The next generation: me and my Estonian friends’ children. (After spending an hour in an escape room, named “The curse of the pharaoh”, which they failed at escaping but succeeded in having fun together.)

Picnic with friends at Pangodi lake. The weather forecast promised more sun and heat than we actually got, which led to less bathing than expected, but also a less sweaty picnic.

The were signposts for a short walking path starting right where we were. It turned out to be just about passable, lined with mostly nettles (but also wild raspberries) and mosquitoes, so when the signage disappeared and we lost our way, we weren’t too disappointed to return to the parking lot.

A lousy night’s sleep on the ferry (my brother snoring, Adrian talking in his sleep, my brother waking up at 5, Adrian waking up at 7, etc etc) and then a few hours of driving. Now we are in Tartu (in my father’s apartment) and we are tired. Vegging out in the sofa, but at some point we will need to get up and at least get groceries.

On the ferry from Stockholm to Tallinn. I liked the DFDS experience last year, but Ingrid especially missed the buffet dinner, so we’re back on Tallink this year again.

The dinner is nice but the waiting before and after is boring as heck. There’s activities for the youngest kids, and adults can hang out in a bar if they like, but there is nothing at all for either teenagers or adult non-drinkers. How about a nice lounge with armchairs and music? A movie theatre?

It looks like we’ll have a great cherry harvest this year. And they reached peak ripeness just today. Too bad I won’t be here for it – the kids and I are leaving for Estonia this evening. Eric will have to eat and pick what he can on his own.

Humans and their cars are away on vacations, so the deer can be more bold than usual. A family of them (dad, and mum with baby) have been traipsing through the garden repeatedly in the last few days.

Or it could be because of the ripe cherries that have dropped from the tree, and the newly cut grass that makes the cherries easy to reach.

This season’s big garden project: replacing lawn with a planting under and around the elder bush, and the new plum tree next to it. The soil is thick clay, hard as concrete when it’s dry and like a lump of glue when it’s wet, so it’s slow going. And the elder is not making it easier. The dogwoods on the left I can just push aside – even tie them up with a piece of string to get them out of the way. The elder branches just break when I push them even the most gently. I started cutting the sod with a normal gardening spade, but in the end I was crawling under it with a little hand-held planting spade.

The little patch of green that’s left right next to the elder should be a patch of white anemones. I know they’re roughly somewhere there, but when I looked for photo evidence, I could only find close-ups of anemone flowers and nothing documenting their location. At this time of the year they’re all gone, so I can only hope I saved at least some of them.

Of course this also means saving the weeds around them, so I’ll be eradicating couch grass here forever.

Here’s the elder when I planted it, twelve years ago:

And here are the bags of sod and roots and the occasional rock. The first one has been here since last summer and I am starting to worry about its structural integrity, given how much the material has faded.

I got my big camera back! And it’s working! Back LCD screen all flat and folded in, and it shows an image! And the lens was repaired as well.

I’m super pleased with the Olympus service experience. Smooth, no surprises, stuff works.

I’ve also been mostly pleased with the photos I’ve been able to get with my camera phone. As long as I take its limitations into account (must have good lighting, absolutely no zooming) the results are not bad at all.

I do get annoyed by all the automatic adjustments it makes, though – it’s impossible to get consistent exposure and white balance even between photos in a single session. Like the ones above. The camera sees a light gray package in one photo, and a dark camera in another, and tries to even things out, and the same single table ends up looking like four entirely different ones (unless I spend a lot of time fixing them afterwards).

Bought fabric for a top. Lovely fabric, beautiful colours, thick with a nice drape.

Was going to try a new pattern. Forgot to check the amount of fabric that the pattern called for, assumed it would be about the same as for a normal top. It wasn’t – the pattern required more – so I couldn’t use the pattern.

That’s a bit sad, but OK, I’ll make an ordinary long-sleeve top from a pattern I’ve used before. Cut out the pieces, start assembling. Top does not fit because the fabric has less stretch than the jerseys I’ve used before.

The fabric was a one-off batch at that store and I can’t buy more.

Throw it all out.

Ingrid is learning to drive, and has advanced to the point where she’s driving in actual daytime traffic on normal roads. Not just to the nearest supermarket, but to a mall fifteen minutes’ drive away. On roads where the top speed is higher than what she’s done before on her scooter, even! Gives me reasons to get all kinds of errands done, like (finally) dropping off bags of outgrown clothes at the charity shop, or (finally) taking the empty planting boxes to the recycling centre. Win-win.