The super thick, super woolly sweater is done. Has been for several weeks already, but I didn’t get around to taking photos of it before we went to Estonia.

Looks stylish, doesn’t it? Too bad that I probably won’t get to wear it much outside the home, because I suspect it’ll be too bulky to fit under my (usually relatively form-fitting) coats and jackets.

The design and especially the construction of the triangular wedges comes from the Tell It Slant pattern, but I wanted a different fit and used a different yarn so I did the shaping myself, based on this tutorial for a basic top-down raglan sweater.

Overall it went smoothly. I had to make several attempts before I got the sleeve sizing right, but that’s par for the course. The only bit I struggled with was the neckline. I bound it off one way and it was too tight; I bound it off in a stretchier way and it was all floppy. I ended up using a weird hybrid of the two, where I alternated between the methods for every other stitch.

Ingrid is away with her boyfriend, Adrian is away at scout camp, and the weather is dry but not hot. Eric and I seized the opportunity to scrub the living room floor. It’s been several years since we last did it. The floor always looks and feels so nice afterwards.

You can see quite clearly where the big rug usually is, where the floor is smoother and more yellow.

The room looks both oddly large and kind of small like this.

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.

Last week of vacation, great weather, no plans – I’m going for a nice long walk. The next stage of Sörmlandsleden is 16 km so it would be an overnight there-and-back hike, which I can’t fit in this week. Instead I went to Tyresta. The best hiking I’ve done near Stockholm is in Tyresta, and that was a while ago.

Tyrestarundan combined with Fornborgsrundan for a total of 19 km.

The initial kilometre or two went through farmland, complete with cackling hens and baa-ing sheep. After that, it was the usual granite and bilberry bushes and pine and spruce.

The trail network in Tyresta has been upgraded to the new marking standard that I’ve seen used in other national parks, coloured hexagons with different numbers of dots.

One of the draws of this hiking trail for me was that it goes through a wide swathe of forest that burned down in 1999. It’s clearly marked in the national park maps and rather distinct in real life as well: the forest is evenly young there, like a lake of lighter green amidst the otherwise darker, older trees.

The reasons for the youth of the forest are barely detectable now, twenty-five years on. I remember a brief visit maybe ten years ago, and I think I recall seeing actual dead, burnt skeletons of trees still sticking up. Now there is none of that. If you look really carefully, you can find a carbonized root or stump somewhere.

And perhaps some rocks are darker than normal? Or maybe that’s just lichens.

The shorter trail that I added to my walk took me all the way around Stensjön. I love lakes – and rivers and waterfalls and all other kinds of water.

As an unexpected benefit, that side of the park was very empty. I don’t think I saw or heard a single person on the east side of the lake, not even at a distance.

I therefore took the chance and went for a naked swim. Wonderful feeling, especially on a hot and sweaty day like today. (Last time was on Husarö five years ago.)

I decided to swim around the two little islets that I could see nearby (in the middle at the back in the photo). At first just around the larger, closer one, but the water between the islets was full of large, slippery rocks hiding just below the surface, barely tall enough to eddy the water when I looked carefully. I gave up on trying to find a way through and swam around both, only to find more rocks on the other side of them, so my circle kept growing. The lake deserves its name (“stone lake”).

Of wildlife, nothing but a few small frogs, and the calls of crows and finches. Most birds have stopped their singing for this season. Some insects, but luckily no mosquitoes.

The current ever-recurring discussion topic: the new EU regulations about bottle caps that came into effect this year. My friends in Estonia didn’t need to say more than “bottle caps” for everyone to know *exactly* what they were talking about.

If you’re not living in Europe, or if you’re future me and have forgotten, EU law now requires plastic bottle caps to be attached to the bottle (or milk carton, or other packaging). The bottle on the left is of the old type with a detached cap; the one on the right is of the new type.

Environmentally-conscious and recycling-oriented as I am, I have never in conscious memory thrown a bottle cap on the ground. Or even dropped one and not picked it up. (Heck, I pick up other people’s litter when I’m out walking.) But I guess enough people do for this initiative to be worth the cost and effort of changing all production lines. I assume someone’s done the maths.

Out of curiosity, I went looking for statistics. I found this report of a Dutch study of garbage found on beaches which mentioned that “bottle caps are among the top 5 items found during beach cleaning and beach litter monitoring around the world”, and “research […] on beach litter over the last 12 years shows that on average, 19 bottle caps are found every 100 metres”. They also report numbers from other countries: “On average, the highest number of caps were found in Sweden (170/100m)” – not because people litter more here, but because of sea currents converging here.

But the new caps are annoying. Most are well-designed: you can twist them out of the way and they stay there while you pour or drink. But they are in my face when I drink. And turning a bottle upside down while drinking also turns the attached cap upside down, which sometimes leads to drips from the lid. Which matters little in the case of water, but I don’t want smoothie dribbles on my face. So now I have to inspect and possibly lick the cap before drinking my smoothie – or detach the cap after all, which is of course intentionally not easy.

Drinks companies complained loudly of course, arguing that the new caps will require more material so the net effect will be negative. Innocent (who makes several of our favourite juices and smoothies) on the other hand managed to make their new bottle caps smaller than the old ones, so clearly it can be done if someone’s willing to make the effort.

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.

The ferry trip with Tallink from Tallinn to Stockholm is made up of hours of boredom – cycling between various somewhat-uncomfortable places to sit and make time pass – and the buffet dinner.

For me the highlight is usually the array of pickled herring. The best one today was one flavoured with elderflower, dill and fennel.

Adrian loves the dessert buffet best. This time there was a chocolate fountain, in addition to all the cakes.

After dinner Ingrid and I spent some time simply roaming the corridors, for lack of a better pastime. The guests on deck 9 got arts posters in their corridors, with Miró and Kandinsky and other abstractionists.

The carpets in the corridors had an odd pattern that made everything look just slightly skewed. Almost giving me hints of seasickness without any waves at all.

Ingrid and I went to ERM, the Estonian National Museum, while Adrian was off with a friend playing video games.

The main draw was an exhibition about surrealism in Tartu and Prague, a collaboration between museums in the two cities. Some of it was interesting, but some works looked more like “general weird” than surrealism to me.

The other current exhibition was about the city at night – one part about nightclubs and bars (most underwhelming) and another about the city at night through the eyes of animals. A wall about people’s encounters with foxes was somewhat interesting, but not much.

A third one was about Bling, which seemed to be an Estonian equivalent of Burning Man. Great for the people who had been there, but I’m not sure what the rest of us were supposed to get out of photos of them having fun.

The entrance to that area was a cool installation of textile and light, though.

We finished off our visit by strolling through my favourite permanent exhibit, Echo of the Urals, about our “cousins”, all the other Finno-Ugric people. I especially like the visual design of the exhibition space, and the icons and signs derived from traditional Finno-Ugric decorative patterns and old Estonian house marks.

Repeating a favourite activity from last year – canoe rafting from Taevaskoja to Kiidjärve.

We were slightly fewer people (and dogs) this year, so we fit on a single raft. Which made things simpler and somewhat easier, because not everybody had to paddle all the time. On the other hand I had fewer photo opportunities, because I was right on top of people all the time.

Except when we made a stop to walk the dog!

The paddling itself is not much of a challenge these days, with lots of young, strong people who’ve all done this before. It got more exciting the further upriver we came, as the river narrowed and the fallen trees grew more numerous.