Winter Solstice

It is Winter Solstice today at 12:11 pm local time. I went outside to catch a photo of the sun at 12:11 pm despite the - 17 C outside.

This is as high as it rises in the sky at noon at our latitude. We have some 4 1/2 hours of daylight here today.

Another view from our backyard above. We have approx. two feet of snow now and our Christmas is going to be as white as it possibly can get.

By the way, I´m going to retire the 30th of December, in fact I have spent the last month at home consuming away my last amount of earned winter and summer vacations so I have slowly got used to spending my days as a free man. :)

100

My dad would have turned 100 today! Here he is a young soldier in the Finnish army in 1932
He died December 31 1966 at the age of 54. Rest in peace Erik!

When I'm 63...

It is my birthday today. I'm going to retire this year, at the age of 63. November 21 I will clean my desk and walk out of the office.

Here I am making a Key Lime Pie for my birthday. I nicked the photo from Ingela's Instagram page here:
http://statigr.am/p/307900087261264610_180875317

By the way, "Key Lime Pie" was also the name of a Camper Van Beethoven album from 1989:

I have not planned much for my future, I will for sure pick up some of my hobbies like HAM-radio and amplifier building with ancient thermionic tube technology, I will be around assisting Ingela, houscleaning and repairing stuff and then we will do a lot more traveling.

We went here in the end of August to celebrate Ingela's 50th birthday and we will for sure go again:

Who knows, maybe we will go elsewhere in Europe, too. You never know... ;)

And this very interesting book arrived some days in advance:



Forty years ago today, June 01, 1972, this then fresh-out-of-the-oven engineer and literally blue-eyed young man drove his bicycle through the gates of the Strömberg Industrial Park in Vasa, Finland and was then directed to the Large Power Transformer factory to design transformers and he is still there...

It is not over until it is over...

The header relates to the picture above. We had kind of an early spring in March, then the weather turned cold again in the beginning of April. After some days of promising weather it started to snow again the day before yesterday and yesterday it was still snowing when I came home from work as you can see in the picture above. The winter is not over yet it seems.

The Real White City

On the Independence Day of Finland Dec. 6, 2011 I was awarded this medal, First Class with golden cross, of the Order of the White Rose of Finland. Why I don't know, but I think it has to do with my nearly 40 years of designing large power transformers for the same employer...

I received the medal on Friday at a ceremony arranged by my employer to celebrate and honour employees working for the company for 20, 30, 40 and even 50 years, and all those who had received medals and diplomas. When the medal was attached to my jacket I got the idea of recreating the White City album cover, using a street of the city of Vasa, the real White City of Finland, as the background and myself as the centerpiece.

The city of Vasa became known as "The White City" during the Finnish Civil War in 1918 when the Finnish legal governement, the Senate, were evacuated out of Helsinki and moved to Vasa. From here the parts of Finland loyal to the governement aka "the Whites" administered all parts of Finland that were not being ruled by the communist rebels aka "the Reds" and plotted the scheme how to fight the Reds and stall the Bolshevik uprising and attempts to join Finland to the Soviet Union. Finland had declared its independency from Russia on December 6, 1917 in the turmoil after the abdication of Cszar Nicholas II and the October revolution. The Reds were defeated and the civil war ended May 5, 1918.

There are some nice interviews with Pete regarding the White City album and film on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKCJVPM5cAw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzT8NwdD31s&feature=related

The White City as Pete describes it in part one applies very much to the surroundings where Ingela and I had the photo session on Sunday. The place is called the Olympia Block, built in the late 1980's and 1990's and mostly inhabited by immigrants and students.

Pete x 2

Lukas and I went to the annual Vinyl Record Fair in Vasa yesterday. Last year I found  "All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes" at the very beginning of my search for interesting vinyls. I then browsed thousands and thousands of vinyls searching for some other of Townshends' solo albums but found none.

This year I was much luckier, we started browsing for albums and after 15 minutes Lukas came over and told me that he had found "White City" in a box further down the aisle so I went there and picked it up. I browsed the other boxes of the same seller and in another 10 minutes I found "Empty Glass" ! 

The envelope of "White City" was a little dirty and abrased but the inner sleeve and record itself were virtually unused. No scratches no dust. "Empty Gass" was in even better shape. Only 5 EUR each! Yay!