The Mystery of Mickey

Kids are nice. Their world is completely different from the grown-up world. Liisa (now 5.5 months) shows it by being obsessed with things to taste. When I put her down, she quickly turns to her stomach, looks around and goes for the closest thing that she could put in her mouth. Usually it's one of her chew-toys but it can be anything from a pillow corner to a paper tissue. Siiri is still very much amused when she tells me, "Liisa tried to eat my pajama pants.", even though it happened a couple of weeks ago.

Liisa has grown a lot. A couple of days ago she learned how to crawl!  She crawls backwards and doesn't quite realize she's doing it but she moved half a meter or even more in minutes. That means I have to be careful with letting her sleep in the large bed while I'm not there to notice her wake up and crawl towards the edge. Liisa is a delightful baby. She's very cheerful and smiles a lot. She lights up whenever Siiri pays attention to her and she loves seeing Erkki after a long workday. It's odd - I didn't think she would perceive the time Erkki is away but she is especially happy to see Erkki when she hasn't seen him all day. I'm not jealous of the smiles Siiri and Erkki get because Liisa is the cutest when we're alone. She tells me long stories (gooo-gaaaaaaa..brrrrr...ghhhhh) and I repeat what she says and she is so happy that we're communicating. I don't remember if I used as much baby-talk with Siiri. I know I sometimes mirrored her sounds because she always had a positive reaction to it, but I think I enjoy it even more with Liisa. With Siiri I felt silly making odd sounds and I was afraid it would lead to me being a silly baby-talking mother. ("awww looky at cuuute doggy woof"  ). There will be a time when we forbid dumb baby-talk around Liisa as well, but it will be months before she actually starts learning words so I can baby-talk all I want.

Around 4 months of age, babies start noticing the world around them. I suspect their eyesight improves a lot very quickly, but they also learn to analyze their surroundings better. That's the time when many babies have trouble breastfeeding or sleeping because they're just too distracted. Fortunately Liisa is a very easy baby to breastfeed. She eats quickly and fusses very little. Unfortunately, falling asleep got a lot more difficult in the last month. I really wanted to avoid one major mistake that we did with Siiri - cradling the baby to sleep. It was okay when Siiri was very tiny but it was horrible for my back when she weighed 9+ kg and had several naps each day. I refused to cradle Liisa (except when she was already over-tired and very sad) because I know where it will lead. I was so sure I don't want to cradle and sent Erkki to Google for alternatives while I was with the sleepy baby. He returned looking quite grim. "Internet proposes two solutions: either cradle them to sleep or let them cry until they fall asleep". That's very bad!  I tried to intuitively find a third solutions and I did: when I lie next to Liisa, she is very livid and playful and tries to engage me in a conversation... and then falls asleep. I don't know how it works because she doesn't seem to get any sleepier but right now it seems like a good solution. I get to browse the Internet on my HTC Desire while I wait for Liisa to suddenly magically fall asleep.

Siiri's world is quite different. A couple of days ago I woke up to the sound of Siiri running around the apartment saying, "Mickey, Mickey,Mickey, where are you? I'm going to find you. Where are you hiding?". It would be great if she found Mickey because Mickey is completely lost! We live in an apartment so it can't be that easy to make a 10-15 cm stuffed toy disappear without a trace. Siiri looked for it, Erkki looked for it, I looked for it. I checked under every closet, I took a flashlight to check behind the closets, under the beds, in all the drawers, behind the curtains, etc. I looked everywhere! It wasn't even such a big deal - Siiri has other toys that are also her favorites - but I was sure I would find it if I looked in the right place. Usually Siiri hides everything under her bed. She hoards hair clips and small toys beside her pillow and some of them  fall under the bed. Once every two weeks a cleaning lady comes and helps us (I absolutely hate washing the floors). The last time she found 8 hair clips, 3 hair bands, 4 tiny dinosaurs and a tiny angel figurine under Siiri's bed. No Mickey: of course I knew that because I had checked already. I have no idea where Mickey is. Siiri sometimes plays hide and seek with Mickey even though the game is quite one-sided.

Siiri is very smart. She loves to learn new things and absorbs information from anywhere. At her age (2.9 years), she's supposed to be able to count to three. She counts to twenty! And she counts to 12 in English. She can also translate the numbers directly, "There are six pens, "six" (in English)" so it's not just a sequence of words that she memorized. She knows all the colors, and some of them also in English. She can read all the letters and some symbols (e.g. +, ?, !) and can write some of them although she doesn't yet understand how letters make words. She's supposed to be able to draw a simple circle. She knows most shapes and can draw circles, triangles, squares, sphere (identical to the circle, so I have to ask which one she drew) and today she made a (slightly crooked) parallelogram (Estonian rööpkülik). "Mommy, look, I made a parallelogram".    I can't help but think that her fondness for numbers and geometrical shapes will lead to good mathematical skills. She just really loves numbers. If she ever gets an imaginative friend, it will probably be "three".

I didn't really tutor her to know all that stuff. We played with letter cards a long time ago, and she learned English while watching videos on YouTube. There are some rather harmless "educational" videos targeted to English-speaking toddlers that she watches while I'm asleep or busy with Liisa. Siiri also has an amazing memory and a really vivid imagination. Just last week she was telling me how when it is summer, we will go to the beach: Mommy, Daddy, Liisa, Siiri together, we'll apply sunscreen, play by the water with lots of toys, Siiri will have a bikini, etc. Her story was full of details that she remembered from the summer but it also included Liisa, which is nice.

Siiri has been falling asleep a bit better now.  Lately I expect her to fall asleep in 30-90 minutes. It sometimes takes longer but overall we have so much more time during the day, she's better rested, wakes up less during the night and is more enjoyable to be around. I'm supposed to be better rested as well, but both me and Erkki have been really sleepy lately. It's a comfortable kind of sleepiness. Lately all soft surfaces just seem so much softer and exercising feels like too much effort.

During the global ACTA protest day, I went to the protest in Tartu town hall square. It was freezing but well worth it. Estonians just suck at protesting. I was hoping to yell protest slogans with the people (over 1000 people were there) but the most activity was when we bounced up and down. I also gave a signature against ACTA on the Estonian petition (~7400 people) and the Avaaz letter to EU Parliament (~2.5 million people). I've done all I could do. Now I can just sit back and wait for either the next wave of protests in the summer or for the treaty to crumble and disappear.

By the way, recipe recommendation. I forgot to tell Erkki to bring more fresh yeast and eggs so I can't bake anything with a yeast dough. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to. So I found a recipe that used up most of the almost-too-ripe bananas and the last egg in the refrigerator and was easy enough to have Siiri join me in the baking process.

Banana bread (simplyrecipes.com)

Ingredients with European units (and sugar amount adjusted to European normal sweetness, 50% of original)

3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
80 g butter, melted
100 g sugar
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda (I used 1.5 tsp of baking powder in stead)
Pinch of salt
190 g of all-purpose flour (I used 9,8% protein flour, no. 405)

Smashed bananas, added melted butter, then beat the egg and added sugar and vanilla, then in third bowl mixed flour and baking powder and salt. Combined ingredients, poured in a buttered bread pan and baked at 175 C for 1 hour.

Really little effort and super delicious. Next time I'll add chocolate chips and a shot of espresso/Kahlua like the comments suggest.

Time Wasted

Today it has taken nearly 5 hours (and counting) to get Siiri to fall asleep. Two and a half hours before her nap and nearly the same time before her night sleep. It is so annoying. Like truly annoying to the point that I'm ready to lock her in her room and just ignore her when she's supposed to sleep and then unlock the door when she's supposed to be awake. We can't do that but I'm allowed to dream, aren't I? 

Siiri's nap kept happening later and later until it was usual for her to still be awake at 3 p.m. That's the time when most kids her age have already woken up from their nap. It didn't make sense to even start putting her to sleep before 1:30 p.m. and the one and a half hours waste was all in the daily plan. Then sometimes she kept resisting sleep until 4 or even 4:30, so for a while we didn't even try anything until 2 p.m. Then she fell asleep even later and woke up a couple of hours before her evening bed time. That didn't work either so we put her to sleep earlier again. It seemed that no matter what we do, it takes 1.5-2.5 hours for her to fall asleep. Now we're trying something different - for a couple of days now, we have set her sleeping times to the recommended 12 a.m. and 7 p.m.. That's 3-4 hours earlier than she's used to.

The bed-time routine is great and I really don't see why it doesn't work. I start by getting into pajamas. Then I wash her teeth. Then she gets to select two stories or fairy tales from her books. If she selects really short stories, I usually read a third short story. That takes about 20-30 minutes. Every other day Erkki does that, but it's deliberately identical. Sometimes she wants to play with a snow globe while I'm reading, but usually she tends to wander around the room and comment what I'm reading. Sometimes I get her to stay put and lie in bed, but that doesn't make any difference so I don't enforce it much. When stories have been read, she lies down, I tuck her in and we wave good-night. The routine is the same for both nap and night time sleep. And then 3 minutes later Siiri is jumping on her bed. I order her to lie down. 2 minutes later she wanders away from her room, I order her back in her room.   Then she spends 10 minutes talking and playing with her stuffed toys.  I treat this as "at least she's in bed", but then she gets bored with that and walks out again. And that goes on for a couple of hours until I get irritated and short-tempered and whenever she even makes a beep, I don't even bother going to her, but I just yell from another room, "Siiri, back to bed, right now!". And then eventually she is so sleepy that she just crashes in her bed, because that's where she happens to be.

So why is it so bad if she spends such a long time falling asleep. I could just, you know, get used to it and not have a problem with it. Well, it's not that simple.  When it's sleeping time, we don't play or eat. I don't teach her anything, she doesn't practice drawing or play with Play-Doh. It's pointless wasted time. It's my life (or Erkki's) and Siiri's just ticking away completely uselessly. I don't get to concentrate on anything because every 5-10 minutes I get to order Siiri back to bed. (I guess now you see the potential usefulness of getting a lock for her door, except there's no bathroom there.). When I'm in the other room putting Liisa to sleep, Siiri takes advantage of the situation and wanders around and then starts playing with the volume of her voice: shrieking softer and louder. When I was cutting Liisa's hair while Liisa was asleep, Siiri came out and casually woke up Liisa with pointless talk. That was one time I was really pissed off and didn't want to talk with Siiri for a couple of hours. I totally see the enjoyment I would get from physical punishment. I really have a cruel streak in me.   Some parts of my childhood have taught me to be cruel because to me it seemed that everyone else is cruel too. That's not completely true but I do still have to work on my temper. Physical punishment would be a bitter sweet revenge for not going to sleep at the right time: but that sounds way too mean for any good parent, so I won't do that.

I don't have any plan. Currently it seems that Siiri falls asleep when I am already cranky and on the verge of losing my temper, so perhaps I should start this way.  Brillint idea, eh? So when I read her the fairy tales and say good night, I can add, "and don't you dare getting out of bed, or I will hide all your toys and you won't see them until you wake up. And if you get out of bed again, I start throwing them out the window. One. By. One." Or I could take a devil's mask that I could buy in some carnival store and put it on and not take it off until after she falls asleep, so that she could be too scared to come out of her room, and while I wear it I could be really mean and angry. Or I could do it easier and "accidentally" start watching horror movies after her bedtime, so that when she wanders out of her room, she happens to see them and won't ever dare to come out of her room at bedtime ever again. (Except when she starts having nightmares and runs out of her room screaming...  ) I don't know. All of it sounds like a good idea at the moment. Anything sounds better than 5 and a half hours (yes, that's how long it finally took) wasted during an otherwise perfect Sunday. Half of that time Erkki was the active party, the other half I was the active party, not none of that time we could spend together, just watching something together or having a meaningful conversation. Today Liisa was in a foul mood as well, so even browsing the net was not easy. I didn't find any useful information how to improve nap times. It seems like we've already tried everything.

Any ideas?

PS! Liisa is doing really well. She learned to turn to her stomach before she was 4 months old and now she turns on her stomach whenever possible. She does't interfere with Siiri's daily schedule much and sometimes she's even helpful in getting Siiri to fall asleep. Siiri is still much more likely to wake up Liisa than the other way around (ratio about 4:1).

Even Greedier Bastards

After my last post about Internet piracy I discussed the topic with Erkki and I also kept reading about it. I found out some things worth sharing.

It is possible to buy games online through Steam. Well, actually I knew that before but I don't use it myself (I only play games on Xbox lately) and I forgot all about it. With all the criticism I have about how the world works and how piracy is caused by the lack of fast, simple and affordable supply, I should have mentioned Steam so I will correct it right now.

Steam is an online game platform. You log in as a user and you can download and play a very wide variety of games. What they get right: Their wide selection of old games easily completes with what pirates have to offer and, even better, they sell all the well-marketed new games. This allows even the people living in nearly abandoned countryside to legally purchase games that would definitely be found in the local store. Now piracy is no longer the only option for them (aside from not playing at all or ordering a physical copy and praying it gets delivered intact). There is one thing that they do perfectly: they let people pre-download games and when it's finally the release date of the downloaded game, people get the codes to start playing it. Excellent. Ingenious!    they have understood that people can't wait so and that their servers would be overloaded during the release day of major games if everyone started downloading at the same time. But... (of course there is a 'but') ...they might be the greediest bastards of all. 

Steam sells the new games for the full price. They do occasionally sell games with huge discounts but the normal prices are just what you'd expect from a new game: €30-€60. "What's wrong with that?  ", you might wonder. Sure you don't get a physical disc or a manual, but that affects the price very little and who needs those anyway. What's wrong is that you buy the game only after you sign a contract that the games will only be for PERSONAL use. That does not include a wife and a couple of kids. If you let your wife/husband play with your account, you're actually breaking the agreement.  I don't know how that is even possible because such user agreements just can't be above marital law. What's mine is Erkki's and vice versa. Sure, it doesn't apply to all things, for example I have no right to modify or delete Erkki's Facebook account or to even view his e-mail accounts but the games he buys on Steam are just as much bought with my money. If it's really possible to sign an agreement that makes those games belong to only him, then why do people even bother signing prenuptial agreement before they get married. One of the partners could just sign separate agreements so that all the best things he buys only belong to him/her.

Actually, I realized there are things like membership fees which only belong to the person who signs the contract. If the husband joins a country club that has huge membership fees, it still doesn't make the wife a half-member. Same with gym membership cards. I have no idea what would happen to a World of Warcraft account during a divorce if the non-player spouse wanted half of it. There was some case where a woman deleted her husband's WoW account and was fined, so I guess the account is worth something. But maybe Steam is selling something completely obscure, like the right to play a game. However I think about it, I'm sure Steam found a legal loophole which justifies the "personal only" agreement, but never in a million years would I believe that they actually thought couples will buy two copies of each game that they both like. Or 4 copies if their kids also like the game. So basically they set up a system that guarantees that there will be people all over the world violating the Steam agreement.  That means Steam sows as much morally bad Internet behavior as the overpriced game industry in general. Or in other words, they re-define what to consider immoral: is it immoral to break a end user agreement? What if it's a stupid and unfair agreement?

Also, Steam games or accounts can't be sold (agreement violation), which makes the games relatively even more expensive. In Europe that's not such a big issue but in USA there are stores that actually buy back the used games and sell used games for (I would guess) a reasonable price.

Another beef I have with Steam is the regional pricing and availability of games. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, for example, costs €49.99 in Europe, €46.14 in USA, and €41.92 in UK. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is even worse, costing €49.99, €23.06, or €35.93, respectively. The EXACT SAME GAME. Just as much data is moved across the Internet, except some people have the privileged to pay more for a game they can't re-sell or let their spouse play. And it gets even worse. Erkki bought and pre-loaded Skyrim  on Steam. When it was the release date, he came home, eager to start playing, except there was a surprise. At the last moment, after his purchase, the game had been changed to "unavailable" in some parts of Europle, including Estonia and several other countries. And presumably it was all fair because Estonia is some weird country anyway, where people live in mud huts and walk around in waist-deep mud in extreme poverty.   Why would they want to play games anyway...

I'm not against Steam as such. I think it's a great start. If they enable family accounts and combine the regions, then it would all be great. And if they keep experimenting with game pricing (cool information about pricing experiments), maybe games will end up being affordable to average people and gaming piracy will become something that only poor people do.

Damn I took so many words to describe all the subtle ways how Steam secretly sucks. But there is another thing I wanted to discuss: Estonian Authors' Society, EAS (Eesti Autorite ühing, EAÜ). Most countries have similar organizations that work towards ensuring that artists get the profit they deserve and people don't break copyright laws. The idea behind it is very noble and I give them my respect for making sure that people who sing professionally actually get paid for what they produce. As you can guess, I wouldn't mention them only to praise their cause. In stead, I'm mentioning to bash their means. EAS collects money from all the digital songs (8-12%, with a set minimum fee for a song), they collect money from TV-channels and TV broadcasters (for showing channels with copyright material, they collect money from all the empty CDs sold in the store because they COULD end up having copyrighted material on them (8%), they collect 5% every time a painting is sold, they collect money from concert organizers, night clubs, restaurants with background music, etc. Basically, they get their dirty little nails behind every cent they can hoard to themselves. In the year 2008, they collected over 70 000 000 EEK.

And now it gets tricky - they only pay out  fees to registered members for registered works of art and only for the member's contribution in that work of art. A song is 50% music and 50% words, so if the singer didn't write the ENTIRE song, they won't get the entire money for it. And even if he did, he still had to pay 25% that was already removed  "for representing the author's rights". EAS has some partner organizations abroad as well, so they pay some money to them as well, for the authors that are registered with them, but there is still a lot of authors who are "being represented" but don't receive the money that EAS has collected on their behalf. Even the artists who are supposed to be paid, often have to contact the organization to get the money, otherwise it will go unnoticed. For that reason, in 2008, EAS distributed only 26 000 000 EEK to it's members. 

I would call that robbery - they take from everyone and only make it seem like they are giving it to the people who deserve it. Their website has listed several people who owe them money, including for Anne Veski's solo concerts and a child protection day event in a park. I wish I was making it up. They're like the ultimate bad guy, taxing a person's own solo concert and robbing money from child protection day events. They should just rename their organization Musical Artists For Indulgence Association. 

This "helpful" organization sets a minimum price for all songs sold online, increasing the price and thus encouraging piracy. One online music store in Estonia just went bankrupt because they couldn't pay those fees. EAS started asking for 12% which was too much for the store. It would be less tragic if Microsoft music store Zune were being distributed to Estonia, but they're not. EAS is also famous for having videos removed from Youtube. That includes any video that looks slightly dubious and they don't check if any copyright laws really were broken. One guy found that his own video of him singing his own song was removed by EAS "just in case". It was in the news recently. EAS also inhibits any fringe cultural events that don't make much profit but have to pay to EAS. If you've been to a place called Genialistide klubi in Tartu, you might not have noticed that it's a "night club".  At least that's how it's being taxed by EAS.

I hope it gave you something new to think about.

Also, almost forgot. There are no movie rentals in the 100 000 people town I live in. I guess everyone buys the movies in the mall (selection is mostly made up of 3-10 year old movies that no one ever wanted to buy) or rents one of the 77 movies in Elion digital rental (if they're Elion clients). Or they just watch movies on TV, because they know that commercial breaks are for their own good, so they can be up to date with products sold in stores.

Greedy Bastards

I live in a mythical country. We have ancient forests and beautiful maidens. We have medieval city walls and castles. And most importantly, sometimes our country exists and sometimes it doesn't.  The ignorant people involved with entertainment industry usually can't see us but the modern all-knowing oracle, the Internet, knows we're here in need of entertainment. Thus our fairy tale features a lot of pirates.

I read Cracked.com very often. It has humorous articles about everything from women clothing to zombie apocalypse. One of the writers there (can't remember which one) condemned Internet piracy, saying it only made sense when he was young and entertainment cost too much and wasn't even always available for all people. I was confused - how is that different from our current situation? Music records are ridiculously expensive and a nuisance to buy. I would literally have to WALK TO THE STORE  to buy an expensive music record with only a couple of songs that I actually like and if the CD gets scratched, I get to throw it away. That is so ridiculous. I would really have to hate money and have no respect for my time to do that. Buying CDs is so damn ridiculous that downloading a few songs or even playlists full of thousands of songs with a few easy clicks doesn't even count as piracy in our society anymore. So when I talk about piracy, why even mention music at all, right? Besides, I could just legally listen to free random music on Pandora.

Or not. Pandora website:

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Estonia (your IP address appears to be 80.235.58.120). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please email us.

Oh go to hell. Licencing is like the evil spell that makes us not exist.  Come on! Estonia has real people who might want to listen to music too. Ah, to hell with it. I'll just download something later.* (*added later: Just kidding! I'm too lazy to even download music because I'd have to actually know the artists that are worth downloading. I might find them on Pandora, except... Never mind. Music is overrated anyway)

The situation is worse with movies. It's not really possible to stay up to date with the movie industry by only watching movies after buying them. Movies are really expensive and it takes so long for movies to be released in mythical countries. Me and Erkki are really fond of watching movies and for a while we had a weird delusion that we want to support the movie industry by actually buying movies every once in a while. About 10% of movies (that we watched) we saw in the cinema, 30-40% we bought and the rest of them we saw by other means. After a few of years we had possibly over a hundred movie DVDs. We had nothing to do with them because it's tedious to watch something old when we barely have the time to watch all the cool new things. We eventually gave most of the movies away and the rest of them are collecting dust and taking up space. It's stupid really - we have all those movies what could fit on a regular hard drive. And we can't even use a "search button" to find the right movie. We have to BROWSE AND FIND the right DVD and actually OPEN THE BOX and INSERT THE DISC.  Are you kidding me? What year is it - 1992?! 

Besides, the price. Oh my god, what price they ask for it. Most people have really crappy TV-sets and even worse sound systems (if any at all). And even with good quality technology, most people live in apartment buildings so they can't turn up the sound. Now can you imagine that the DVD version of Inception costs 13 euros? For such a price you can buy one movie that everyone has already seen, and are already forgetting. For a standard family of 4, that would be a good deal because going to the cinema once would cost about as much money and then you couldn't watch it over and over again. Except it would be on your crappy TV set with that crappy sound system in that thin-walled apartment. Another aspect of entertainment prices: what's your entertainment budget for a month? For most people 35 euros for a month of gym membership is too much. How would they ever manage to watch more than 2 movies in a month if they also want to listen to legal music of their own choice.

And the stupidest thing of all - the reason why the movie industry should just do a huge face palm at their own horrible idea - DVD regions!  Some of the movies sold in Estonia aren't even meant for our region. One Estonian guy told a story how he used to be completely legal in terms of Internet piracy (sucker!). One day he bought a cartoon DVD for his kid but when he got home and tried to play it, he found out it was meant for Australian region instead or somewhere similarly far away. He hadn't cracked open his DVD player regions, and I think that would have been illegal anyway, even though everyone does that. He was furious and called some official line to complain and ask for advice. As it turns out, the store did nothing wrong, there are no grounds for getting a refund, it would still be illegal for him to download the same movie and he should have bought an Australian disc only if he had a plan on traveling to Australia to watch it. That was the day he turned to piracy for justice. 

Movie industry just doesn't get it. The entire world is paying for those blockbusters so it's just horribly unfair to treat some countries worse and give us the movies much later. Also, if there is any statistics out there saying that movies make more money in US than in the rest of the worlds then DUH! That's because the rest of the world decided they won't take that crap and just went and saw the movie for free. The movie Inception premiered in UK, was released in USA on 13 July 2010, already on 23 of July in Estonia and then finally on 1st of September in China and 24th September in Italy. So, they they expect Italians to just wait around for all that time to actually see the movie? And people who enjoy watching films in their own home had to wait until 7th of September for the DVD to be released. In the modern age, that translates to AN ETERNITY! Enjoy your regional favoritism, movie industry and don't worry about the common people - the Internet offers an alternative.

The movie industry bitches and moans about lost profit while they still think its possible to screw people over with regions and delayed release of movies. If you're assholes enough to say: "you have to wait three weeks to see the movie just because you live in Estonia and you have to wait even longer if you want to watch it in your living room" then people in the world will simply find an alternative. People can't wait. The proof is the existence of screener copies of movies. There are plenty of people out there who would watch a low quality version that has been filmed with a hand camera by someone with shaky hands in stead of waiting a couple of months for a good copy of the film. The world is too fast paced and global for the current system of movie release dates.

Don't even get me started on programs that cost more for the European market than they do for the USA market and come with a price tag close to minimum wage or much more. Between the choices of not using the ridiculously expensive programs at all or using freeware crap, the market found a third option, which unfortunately isn't legal. I once tried to find out how much I would have to pay to use Photoshop at home.

From Adobe forums:

Hi,

could someone from Adobe give me a real answer to this question?

Photoshop CS5 is 999$ in the US but....1434Euros in France!

If I use the current change rate, it should be something like 735 euros!!!

So, why do you simply multiply the price by 2?

(And please, don't tell me that the shipping in France and the translation of the manual cost 700 euros)

Thanks

JM

Good going Adobe.  Nice of you to make sure no one actually buys your program for their home computer and to guarantee that there will always be pirated copies available online. I don't use photoshop very often so I would pay 10 euros for Adobe Photoshop if I could download it in from a fast server and get some extra benefits (like removing ads that could be included on the FREE version that you yourself upload - so, what do you think?  ). I would not pay the ridiculous money it costs now. It costs so much that piracy seems to be the assumed way of using the program at home. Besides, it's truly inconvenient to actually download and install the official Adobe program, as I know from workplace experience. As long as the legal option is infinitely more tedious, piracy isn't going anywhere.

E-books.  That's possibly the issue that justifies piracy more than anything else. The translated, hardcover copy of Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" costs 14.19 €. That makes sense. The original language hardcover copy is 12.11 € (calculated with Google currency conversion). Translating and transporting books is very expensive. Paying only 2 extra euros for translation and transportation is a bargain. Printing a hardcover book is also expensive, especially a book with 408 pages. One online printing company says that the price of printing hardcover books is $8.50 per unit + $0.02 per page, which is 16.66 € for a 408 page book. I guess Chinese sweatshops do it for much less, but nothing can explain why the e-book of translated Digital fortress costs 12.14€!!! Absolutely nothing except for evil greedy manages who are laughing their evil greedy laughter in their Bad Guy castles that are surrounded by moats full of hungry piranhas. 

So basically what I'm saying is that piracy is so mainstream only because the entertainment industry (and some greedy companies) have made so many bad choices and now there is no turning back. There would have been some piracy no matter what they did, but in their attempt to squeeze more and more money out of regular people, they have made piracy the widespread norm that it is today. Those regular people actually like to eat and pay electricity pills and can't seem to find leprechauns  to give them pots full of gold. There is one way to stop piracy - no it's not ACTA or PIPA or SOPA. The solution is for the entertainment industry to stop living in fairy tales and realize that they live in the real world where all countries have access to the Internet and people do not have unlimited money and time that they are dying to give away to support greedy bastards. 

PS! I have officially lost 18 kg (4 months and 1 week) and I'm now back in the pre-pregnancy weight. For a long time it was 18ish kg (0,3-0,6 over the goal) but today the scale was my friend. I am very happy about it!  

Confusional Arousal

I know what inspired the movie Exorcist. Just imagine a kid waking up at night and screaming. Mother enters the room, "Mommy's right here. Everything's okay!" and the mother touches the child's arm. The child starts screaming twice as loudly as if touched with burning iron. The father joins the scene and also tries to calm the child who still hasn't opened her eyes. The child cries and cries and screams and then cries some more for 10 minutes while both parents are confused. Then she walkes around the room being angry at everything  and suddenly calms and goes back to sleep. In the morning the child is happy and playful as if it had all been a dream. 

The contrast between nighttime Siiri  and daytime Siiri and is like the difference between night and day, or the difference between being possessed by a demon or not being possessed.  (A lot of good that baptism did.  ). I've done a lot of Google research and it's actually a sort of sleep disorder ( a parasomnia) called confusional arousal. It mostly affects infants and toddlers. It's almost like a form of sleepwalking, because the child is still asleep during the episode. Siiri is very difficult to wake up when it happens. At first we tried to wake her up every time. What else are you going to do if the child is screaming at 3 a.m. for no particular reason. It sometimes worked but usually it just made her mad. And I really mean MAD! She was still not very responsive, except she started making demands. "Bunny doesn't want to be tucked in! BUNNY DOESN'T WANT TO BE TUCKED IN! BUNNY...  "

A few days ago she made up a new demand "Put Siiri back!". Neither me nor Erkki knew what she meant by it until Siiri started demanding it in the middle of the night, screaming it as loud as she can. Finally Erkki picked her up and placed her in the last place she had been standing and that solved it. Erkki must have casually nudged Siiri, thus "helping" her move further and now had to restore Siiri's location in the room. You see, any kind of help is completely forbidden at night. For Siiri it's all about "myself!". I do like to encourage Siiri to try to open buttons herself, open the door herself, put on clothing herself, but it's not quite the same when a sleep deprived (or still askeep fidgety toddler picks up a class full of water, says, "I will do it myself." and then attempts to climb and sit on the bed while still holding the glass. If I take away the glass, she will say (I mean, scream as loud as possible), "do not help me!". 

Some of the demands are perfectly reasonable. If a stuffed toy falls off the bed and she wants to climb down and get it, it's a perfectly reasonable request. However, if she holds on to her thumb with the other hand and cries, "Remove finger!", that's not quite as reasonable. I thought she was simply confused but then she told me to get the scissors from the kitchen to cut the finger off.  There's also a thing with hating her left hand. At night, Siiri's left hand isn't allowed to do anything. It can't help adjust the blanket or pick up a stuffed toy. Sometimes it isn't even allowed to help hold that glass of water. Sometimes Siiri lets me help her hold the glass with my right hand, but not with the left hand.

The nighttime tantrums are really annoying and cause sleep deprivation to all of us. It's been going on for months, with some nights worse than others. Sometimes all is quiet for weeks and then sometimes there isn't a single quiet night for a week. Lately it happens several times a week.  After I read up on confusional arousal (or sleep terrors, whatever the difference really is), I found out we're not supposed to wake her up at all. Actually we had tried just waiting out the crying but only for a few minutes at a time and then we interfered. When we finally tried to not interact with her in any way during the episode, she cried for 6 minutes and then simply went back to sleep, not saying anything or doing anything. It won't always work though. Even touching the blanket in the wrong way can end with 30 minutes of confused tantrum. I call it confused because even if she gets exactly what she wants, she decides she wanted something completely different in stead. 

Confusional arousal is really interfering with potty training.  During the day she doesn't use diapers and doesn't have any accidents. She often wakes up in the morning completely dry, except when she has one of those nighttime confusional arousal episodes and can't make it to the bathroom in time. She tries, but it's just doomed effort. She tries to do everything with only her right hand, including taking off her pants and climbing on the toilet seat.  When something fails, she has to do it again from start, all while crying and screaming. By the time she's sitting, it's 20 minutes later and too late.

Some mothers think that the episodes are caused by discomforts such as wanting to pee or being too hot or too cold. Doctors are mostly just confused themselves. The description of the episodes varies a lot but tantrums are rarely mentioned. They often say that interacting with the child will make the situation worse but they don't say that the child might want to cut her finger off. One thing that all the medical descriptions say is that lack of sleep causes such parasomnias as night terrors and confusional arousals. And since parasomnias  cause lack of sleep, the condition starts to feed itself. For Siiri, lack of sleep is most definitely an issue. It takes HOURS to get her to fall asleep. Lately we start putting her to bed at 8 or 8.30 but she falls asleep near midnight. Nap time isn't much better: I read her the stories at 1.30 and she falls asleep around 3 p.m. or later. The smartest solution suggestion to a similar problem was to put the child to sleep even earlier, at 7 p.m. because of the child's circadian rhythm. If we do that, Siiri can only see Erkki in her dreams. I don't like that solution one bit but we might not have a choice. 

...or perhaps a priest with holy water would be more convenient. 

Gingerbread Cookies

I really do have too much energy for spending my time being idle and doing really boring repetitive tasks. Thus I find stuff to really care about. Yeah, okay, I really care about my kids but it would be really unhealthy to obsess about their development too much. I can just imagine it, "Siiri, I see you drew a sun, again! But you already knew how to draw it! Now try to draw a cat. Practice!" . If I really want to push someone to change and improve themselves for my entertainment, I'd rather it would be me. So I try to learn new things.

I have horrible memory, so at first I tried to do some memory exercises. Pretty soon I realized that it's frustrating to spend my time doing something I'm terrible at. Then I thought I would learn to dance better. I'm not good at it, but it's not nearly as bad as with memory. I took on the challenge to master all the dances on Kinect's "Dance Central 2". That was also going badly enough that I kind of gave up. It's wonderful physical exercise but I'm pretty sure that's one challenge that is not really worth the effort. At least not with my grasp of choreography and my lacking physical memory. Then I thought - I haven't made the perfect gingerbread cookies! 

Gingerbread cookies are not just a sugary treat. They symbolize my favorite holiday!  There's so much tasty food that is only eaten during Christmas. I'm not religious at all anymore and the entire baby Jesus theme is just a nice childhood memory, especially because I barely hear anything about Jesus anymore now that I'm surrounded by spiritualists, pagans, atheists and agnostics. I love Christmas for all the candles and spices, the smell of a spruce tree and the activity of baking and eating fresh gingerbread cookies.  As long as I remember, Christmas has always had those things. Most people don't really think about it but when you have kids, the things you do become their childhood memories. How could Siiri have a childhood memory of family Christmas if we're too lazy to celebrate Christmas. That just won't do! We should make the most of it! I want my kids to have childhood memories of Christmas that are worth remembering. One thing that I always remember about Christmas, is when we were kids, we took a bunch of gingerbread dough and made all kinds of shapes and a lot of cookies. Everything was covered in flour and the entire home smelled like gingerbread spices. We always bought the dough and the quality was different every time. How about if I learn to make our own gingerbread dough, so that it will be good every time. My kids could some day eat store-bought cookies and say, "yeah, it's good, but not as good as the ones mom makes.". It's a silly thing to take pride in but I really want to be able to make something better than can be bought in a store, something uniquely excellent.

I started by researching recipes on Internet. The basic idea is that you melt and caramelize sugar, add water, butter and more sugar, then let cool a bit, add spices, let cool a bit more and then add egg and flour. Easy enough. Except it's such a classic treat that everyone has their own recipe. Another problem is that the recipes have been modernized to contain margarine, "gingerbread spice" and special caramelized sugar syrup. I really wanted an ancient-sounding recipe, like something that grannies might have used decades ago. I picked two recipes that were as different as possible. One of them was a really basic gingerbread dough recipe from an old soviet era cooking book. Those cookies were good but nothing special. The other recipe was interesting, though. I found it in some forum post (that I haven't been able to find again). It said, "This is my great-great-aunt's recipe...". WOW, cool!   A recipe with genuine ancient family background. That's exactly what I'm looking for! Also, the recipe said, "and then add hot coffee". Plus it had twice as many spices and herbs as any other recipe!

Both recipes contained orange zest (orange part of the orange peel) but I know from experience that adding orange zest sometimes it leaves visible small pieces of orange peel in the pastry. My goal was to make perfect cookies so I wanted to avoid that. Then I had an idea - I will dry the peels and then quickly grind them to dust with a mortar and pestle. So I took the orange and peeled it with a potato peeler. Superb thickness, without any of the bitter white part. Then I let it dry overnight. The next morning I got up and inspected it - the long orange peels had turned into long pieces of orange rubber.  I tried to grind one piece. After two minutes of grinding it was still the same piece of rubber. Sugar will surely help! A added some sugar and used the mortar and pestle for another couple of minutes and inspected it - now it looked like an orange piece of rubber half-hidden in powdered sugar.  "No, that doesn't look right!". I searched it on the Internet and found out I was supposed to dry the peels  for 3-4 days. I didn't have 3-4 days!  Okay, but I could just apply a bit of heat. So I put it in the oven at 120 C and the oven fan turned on. About 30 minutes later I was walking around the kitchen being happy with my idea to try the oven until I smelled something strange - cooked orange peels! Gaaah! I rushed to the oven and took them out. They were completely dry and crispy but half of it now looked slightly brown. Well, at least it was dry. So I tried to grind it: in stead of orange dust, it turned into orange sand, leaving visible small pieces of orange peel in the cookies.  Epilogue: The next time I just used a fine grater on fresh oranges and ended up with fine wet powder perfect for the cookies!

Okay, so I'll give you the recipe as well. I'll add the spice names in Estonian because even I don't know the translation of some of them. 1 dl is 100 ml. 100 ml liquid weighs roughly 100g. The first time there wasn't enough water or I added too much flour. The result was a very crumbly dough which couldn't be used until I added water and flour just before we made the cookies. The second time I made it, I added water to the dough before I let it sit in the refrigerator. The second time I also used twice the amount allspice and caramelized the sugar even darker. It looks and smells even better than the first time. 

PS! We actually baked the gingerbread cookies with several friends  and we had four different kinds of dough, including two (Eesti Pagar and Vertigo) that had got the best rating in two separate articles comparing gingerbread doughs sold in Estonia. This dough was most people's favorite that night.
PPS! Vertigo's dough was very good. Eesti Pagar's dough was bland and the cookies turned into wood the next day.

Gingerbread Cookies

2 dl sugar (for caramelizing)

1.5 dl hot coffee

3 dl sugar (originally 2.5-3 dl)

250 g butter

Spices:

---0.5 tsp clove (nelk)

---1 tsp cinnamon (kaneel)

---1 orange zest or 1 lemon zest (riivitud koor)

---0.5 tsp cardamom (kardemon)

---0.5 tsp powdered ginger (jahvatatud ingver)

---a bit of nutmeg  (muskaatpähkel)

---5-6 allspice berries, ground (jahvatatud vürtspipra tera)

1 egg

800-900 g flour (I used pastry flour 405)

3-4 tsp baking powder

Pour 2 dl sugar into a thick-bottomed pot and caramelize. This is the tricky part. I had best result when I used two spoons and when the sugar started to melt, I kept the sides of the pot and the spoons clean of the melted sugar, otherwise it will turn hard in only a moment. When sugar is sufficiently brown, remove the pot from heat and then add hot coffee. Be careful. Mix constantly and beware the steam. Then mix (on very low heat) until sugar is dissolved. Sounds easier than it is. I kept adding small amounts of water because it took so long. Remove from heat and add butter. Add sugar and butter and mix and melt it all together. Let the mixture cool. When it's half-way cooled, add spices. When it's completely cooled, mix in the egg and flour, with baking powder mixed into the flour. Add water if the dough is too crumbly. Refrigerate for a couple of days before using the dough.