hiidenkonttibeta

We spent the Midsummer’s Day in Tervola. The eve was very summerlike, with the whole countryside full of flowers:

It was peaceful holiday, with walking around, killing mosquitos, bicycling around the village, killing mosquitos, rowing a boat on the river, killing mosquitos, burning a “juhannuskokko” and eating sausages, and then killing some mosquitos.

I took a lot of photos of flowers and of interesting rocks. If anyone wants to see my holiday photos, I can show them a few gigs worth of rocks.

Wandered around the city center the other day. Taking photos of trees, mainly. One uninteresting side street had this gate with a simple instruction:

Close the gate soundlessly. Not noiselessly, or silently, or quietly, but soundlessly. What sort of high level にんじゃ the occupants must be to achieve this feat?

Some kind of larvae has made an invasion on most of bird cherry trees (prunus padus, tuomi), covering their late flowers in some kind of web. Or it seems they start with the dead flowers, and go on – covering nearby leaves, the branch, the whole tree, and even the neighbouring trees and plants in the same web. I have no idea what they actually are.

There was a park bench under one of the completely wrapped trees. I had just been photographing it, and moved on when I noticed two young women about to take a break on the bench. First one sat down, completely unaware of her surroundings – and got up rather quickly when her friend instructed her to study her sitting place on a bit more detailed level:

I had already brushed larvae dropping from the trees off my clothes a few times.

update: the larvae are yponomeuta evonymellus, or bird-cherry ermine moth (“tuomenkehrääjäkoi”).

The workers of paper industry have been on strike (or locked out) for over a month now. Some kind of paper products (food packings) will run out sooner or later, and some shops have already run out of toilet paper because people have gathered storages for themselves. Someone has enough, and wants to show it:

Also, if the new benches in Ainola park were made of wood, one of them might be here instead:

But the current ones definitely will not float.

A lazy Sunday and a pleasant weather. I took my bike and started wandering around Oulu, aiming towards areas around Toppila, where I haven’t been often. There’s a lot of yellow voikukkia everywhere:

Taking bicycle paths at random (if there’s a crossing of four paths and a sign, one going towards city center, two to some suburbs, and one not marked, guess which one I took? Right, and it lead to a small harbor), sometimes arriving at dead ends in suburbs and taking uncharted forest paths from there, I reached the seaside in Toppila. Going along the straight and boring route it’s about 4 km from my place to there, but I managed to find a 23 km long route, according to GPS log.

Somewhere around there is the strangest intake of water ever built into a dam:

It looks cool, makes a lot of waterfall-noise, and is fascinating in general, but is there some actual functional reason for the shape and form of this creation? If it’s just for the looks, it should be a bit more accessable, I had to climb some low fences to get even this close.

Yesterday I missed the bus to Linnanmaa. It was supposed to leave at 17:14, I was on the bus stop at 17:12, but the bus didn’t come. I guess it had already gone. It wasn’t a “major” bus stop, so the time is only a guideline. Hopefully they get the info screens really working soon so there’s no more time wasted waiting for “arrives real soon now” buses that have already gone. Walked to another bus stop to catch a different bus, and found out that the last one goes at 16:35 during Summer. Since I didn’t feel like finding yet another solution, I gave up the OMAKE video session.

Somebody had left this in the front of Koskilinja’s office I passed by: