The ten-day posting gap from October 10th to 19th is now filled with posts. If you missed any of them, you can find them all here:

Daily: 2105 – the house is cold
Daily: 2104 – Kinnekulleleden, day 4
Daily: 2103 – Kinnekulleleden, day 3
Daily: 2102 – Kinnekulleleden, day 2
Daily: 2101 – Kinnekulleleden, day 1
Daily: 2100 – making chestnut creatures
Daily: 2099 – gloomy
Daily: 2098 – hole in the ground
Daily: 2097 – steam coming off the deck
Daily: 2096 – we have wasps

I’ll be migrating this blog to a new server soon. Hopefully you won’t notice anything, but if you come by and notice that some recent posts are missing or that things are otherwise not working quite as usual, then don’t panic, I’ll have it back to normal soon.

Sorry for not posting. I’ve been away on a four-day hike and had some other things to keep me busy in the evenings. I’ll be filling in the gap soon.

I have been on a reading binge, neglecting just about everything I can neglect without feeling really, really bad about it – including workouts, blogging and laundry.

I still like paper books – old dog, new tricks, all that – but I am gradually getting more comfortable with the Kindle reader. It no longer feels like second best. Binge reading, for example, is an area where the Kindle beats paper books hands down. I saw a book recommendation, downloaded a sample, and bought the book within an hour. When I finished that book and wanted more, a few taps got me the next one, and then the next one after that. No searching, no waiting for days for a delivery.

The Kindle also handles better with one hand, for example when I’m reading lying down and need the other hand to support my head. Or with no hands at all, when I balance the book on my thighs because my hands are busy knitting. Some books don’t deserve my full attention but I still want to finish them. Can’t do that with a paper book. (Am I still “handling” the book when no hands are involved?)

I read differently with the Kindle.

It’s harder to skim backwards and forwards. With a paper book I can easily flip back a few chapters to look up some detail. I can usually remember roughly how far back that part was – how many centimetres back in the book. With the Kindle I have much less context about where I am. The e-reader can show some metrics for this – how many percent I’ve read, for example. But I would never have an intuitive feeling for how many percent or pages I’d have to scroll backwards to get back to something I’ve already read. So I’m less likely to do so.

Recently I turned those percentages off, anyway, so that they wouldn’t constantly remind me how much I have left of the book. You can’t do that with a physical book. The constantly diminishing amount of pages to read is always visible and tangible.

I’m more likely to re-read a page with the Kindle. Sometimes when the action is exciting and I just want to see what happens next, I only skim parts of the page. With the Kindle, I am more likely to notice this and read the page one more time, more slowly and carefully, before flipping to the next page. There’s nothing stopping me from doing the same with a paper book, but it just doesn’t happen. I think it might be because the Kindle page is less dense and contains less text, so one page is just the right amount of text to re-read. Paper book pages are denser and have too much text – re-reading an entire page would be too much.

When I’m a week behind with my blogging, as I am right now, catching up looks hard and blogging becomes a slightly icky task. I want blogging to be fun rather than icky, so I’ll leave the gap for now and catch up later. You’ll have to check below this post to see if and when I succeed.

Plus I now have a whole virtual pile of books that I want to review. The binge was most enjoyable but it’s a good thing that I ran out of books because otherwise I’d never get anything else done.

I’ve been thinking for a while about starting to write down some memories of my childhood here.

Some random memories keep circling in my head, resurfacing again and again. Writing things down tends to get them out of my head.

I generally have a pretty lousy long-term memory. Other people – friends, family – ask me if I remember this or that event or detail, and usually I don’t. Sometimes I have a factual memory that the trip they talk about did happen, but have no personal recollections of it. Sometimes I don’t even have a clue of what they’re talking about.

An old classmate recently linked to his blog posts with memories from school. He remembers teachers’ names and can link events to particular school years. I mostly have no memories of all the things he writes about. But I can remember the “feeling” of the new, young maths teacher we got some time in middle school, and the feeling of the dank basement canteen.

I remember random tidbits, loose fragments, what a particular place or moment or activity felt like. Out of nowhere I can sometimes recall the experience and feeling of cycling down a particular street in London, or what it felt like to be standing on a crowded bus in Tartu.

I wish I had more photos from my childhood; photos tend to jog my memory best. I wish people had smartphones back then and took endless photos of ordinary school days.

Maybe writing down the things I do remember will also jog other memories.

There is a possibility that this mini-project will fade away soon after my vacation ends and I will have to start focusing on work again. We’ll see.

I’m editing my photos from Saturday, which we spent on Fårö. There are a ton of horizons in those photos and a lot of them need straightening. It’s funny how sensitive the human eye (or at least my eye) is to crooked horizons! Some are less than a quarter degree off, and that’s enough for me to notice.

Yes indeed! I have finally adjusted the layout of this blog to work decently on mobile phones, tablets and other small screens. So if you’ve been dragging out your old computer just to read the blog, while what you really wanted to do was curl up in the corner of the sofa with the blog on your phone, your troubles are over! Put away your laptop, take your phone with you to that sofa corner, and enjoy the blog.

I’ve now filled the three-week gap in my daily posts in September, so if you want to catch up and read all about my hike in Jämtland (among other things) then you can start here and then continue with the help of the links to “older posts” at the bottom.

No, I have not given up blogging. My computer was out of commission for nearly two weeks, hence the lack of posts. Now that I can access my photos again, I will work on catching up.

I was away on a ski trip – an exceedingly satisfying one – all of last week, far away from work, housework, and other duties and musts and shoulds. Far away also from things such as wifi and phone networks, so my blogging is lagging. I will be slowly catching up soon. In the meantime, posts will be turning up out of order, so you may have to scroll down a bit if you want to be sure you don’t miss any.