April seventeeth

 

Hello!

It's a monday morning, I'm sitting down with my fresh cup of black coffee (with a dash of golden spice mix), birds are chirping, cats are sleeping.

Husband is at the office, kid at the 'garten. 

I've sent all the (3) emails so I already feel a grand sense of accomplishment. Other things on the agenda are yoga, shower, making art, sewing a bit.

It was my grandpas 88th b-day on the weekend. A really lovely old school gathering with around 35 mostly related ppl and a long table with salads and meat slices and mushrooms and a warm main course of pork, potatoes and cabbage. And cringle! Raisin cocoa of course. 

Live harmonica music, old skool coupled dancing, speeches, lots and lots of vodka, similarly shaped blushing noses and sparkling eyes. It was cozy, it was divine.

The house is also.. coming along?

It's a little difficult for me to talk about it because at this moment the house is at it's most miserable stage, the roof is ripped off and the crap on the attic floors is in the process of coming down through the holes in the ceilings and just at the sides, everything will be covered in crap inside and outside. It's messy and ugly and needs to be done. I trust the building guy and my dad and urmet and the universe but it's also a big messy unknown for me. It is heavily implied that the agreed upon budget of 10k (which was a steal, honestly!) will not be enough to finish the roofing job. And that the fixing of the upper brick wall is not part of it (though it really seemed to me that it was at first? I mean, dad said it was, multiple times..)

But it will work out.. pretty soon the house will at least sport a new shiny red roof and at least active decay will stop.

Everyone is so helpful and I am very lucky to even be in this situation, this is what I've been dreaming about for years and all I really care about that we as a family have our very own land. It's a large fertile 10 acre hunk of varied land, with ponds and creeks and massive ancient trees, poku patches, old apple orchard, pasture, thickets, old ruins and stone foundations and everything. It's a really unique place with a really unique house, that WILL see better days.

yas.

Candlemas

 Hello again and it is indeed a happy new year!

Boy have I some big news. In a week, after years of actively dreaming and squirreling away at least half of any and all of my earnings, we will officially own our own formidable chunk of land (4.36 ha) with a cool, salvageable 2 story brick house (currently unlivable, but very well proportioned and with Good Bones as they say). 

Let me tell you all about this new, HUGE addition to our little family's life, the Saare talu (it's actually called that), our dear 112-year-old pirate castle, the future Charm Farm!

It's fun to think that on the summer of 2021 I deliberately decided, sort of magically, that in 2 years time, in one way or other, first time in my life, I shall have a piece of this Earth that I can actually call my very own. A year later I finished my masters thesis themed "art farms in Estonia" as a research for establishing one myself one day...  A place that has good connection to Tartu (this place is 20 minute walk from Puka train station which takes you through Tartu all the way to Tallinn if one pleases), plenty of land to develop a little permaculture foodforest, maybe even grassfeed an aboriginal horse (my childhood dream ofcourse), enough privacy yet close to a school and kindergarten (again, right outside of Puka that has it all, even a freaking children's art school!!1)..

What else.. There are 2 lakes very near our property, one is 750 m and the other is 500 m. The house used to be a good middle class family home, built for a lawyer, by a proper architect, so it's a bit of a gem in its category (all the other places we were considering in the same price/area range were all old wooden country homes, which are also nice but a different vibe).

I had this house on my radar for a while but I didn't really show that to Urmet because he had rejected all of my (more livable) picks already in the past year and a few times my hopes were crushed so painfully I was almost afraid to keep dreaming. When we were at Saaremaa for the holidays I did show the listing to my dad, for consideration and advice and he was immediately like, heck yea! Cheap as dirt and it's brick! Brick don't rot! Go check it out, it looks g00d! he said.

(Well actually this house has some severe water damage to the walls on 3-4 large spots and a completely busted roof but the Dadman, who has restored 3 absolutely miserable houses to a very lovely condition in his lifetime has already contacted a roof guy who will come in May, and he also has an electricity guy and all sorts of guys, so his connection and wisdom will prove amazing on our journey.)

And we did check it out and.. decided together to just go for it. And everything has been very smooth sailing indeed.

Since the place was so cheap we didn't even have to get a mortgage (i mean it's a hovel so no bank would give it anyway), just the max amount of "family loan" and we even have money to spare for the new roof and brick repairs.

This is all a lot and very exciting and scary as well!

Just trying to focus on one step at a time (though yeah, I have already decided the color scheme of most of the rooms and so on) and the first task will be hacking the overgrowth around the house.

It's so romantic and spooky, the home has been empty for 4 years and there's a massive growth of Robinia Pseudoacacia in the front yard. The plant has HUGE thorns, this literally looks like an abandoned courtyard from Sleeping Beauty. Removing it will be the toil. 

But since the plant grows so fast I'm considering letting it encircle our yard for extra fortification. Locust hedges were actually used tactically around forts in the times of american civil war or something  because of the massive freaking thorns that remain a formidable presence even if the plant gets culled to death. But when it is alive it has beautiful flowers and it's leaves resemble ash tree (saar) or rowan. I love this for our little witch fort.

I sort of sense a theme... I'm going to get so many beautiful thorned witchy plants growing in there. Rose hip, obviously (wild rose is my spirit plant), barberry, blackthorn, dewberry.. I'll have a whole thornberry wineyard!!! 

Ok, I am getting ahead of myself but.. these are just the loveliest daydreams. The actuality is that.. we will get the keys in a week and the reality of cleaning the place up shall begin. Wish me strength!! (and lots of money for endless renovations and artsy witchy charm farm projects)

Seeya soon!

Day

'ey

I feel really tired and sleepy at the moment. Got up at 7 to help Roora get ready for a change, it's good to volunteer sometimes, so that Urmet can have an extra hour of sleep in the morning every now and then.

Chose coffee instead of a morning nap and cleaned the kid's room, had my lunch and a second coffee and now I'm an absolute zombie. It's kaduneljapäev and we will be leaving for our winter holiday trip to Saaremaa tomorrow and a lot more should be cleaned. It's getting dark. Uuugh

Whatever, at least I got the worst room done and swapped half of our bedding before dark (Miisu is blocking the rest atm).

My apple tree painting is almost finished, it looks pretty cute, and weird. I like it I think. The weird faces on the apples are a bit much, which is not bad. It's.. campy..? I don't have any boat varnish at hand so the finishing touches will have to wait till next year. I think it should still be signed '22. Idk. Too lazy to think.

Ugh it's so annoying to be reminded of my absolute intolerance for even the most minor lack of full night's sleep. 6 hours of sleep and it's like I'm hungover, and the feeling gets worse over the day not less, until i finally catch the sufficient amount of z's. ´

Maybe I'll feel better if I put on some energizing perfume and do my daily 35+4 mins of yoga. I've been on a really good yoga streak this past month, upping the difficulty few times just enough to keep me sweating and shaking in the most intense parts of the set with plenty of chill stretch time. 

Yep, gotta do it, can't break the streak, it will get much harder to keep consistently at it over the long winter holidays at Saaremaa. It may not vanquish my sleepiness but with that very important task out of the way I can pretty much call it a day if I want to.

Harvest moon

 

Tere.

Nearing midnight on this Thursday.

Has been a day. A couple actually. 

Haven't had a chance of quiet before now, yesterday I had an "early" post noon driving lesson and today the family was home for the day. Driving is going swimmingly, the teacher is moderately chill and I'm an OK student as well. Vrumm.

1,5 h post lesson I had a painting sale date set up with a cool young Finnish biophysicist at Pirogov. Bye bye buckthorn crows, off to a happy home with you and a heap of coin for me. This year its seems my paintings have been selling like hot cakes. Can't make enough to have a decent exhibition's amount at hand almost. Feels so good!

Today I got a call from a lady expressing considerable interest in my work as a whole, and had a few favorites she's going to come check out after New Year's. She also asked whether I was going to make more of the massive foldable iconographic polyptychs and I revealed that I currently am pondering another large piece on Estonian mythology. She was immediately like, can I be the buyer? When will this manifest? I'm sure there'll be a string of potential buyers so can you please notify me first? I hope I can afford it?!

Wow.

I guess that's the exact flavor of motivation I need to actually give a go at another piece so grand after...7 years. I have a bunch of keywords and some very preliminary sketches somewhere.. I'll dig these out soon, the Matron beckons! 

heehhheeghh x3

It's days like these when I feel like it's all coming together. Like I was told it would. If I kept at it and just.. trusted.

The "work hard, have faith and your dreams will come true!" thing. Only that my hard work has been.. working hard and gradually not failing at not getting tied up in random paying jobs and gigs,  the tasteless "productivity" mindset of every other aspiring peasant. Just letting myself float, breathe, sleep and play even at most tightest of circumstances, claiming my territory proudly, even though and just because. To do exactly what I please, often verging on absolute childish irresponsibility (self-judged), demanding space for my deeply selfish delicate "flowerhood", making highly personal, naive, silly works, (that I'm embarrassed about half the time, because they looked so much better in my head) just seeing where my muse takes me, just because.. am artist? I don't think I can really do any better. Or different. Anymore.

For a long while I was sure that I'm a deeply committed self-saboteur. If some painting I made got "too popular", like the "5 little red riding hoods" or "winter solstice" I would do a spin and try something completely different instead of trying to zoom in on the approaches, even if I felt there was more to explore personally. My need to always cover my tracks to avoid "selling out" has been an actual thing forever. Masses have bad taste, galleries suck, like the best place for exhibiting my "brilliance" is either a seedy watering hole or a library in a small town at the edge of Estonia. I'm not yet entirely sure how this weird stance actually relates to my success or non-success and I believe this subject deserves its own entry. But at this moment and context I believe this attitude in it's more balanced moments has helped me to stay on the track of my unique creative independency, that may be at fault for things looking up this year. Maybe not though. 

More to ponder, but right now I feel pretty good about things, and it's a good spot to wrap it up.

:3