My mum asked if I could share photos that I have of her.

Hello, 40 000 untagged photos.

The task seemed overwhelming so I put it off for many months. Today I thought I’d have a go at skimming through a subset at least. In the end I scrolled through all twelve and a half years of photos that I have in Lightroom in a couple of hours. After a while I found patterns that made the work easier – I could easily spot longer trips that I could quickly skim past because I knew she wasn’t there, etc. (And then had to do it all over again because I misunderstood a Lightroom sync setting and lost all my choices and this specific action, of all things, did not have an Undo possibility. The second time was even faster.)

I could definitely prune some of that. In the early years, when I was new to photography, and the kids were squirmy and wiggly, I often took many photos in the hope that some would be OK, and then kept more than I really needed. I wasn’t even photographing daily, then, so the output of each “session” must have been even larger. The kids sit still these days, so I don’t need to spray and pray any more. On the other hand, now I can take ten or twenty shots of the same flower, with only minor variations. I try to be better at culling them afterwards, but sometimes I don’t have the energy for that effort.

2021 was clearly a bad year for photography. And for life. I’m still not living like I was before the pandemic; I go out less and undertake fewer projects of any kind. It takes an effort now, where I could just make things happen before. I’m improving, though.

First day back at work. The same for four out of our five-person team, so we congregated at the Sortera office.

I tried to remember how this office work thing works, and mostly managed to pack all the necessities (computer, mouse plus pad, change of clothes, lunch box) except for my knitting. Missed it several times during the day. When I got home, the first thing I did (after unpacking my used lunch box) was to put the bag with my sock knitting in my backpack for tomorrow.

I’ve only used 3 out of my 5 weeks of vacation. But Adrian is away at scout camp all week, and Ingrid will be working, so we won’t be doing anything as a family anyway. I think I’ll use another week to go for a full-week hike some time in September, instead of the long weekends I’ve been doing in the past. And the last week is for Christmas.

I realized I had forgotten to post photos that Ingrid took of me at the climbing park in Otepää. She got some great angles, especially of the Tarzan jump, since she was ahead of me. I’m always the one holding the camera, it’s nice to get some memories of me also being there.

These two are from the first obstacle on the last course:

And this is the Tarzan jump:

Just some climbing.

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.

Sorting through all the paper that Adrian has produced during this school year. Archiving some for nostalgia; throwing out the rest.

Perhaps I’m more nostalgic and inclined to storing memories than most people. I like having the ability to go back and re-visit old memories, and not just in my head but with the support of pictures, words, and objects. I’ve saved a few baby clothes for both Ingrid and Adrian, and my favourite baby-wearing wraps, and material from my own years at high school and university.

I wish I had more from my own childhood. I’d have loved to show my school uniforms to the kids, because that’s just so different from how things work these days. Or my handwriting exercises, again because things are so different now. Fountain pens (not pencils), with a jar of ink on the desk, and exercise books with lines after lines of uniform, tidy copies of the letter “m”.

Twenty years from now, the idea of even having paper in school could be a quaint memory, so these might be fun to look at. Maybe Ingrid and Adrian won’t care when they’re all grown and have their own children. But maybe they will.

Bonus cat, because of course every flat surface is a cat bed.

29 °C outside, 29 °C inside. I am not enjoying this.

Voting in the EU election. Election day is tomorrow, but I see no point in waiting another day just to queue more.

The participation rate in these tends to be lower than in the national ones. The media do their best to improve turnout. If it’s sounds like too much work to figure out who to vote for, they say, it’s not a bad idea to just choose the same party you’d vote for nationally.

I’m not going down that route. The national questions I prioritize are not the same as one the EU level. In this vote, it doesn’t matter to me what their opinion is on education, healthcare, crime, or most social questions. I only really care what they will do about climate change, because that’s the area where national decisions matter little, and continental or global action is needed to make a real difference.

The various online guides tell me my opinions match up most closely with the Environmental party, the Left party, and the Centre party. No matter how much we agree on the environment, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to vote for the Left party. They no longer describe themselves as communists, but their communist past still permeates their ideology, and I just cannot.

I hate it when a long-time favourite product stops being produced. Especially when it comes to cosmetics. They’re close to my body, and they have scents, and the scent matters a lot to to me. I find it really difficult to deal with “bad” scents – too strong, too sharp, too artificial. And entirely unperfumed cosmetics have a kind of chemical smell of their own, which I also dislike.

I’m on my second body wash crisis. First I used Palmolive Almond & Honey. When I noticed it getting harder and harder to find, I bought a pile and stashed them in the basement, which gave me a few years to find a replacement. Then I found Apoteket’s body wash with Almond & Argan Oil. When this one disappeared, it was sudden. One day I went to the pharmacy to buy more; they had none, and it was also out of stock online.

Panic.

I bought the least offensive body wash I found at the pharmacy. It seemed OK when I sniffed at it, but in actual use I really disliked it. Then I tried another almond-scented body wash (from Weleda) but where the others were soft and mild, this one was like getting a blast of bitter almond extract in my face. Horrible.

Today I spent a long while at Åhlens, sniffing different kinds of body wash. Most of them sucked. Finally I had to ask the staff for help, and they helped me find a few that were… less bad. Now I’ll try them out and pick one, and then hope that it doesn’t go out of production soon. Which I don’t actually have high hopes for, given that these are fancy branded stuff, unlike the ones I used before. This sucks.

Back the way I came yesterday, from Henaredalen to Ånhammar, 13 km.

The paw print yesterday may have been wolf or dog, but the droppings I spotted are most definitely from a wolf, because they’re mostly made up of the hair of whatever animal the wolf ate.

I also met a hiker on the trail who was here specifically because he had seen a wolf here a year earlier and was hoping for a repeat. But I never saw anything more than the droppings.

Unsurprisingly today was similar to yesterday.

As a bonus I already knew the best spots for taking a break.

In no rush to get back early, I took a longer break towards the end of the trail, on what I guessed was a bird-watching bench next to a large lake, where I had the company of geese and ducks and herons.

The cows in the oak pasture were at the near end of the pasture today, and seemed quite curious about me. I didn’t mind the curious cows or the calves, but they were accompanied by one or two bulls of impressive size, and I felt rather more cautious about them, so I hightailed it out of there.