The party preparations started several days ago, with three cakes baked over three days. We had an apple-pie cheesecake (Ingrid), a banana and chocolate cake (Adrian) and an almond cherry pie (Eric).

Today Ingrid decorated the house with golden balloons and serpentines.

Then there were guests – grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins – and presents.

The cakes and cheeses and snacks were eaten with much joy and appreciation.

There had been some concern that three cakes might be excessive, but it really wasn’t.

With no one to take pictures of me, here are two quick selfies to prove that I was also there.

Afterwards, we were tired.

Prepping for tomorrow’s celebration with our extended families of Ingrid’s and Adrian’s birthdays.

The children can barely be called children any more, and the guests are getting older. Cake is still an important part of a birthday party, but there’s more and more interest for less sugary snacks. Hence, a cheese platter or two. I’m splurging and buying the cheeses at an actual cheesemonger’s in Hötorgshallen, rather than just supermarket cheese.

I am out of my favourite chocolate, the Friis Holm Tobago dark milk. I normally have one stash at home and one at each office, and now they’re all empty.

What’s even worse is that there’s none in the shops either. Today I asked at the chocolate store in Hötorgshallen, and apparently there were problems with the cocoa harvest this year so the chocolate production is delayed.

However will I cope? Some meals almost require a palate cleanser afterwards. Especially anything with lots of onion, or even the smallest bits of raw onion.

At least I got some nice pralines from Ölands Choklad.

Ingrid arranged a dinner party for a group of her friends. That’s the kind of stage she’s reached in her life: three-course dinner parties, with tablecloths and candles and home-made pizzas.

Her friends’ palates are not as sophisticated as hers, and they’re all meat-eaters, so adjustments are necessary. I don’t begrudge them their pepperoni pizza. But I’m glad that there was enough tiramisu that there were plenty of leftovers for us as well.

Preparing and cooking a three-course meal for six people, including also shopping and decorations, is a full-day project. Ingrid was rather exhausted by the end. I do hope her friends realize what a treasure they have and appreciate her efforts properly.

There is internal drama going on at tretton37, and everybody is worried and/or disappointed and/or confused, which is very distracting and distressing. If anyone managed to spend even half of their attention on actual work, I’m impressed. I was in such a bad mood when I got home that I comfort ate cake. (Cherry cake, from the freezer.)

The vegetable stand at Spånga Torg is my source for fun fruit and vegetables. Right now the best thing is plums and mangoes. They have five or six kinds of plums, where ICA might at best have two. And some are clearly relatively local, and sourced from a small-scale grower: they are so tender when ripe that they can’t have been grown with long transport in mind.

Late-summer weather is unpredictable and not quite as summery any more. Heavy showers, windy afternoons. But when we’re lucky, we can still enjoy meals outside.

After-dinner ice cream (Eric’s home-made stracciatella ice cream). And there was a rainbow in the background. I wished I could somehow capture the combination, but even though I could see and enjoy both at the same time, the camera couldn’t.

For years, we had the perfect lemon press. Stable, good grip, efficient at pressing, easy to pour. Tilted top surface, large drainage openings. Separate tops for lemons and oranges, one small, one larger. Perfect in all ways – except it was made of plastic and started cracking due to all the pressure we’ve put on it.

It’s from our time in London and we probably had it for years before moving, so it gave us a good twenty years of freshly pressed lemon juice. But its days are numbered so it was time to look for a new one.

Two years later, I have trialled some decent ones. Each of them is an improvement over the OG lemon press in some ways, but falls short in others.

This single-piece one in green melamine is nice and pointy on the top, very stable, super easy to clean. But: the side ridges are barely there, so you’re pressing the lemon against a mostlyl flat surface by brute force instead of scraping it open with the ridges.

This metal press from Exxent has better ridges, and is probably more or less unbreakable. But the top is a bit too rounded which makes it a bit harder to start pressing, and the holes are just a bit too small so they clog up and the juice all sits on top instead of draining into the lower part. Still, it’s the one that stays in use for now.

Does the ultimate lemon press exist? One that combines the best of both of these? I have email notifications set up on Tradera but haven’t found anything better than what we have. People sell flimsy plastic stuff, or the long-legged Alessi press that is more sculpture than utensil, or bird-shaped squeezers that also look more decorative than useful. And vintage glass lemon presses from the 1950s that look like they would be hard to clean, but who knows, maybe they’re not? Why is this so hard.

Celebrating my birthday a day early because Adrian is leaving for scout camp tomorrow, and Ingrid is also looking forward to spending tomorrow with her boyfriend since they’ve been apart for over two weeks. Since I am mostly celebrating for my family’s sake and not mine, I don’t care at all what day we do it.

Happy birthday, I am now 47 years minus 1 day!

That’s my factual age. In my own head, I don’t even know what age I am.

When I see people in the street, I instinctively think of roughly 25-to-30-year-olds as “like me”. Like, I see a person walking by in the street and subconsciously identify as belonging to the same group. Whereas people of my own age often start to get a bit of a paunch, or lightly bad posture, and looking “matronly”. I was at a second-hand clothes shop in Tartu just the other week and vaguely noticed a woman next to me who was holding up some shirt or something, without paying any real attention to her, and subconsciously thought of her as “old”. Like, “oh, there’s an older lady here, too”. And a second later I realized that she was no older than me, and could well be a bit younger. Ouch. Maybe I’m just desperately clinging on to my lost youth, but I am absolutely going to keep on clinging, by exercising and eating healthily and not dressing in baggy clothes in navy and beige. Absolutely embracing the grey hair, though!

But when I talk to people, then 25-to-30-year-olds seem really young, and I feel my calendar age. They’re all full of bouncy energy, somehow naive and fresh. They care so much about all sorts of things, whereas I am becoming jaded and can’t work up much energy about any of the big questions. Giving up on humanity, kind of. I’m an optimist on a small scale, when it comes to individual people and relationships, but a pessimist on a larger scale.

Got home from Estonia. Now I’m tired. Lots of driving yesterday, lots of driving today (to take my brother back to his home in Uppsala), lots of boring waiting in between. No photo for today. Instead, here are some more photos from Estonia.

From our visit (one of several) to our favourite restaurant, Veg Machine. Its combination of vegan food, flavours we like, low prices and great location, has made it our recurring favourite.

From ice skating at an indoor arena in Lõunakeskus, which is a nice way to pass time together with friends. Kids skating – with a lot of horseplay and monkeying around – and adults chatting.

From my late-night walks with one of my best childhood friends and her dog. More opportunities for leisurely talking about everything between heaven and earth, while getting fresh air and stretching my legs.

We walk along local streets and paths rather than any fancy parks, so this has also been a great way to see how Tartu and especially my old neighbourhood has changed. Where new supermarkets have popped up, where an old meat processing plant has been torn down and replaced with greenery, where the railway serving the plant has been converted into a path for bicycles and pedestrians, and where the scruffy industrial underbelly has remained as it ever was.