August

I guess it's only fair if I try to type up my August as well. I don't have a lot of time to do this as you can probably guess from my latest posts. Yes, first of all, I am developing extra fingers which are not keyboard-compatible AND we will be going on our vacation the day after tomorrow. We will not be bringing a laptop on the flight because.. well, it's just a hassle. We might change our mind though. Yes, there's two of me's.

So what happened in August.. as far as I can remember, we were very excited over our trip. We got the tickets early August and the rest of the month has just been spent in anticipation. And work. It sucks because before vacation there is always so much to do. I had to type up tutorials for my colleagues so they would be able to perform the duties I usually do. Boring computer stuff.

Ok, so let's look at some of the pictures. We didn't take too many pictures this month.

• On the first of August we went to a cafe! Yeay! It's called NOP and is situated in the nice park area of town called Kadriorg - The Valley of Kadri :) It's a cute little cafe/grocery store. One half of the place is the store, the other half is the cafe. I don't like to go to new cafe's very often as usually I feel like a stranger there and I felt like I've been a regular for years. This place was so great! And they didn't mind us bringing a little puppy with us. So if you are in Tallinn, go check it out! But you might want to go on a regular weekday and not during a very popular time because we are not the only ones who love the place!

Mummu felt very comfortable. He slept like that for a while

•  I've blogged about this before, but wherever I go - construction follows. Now, I thought that since we live so high up, nothing could bother me. Hah! WRONG! They decided to first repair the road going past our house. And since public transportation in the form of trolleys uses this road and setting up a detour for them is a lot of work (cables and all that), they decided that the road works will continue 24 hours for a couple of weekends so they could avoid the trolleys and work in peace. Awesome, huh? Yep. And when they were all nice and finished with that road, they decided to reconstruct the parking area around our building. Not only did I hear them loud and clear during the day when I'm working, I also FELT the vibration when they were leveling the gravel or whatever it is.. It was insane! Kind of scary. Not to mention going for a walk with the puppy. I felt like in the transformers movie. Going out the front door meant keeping an eye on the big machines and then skipping along dodging them. 

It's coming for us! The darker gravel area is the entrance to the building.

What it looks like now. The grass hasn't fully grown back yet, but it's on its way!

• Sometime in the beginning of August we went to Paide for a cute little Jazz concert held in the local church. It was great to see and hear some of my almost Swedish in-laws. We took the puppy with us and smuggled him inside (heh heh hee). He has been to a concert in a church now. And he behaved like any well-behaved puppy would - he slept in my lap during the whole thing. I guess he's not much of a music lover.. And this is the only decent photo I have of that day: 

Here's Mummu with his new hoodie which I sewed out of my old hoodie. Oh how I love to reuse stuff. If only I did it more often...

• You all have heard of Facebook and such as. Well, dogs have their own social network called Kutsu.ee or uniteddogs.com. I happened to stumble upon it one day and say Mummu's sisters on there. So I made Mummu a profile, too. One of Mummu's sisters invited us over for a play date. The dogs had a GREAT time! His sister is a lot smaller than him, like incredibly small and fragile looking, but she didn't let that come in the way of FUN!

• For years now I have been wanting to go to an open-air festival called Leigo Järvemuusika. It's a beautiful event that takes place in Southern Estonia. The stage is in the middle of the lake and the public sits on a hillside. Well, ok so it's not really a hill, but whatever. It's Estonia, the land of flat. Anyways, besides enjoying beautiful music you can enjoy the wonderful background of the lake and hills and horses and bonfires.. We went there in the evening when it was almost dark, so we didn't see much of the rolling hills in the background, but we did see thousands of little candles on the lake, beautiful bonfires on the hillsides and what I called a primitive light show - they had some fancy stage lights too, but most of the work was done by live fire - huge bonfires, small bonfires, outdoor candles and even balloons with candles. That was AMAZING! I was so glad it had been raining the whole day as the fire hazard would be tremendous! Anyway, the reason we finally went was the tribute concert to Pink Floyd. Not that I had ever knowingly listened to that band...but top Estonian musicians played the songs of Pink Floyd and guess who played the keyboards! My father-in-law! How awesome is that! He used to be in a very popular band back in the day ;) And now he was invited to play for that concert. We took our wonderful friends and headed for a 4 hour drive Southwards..and then back. It was well worth it.

Stage on the right and thousands of candles on the lake. Some dude checking it out.. Oh, and bonfires on the right

Stage on the left and Primitive Light Show on the right.

• You know, I haven't been swimming this year yet. The closest I came to swimming was walking into hip-deep water with the puppy in my arms. He doesn't like cold sea water that much. Probably because it's cold. Anyway, we did have a lot of fun on the beach though, and gloomy stormy days are a lot of fun too. I have so many cute doggy pictures but I don't know how many of them you can take! I'll post only a few of them here, more can be found in my picasa album. There's a little slideshow on the right panel which you can click and enlarge. 

• I don't know if you remember but a long time ago I tapped into my creative side and conjured up some tiny little cakelets to make into cute little jewelry. I've given them to people as presents and wear a pair myself but I have way too many of them. So I decided to put them up for sale. And that's just what I did. I uploaded photos of them to an Estonian equivalent of ebay, only on a way smaller scale. To my surprise, three pairs were sold! I got to send out my very first packages and even met one buyer. II really enjoyed making cute packaging, the kind that would make me smile when I'd get it in the mail. Now I have further plans with them but I'll probably get around to realizing them after I'm back from my vacation.  

Little Cakelet Earrings. Sold :)

Earrings packaged in some cellophane with a cute bow

Finished product in a decorated envelope. Don't you like it how I scrambled the address ;)

I guess this is all the photos I have. And tomorrow we shall be going on vacation and hopefully a lot more photos follow! Must pack up the puppy now as we will be taking him the the kennel for some fun  with his own kind. And then we have to pack and do billions of other things we have conveniently, yet unknowingly, left for the last minute. Ciao!

Finland FUN

On Friday evening we will be taking the ferry to Helsinki. Then we are going to spend a wild night partying in the capital of Finland and theeen making our way to the Helsinki-Vaasa airport where our flight to Amsterdam will take off at.. very early. I do not know such small numbers. Something starting with a six. We will get to spend about 3 hours in the Amsterdam airport until our flight to San Francisco. That will be a fun 11 hours of.. well, fun! So yeah, hold your thumbs that our flights will be magical and good. Or just pray! We will be in the land of the Americans for 3 amazing weeks until we have to do the whole flying and partying thing again ;)

Watch out!

We have been using this same brand of dish washing liquid for a long time. I am very sensitive to smells and once we had tried all of their different scented liquids, we decided to try another brand. And there it was, sitting by the kitchen sink, staring at me for a while until I decided to speak up. Now, look at this picture and tell me if you find anything wrong with it:

Ok, seems like a regular bottle of dish washing liquid, right? Right? Wrong! It claims to have somesort of care formula, but look closely! What is that in the lower right corner? Looks like hands, right? But when it is sitting by the kitchen sink staring you in the face every single time you wash the dishes... you begin to see the ugly truth! LOOK!

It's somekind of freaky deformed hand! Fingers coming out of the palm of the hand and no second thumb! It started to really bug me every time I saw it! Tell me you see it too! WHAT is it!?

The United States of America

We shall be departing Friday evening to embark on our journey to California! Awesome! We shall be there for three weeks. Three weeks of awesom

July

I just don't know why but someone is refusing to update this blog.. it might be me but I don't want to blow my own cover just yet..

So what oh what did we do this July... It was a month of summer, finally! Although it took half the month for the summer to get here. But finally it did, for a brief few weeks. We also had a week-long vacation, yeay! It wasn't filled with as much of fun and sun as I would have wanted, but it was fairly close.

• July started off with the wonderful Song and Dance Festival. Every 5 years Estonians flock together to the capital Tallinn to take part in the biggest event of the summer. And just to clear things up, in a nut shell the Dance Festival is about folk dances, and Song Festival is about a huge choir singing traditional and contemporary pieces. This year, around 100 000 people managed to pack themselves to the song festival grounds. It was amazing. You can see more of my Dance Festival photos at my Facebook album here.

Dance Festival - Hugs all around!

Song Festival - The choirs and clouds gathering

• Since we couldn't bring our dog to the Song and Dance Festivals, we took him for a long walk in the woods. It was his first time to run around without that pesky leash. He enjoyed it very much and didn't run away. Hahha Yeay! :) Later on we went to watch the sunset and these are the photos to represent the evening:

• For our birthdays we got tickets to the Beer Summer to see Moby. Woot! Beer! Well, we didn't have any beer, but we did have some sashlõkk. Mmmm! Yum! Beer Summer is, well, an open air event of beer, grilled meat, and music! And Moby happened to be the opening act. So everyone flocked back to the Song Festival Grounds to this time listen to imported music. Except on a way smaller scale. I realized that I do not enjoy crowded events too much as I am so small and air is scarce when you are shorter than everyone else. And I also learned that some certain nationality is very flexible - one person leaves his seat and 2 people come to fill it. And they always fit! Amazing! Ok, moving on. This will not come as a surprise for you, since I have already covered the topic of Why I Shall Never Make it as a Concert Photographer, but the pictures didn't come out too great.

Feel free to click on the image to enlarge it. The glowing thing in the middle is Moby's head.

• One weekend we went on an improvised road trip. It was a foggy lazy Saturday and instead of sitting at home, we packed the puppy and headed out. On the way we phoned my brother and so they ended up joining us for a random mini road trip to Kaberneeme. If you are ever thinking of where to go for a short summer trip, I suggest you go there. It has beautiful sandy beaches and cute little summer homes. Which are, of course, owned by other people but are still wonderful to look at. It's beautiful over there. Since it was such a gloomy day, the beaches were empty and our dogs could run amok. My brother hasn't shared with me any of the photos he took, so I will post one of the few photos I took with my camera. (He shared them not but for the sake of awesomeness, I will keep the picture I originally uploaded)

My Husband and my Brother - I do not know what they are doing.

• And theeen... we finally got our one week vacation! Yeay! The funny thing was that the company I work for decided to have their Summer Days right in the middle of my week off. I had a choice of to either go there or not. But since that company consists of four people, one of whom is a relative, we decided to go. Everyone brought their families and we had a great 3 days in Hiiumaa (Hi, Brent, I pronounce it like you did).

Here we are in one of Hiiumaa's main tourist spots.

Ristna Beach. 

My Husband and his Uncle enjoying the natural water park

Here I am resting my elbow on a small girl's head

On the ferry on our way back from Hiiumaa, this celebrity sat beside Husband and opposite of me. It took us forever to confirm his celebrity status but it was him alright. Here's a photo of his shoes. The opposite of his name would be Eha Viime. Can you guess who he is?

And a nice little family portrait. We look like crazy white people. But I guess we are.

• Okay, off-topic! So right about now my laptop died. I had to take it to the computer doctor because trying to switch it on and off with or without all the cables didn't help. The doc gave it a very bad diagnosis: its motherboard had died. Look at me talking about my computer as if it were alive. Well. It was. And replacing the motherboard would have cost probably more than the computer was worth. So since it was my work computer, I got a new one! Yeay! Three days later and I was back at work. Installing everything again is such a pain. Seriously. Luckily all my data is saved and now I can continue with this blog as I have access to my photos again. I wish all the computers a very long healthy lives because three days of running around like a chicken without a head is not good.

• Later on in the month we had an awesome family birthday celebration. Because my Husbands side of the family is a bit on the large side (no, not fat, just many of them), everyone agreed on having one big birthday bash for people born in the summer. Which includes both of us. Yeay. 

Here are cousin It and Babyface with a boychild.

• The month of July was also the month when our good friends got married. Yeay! I'm not going to post pictures of their bachelor/ette's nights but I can tell you that at least She looked adorable! I do have a bad picture of the ceremony and a photo of the card I made them using an vintage pin a friend of mine gave me. It was perfect as we wish the happy young couple nothing but lot's of children! (Sorry, I have absolutely no photo editing tools on my computer yet, so bear with me. Growl! Little teddy! Um.. yeah.) ANyway, the wedding was wonderful! We got soaking wet! Yeay! After the ceremony when people were taking photos in front of the church, rain came pouring down HARD! We could see a wall of water approach us but we couldn't run to our car like everyone else because we had to take all the flowers and other stuff with us. Thus we had to wait for the rain to stop to be able to access the car with those items. Raindrops were hitting the ground with such a force that they bounced up and soaked my legs from the knee down. My shoes had little fun pools in them. Not comfortable, but oh well! It was an experience. They managed to dry out enough to walk around in them and the wedding party was wonderful! I really enjoy weddings :) Many Children to you, my friends!
  

• What else can I tell you.. oh, yeah. Giant grasshoppers on peonies in my aunts garden.. Keep in mind peony blooms are quite large. Disgusting.

• That has pretty much been my month of July. Yep :)

June

June went by so fast I hardly had time to notice it was June already! I'll note down a couple of things that happened during the great month of June:

• The first weekend was a dream! Hot beach weather! Yeay! Enjoyable indeed.
  
  
  
  
  Puppy in his beach shelter hugging his water bowl
  
  
• And I managed to catch a cold and be sick for TWO whole weeks! I even had a fever for a few evening and I never get a fever!
  
  
  
  Crazy Dog Lady
  
  
• During those two weeks we kind of celebrated our birthdays. Since I was very sick, we didn't do much on our real days of birth. We did have a little pancake morning with my parents, an outdoor lunch with both of our families and a small party Burger dinner party with a few friends. You know, Hamburgers, like the Americans eat. Because we want to blend in when we visit in September. Mmmm.. delicious. I am making me hungGGrRRry! Anyway, those events weren't on the same day though.
  
  
  
  I just love this photo of mom:)
  
  We got these shirts for our last years b-days. We love 'em
  
  I am trying to pose as the Statue of Liberty?
  
  Our pretty families
  
  
• As I was recovering from the flu, I had to whip up a dress for a friends graduation. Lets call her Magdalene. I offered to make her the simplest dress in the world if she didn't find anyone else to make anything else for her.. but she had to go ahead and trick me into agreeing to make her the dress anyway and even put ruffles on it. I worked on the dress for many evenings, finished it, and she graduated in it. I was proud. As a side note, I must mention that my sewing machine, which usually has a bad temper and messes up all the stitches, sewed the dress without ANY problems. Miracle indeed.
  
  
  
  
  
• My brother and his fiancee had recently moved into a new apartment so they had a Salt-Bread Party aka Housewarming party. They have a pretty sweet apartment. We made loads of yummy sushi and ate it all. And they got a mean letter from a downstairs neighbor for letting the dog run loose in the apartment. Their doglet weighs about 3 kg (about 6 lbs) and our doglet about 4 kg (about 8 lbs). Imagine the huge ruckus they create :P Those little doglets..
  
  
  
  Dogs playing. BFF
  
  
  Dogs resting :) Mummu took the spot right next to the water bowl. Why bother standing?
  
  
  
• The following weekend we went to Magdalene's graduation. But first we started the weekend by using my brothers help to saw off a tree branch at the summer house followed by some hot grilling action. MMmm.. burgers! After that event, we drove to western Estonia for Magdalene's dance performance to which we were 18 minutes late. The performance only lasted 20 minutes, so we didn't see any of it. Awesome, isn't it! Oh well, we did get to drive Magdalene from the western town of Haapsalu all the way to the south to Viljandi. Estonia is tiny, but when most of the roads are detours, it took as a good while to drive. It was beautiful though!
  
  
  
  That's my brother up there, sawing the branch he is sitting on ;)
  
  
• The next morning.. well, afternoon, we attended Magdalene's graduation and her garden party followed by a nice row boat trip on lake Viljandi with her family. We were the only non-related people there which made me feel oh-so-special :D They didn't allow dogs on the boats so Husband put Mummu in his hoodie and zipped it up. The boat keeper man guy was kind enough to let it slide. Slide with me! Magdalene's a dance teacher/choreographer now.
  
  
  
  
  Beautiful Magdalene graduating
  
  
  
• When driving home from Viljandi on Sunday night, we were almost ran over by a MOOSE! And when I say ran over, I literally mean it! Our car is tiny, we even call it the Nut and the moose was HUGE! I saw it first and yelled DEER! DEER! MOOSE! Husband saw it and hit the breaks. After I was done with the thoughts of death, I thought of taking photos. But couldn't because I was busy holding the sleeping puppy in my arms - he didn't seem to mind the whole danger part. Of course the car does not have ABS breaks, so it slides all over the road but fortunately there were no cars behind us or coming our way. We finally stopped and the moose was startled so it galopped the other way. We started driving again and as we were moving away I saw the moose cross the road safely. It was HUGE! One the way home we saw some deer too.
  
• Next week presented us with two additional days off :) National holidays, baby! Victory day and Midsummer Day aka Jaanipäev. And the weather was splendid, so we got some tanning done, some bonfire done, some hanging out with family and friends done, some Munchkin done.
  
  
  
  The "Boys" sleeping on Jaanipäev morning right before going to the beach again
  
  
• Sometime during the month Husband shaved himself a beautiful handlebar mustache. Oh yeah, and he has a new passport to prove it! The lady at the passport place didn't want to give him the new document because he looked so suspicious. Hopefully this will not create us any problems when we travel.
  
  
  
  The Handlebar.
  
  
  
• As true Estonians we went to look at the new Victory monument in Old town.. a week or so after it was officially revealed. This monument has had a lot of press coverage because of it's design, the companies building it, the insane amount of money it cost and the mere necessity of it. My two cents: it is too big, too modern, too brightly lit, to be on the edge of Old Town. Did I mention huge? I did? Ok then. But the glass it is made out of is pretty nice. Did I mention it was of gargantuan proportions?
  
  
  
  No, you can't really tell how huge it is from this picture..go look at it there ilm.ee/tallinn Notice how it is the same hight as the building next to it?
  

This has pretty much been our month of June. Some other events happened too, like visiting the cinema. Guess what we saw! If you guessed Terminator - Salvation and Transformers - Revenge of the Fallen, you were correct! In fact, Husband saw the last one twice! Once with me and once with his little brother. We're such geeks! We almost never go to the movies and then, when we finally happen to lift our little legs into the cinema, we pick either zombie movies or total geek pits. Oh well. I liked the first one because of Sam Worthington (mmm.. hawt! Don't worry, my Husband knows this) and the second one was... well, entertaining.

Ok, I think now I'm done.

Questions:

First off, I am interested in more opinions what to do when you find a set of house keys in a park next to a pathway? I was walking the dog in the park and suddenly noticed the keys sitting there, in the grass, all alone, sad and scared. I picked them up to look for some sort of identification but all I saw was a bottle opener key chain. That's it. So I contemplated for a few minutes and then just gently placed them where I found them. But a bit more visibly, so if someone were to trace back their steps, they would easily locate them. What would you have done? I really wanted to help someone out by giving them their keys back...

Second question is why do I not have cookies. I REALLY want some right now. Big and fluffy with chocolate or peanut butter or nuts.. But I am way too ill to bake something and going to the store is out of the question to even retrieve the items needed for baking such wonderful morsels of instant gratification.

Third question I have is about poop. You see, I was cutting up some meat for the puppy, when I noticed some brown marks on the kitchen floor. Gross! WHY!? I did handle some chocolate in the same place a few moments ago. But still.. I went to look for the turd. Sure enough I found them. Great! Now, how do I know the thing in the kitchen was poop or chocolate? My nose is all blocked up and I cannot smell a thing! The dog has stepped in his own poop before and trotted around the apartment. I washed his little feet and they were surprisingly very clean. Then I picked up the real poop and lastly cleaned the kichen floor. I'm 99.9 percent sure it was chocolate.

Being ill kind of sucks. But at least it's cold and nasty outside. I am even not going to bother to at least try and find a picture to accompany this post. I just.. can not be bothered... need.. sleep! And.. cookies.