Oh wow, it's my tenth ten thing of thankful post this week. How cool is that? The blog hop has made me reflect on things to be thankful for and I must say it's has become one of my favorite routines ever since I returned to the blog and writing. It does something weird to the overall mood... I strongly suggest to read other authors posts too or to write your own, the link-up has all of the participants, so be sure to check them out!

Ten Thing of Thankful #10

First — Six Sentence Stories hosted by Denise

It has become my favourite way of spending my creative energy, and that comes from someone who only wrote poetry before finding the hop...

Even if it's a blog hop—which essentially means reading one another's posts and leaving comments, because that's what blog hops are all about—the community behind it is just so lovely, and they have become very dear to me. Yeah, I think I may have found my people: the crowd of authors and writers on the wide internet.

If I am honest, I was always the unsure type of writer myself... Is it good enough? Am I weird? Does it even fit in? But the hop has all kinds of writers, and I have realized that this is what makes it so cool. So if you are like me—the nervous and unsure writer—perhaps something similar could be for you too.

Second — the SSC&B

Honestly, I have never in my life written for a collaboration before, and it's something that is actually super fun. It definitely makes me grow as a writer, and I am so happy and honoured to have been invited by Clark in Chris's comment section. Honestly, I didn't even think of it as a serious invitation at first until I got an email and only then noticed Clark asking for my contact there haha. In my mind, I was at first like, Who, me? Probably a joke... I am a bit awkward in that sense...

Oh and I actually do have a tag page for if you want all the Nervous Poet entries without having to search through the Six Sentence Stories. I may add the link to the posts in the Bistro later next week so it will be easier to navigate for all the other participants and the Proprietors of the Cafe, and readers.

Third — Brigid and Felreil by one of the Authors I found on the Six-Sentence Stories.

It's one thing to read the series every week as the author posts for the hop. This series has, by the way, been one of my favourite ones to follow, and this week it ended, so I read it from start to finish to experience it as a book. I seriously recommend it—it's just so good. But the thing is, this reminded me of why I fell in love with reading and writing, I will not say too much... but perhaps, if you read it, you can understand.

Fourth — Books

I think I mentioned how I had trouble speaking as a kid. I did not speak much until I was in school, and my mother used to read fairy tales to me because of that. Already as a child, I wanted to be able to read them myself, so somehow, before I could properly speak, I learned to read, which, by the way, helped a ton with building my vocabulary and understanding language.

Later, in school, I started hanging out in the library (at first to hide from my schoolmates), where I befriended the ladies working there, who would recommend books for me to borrow every single week.

I want to name some of my favourite books here, which I think changed the way I look at life and, perhaps, the way I write myself:

• Night in Lisbon by Erich Maria Remarque
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Truth and Justice (Tõde ja õigus) — the entire series by A. H. Tammsaare
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Finding Nouf by Zoe Ferraris
• City of Veils by Zoe Ferraris

Fifth — Music

Not much to say about it but I can't imagine a life without art... music is just one form I love very passionately.

Sixth — the lack of photos

I did take only a few photos this week, which I posted on social media, but as you probably noticed, there aren't any photos in this post... Why, one may ask? Well...

I went out this week!

We went swimming and sunbathing at the lake, then we also went out to eat and took walks together... I didn't take too many photos to share here, lol. Anyway, I had a great week that was a bit different—calm and peaceful.

Seventh — dVerse is on hiatus

I wrote a poem for their last prompt before the hiatus and forgot to link it up in time. I was sad... but then I realized I might have time to let it marinate, along with a few other drafts, and perhaps share them at future OLNs.

Eighth — Instagram authors section

I have a problem... I have started mindlessly scrolling Reels once again, which was the whole reason I did the phone detox earlier this week... Oh no...

BUT...

I found the corner of Instagram where all the authors hang out, and I got lost there for two hours, laughing my arse off the other evening as I lay in bed at their Google search and all the other little things of being a writer...

I occasionally think it's bad that, instead of reading a real book, I have now begun sitting behind a screen, scrolling through poetry and authors' Reels... But then again, if I can perhaps hold myself back a little, I won't become too engrossed in my phone... and that is my current fear. Tough, it still counts as reading... right???

Ninth — Rain

We had a huge downpour the other day. Luckily, I was already indoors when it really started feeling like a Niagara falls or such... but the sound of the rain was so relaxing, and so was the smell. I just love, love, love summer rain...

Tenth — Ventoy

Basically... I carry a USB stick on my keychain. It has Ventoy on it, which allows me to simply copy and paste ISO files of operating systems on and off it without having to create a bootable USB, and I keep a few ISOs on it... Just in case...

Anyway, this week I was cleaning and upgrading the hard drive to an SSD in a really old enterprise grade Dell (2011 old, DDR3 memory old, used to cost a fortune old), and even though I am a huge fan of Linux myself—which would make this laptop shine, at least in my eyes as a lover of old tech (they don't make them like they used to, and I know a few things the owner uses the laptop for wouldn't work well or reliably on Linux from my own experience)—Ventoy allows you to bypass the Windows 11 hardware checks, so I installed it on the laptop.

After a few tweaks, I must say it behaves surprisingly well. Using Windows 11 on unsupported hardware may mean that future updates are not guaranteed, but we were fine with that trade-off... and the owner is very happy, as they can continue using the apps and things they love without the laptop taking 15 minutes just to open something.

By the way, on the topic of making old hardware work for your purposes, I am all for it. I myself am a bit pickier about my hardware only because I need it to do certain things for me, like run my games and allow me to do some editing and so on... But those places that sell laptops...

The other day I witnessed an old man standing there with a perfectly well-working old ThinkPad because of the Windows 10 situation. He said he uses it twice a month for a few things, like reading the news and such. The salesperson was like, "Yeah, nothing to do with it, you need to buy a new one."

This thing actually angers me to my core...

Don't we have enough landfill made of tech already? People who use their computers just to browse the web and do a few simple things don't need a brand-new laptop... seriously. There are a thousand ways to make older hardware work for this type of usage.

Sorry, but you can't change my mind. Though, using Windows 11 with a bypass is a bit of a weird fix to me personally, but well... sometimes you have to do things differently because I'm not the one who will be using the laptop...

There's more of my work:

If you like short stories I have them scooped up into one category (including the six-sentence stories).

The Nervous Poet at the SSC&B can be followed here.

There is also poetry.

More personal entries can be found at the Blog.

There's also the IT studies blog in Estonian and "Chaos in Spring" on YouTube, Spotify and other streaming services.