hiidenkonttibeta

Vappu came and went. Vappupäivä was on Saturday this year – what an awful waste of days off!

The strange thing in the next photograph is called “tippaleipä”. This one is half eaten, but it still may give an idea what this difficult-to-eat (it falls in pieces) Vappu specialty looks like:

And here’s two photos from Rotuaari:

Yesterday we celebrated Vappu with おいしい barbecue steaks and beer (well, only one of us did any
ビールをのむこと, bravely trying to hold on traditional Vappu values.. who it might have been..). I wonder if barbecued lamb steaks would be great as well?

Yesterday I also watched Elvira’s Haunted Hills. Too bad it wasn’t as good as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.. I spotted a few horror film references/jokes, but there was probably a lot more of them. Obviously I should watch more horror movies :-) Started today, with Opera. I could stand watching more Mario Bava’s movies, too..

“Ice-cream summer has started”, the local newspaper says. “Winter is back” would be closer to truth – there was an inch of snow in the morning, and it’s been snowing some wet snow for the whole day. And I’ve catched cold. No ice-cream for me, thank you very much.

Restaurant boat Neptunus was removed today from it’s location by the marketplace. It has been sinking deeper and deeper in to the water for the last year, apparently nobody was interested in using it anymore – or it was in too bad shape to even bother.

The liquid water is now closer, the part of the sea by Meritulli has only some ice left. There was another big flock of noisy birds (probably gossping about their winter in south?), some of the black dots in the middle might be them..

And, as the second photo shows, we’re running out of snow, too.

Oulun Kärpät ice hockey team won a Finnish championship or something. Anyway, yesterday evening they had some sort of celebration on the nearby marketplace, with about 20000 people attending. They had fireworks too, and my balcony is べんりな for watching those. I snapped as many photos as I could to get at least a few good ones:

My personal favorite is the one on the right in the middle row. Together with the smoke it makes interesting shapes – the upper left part looks a bit like a nebula, and the smoke forms a dragonlike shape with the smaller fireworks in the middle being it’s flailing legs. I name that one “Angry Dragon Nebula” .

The IC trains have an LCD in every coach telling all the information the traveller needs to know. The trains going North from Here have this kind of displays instead:

While in Tervola I snapped photos of random subjects to pass time (a roll of real film, too – using a Russian 16mm fish-eye lens for the whole time…). Here’s two wooden birds I made as a kid – the first one is a doorknocker made in school, the second one is a piece of branch which almost looked like a bird already:

And this is how the small roads look like when the snow is melting:

I visited my parents on the holiday (pääsiäinen/easter, whatever..) and realised just how colourful their house is.
Except for the bathroom/sauna, the colours of my apartment are:
ceiling: white
walls: white
floor: white with some gray dots
kitchen cupboards: white and some wood (cherry?)
Most modern homes I’ve seen have that kind of colour scheme.

Well then, let’s have a look on the colours of my childhood home. Clockwise, these are: my room and the corridor, kitchen and the corridor, kitchen wall and cupboard, more kitchen cupboards (and carpet):

Then there’s: paintings in the kitchen cupboard doors, living room wall, living room floor and the corridor floor, and porch floor & wall (quite strange angle in this photo, but the blue part is the floor):

… and I’ve left out a couple of rooms, but this should give the general idea of how non-blank house looks like ;-)