Unexpected advantages of having a garden: I can decide at 10 o’clock at night that what my sick body and sore throat want most just now is baked apples with cinnamon, and walk out into the garden and pick 3 apples, and slice them and sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and butter and raisins, and shove them in the oven. And eat them half an hour later.

With the cold come the colds. The whole family has been sniffling and coughing for almost a week, and I have been more or less knocked out for the last two days. Ingrid seems least bothered, all bustle and activity despite a runny nose and lots of coughing at night.

Yesterday evening I went to bed at 9 and slept until 8 this morning, and this morning Eric and Ingrid went out and left me in the sofa with hot orange juice and some cheap fantasy to read. The rest has done wonders and I feel quite good now, except that now I’ve lost most of my voice. Have you ever tried singing a lullaby while your voice is gone? It sounds quite funny since I can only hit a few tones in the middle (just above my normal tone of voice), all higher and lower tones become hoarse wheezes.

The outside temperature this week has been around 7°C. Not exactly freezing, but nevertheless shockingly cold after the mild London climate we’re used to. 7°C is about as cold as it got in London, except for a few really cold weeks in the middle of winter – 95 percentile temperature for the winter. And here it’s only September and I’m digging out what I used to think of as my winter jacket.

No, we haven’t lost our internet connection again. I’m just too busy to post. With Ingrid’s nursery start, the aftereffects of the house move, the build-up of stuff to do after our vacation, the need to buy the next size & season’s worth of clothes and shoes for Ingrid, I’m swamped. The nursery start is the biggest culprit: for a week both Eric and I were working, but Ingrid was only at nursery for 5 hours or so, which left me trying to squeeze a full day’s worth of work into 4, and Eric working late nights. I’ve got just enough energy to keep all of us fed and clothed, and the dishes and laundry done, but have got little energy or time left for blogging. It doesn’t help that Ingrid is sleeping like crap just now.

Back soon, hopefully.

While we lived in London, I’ve tried to go to Estonia once every year. It’s naturally become a summer trip, since that’s when most people have vacation, and that’s when the weather is best. This year the timing of the trip was pretty much decided by Ingrid’s nursery start. Eric started working August 1st, and Ingrid didn’t get a nursery place until August 21st, so my vacation had to fill the gap in between.

I usually visit those of my family who live in Estonia, plus a few childhood friends, and do some sightseeing and shopping. All that was still part of the trip, but one important aspect has been added, and will remain a priority in the future: getting some Estonian practice for Ingrid.

Part of the plan was to buy a lot of children’s books in Estonian. Partly because of this plan to fill my bag with lots of heavy books I decided to go by ferry rather than by plane, which I’ve normally done. (There was also the fact that flying is such a hassle nowadays, plus I had the pushchair to consider. I could probably take it on a plane, but not be sure what state it would be in when I get it back.) The ferry trip was a big success. They had a nice play room, with a ball pit, a small slide, toys, crayons, and most importantly, other children. Ingrid was perfectly happy to spend most of the evening there, and most of the morning as well. She also liked the ferry itself: the long carpeted corridors were great for running, and there were lots of lifts and staircases and windows. And the sea was interesting, too: we had a window in our cabin, and she would sit there and look at the sea, and point out the smaller boats we passed.

Initially I thought we would spend a lot of time in my father’s summer cottage. But (a) the weather was bad, and (b) it turned out that Ingrid did not like the countryside. She would not go more than 10 steps from my side, and was happiest when we went indoors and read a book. The only outdoor activities she accepted were playing in the sandbox (with me by her side), playing ball with me, or eating strawberries in the forest. When it was late afternoon and time to take the car back to town, she suddenly perked up and ran to the car, even though she isn’t fond of car seats at all! Too much greenery? Too wide open? Too few people? Whatever it was, it meant that we spent more days in Tartu than I would have done myself. I guess 18 months of London life have made a city child out of her.

It appears that long-time city living has affected me as well. I seem to have become sensitive to mosquito bites. Mosquitoes are part of a normal Estonian summer: every child and every adult is familiar with the itchy red spots that their bites cause. But whereas the mosquito bites I remember from my childhood were half an inch across, mine now grew and grew until each one was a palm-sized swelling, red and painful like a bad bruise.

Our days in Tartu (and later in Tallinn) were not that dissimilar from our days in Stockholm. We spent a lot of time on playgrounds, and made occasional trips to child-friendly attractions, such as the toy museum (which has a great play room) and the animal park in Elistvere, and a swimming pool in Tallinn. Unlike in Stockholm, Ingrid had other children for company: three of my childhood friends have children of roughly the same age, and Ingrid had a great time with them. Looking at them they didn’t seem to be playing together. Sometimes they followed each other (if one went to the swing, the other one followed), sometimes they played side by side, and other times they just happened to play in the same room. But somehow it still made a great difference. Just moments after leaving them, Ingrid would already say “varsti tagasi” (“soon back” – meaning she wanted to meet them again soon).

The book-buying aspect of the trip went well, too. I came home with almost 20 children’s books of various kinds. A few are for slightly older children and won’t see much use this year. Some are already in use. Others I’m saving for later so she can get a new book every few weeks. Among them were a few of my first books: small cardboard books with simple texts in block letters. One of them is the first book I remember reading myself, on my own.

Sweden is expensive. People used to tell me that this was the case, but until I moved I didn’t believe it could be worse than London. But it is. And don’t forget that salaries here are nowhere near London levels.

Eating out is the worst. Every time I eat lunch outside the home I am surprised by the prices. You won’t find even the simplest lunch for under 65 SEK, and it goes up to 80 if you want a hot lunch. A small bottle of juice: 20–25. A piece of cake (cakes are the worst!) often goes for 35.

For comparison: 1 USD = 6 SEK, 1 EUR = 9.5 SEK, 1 GBP = 12 SEK.

It may seem a million miles away
But it gets a little closer everyday

1.

The code base I work with is large, amorphous, and ugly. By now I’ve cleaned out the obvious junk (unused variables and methods, commented-out code, files that weren’t used). But the rest is still in a bad state. There are 3000-line classes and 500-line methods, and lots of copy-paste code.

Ugly code makes me feel uncomfortable, anxious, tense. It’s like an itch, or an unpleasant noise. I have clean it up because I couldn’t stand the knowledge that I’d have to look at this every day for months, or years.

Cleaning it up on the other hand gives me such a feeling of relief. Refactoring is a pleasure. I refactor when I am bored. I take a break not by eating ice cream, or going for a long lunch, or going out shopping, but by setting aside my main coding tasks and refactoring instead.

2.

The house and garden are a never-ending project. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. Even though I normally get home shortly after 6, I don’t get a chance to do much around the house until after Ingrid goes to sleep, which often happens as late as 8:30 or 9.

So I try take small steps in the right direction: half an hour here, half an hour there. It took 3 sessions to clean out all the dead branches from the lilac hedge. Every few days I spend 15 or 20 minutes exterminating cherry seedlings and the remains of sloppily cut-down cherry shoots. (They are all over the lawn – everywhere I go, I’m stepping on sharp stubs.) Every weekend we try to buy at least one of the things we’re missing: one day it’s a new saucepan, the next maybe some shelving.

I’m OK with these projects taking a long time, as long as there is progress, as long as every day makes things just slightly better.

Ingrid’s hair smells like wool. When it’s wet, it smells a bit like a wet poodle. Clean, but faintly animal-like, and very very pleasant.

Initially we fell into the usual “must have lots of lotions and products” trap and bought a baby shampoo / bath lotion. It made her skin dry and red so we stopped, and had a lot of trouble getting her skin back to normal again. Now I wash her with just water, and use soap on hands and feet only when they are really dirty or greasy.

I wish I could do the same with my own hair. Apparently some people can get by with just conditioner, no shampoo. (Google for “conditioner only” if you’re interested.) I tried that for a while, but my hair never felt really clean, so now I’m back to using shampoo again, but the mildest one I could find.

The decline that started in early July has continued and reached an absolute minimum (from my point of view). This afternoon I was the only person in the office. It felt very empty. If I’m lucky, someone will come back from vacation next week. But just in case, I think I will bring a radio to work, to give me something to listen to apart from the quiet clatter of the keyboard.

One day June became July, and almost instantly the office emptied as everyone went on vacation. Today we were 4 people in the office, out of the normal 15 or so. There are also noticeably fewer people on the train in the morning and the evening, and various restaurants in town have closed for the summer. In Sweden, apparently, the old industrial tradition of everyone taking vacation at the same time (in July) is still alive. I’d forgotten that things worked this way here.