination of greenery and water. Greenery is nice; water is nice; the two together are more nice than the sum of the parts.

An evening flight to Riga, in a noisy little propeller plane, for a company-wide conference.

Soft clothes, uncut hair, usually somewhat grimy and with scabbed-over knees. He doesn’t seem to notice dirt much, neither on himself nor his clothes. I have certain standards in that regards, so I usually inspect him before I put him to bed in the evening. Quite often I find his clothes so dirty that they go straight into the laundry hamper, no matter how favourite they are.

Another part of the evening routine is the application of various creams. He has dry skin, although that’s become much better after we left winter behind us. He also has one molluscum wart – just one! – that has been bothering him since last summer already. The wart itself sometimes itches a bit but really isn’t too bad, but unfortunately it irritates the skin around it so Adrian keeps getting eczema in the crook of his elbow. We salve it and it goes away, and then it comes back again. Both Adrian and I are quite fed up with it now.

Adrian likes climbing trees, and has often told me he wishes we had better climbing trees in our garden. But the ones we do have are pretty OK too. And of course he climbs every climbable tree we find when we’re out in a forest or park somewhere.

The era of Bamse is over and Adrian has graduated to reading Kalle Anka instead. When a new Bamse issue arrives he still reads it, but is done with it in five minutes. And he no longer spends all evening reading old issues. Instead, Kalle Anka is the thing.

Of games, Minecraft is his favourite, especially when we play it together. He likes building best, especially tall constructions with towers. I’m more into exploring and mining. In our current world his ongoing projects include a trampoline made out of green slime blocks, and a sniper tower that he wants to use for shooting monsters from a safe distance. (We’re not very good at fighting monsters and I regularly get killed when I run into skeletons, and then we have to restore from a save point and that is annoying. We do want some monster excitement in our world, but ideally all the monsters should be clearly weaker than us.)

And Pokemons, of course. He’s saved up so he could buy a used iPhone on which he can play Pokemon Go. We paid enough to get him a phone, because before long he will be walking home from school on his own. That was about half the cost of a modern-enough iPhone, and he contributed the other half. It remains to be seen if it ends up like Ingrid’s “Pokemon Go phone” which was initially so very important and which she now almost never actually uses for Pokemon Go.

Random fact: he likes carrying out small lumps of Blu Tack-like putty and playing with them: squeezing, pulling, rolling, pressing them onto his thumbnail or an uneven patch of wall, etc. I think he probably keeps one in every pocket.

Ingrid’s class had a kind of “open house” day today: parents were invited to attend classes, and groups of kids acted as teachers. We got one lesson about energy (and how it can be transformed but not created or destroyed), one about Nordic geography, and one in art (during which we had to speed draw superheroes).

I now cycle to work three days a week. I learned my lesson – that the shortest route is not necessarily the best one – and now cycling is a pleasure again. The weather is great for cycling, warm and dry. It’s hot during the day but the mornings are cool enough. The cycle paths are mostly straight, wide and uncrowded. And edged with trees – as I note with joy almost daily – so I arrive at work (and home) sweaty but rested.

Scientific studies have shown that just seeing trees is good for people’s health, and I feel this every day.

This month’s big new thing is the new haircut of course. It’s taken me a while to get used to it, but now Ingrid no longer looks like a stranger. She herself is amazed by how easy to care for the shorter hairdo is – how she can wash her hair in the morning and have it almost dry before it’s time to leave for school.

Ingrid’s mornings are otherwise getting lazier. She wakes when the alarm goes off at seven, but it usually takes half an hour before she actually gets out of bed. The bed is so fluffy and cosy, she says. So she lies there and fiddles with Instagram och Snapchat and such. Once she does get up, she’s fast and efficient, and her breakfasts are light, so she still gets out the door in time.

Instead she stays up later and later in the evenings. We used to have nine as the cutoff for good night stories – if she wasn’t in bed by then, no story. Then we shifted to reading until nine-thirty, so as long as she got in bed at least five minutes before that, Eric or I would read for her. Now she isn’t even in bed before ten on most evenings, and stories really aren’t happening any more.

In the evenings, she likes listening to The Hunger Games. That’s because she’s not allowed to play games or watch movies late at night, which is what she would prefer to do. When she isn’t playing, she likes to draw cute pictures, especially of cats.

At school, with less than a month to go until school’s out, there’s less and less actual schoolwork happening and more and more events of all kinds. The kids from the entire school ran the Järvastafetten relay race (together with kids from other school); they had an “open classrooms” morning where kids held lessons for the parents; and outings of various kinds.

Bits and pieces:

• Making plans for Comic Con Stockholm, which takes place in September, and thinking about how to earn more money in time for it, so she can buy more stuff there
• Broadening her range of dinners and cooking from new recipes rather than the same old five favourites
• Trying out the Swedish “Saturday candy” thing

Ingrid’s scout group are now deemed old enough to get their saw and ax badges.

It’s too hot to eat breakfast in full sun on the deck, so we moved the furniture out onto the unmown lawn.

It’s not even mid-May yet and the weather is as hot as it normally gets in high summer. Last year we had no summer; this year we almost skipped spring and went straight from winter into summer.