hinhdepz7

In between of being away working on Friday and Saturday, and before starting rather hectic May, this Sunday was a day off, letting the to-do list be for a little while. From snow to flowers in a couple of weeks! Apart from coltsfoot the scillas are always the first to bloom. The cows are also out now. A sure spring sign! Dag's bike is out as well. Practice-time! We haven't really been biking a lot out here as everything is so far away and there is not really much to bike to over here. This summer however I intend to help him ride properly and fix up my old bike  as well (someone stole the saddle the year before we moved away from Tapiola and I haven't ridden it since) so we can bike to the little lake . Then we had a popcorn lunch (because that is awesome!) and made Bear Grylls eat various yucky things and piss on a scarf to wear on his head.  (To keep cool from the heating sun. You learn new things every day! ) It was really fun to watch / do You vs. Wild with Dag though!...

Today it's the gloomy Halloweenish weather one would expect with mid-October approaching (already! What? How?), but yesterday we woke up to a breathtaking colourful frosty sunrise that I even tossed out barefoot for to try and catch with my phone - The view to the south is often like a painting. This is also the bathroom view, and one day eventually the view from the study-to-be; the brown room which for the moment is just (you guessed it): boxes. Colourful trees to the west! And the old barn of the farm peeking from behind them. The study will be the only room in the house, apart from the living room, with windows in two directions. That actually makes it the nicest room in the house. This, plus an apple tree in the front, would be the view from the second window. Amazing colours to the north! And the rising sun in the east. I really love crips autumn mornings like this, when the air is fresh and cold and the light makes everything magic.  But give it a month and we will be up ea...

We finally have a living room! Yes, there has always been a living room downstairs , but that room still has boxes and extra furniture from our  former city flat  everywhere, that have been waiting for the renovation to progress so they can be taken into use and the downstairs one glorious day be emptied up of extras. A day which is very much closer now than a few months ago. (Insert big choir underneath my window singing Hallelujah! the Bach way here.)  We had basically been hanging out in the kitchen for the past two years while first fixing up the boys' rooms , and this summer we finally got the upstairs hallways turned into a hang-out space.  The hallways was always ugly, unpractical, and tended to collect junk. There are no proper before's of that exact reason. A long time ago when I first came here it made you feel like a tiny hotdog in a bun as one wall was ketchup red and the other mustard yellow. Eventually we coloured the walls white as a quick fix. The ce...

When it gets warm, and like now, when it STAYS warm, I keep on being amazed by how pleasant it feels. And by how light is is. You forget that during the darker months. Every time. The air feels nice and smooth and everything is green and growing and I am hoping it will stay like this until September (instead of waiting trough those short summer months of almost-there disappointments forcing you to pack a jacket with you wherever you go, like the two last summers turned out. Weather - we are at it here again...). Everything is green and blooming here now.  I think it has never been this warm in May for such a long period here before. Woop! Even our house is getting naked! The summer lambs are back on our meadows. And underneath my window the apple tree is blooming for a few moments still.

I just drove my husband out to his tractor on the field to work. It is so dry and dusty everything gets coated in a layer of dirt. And I laughed a bit at me driving trough the fields because that was that one thing I never saw myself doing earlier in life. Never say never and all that. My nails still look like this though, and that won't change.

At the end of last summer we renovated a room for Dag! Ever since we moved out of the flat in the city to stay in the countryside permanently we have been living in a constant renovation state, or rather, the notion of a  we-should-be-renovating  state. Half of our downstairs still consists of a labyrinth of boxes, and while I knew this would be a slow process, it is driving me insane nontetheless. However, slowly but certainly we have managed to get  some things  done:  a year ago we turned what I had referred to as "the renovation hole" into a walk-in closet, and at the end of summer we finally got around fixing Dag a proper room! (Earlier this year we renovated a room for Dag's older brother -the oldest boy has moved away from home to study already- and as late as then we finally also got proper electricity in this room; everything had been with extention chords there forever. We also got electricity to the walk-in closet and some chords and plugs in our bed...

When everything is not really that white, but a lot of different hues. And cold. Oh so cold. The usual countryside photo view in it's winter mode. And my  cherry trees in theirs. (There's also a cake behind the summery cherry tree link and here's the recipe to that btw: Dream Cream Candy Cake with Cherries .) When it's very cold everything is sort of slower, in a very strange mode. I think Tove Jansson captured the cold loneliness of winter so well in the Moomin book Trollvinter . I often think about that story and it's images on cold snowy days. How Moomin woke up and everythin was just white cold and oh so silent. A snowy mist rose on the fields as the temperature sank and sank. But, rumour has it that during this night the temperature will go up by some 20c and we'll be at zero again...

I recall myself stating, after last Christmas, that went by too fast, that I'd start the following Holidays in early November already; haning up Christmas lights and stars here and there, enjoying  glögg  (the warm spiced wine -or sometimes just juice- that resembles 'glühwein') and getting to enjoy Christmas for as long as possible. I probably say it every year but I do enjoy the holidays. Well, this year we put our lights up in the evening of the 23rd and didn't even get a tree (it can't fit for the moment, as our Tapiola-flat is boxed up in our living room)... Well,  next year  my home will be nice, organised and fancy again and I'll have all the time in the world to sit at home and be cosy with my cup of hot and spicy and my seasonal light for weeks ahead. Or, so we can say. But, even though the rain was pouring outside (ironically, I did joke about it being all green on Christmas as we had half a meter of snow two days after Halloween ...) we managed to get...