Monday, March 31

I got up at 7:00, tired from a night with Sunshine racing up and down the house screeching, and woke Naa who was still deep asleep.

I began the day by answering the email that I had not answered in Poland. I had dealt with some mail in Warsaw, but not much that we might count as official communications. Then Jutta and I talked through what still needed to be done with the Omtänk website. When we got onto page three of our notes we realised that it amounted to quite a lot, and that some of it depended upon information that we still did not have.

I started hacking away at the WordPress theme while Jutta amassed information and took charge of entering and editing the actual content. With a short break for two crispbreads and fish paste, that was the day.

Somewhere during it I fitted in a long chat with the HostMonster helpline about the very intermittent ftp access I am getting to the account, but nothing was solved, and so I ended up working in the most cack-handed way possible. I edited the css and php files in Notepad++ and then copied and pasted them into the Editor panel in WordPress. This was the first time I had ever worked like this and I hope it is the last.

On the metro home I thought back over our weekend in Warsaw. I was very glad we had done it, and it seemed like a small step forward, but at the same time coming back made me feel very deeply everything that I was not coming back to. I got off the metro at Itäkeskus, wiping streams of tears from my eyes; but as we know from a few Sundays ago, that sort of thing passes unnoticed in this part of town.

Now I am walking back from putting the paper rubbish in the container a few hundred metres away towards the shop. Just past the house I notice what might well be the last pile of snow in Vartiokylä and walk over to have a look at it. It is certainly the only snow in sight.

We will go to bed at 22:30, all tired, but I will fail to get to sleep. My mind will be agitated by an extraordinary mixture of memories of Auo and questions about the way the css cascades in the Spun theme, when you incorporate Buddypress. At times they will fuse into imaginary conversations that Auo and I might have had in a couple of years when she would have inevitably turned her attention to how websites are made.

Auo was already asking questions about this at the end of last year. She just didn’t have enough time to get to do any of it.

The cat will wake me at 2:00 in the first of three compulsory night-time interludes. In each of them I will wake up having strange, but not entirely unpleasant dreams, evoking an imaginary future I will only ever see at night.