Daily activity

This is how I spend 1-2.5 hours (almost) every day.

Smeķīga kūka

Hanna's 2-months birthday gave a reason to make a hazelnut cake, which came out very good looking and delicious. The pieces had to be small, however, as cake is quite an energy bomb. It would be very good for cold-cold winter evenings, and I guess making of this cake was expression of my "hronisks sniega trūkums organismā", or, to say in other words, I miss cold and snow a lot. If anyone is interested, recipe is here (I could even be so nice and translate it from Estonian, just let me know).

City life

It might seem, judging from the title, that I will talk about shopping, theatres, night clubs and similar activities of city life. Not at all. What night clubs can we talk about with two months old, or rather young, baby at home (ha-ha, here the baby is mentioned again).
Our city life is more pragmatic. Since October, when we moved into larger flat,which happened to be in the Tallinn city center, we have been living behind scaffolding because facade renovation was going on for our apartment house. To start with, the facade renovation was supposed to be finished before we move in. Then finalizing was postponed to "before baby (...b-word again...) is born", i.e. beginning of the November. Then the deadline moved to 15 December, but that day as well as Christmas and New Year's Day passed behind the scaffolding. I was already feeling that it is not bizarre at all that there is somebody walking behind the window despite the fact that the window is on seventh floor. Today, however, was the big day when they finally removed the scaffolding.
... but, there cannot be emptiness, and exactly from today we have this thing just across the street:

It's a big advertising light box. It is very bright and shinning directly into our windows. Our flat is situated so that all windows are to the same side, and there is no escape from this light. From today I can read without switching on lamps. Good news are that we can save on electricity, but on the other side it's quite annoying. Tomorrow I'm going to investigate if there are any rules in Tallinn city regarding the brightness of advertising in direct proximity of living houses, but to be honest, I have little hope to get rid of this light terror behind our window.
At least now we are saved from winter depression caused by the lack of light.

... and few more things...

Not being shy, I definitely have to mention that finally I did some bit-more-active sports since last May! Couple of days ago I went jogging for 30-40min. That felt good despite some ache in knees (which only shows that I have to do more sports to get back to previous state).
Looking forward to skiing, but unfortunately still waiting for snow. To get things worse, just had a look at pictures from snow-boarding last year. I would like so much to go to mountains again! But not this year, for sure... Hanna is still priority. Yes :)) here we go again - cannot miss speaking of babies. As we already got there, then here is some picture by Kaido how we made her footprint. And some more are here.

What to do with Christmas tree in Tallinn

After Christmas and New Year's Day were gone, the question arose what to do with the Christmas tree. This was somewhat new problem for me, being a country girl, as at my parents' home we always burned our Christmas tree and I had never had a Christmas tree in the city before. So last Friday I started to investigate the options, as our Christmas tree looked more and more funny with losing its needles. Especially so after our 5 and 7 years old nephews had visited us and, using the moment while all adults were sitting in the kitchen and chatting, discovered that it is quite some fun to shake old Christmas tree with falling needles.
First I tried official home page of Tallinn city, checked through any information related to waste collection and environment - nothing. Checked also news on Tallinn website - again nothing. Then I went to good-old Google and tried search using different key words involving Christmas tree, collection, Tallinn, and so on. The only sensible response I got was a 2 years old article from Postimees (one of the 2 largest Estonian daily newspapers) in January 2006, stating the situation 2 years ago. It mentioned that Tallinn has no organised system for Christmas tree collection, but trees can be brought to 2 places where large fires will be organised.
No articles or information for 2008, so I came to conclusion that obviously nothing has changed during those 2 years and there is still no "official" place to get rid of old Christmas trees. The result was also visible in the yard of our apartment house - where some Christmas trees where piling up besides the waste bins (by the way, they are still there by now).
I asked from relatives living in Tallinn what they do with their Christmas tree, and they said that they also leave it by the waste bin, as they have smaller house, and the waste company brings it away. Just leaving our tree by the waste bin we didn't take for an option.
I didn't know any other friend who had a Christmas tree. So this still left us with the problem, what to do with our old Christmas tree.
In the end, we arrived back to the burning option known from my childhood. Not on our balcony, however (although, I'm sure, our nephews would have enjoyed it a lot). We decided to bring the tree to our house under construction, where in spring we can burn it in the garden together with all spring cleaning up.
Despite we found solution, it is very strange that Tallinn, being the largest city and capital of Estonia, has no information what to do with old Christmas trees although that should be pretty common problem in early January. Not everybody has some house with garden where Christmas tree can be burned.
By the way, while writing this post, I decided to run Google search again if there is anything new, and - voilà - there is Postimees article published on January 9. It turns out that also this year they will make 2 large fires being also part of Light Festival. Well, too late, folks, our Christmas tree was too tired already by January 5.
Anyhow, in my opinion there should be more specific and timely information for city people what to do with their Christmas trees. Perhaps long-time Tallinn people just know things, but I really couldn't find any sensible information in time when I needed it. One way would be to distribute information together with selling Christmas tree - just small information label where one can dispose it afterwards. That shouldn't be too difficult as information would be town or city specific for every sales place. Perhaps it would help to reduce the number of Christmas trees left by the waste bins.