When I was a child, Tartu had two cinemas – Ekraan (“Screen”) and Komsomol. Ekraan was close to where we lived, a few bus stops away, so that was the only one we ever went to.

Ekraan was and is a low, boxy white brick building. Now it has all the conveniences of a modern cinema. But back then it had a single large auditorium, with maybe thirty rows of seats and hardly any rise in the floor. The seats were unpadded, made of thick plywood, dark brown, slightly curved. The cinema sold no drinks and definitely no popcorn, and had no toilet. You always made sure you went to the toilet before leaving home.

Tickets were made of paper. I found this photo of an old ticket from Ekraan at an auction site in Estonia. The row and seat numbers are hand-written. A grumpy middle-aged lady sat in a booth in the entry hall and sold them. When you had chosen a seat, the lady crossed that seat off the seating map, wrote the row and seat numbers on a blank ticket, and tore it off the ticket block.

When the movie was about to start, the grumpy lady moved from the booth to the auditorium entrance and checked your ticket and tore off the stub.

For the first time in a long while, Adrian is building with Legos. First we brought up boxes with his old Legos from the basement, and he rebuilt a few of his old Ninjago sets. Yesterday we went shopping in the Mall of Scandinavia for a new one, which he built today.

Of course the best way to build Legos is sitting on the table. Not on the floor, or the carpet, or the sofa.

The other thing we did in MoS was go to the movies for the first time in many months. Apparently movies are now allowed again, but with every other row empty and two empty seats between each group.

SF (now renamed to Filmstaden) is showing a few classics, now that there are no new releases. We saw Interstellar on the Imax screen. I’ve seen it before and it’s a great movie, and works exceptionally well on a supersized screen and with large sound as well.

I’d forgotten how long the movie is! Three hours, and it ended close to eleven o’clock. No problem for Eric and myself (and Ingrid is away at scout camp) but that is waaay past Adrian’s bedtime. I was worried that he might find Interstellar too impenetrable, that we’d dragged him there and forced him to stay awake at night for something he didn’t even enjoy. But he said he liked the movie and would like to watch it again, at home, with maybe a few more explanations.

Most people in MoS seemed to not care about social distancing and covid-19 at all. People walked so close that they brushed against each other. Young people feeling immortal – “This won’t affect me.”

Meanwhile a study found heart damage in 78% of people who had recovered from covid-19 even though these people were relatively young and most had not even needed hospital care. This is not a disease you want to get.

I’ve never been fond of crowded shops and malls. Now, after months of abstinence, the experience at MoS was more annoying than ever. I will stay away as much as possible in the future.

The bushes that I planted behind the house are coming along very nicely. They mostly don’t look very impressive, but all seem to be growing, which is all I can ask for in the first season.

The hydrangeas, which I’ve seen described in various places as “extremely thirsty” and prone to dying because of lack of water, have behaved like any ordinary newly planted bush and not been particularly thirsty at all. One of the spireas has been much fussier and shown signs of wilting several times. Maybe all the talk about thirsty hydrangeas comes from people growing them indoors.

Both hydrangeas are currently flowering with blue flowers. I wonder if that’s because the soil here is slightly acidic after all, or if it’s due to the soil they came with. I guess next summer will show.

Sounds of summer from my childhood:

The sound of wind in birch trees.
I spent all my summers at my grandma’s summer cottage in Kiisa, together with her and my brother, and my parents for part of the summer. She had a largish garden, mostly cultivated and full of flowerbeds, a kitchen garden, fruit trees and so on.
At the bottom of the garden there was a wilder area with weeds and thistles. At the other edge of that area there was a stand of trees, mostly birches. She had a rope hammock between two of them. We used to lie in it and solve crossword puzzles together.

The sound of lawnmowers.

The distant sound of saws and hammers. I guess our neighbours were building things.

The sound of swallows.

The sound of weather reports on the radio. I cannot remember listening much to the radio much at home, but my grandma had a small battery-operated radio that she used to listen to. News reports, weather reports, other things I cannot remember.
The closest weather station to Kiisa was Kuusiku, so I knew to listen for that word. Vahelduva pilvisusega kuiv ilm. Tuul puhanguline, valdavalt lõunakaarest, 5 kuni 7 meetrit sekundis.

The sound that I currently most strongly associate with summer is the song of blackbirds. They are plentiful around here. I like sitting out on the deck in the evenings and listening to them sing.

They go to sleep before I do.

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.

A meteor crashes into the woods near the small town, except it turns out to be not a meteor but an alien spaceship. The only ones alive are the pilot and her child. Both are taken to a hospital. The pilot dies shortly after, but the child is sneaked away by a nurse who keeps him alive and basically adopts him as her child. But it’s hard to keep a curious, restless alien child a complete secret.

Overall, it’s a nice book, somewhat naive, with a feel-good tone. The couple who adopt the alien boy treat him with endless love and curious wonder. Nobody is ever frustrated or angry; everyone is lovely but flawed in an almost predictable pattern. Adopting the alien heals Molly’s spiritual wounds.

This is a small-scale story, about just a few characters and their small-scale joys and worries. The book doesn’t have any grander ambition and never rises above the late 1960s suburban atmosphere. “Be nice to people who look and act differently.”

I keep digging. And I keep rediscovering techniques for getting through this clay. (I’ve done this before, after all, for the planting along the front of the house.) Shaving slivers off the untouched wall of soil works well, because then the chunk that I cut loose is thin enough to break up easily. The downside is that this risks killing a lot of earthworms. Cutting off larger chunks of earth is more work but spares the worms. When I break up the chunks, they tend to split along natural cracks, and the earthworms just sort of fall out, unharmed.

Earthworms apparently spend sunny days resting, about 20 cm below the surface, curled up into what looks like a knot.

In a few spots I ran across soil that was packed so hard that even my body weight wasn’t enough to get the spade into the ground. It was clay mixed with gravel, and probably compacted by some kind of machinery. The weight of the soil above it, or the weight of a human, would not be enough to pack it so hard. It felt like trying to hack through concrete. Hacking at it with various tools and from various angles finally got me through it.

You know what’s harder to dig through than clay? Large, rusted nails. Unrusted nails would probably be almost as bad, but I haven’t found any so I can’t compare. They might be slightly less work because they wouldn’t be so camouflaged. Unlike rocks, rusty nails don’t make a sound, and you can’t make out their shape and size with the tip of the spade. Unlike roots, you can’t hack through them. The spade just stops.

People who throw building hardware into the soil in a garden deserve their own special circle in hell, where they have to dig through a patch of earth and pick out all the nails, and a demon walks behind them and makes new nails materialize in the soil that they’ve already dug through. Forever and ever.

Hey, look, a book review! I haven’t written any in a while, but this series that I finished a while ago really deserves one.

Brent Weeks’ Lightbringer is an epic fantasy series that I must have seen recommended somewhere. Reddit maybe? It is quite epic in scale and I won’t even try to summarize it here.

The foundation of the series is its interesting system of magic. People with the right gift (“drafters”) can turn light into a physical substance called luxin. Different colours of luxin have different properties: green is springy, red is flammable, etc. Those who can “draft” multiple colours are called polychromes, and full-spectrum polychromes are the rarest of all.

There’s a complex world and a complex plot and a lot going on, intrigue and battles both magical and mundane, and plenty of personal drama as well.

Things I particularly liked about the series:

• Gavin’s story. Gavin is the Prism – the most powerful man in the world, a polychrome with extra powers, kind of like the pope and an emperor and supreme mage in one. But he has come to this position by deceit, and he is not who everyone thinks he is, and that is causing him major difficulties. The world has major problems, some of which only he can fix, but he’s distracted by his personal problems. Those personal problems include his new-found bastard son Kip, and his tricky relationship with his beloved Karris. And he acquires plenty more problems throughout the series.
• Brent Weeks’ prose. These books contain so many intense, well-wrought phrases and sentences to savour! There are many nuggets of philosophy and life advice, masterfully expressed. I wish I had taken notes, so I could share some here.

Nevertheless my overall impression of the series is more negative than positive. There are some shortcomings in the plotting and world-building. I can look past those. The series has bigger problems.

• The pacing and intensity. The books are cut up into short chapters, and every single chapter tries to be the most intense one. Reading these books, it felt like every chapter ended in a cliffhanger or a life-altering event. It was a constant flow of “I can never be the same person again” and “this changes everything” and “I will never be able to survive this”. It was as if the emotional intensity knob was turned to eleven for nearly every chapter. After a while it became exhausting. I was interested in the story, I wanted to know what happens next, but I had to put the book down for some days to rest – because there was never any rest in the books themselves. My main feeling when finishing the series was one of relief.
• The shift in focus from Gavin to his son Kip and Kip’s friend Teia. Maybe it wasn’t a shift, maybe this was the case from the beginning and I just got the wrong expectations. I started reading what I thought was adult fantasy but after a while had a YA book in front of me instead. Gavin was an adult with a mature mind and complex adult problems. Kip and Teia were teenagers, whose teenage problems I wasn’t particularly interested in.
• And Kip is annoying. Above all, he is annoyigly Mary Sue-ish. He’s a great drafter, just because. OK, I can give him one natural gift. But then he somehow also turns into a masterful leader and tactician – in his late teens, with little to no life experience, and with no one teaching or guiding him? Come on…
• The deus ex machina solutions in the last book. Religion is an important part of the world of this series, tightly bound to its magic, and Gavin as pope/emperor is naturally particularly involved. He loses faith and finds it again, and much of that is finely written. But in the final battle (because of course there is one!) the good guys are basically saved by God, not once but repeatedly, and that is just silly writing in a book like this.
• Some of the plot twists are too abrupt to make any sense. Gavin turns out to be an unreliable narrator who has apparently forgotten some very important things, and rediscovers them one by one. But it just seems incredible that he would not notice anything odd about himself or his beliefs, and that he could look at thing A and believe that it is thing B which is nothing like thing A. I get the feeling that the author put these twists here just to keep us readers on our toes even more. It doesn’t make the book more interesting, it just adds even more of the “this changes everything” moments, and the books really didn’t need any more of these.

There has been a distinct lack of progress in the garden since I finished planting the bushes behind the house. (I see I have posted no photos of the end result – I have to do something about that soon.)

The last time I mowed the lawn, I decided that my next gardening project was going to be around the bushes in the front. Mowing around them is getting very frustrating. Yes, I was going to focus on planting a plum tree, but that can wait until later in the season. The lawn/grass needs to go NOW, so I can plant something else underneath and around those bushes. Something that doesn’t need mowing.


I’ve been digging here for some days already. Today I mostly finished cutting away the sod. I started out with a more curved shape for the planting, but then I started thinking about maintenance, and keeping the grass away from this new planting. I like the steel edging I’ve used before – but it’s quite stiff and I don’t think it can be bent into those shapes. So today I evened out those curves.

Digging under bushes is not a lot easier than mowing there… the branches of those Chaenomeles bushes lie close to the ground and are a bit of a tangle. I tried getting them out of the way by binding them up with string, but in the end the best solution I found was to just push a bunch of branches to the side and stab a garden fork in the ground in front of them to keep them there. That’s why it looks in the photos like I’m wielding two spades at the same time.

Eric and Adrian were out catching Pokemons while I was digging, and came back just when I had set up my camera on a tripod. Adrian took charge of the camera instead and took some action photos.

Then he tried digging, and discovered just how stiff the clay soil is here. His body weight is simply not enough to push the spade into the ground. Mine is – sometimes barely.

Happy birthday to me! It turns out I’m now forty-three years old. I have learned by now that I’m forty-something. I still can’t keep track of the exact number of years, though, and have to do some mental arithmetics whenever someone asks. Funny thing, that. Eric could probably recall my age better than I do. Even Adrian can, I think, but he on the other hand cannot remember my date of birth. For him the age is more interesting than the date.

Forty-three is a great age. I’ve had about twenty-five years of adult life and I expect at least as many more, before I might start thinking of myself as “getting old”.

Eric made the lovely cake. It’s raspberry mousse and lemon frosting on a brownie base. Just the kind of cake I love best: light and moist and with a fresh, tangy, fruity flavour.