The basement was nice and cool in the thirty-degree heat we’ve had, but after two days spent down there, I needed a break. Today was interior decorating day. Also today was less hot so it worked out nicely.

A free-standing wardrobe, together with some bookshelves, used to split my bedroom into two – a bedroom side and an office side, both rather small. With the wardrobe gone as of yesterday, and after me moving furniture around today, the room is back to being one space. (Moving a bookshelf is bloody tedious.) Much more open, light and spacious.

It’s a weird room now, though. There’s furniture around the edges – and a giant empty space in the middle. And two ceiling lights for a single room. The light fixtures are an easy fix, but I don’t know what to do with the room itself. A bigger bed, yes. But then what? What do I use the rest of the space for? Where do I put the dresser and the mirror? I’m probably letting the current configuration (especially the wall shelf above the bed) steer my thoughts too much. Time to get out squared paper and make a mockup starting from scratch.

While the bedroom thoughts are marinating, I finally hung up pictures that have been waiting for months. My Stockholm embroidery is now hanging in the sun room, next to Ingrid’s painting of sunflowers, where it was always intended to be.

Two large botanically-themed photo prints went up in the forest room, as well as another one of my embroideries.

When I hung up the prints, they were not at all level with each other. I was all shocked – I thought I was so careful when measuring out the positions for the wall hooks. And I had been! It turned out that the magnetic poster hangers didn’t match each other – the grooves for the string were not at the same distance for the two, at all.

One of my plans for this vacation (of which I have nearly two weeks left) is to bring some order to the basement.

The basement is a mess. There are corners I have never looked into so I don’t even know what all is there. The things I do know should be there somewhere are hard to find and/or hard to reach. There’s plenty of junk that should be thrown out.

Yesterday was a basement day, and today is another one. I’ve found that it’s easier for me to make progress, and to feel that I have made progress, when I spend a large chunk of time focusing on a single “theme”. If I do a bunch of unrelated small tasks and cross them off my list, then I don’t get the same satisfying feeling. So instead of doing a dash of basement-clearing, a pinch of gardening and a smidgen of sewing, I am focusing on the basement only.

I’m clearing out so much stuff. Old inflatable swimming pools. (Plural.) Boxes of pool chemicals. A dusty foam mattress. A saggy foldable bed. Swathes of geotextile that I will never use. Buckets and buckets of old paint from when we renovated the house in 2011. Decades-old snorkelling equipment. A sleeping bag from the 1970s.

Things that I still have entirely excessive amounts of:

1. Terracotta plant pot saucers – several dozen. I don’t even like the terracotta pot + saucer combo.

2. Screws. Boxes and boxes of them. Deck screws, drywall screws, wood screws, floor screws, cabinet screws, roof nails, general-purpose nails – you name it, I’ve got it. Some of them literally in the hundreds. I am most unlikely to need this amount of screws in the next few decades.

3. Jam. I counted, I have 95 jars of jam/marmalade/chutney. These might literally last me until I retire (unless they go bad first.) I don’t eat much jam. Neither does Ingrid, and when she does, she prefers low-sugar versions, which these are definitely not. Adrian only likes raspberry jam and blueberry jam, whereas this is mostly funky stuff – cherry jam is the only “normal” kind here, and the rest is more odd things like gooseberry, rhubarb with ginger, redcurrant, spicy plum chutney, etc. Still, I won’t be getting rid of any of these. They’ve been made with love, and I will do my best to eat my way through them.

A moth posed very prettily on the French doors towards the deck, contrasting starkly against the horribly dirty windowpane. This is the spot where Nysse “knocks” when he wants to come inside, so keeping it clean is hopeless.

It was hot in Estonia, but I think it’s even hotter here. On the shade side of the house, it’s 28°C outside and 30 inside. Of course it doesn’t help that the house has been closed tight most of the time, with no air flow to cool anything down. And I didn’t think to close the curtains on the sunny side of the house.

The houseplants have easily survived ten days without watering before, but that in combination with 30-degree heat was too much for the Spathifyllum. It’s not quite dead but not looking very lively either. The rest are all in better shape.

Ten days is a good length for a trip. We feel like we’ve had time to meet everybody, see the places we wanted to see, do the things we wanted to do – but it’s nice to go home. Sleep in our own beds, not live out of a suitcase any more.

A full day. In the morning, a picnic outing to Taevaskoda. Then bathing at Kiidjärve lakeside beach. In the evening all the children participated in a charity run.

Taevaskoda is mostly as it has always been. A bit more people, I guess – at one point it felt like a whole busload arrived. And it all feels smaller than it used to, when I was a child.

I crossed the river and climbed to the top of the cliff to look down on our picnic site. The wear and tear on the grassy meadow was striking.

The river is shallow but fast-flowing and rather cold.

It’s a very scenic spot, but we’ve been here enough times that most of us barely look around us. Get there, eat picnic, get back. I kind of wish I could spend a bit more time just looking at the surroundings.

After the picnic, we drove to Kiidjärve for bathing. There’s a nice grassy slope down to the water, and it never feels crowded, although there are always people here. The water gets deep quickly, which works out great now that the kids are older and comfortable in deep water.

Somehow they ended up doing yoga poses in water. First just while standing, and then Ingrid and Adrian wanted to do the same also while jumping. The timing was most tricky – both for the two of them to jump at the same moment, and for me to press the trigger at the appropriate time.

In the evening there was a charity run where the audience threw colourful powder at the runners. Adrian and Ingrid came back bright green and pink.

At Kapsta again. Helped take down and cut up a mostly-dead tree. Looked at old photos of my ancestors (everything from my grandmother as young, to various “great-grands”) and tried to figure out who’s who.

I am very grateful to my father’s wife Ülle, who welcomes us, feeds us, and brightens our conversations.

Buying Estonian candy is a necessary part of a trip to Estonia.

Likewise, eating Estonian cake. This was a sea buckthorn cake with cream cheese and chocolate.

We spent the day at Kapsta with my father and his wife.

Made our traditional home-made sushi lunch.

Enjoyed lunch out in the gazebo tent since the weather remains horribly hot.

Went for a walk in the early evening when the temperature had cooled a bit. Still 25 degrees but at least it’s not 29 any more.

My father’s back is in a bad enough shape that he’s probably not going to be taking any more walks in his life.

There are no pea fields this year. Beans and wheat instead.

A hot and rainy day. Had the weather been better, we might have gone to the adventure park in Otepää, like we do must summers. Now we chose indoor climbing instead – or bouldering, to be more precise. “We” here being the next generation (Ingrid, Adrian, and my Estonian friends’ kids) and me. The rest of the older generation were all either working, or not the climbing kind of people. Occasionally I feel a bit weird, being the only mum in a group that’s otherwise mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings and one brave nine-year-old. But I’m young at heart, eh?

The first room had the traditional kind of bouldering wall with colour-coded routes going crossways and sideways. Then we found the other room, which had a series of twenty-odd competition routes. The first couple were easy, the next few were doable, and beyond that they got more and more bizarre. It’s hard to even picture someone climbing some of them.