My son Markus and his girlfriend Tuuli came up from Helsinki the weekend before my birthday to celebrate my big 6-0. On Saturday evening we went to a nice restaurant to have a good meal. Ingela's mom joined us.
Afterwards we went home to our place for coffee and three different kinds of desserts.
And then followed the unavoidable SingStar competition:
The old lead singer :)
Ian
Lukas and Markus
Lukas and Ian
Ingela, the very excited listener, sewing together her granny square afghan.
The party continued the following Friday, but that is a different story :)
Even the sun remembered my birthday and produced a new set of sunspots on October 23 :)
Solarcycle no 24 has been a slow starter so far but this set of spots are good looking. But I'm still predicting a cold winter here on the northern hemisphere.
Despite the low temperatures the last days there are some species out in our garden that do not really care. I found some rucola flowers and the gooseberries are still hanging in there.
Last night the temperature dropped down to -7 C and the forecast tells us that it will continue to drop day by day now. Which tells me that whenever there will be a low pressure arriving from the Atlantic ocean we will have snow, lots of snow...
Anyway, the weather was crisp and clear this morning and the nature was beautifully glaced by the frost so I decided to take the new Tamron 90mm macro for a spin.
I am in the beginning of the learning curve how to use this new toy of ours and it shows of course.
After a long time of procrastination, thinking and rethinking, searching for the best fit for our money and needs we finally invested in a new camera, a DSLR with a few lenses. The camera body is the new Nikon D3000 introduced in August this year, the lens included in the package is the 18-55mm standard zoom with Vibration Reduction. As extras I chose the classic Tamron 90 mm short tele with 1:1 macro, now available with built-in autofocus motor to suit simpler camera bodies like this. From another resource I found a cheap Nikon telezoom, the 55-200 but without vibration reduction.
Well now nobody here in this house can blame the equipment if taking crappy pictures with this stuff...:)
Well, if you take a look at the specs for this camera you will see that the sensor is just a moderate 10 MPixels and the "old" camera, the Olympus SP570 UZ is the same so what´s the big deal?
The big deal is that the physical size of the sensor in this camera is twice the size, width- and heightwise which makes the light receiving area four times bigger as well as the size of every pixel itself which provides for better sensitivity with less picture noise in low light. And the resolution of the lens itself can be better utilised on a larger sensor.
I may not have mentioned it before but (as so many other people involved in vacuum tubes, radio and audio) I was deeply involved in photography in the good old days. Back in the beginning of the sixties I would run around with an old box camera my mom got from her sister Hilda who was living in the USA and later on I got my own box camera.
My first girlfriend's dad owned a Yashica two-lens reflex camera for 70 mm film and that was the first camera I ever used that could take really good pictures. I learned how to develop film and got myself an enlarger, a second-hand Opemus III and started to make copies in B&W. The first 35 mm camera I bought was a Nikkormat FT2 in 1975 with a hefty 35-105 mm Sigma zoom lens that was something new and exclusive then. Later I bought a real pocket camera a Rollei 35S for 35 mm film and that was a nice little camera that travelled with me everywhere. Started to shoot color slides and traded in my old Opemus for a new Durst with a color head and started to make color copies of my slides.
Nowadays all that equipment is sold and all cameras in this household are digital cameras, compact- and bridgecameras and now this new Nikon.
Some samples taken with this camera and the Tamron lens:
As you can imagine there has been a lot of thinking to do and I must tell you that it creates a lot of stress inside my head. As I was my mom's only child I have to make plans for the future regarding my mom's stuff and what to do with the house etc. etc. We have emptied the refrigerator and freezers and got rid of the flowers, taken care of valuable stuff and documents of importance and shut down everything except the circulation pump for the heating system. There is oil in the tank to keep the house warm at a reduced temperature next winter but in the meantime i want to find somebody to buy the house because it is in much need of renovation and I simple cannot afford to do that. We already have a house of our own and the small summer place so we already have two money-sinks on our hands.
My mom, Dina, is seriously ill and hospitalised since the end of April this year. The photo above is 1 1/2 year old and taken the day she turned 87. She has struggled with cancer since 1993, it started with cancer in the bladder and she went through a bladder removal with a urostomy in 1996, after that they have removed melanomas from her forehead and she got her right breast removed in 2006. The last six months her health has deteriorated and the results from several tests show that a lot of indicators for cancer are severely elevated but she denied any kind of agressive treatment, no operations, no drugs, no nothing at this stage. She just want to leave this life in peace and takes only pain killing shots. She is fading away day by day. Her house out in the archipelago is empty and cold now and it gives me an odd feeling to think about that she won't go back there anymore.
Yes he did! We left from here around noon yesterday for 2h45min drive to the city of Tampere and got to the venue about 1 1/2 h before the gates opened and the security check started. There were approx 1500 people in the line in front of us so we did not really expect to get some really good spots this year but at last we found ourselves togeteher with Steve, a guy from Ireland we bumped into when fighting for a good spot.
Steve and me waiting in great anticipation...
When the show was about to start we took advantage of the sudden chaos of people sitting and then standing up to advance some few steps and ended up just some few feet from the fence to the right of the center of the stage more or less in front of Soozie.
In this picture you may see how close we got. Why do I get this "Sally Simpson" feeling here...?
Well the show was like an eruption of energy and we left Tampere with our ears ringing and legs hurting of 7 hours af walking, standing and jumping around. regarding the tinnitus it wasn't so much because of the sound level of the music, in front of the stage the PA:s are blasting away over your head but my ears was ringing because I was caught in the middle of a group of ladies in their mid forties and some teenage girls who were screaming their lungs out... :) Sorry Ingela, no offence!
Badlands Radio Nowhere Prove It All Night Outlaw Pete Out in the Street Hungry Heart Working on a Dream Seeds Johnny 99 The Ghost of Tom Joad Raise Your Hand Cover Me Because the Night Thunder Road Waiting on a Sunny Day The Promised Land Dark End of the Street Kingdom of Days Lonesome Day The Rising Born to Run
Encore: Hard Times Come Again No More Bobby Jean Land of Hope and Dreams American Land Glory Days Santa Claus Is Coming to Town Dancing in the Dark
If he does I will go nuts.... :) Anyway, we are leaving at noon for Tampere to watch mr Springsteen and his E-Street Band tonight. He seems to perform some really good sixties covers on a regular basis on this tour. And "Outlaw Pete" of course :) A report will follow whenever I recover...
Pete Townshends major opus "Quadrophenia" takes to the stage in Plymouth UK on Saturday. Wish I were there! I did not own a scooter in the sixties, I owned a bloody old Russian Izhevsk-49 motorbike, that was the only stuff on two wheels I could afford...
My bike looked like this that I found at: http://www.overlocker.narod.ru/ij-49/izh-49.htm
...when I remember what happened around Easter holidays 1964. There emerged a new radio station named Radio Caroline on the Medium Wave band and that station was playing my kind of music. More stations followed and in 1966 there were a lot of them on international waters around the coasts of the UK and most of them in the Thames estuary and south of the coast of Essex moored on the "Pirate Alley" From Clacton-on-sea to Frinton-on-sea. It is now the 45:th anniversary of Radio Caroline and i will show you a QSL-card from that fabolous year of 1966 when offshore-radio was at its summit.
A great lineup of former offshore DJ:s including Tony Blackburn and Keith Skues will attend. Not to forget "The Boat that Rocked", the fiction movie about the abovementioned subject that is now out in the UK and will be out in the rest of Europe 16 - 17-APR-09 http://www./theboatthatrocked.com/ Watch the trailers and listen to the music! The soundtrack will be hot!
Solarcycle 24 has so far produced very few sunspots and now there is a debate wheter cycle 24 has really started or not. This sunspot minimum is so deep and prolonged as such a lack of solar activity has not been seen in soon 200 years. Some scientists are already predicting a new "small ice-age" like the one in the middle of the 17:th century as a result.
But today there finally emerged some sunspots on the surface of the sun...
Hi there, It has been a while. I thought I had to give you all a life sign :) Yes, I'm alive but I am all the abovementioned in the header. It is just the time of year, after a long dark winter, when I allow myself to slow down and do nothing. I start to feel some kind of fear for all kinds of duties and work that is ahead of me now that the days grow longer (and probably warmer...) and I retard into this kind of "numb" and lethargic mode until somebody (probably Ingela...) kicks my ass and tells me to get my acts together. Well I promise, I will wake up soon and finalize a lot of interrupted projects and if the weather allows, we will take off to the woods next week and continue the work were we left off last spring.
Our son Lukas turned 18 in the meantime and got his driver's license soon after his birthday, so now we are relieved from a lot of transportation duties.
The weather is nice at the moment, but a little too cold in the mornings, but it makes the nature look wonderful and white. The photo is from last Saturday (and nicked from Ingelas' blog) when we went to the village out in the archipelago where I grew up. Those wo commented my question over at Rachel's site and gave us input regarding the opening lines of Pete's "Baba O'Riley" can see the result here:
Well, we are now nearly a week into the new year but better late than never... :) Christmas and New Year came and went and left behind some 5 lbs extra around my waist and a lot of Christmas gifts to everyone in the family. One of the most popular was Singstar for PlayStation 2 with ABBA and 80's hits included. OMG, I was about to pee in my pants when the boys started duelling late on Cristmas eve. You know, here in the Nordic countries, Santa comes in person to give the gifts away on Christmas eve and then the fun starts. We spent New Year's Eve with our good friends and brought the PS2 and Singstar eguipment along and continued singing until 2 am. Great fun! The lady in that family sings in a choir and her husband is a teacher but also a really skilled multi-instrumentalist, drums, bass guitar, rhythm and solo guitar and as it turned out, also a very good singer! So the competition was tough! Another nice gift was "Mamma Mia - The Movie" on DVD. When putting the DVD in and starting to watch the trailers I was quite surprised to see this:
As I was quite an "Anorak" in my teens, I really have to go and watch this movie if it comes to Finland. The story is about some Pirate Radio stations competing with each other on international water, broadcasting to the UK offshore from the coast of Essex but also facing a common enemy: the British governement, especially the Postmaster General and the BBC. The story is fictional but loosely based on the commercial offshore stations that were operating from international waters and broadcasting rock and pop music in the mid sixties but got prohibited by the Marine &c Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967 Followers of Pete Townshend's blog back in 2006 may have noticed that Pete gave a great credit to those stations and how they influenced the music scene of the UK and Europe at that time when most public radio stations like the BBC only broadcasted some 1/2 hour of pop and rock music once a week.
The station with the strongest and best signal here in Finland was Radio London and could be received all day long during the winters of 1965 to 1967 and that station was my source of new exciting music and the one where I first heard "Can't Explain" in early 1965. The Radio London fan site, operated by Mary and Chris Payne contains all the Fab40 charts of Radio London aka BigL from the very start to the bitter end: http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/index.html Radio London (as also the pioneer station Radio Caroline) was a breeding ground for many famous (in Europe and the UK...) DJ's and TV-personalities like Kenny Everett, Keith Skues, Tony Blackburn and John Peel to name a few. A tip: put in "Hans" into the search engine of the Radio London site and hit "search"... ;) Well... Hans Knots' site is a real goldmine for everyone interested in offshore Pirate Radio, follow the link to Offshore radio Stations on the right of his homepage.
Edit Jan 19: I went searching for "Radio London" on YouTube the other day and I found a very nice video:
Here we see a lot of familliar "voices" in action. They who own the album "The Who Sell Out" will recognise the jingles. :) Remember to stop Garys' radio station by hiting the square button while you watch these videos. By the way, "The Boat That Rocked" will be out in Europe in the mid of April this year.
Lazy, now retired, engineer in heavy electrics ,HAM-radio operator: OH6MY, full-time Wholigan, all night snorer, happily married, three sons, rockstar-wannabe 45 years ago but ended up building and tweaking amps for my gifted friends...
