...and it went as suddenly as it arrived!

The temperature at the Vaasa Airport at 12:15 today: 7 C! =:0

Well... I've seen worse, we had sleet and snow in the beginning of June in 1974 and the rest of that summer was cold and rainy here. I hope it won't follow that progress this summer because May 1974 was mostly very warm.

Anyway, yesterday I nailed the last piece of moulding in place in our renovated kitchen and moved out all tools and hardware back into the garage again. You who haven't been following the resurrection of our kitchen at Ingelas' blog may take a look below.

The summer arrived suddenly

Above is a screenshot from the Finnish weather service today at 12:40 showing the temperature curve for the last 24 hours at the airport nearby.
+25.1 C or 77.2 F !
We even had a thunderstorm this morning which is very unusual in May.
The bad news is that this pre-summer will last only for a week. Then we are back to the normal crappy 12 - 15 C again.

In the meantime in Korsholm-Mustasaari...

It is getting hectic here and I feel a little stressed now, a lot of work and our new kitchen will arrive this weekend so the old furniture has to be completely dismounted and moved out of the way before Sunday! Phew...!

Our dear old blogger friend Val at http://vereeniging.blogspot.com/ came to visit Finland last weekend and we enjoyed a couple of days in her company and that was an excellent break in our self occupied and stressed out life this very moment.

The spring is arriving very slowly, it is bitter cold at nights but we get a lot of sunshine in between and some early flowers are popping up.

In the meantime I'll will try to follow the instructions printed on that bottle above, I think it would work even better if I filled it up with brandy or something...

Though we had some trouble getting out of London when we went there, we have made up our mind to go back and cross the street above (among other tings to do) as soon as possible! In between we will perhaps go to see some barges in Rotterdam... ;)

Five Days in London, day one

Our trip to London became somewhat drowned in the volcanic ash from Eyafjellajökul but before the trouble started we managed to have a lot of fun in london. The first day we went to see the RAF museum at Hendon

Spitfire at the entrance

B17G

Me Bf109G

Nose art o a Handley Page Victor, please observe the text "Axe stored here". That is not really what you expect to see on a jet bomber used to carry nuclear bombs :)

We had a lunch break and a bottle of Spitfire ale. "The bottle of Britain" :)

Lancaster

The infamous quote of Herman Göring slightly modified and translated to English and painted on the Lancaster above.

The original quote goes like this: "Ich will nicht Hermann Göring, sondern Hermann Meyer heißen, wenn jemals ein feindliches Flugzeug die deutschen Reichsgrenzen überfliegen würde."

Typhoon

The very complicated powersource of the abovementioned Typhoon, the Napier Sabre 24 cyl. H-configuration

Sunderland, oh my, this was BIG!

German V2 rocket

These are only a few of my photos from the RAF museum in Hendon. We spent the whole day from 11 am to 5 pm  and we did not go and look at every subject there. 

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/london/

Of course I had to buy a souvernir and what could be better than some good old wartime Big-Band music:

What's so special about the Squadronaires? :)

The long and winding road...

...back home from London:

We could of course have gone straight from W to Y but we had to go via X because our cars were parked there at the Tampere International airport.

We travelled 3000 km (1873 miles)back home in 82 hours.

The vehicles used were, starting in London: taxi, ferry, bus, train, taxi, train, ferry, bus, ferry, train, taxi, own car. One night spent in a hotel in Lille, about 7 hrs. Effective travel speed including waiting for trains etc was then 40 km/h or 25 mph. :)

OH6MY´s European tour...

...is finnished!
It went like this:

-Day 1:
London UK
Newhaven UK
Dieppe France
Serqueux France
Lille France

-Day 2:
Lille France
Tournai Belgium
Bruxelles Belgium
Liege Belgium
Cologne Germany
Hamburg Germany
Rostock Germany

-Day 3:
Trelleborg Sweden
Malmoe Sweden
Stockholm Sweden

Day 4:
Turku Finland
Tampere Finland
Pirkkala Finland
Korsholm Finland

We have used the following means of transport:
-Taxi
-Bus
-Train
-Ferry

And we may have been running and walking from terminals to train stations and car rentals about 100 km.
We arrived home at about 15:00 local time today

5:15...

...to Brighton, not really but tomorrow 5:15 AM out of London in a van to Newhaven in an attempt to reach the continental Europe by ferry to Dieppe. The ultimate Dieppe raid.
Then we will try to get a train to Paris and then to Stockholm. Ferry to Turku (Åbo) in Finland, train to Tampere, taxi to Tampere international airport and car back home.
Phew.
This will last some few days or more. We will blame Iceland.

Anyway, we had to spend an extra day in London, most of it spent in trying to get us out of here without any significant success. In the afternoon we took off to Richmond to see if we could spot some famous people there :)

"Mind The Gap!"...

...is sounding in my ears ever so often this week so where am I ?

Spring has sprung...

...or not.

Ingela picked some branches of a cherry tree in our backyard some weeks ago and brought them inside.

Now the buds have bursted into flowers.

The snow in our backyard is still at least 1/2 m.deep though so it is still very wintery. 

It is raining today for the first time this spring so there is still hope... :)

Tax return time... blaaaah...

My favourite pastime, not! But it has to be done every spring and of course I'm procrastinating until the very last day. But not this year, Ingela has kicked my butt several weekends now so I finally caved in...

Anyway the result was pleasing, we are going to receive some refunds later this year! Will be very much needed because we are going on a trip to London, doing a total makeover of our kitchen and a total makeover of the ceilings in our hall, living room and kitchen. I started the ceiling project yesterday.

Signs of spring to be seen here lately, we had a thaw for two days in a row and the blanket of snow shrunk some 10 cm. Now it is chilly during the nights but nice sunshine in the daytime rising the temperature close to 0 C.

Winter update

Hello everybody from this frozen over hell called Finland. Blogger Val asked me regarding my last put if it has got any better now, the answer is no.

Its is worse...

Since Sunday we have got som 10 inches of snow combined with a hard northern wind yesterday and today that made the snow pile up, up to my eyebrows in places as you can see from the picture of our backyard this evening:

My car trailer parked alongside our woodshed is somewere inside the pile of snow below:

The temperature today is only a moderate -6 C but tomorrow it will drop down to -15 C again.
Aaargghhh!

Still hibernating...

Nothing much else to do. The temperature plunges down below -20 C every night and hardly rises above -12 C in the middle of the day. I generally like a good old winter but this is too extreme even for my taste. The snow is soon waist deep.
To comfort myself in the meantime I upgraded from D70 to a second hand D300.
Took some test pictures from the front- and back porch last Sunday (cold) morning. You really don't want to walk around with the camera in this weather. Your fingers will be frozen stiff, the lense will stick and the battery will die in some few minutes... :(

What are these brand new suitcases doing...

...in our living room?
Well, we are going to London, UK, later this spring. We had some vague plans to go around my birthday in October last year but London late in October is not such great fun.
Any ideas of places to go and stuff to see? Maybe drop by at Rachels and Petes place...? :)
One thing is sure though, RAF Museum, Hendon, here I come!

20 Years ago this day...

...we decided to start dating seriously :)

We had met at common friends place earlier in the autumn, we were all working for the same employer but at  different factories, our friends knew that we were both singles and came up with the idea to bring us together.

Which was a very good idea indeed! :)

From this day on 1990 we have been a couple, we got engaged to be married in June and got married in September 1990.

Ingela and her cousin Thomas AD 1990:

Me AD 1990:

The art of arctic biking

As you all well know I'm biking to work all the year despite the weather conditions. It is all about the way you dress. Proper clothes, boots and gloves to suit the weather. The same goes for the bike, I change tyres to studded ones when the winter arrives and use synthetic oils for greasing. I have a totally encapsulated 7-speed Shimano hub at the rear. No complicated levers and pivots that may freeze and get stuck.
A protective bikers helmet is mandatory in Finland. As is a flashlight at the front. You have to dress yourself in reflective vest and other reflective stuff because 95% of the drivers in Finland are blind and/or doesn't pay any respect to STOP-signs.
This is what i looked like yesterday ( -27 C in the morning) when I arrived home:

winter tyre:

Nuff said...
Last Wednesday (Epiphany) as it is a holiday here in Finland we went to my mothers house out in the archipelago to help some people to carry away some furniture we sold them. I will write more about that in another blog.
It was a crisp and clear day and before we left for home I took my D70 out for a spin:

The harbour in Björkö is hibernating

Then I shot some pictures throgh the car window as we drove home:

Welcome to our arctic world or what happened to Global Warming?

It is not great fun to run around outdoors with the camera nowadays when the temperature rarely rises above -15 C. Fingers get stiff and cold after some few minutes, though my Nikon D70 is quite big you cannot really handle all the small buttons and controls with mittens on. Anyway our surroundings are really beautifully shaped by the snow and ice so there is a certain need to go out and shoot some photos to show you all.

The corner of our neigbours garage drowned in the snow

Mother natures abstract art

Snowy trees on the opposite side of our street

Arctic sunset at 3 PM last Saturday

Our front door late in the evening

Red Christmas...?

We had a Red Christmas this year as you can see from the picture above.
Well, not really, the picture is taken in the afternoon at sunset last Sunday when the sun broke through the clouds as it stopped snowing. White balance set  on "clouds" and Ingela got exactly the colour shade of our surroundings at that very moment.

I'm not dreaming of a Christmas this white...

The picture is from a webcam overlooking a traffic circle here. The snow is pouring down at 11:35 am. And more is to come the next days.
Nuff said...
Hans

The shortest day of the year

Sunrise at 10:12 am
Sunset at 2:42 pm
Length of the day 4h 40 min
That is not much if you need to work by daylight :)
The sun is "shining" but it is -12 C outside in the middle of the day.
In the meantime we can enjoy our Christmas tree

Winter at last!

The winter finally hit us, the temperature has occasionally plunged down to -17 C since Monday morning, last night we got about 6 inches of snow and in the morning it was like this outside when I left for work at 7:30 AM:

View from our driveway down our street

Our house as seen from the street

Our miniature tree is doing well and growing... And it seems that the jar has grown too...

just kidding, this is another, bigger one, than the one shown some weeks ago!