Juhannus 2009
Juhannus is the Finnish midsummer party, when people usually go to the countryside to burn big-ass bonfires, eat themselves silly and get totally plastered. This year Susi and I reserved the cabin for our and our friends’ use. The aim was to simply go in there, make good food, laze around, play board games and generally unwind.
As so often is the case, Juhannus was once again cold, rainy and windy, but this is something we had prepared for. So, enter a weekend of saunaing, playing board games, cooking a lot of food, sleeping and eating far too much and even managing to do a short trip on the lake when weather permitted.
In my Flickr there’s a bunch of photos of our activities, including the incredibly lewd looking sausage making. A few samples below.
Christmas Eve at the Cabin
It’s now Christmas eve and I’m sitting comfortably on the cabin bed, trying to raise enough energy to go and add some firewood to the sauna stove and to start preparing the Christmas foods. I’m here all alone, which makes this the first Christmas I’ve ever spent without seeing any family or friends. This solitude is self imposed, though, and so far very very comfortable.
Susi and her sister went to spend the Christmas with the family and I didn’t want to spend several days alone at home (freelancing from home made the apartment walls pretty familiar…). Neither did I want to go to a place where there was no chance for privacy after an autumn of a whole lot of people around me, so I ended up here in the wilderness.
The Autumn in Retrospect
This autumn has been hectic and very busy, but at the same time quite pleasant. There’s a distinct difference in being simply tired from working too much and doing too many things, and being pissed off and stressed about stuff. The autumn has been of the former variety, not the latter. The advantage is that a good mood is just a couple of well slept nights and lazy days away. I’ve had to travel so much that one time I literally had to check the plane ticket in the evening to see where I was going the next day. I’ve spent countless hours in airplanes squeezed in between two lardasses in the adjoining seats and running with a camera case from one interview to another. Things at the work have progressed in a pleasant way, though. My efforts and the risks I’ve taken have actually started to pay off in several ways.
The last week has been a barrage of good news, that has left me feeling almost suspicious. The ancient Finns used to believe that onni, which translates as luck and happiness, is a limited resource in the world. If you had some, you should hide it, lest someone steal it. I’m kind of amused, since although I don’t of course believe in that, I have inherited some of that philosophy in my blood. I seem to feel that there has to be some kind of equilibrium with things – wild streaks of lucky breaks leave me feeling suspicious of what kind of nasty stuff will counterbalance them. I find these superstitious feelings amusing, but can’t really help them.
One nice thing is that in spite of the global economy, I’ve got work for the next spring and quite certainly for the next autumn too. TV is not the stablest of fields when it comes to holding a job, because the networks often buy shows one season at a time & funding is at times hard to come by. The decisions are often made quite late, so theoretically you can be out of job every spring, autumn and new year in a few weeks notice. The spring season looked a bit bad for a moment, but our executive producer managed to secure us a full season. The company is also doing well enough to give out christmas bonuses, with lots of productions that have traction, so things are looking pretty good.
In addition to the day job I’ve had my own projects. One of them has been to get my credit card debt zeroed out before the end of the year, which I almost managed to do. This meant cutting down on expenses and doing work worth an additional 4000 euros in three months. In addition to that there have been hobby projects, like role-playing games and of course the whole brouhaha with Älymystö’s new web page. So there have been long days, insomnia and moments when taking a dose of Fukitol and hibernating for four months has sounded really good.
We’ve managed to go diving only once since the previous entry, which sucketh. Either we’ve been busy, Susi or I have had the flu or there’s been a miscommunication. The diving trip we did a couple of weeks back was a real blast, though, with lots of interesting sealife and so on. But more of that in a couple of days.
The Christmas
So, yesterday I wrapped things up at the office and left for our cabin site. The weather was quite sucky for driving, since the temperature was just at the point of freezing, nodding slightly below it, so the roads were at times very slippery and all the cars threw out a cloud of freezing muddy mist that smudged the windshield. At the cabin site I started with the ordinary routine of warming up the sauna and the cabin, while finishing the last of the work over the cabin net connection.
Apart from one godawful thundery blizzard earlier in the autumn we haven’t seen much snow in Helsinki. Our cabin site is about 150 km to the north and luckily there’s some snow from here. Just a handspan or two, so not too much, but at least the ground isn’t completely dark, muddy and bare. When I got to the cabin, the first song I heard from the radio was “Walking in the Air” from the snowman animation they show every Christmas, which was kind of a pleasant emotional nuclear bomb.
The first evening’s sauna is a kind of a ritual in the cabin for me – it sounds corny, but it’s kind of a purification from all the crap of the everyday life. Sweating out the stress, the pissed off feelings, the vinegar-like stress-caffeine sweat and so on. Yesterday was no exception. After I had sweated it all out and scrubbed myself with the coarse sauna brush ’till my skin felt tender, I was feeling very light, content and relaxed.
The sauna stove stones glowing cherry red.
I set all the things that go “beep” to silent mode, even turned the cell phone face down so I couldn’t see the light if someone called, and went to bed. I did the usual panic wake ups at 6:50 and 8:30, but steadfastly continued the very heavy and in many ways communicative dreams I was having. I finally got up before noon, feeling very good, rested and well slept.
Walk in the Wintery Forest
I had a breakfast of traditional rice porridge, cinnamon and milk. In the early afternoon I left for another eight kilometer walking trip into the forest. I went looking for the same geocache I tried to find earlier in the autumn without success. After the August trip I’ve found a couple of quite cleverly hidden caches, so now I managed to take a right point of view to this one and found it in a couple of minutes.
It's not very cold, so small streams and large ditches haven't frozen over.
The walk in the forest was pure bliss. Surprisingly enough it’s often easier to walk in the forest in wintertime than in the summer. This time I also had better shoes, ie. army boots instead of running shoes. There was no undergrowth, the snow acted as a “smooth more” -filter to the ground and the leaves had fallen off the trees, replaced by a frosting of snow. It was quiet and peaceful, the weather was cool but warm enough to go without gloves and a wool cap and the world was really beautiful. There is a certain peace to be found for me in trips like that.
There are a couple of bad thickets on the way to the geocache. Much more pretty and fun in the wintertime, though.
When I was walking back and reached a road that connected a few houses to the main road, it was already getting dark. It was that moment of gray winter twilight when the eyes aren’t sure if they should rely on the cone cells or the rod cells more, leading into a slightly unreal feeling and the colours and the light level fluctuating. I met some people coming the other way, two kids who were sliding on the road with a kick sled and two women. A small girl was sitting on the sledge and she saw me, she sharted shouting “Santa Claus, Santa Claus!” I replied in Finnish “Ei kun ihan tavallinen tonttu“, which has a double translation of “nope, just an ordinary elf” and “nope, just an ordinary doofus”. The kid was a bit confused, as were the women, because there was really no other place for me to come from than the three houses (were they probable were staying or at least knew the inhabitants) and the forest.
There were candle lanterns lighting part of the way. Nope, the colours are not retouched.
I used the walk in the forest to think about the last year and where things are now. I have to say that finally I’m pretty much in the place in my life I have aimed for. I have a job which I find comfortable doing and which challenges me, but also takes me into nice situations and gives me things other than just the money. I have a great, stable relationship which especially for the last couple of years has been better than ever, I have great hobbies and the means to pursue them, great friends, my health is ok, the finances are more or less balanced now and so on. The situation doesn’t feel fragile or a milestone on the way to somewhere either, it feels like the endgame to a lot of stuff I’ve been doing during my life.
No doubt this current blissful status quo will be broken soon, but I’m not worried about that – on the whole I’m not afraid of losing things. When something is attained once, it can be attained again. Being thoroughly happy and content like this is a proof-of-concept -kind of thing for me.
Some of the lanterns were hanging on fir trees.
The Christmas Eve
After I got back to the cabin it was almost pitch dark. I wasn’t that tired, but nevertheless some hot coffee, Christmas star-pastries and gingerbread biscuits tasted really good. So, this is were I’m now, watching the fireplace roar. I just took a short pause from writing to add some firewood to the sauna and set a fire under the water cauldron to get some hot water for washing. The lake hasn’t yet frozen over, but it’s been cold enough today that there’s an one centimeter crust on the lee side of the cabin shore – nothing you couldn’t get through after hammering it with the buckets.
The sauna is almost ready, so I’ll better start setting up the meal. I brought with me the traditional casseroles, a ham which I roasted at home, sweet Christmas bread and all the relishes that go with the deal. I very much doubt that after today’s mini hike in the forest, a hour or two in the sauna and then eating myself silly I’ll be good for much during the rest of the evening – but then again, what is there to do apart from curl around my tummy to sleep.
Thanks for a great year to all of my friends reading this!
Weekend with the Honeymooners
Jori and Riikka ditched their plan of spending the week after the wedding abroad, because the summer has been pretty hectic. Instead of a full-blown trip they went to Riikka’s family’s cabin, spending a week together and inviting a bunch of friends for the weekend. The people who made it were Susi, Ville, Katja and I.
Spending a weekend with friends in the countryside didn’t sound half bad for me either, since this summer has been very good, but there has been relatively little downtime. We got to the cabin on Friday, a bit later than I would have wanted. Jori was already warming up the sauna, so we got pretty straight to the business: saunaing, drinking and chatting. The tone of the evening was really nice and relaxed and afterwards Sandman used a crowbar.
Jori pouring ice-cold vodka to wonky glasses.
Saturday started off slowly and comfortably with a breakfast of coffee, garlic baguettes and Donald Duck comics. I dragged my ass to the sunny and humid early autumn day, which was a perfect choice. The cabin yard turned out to be extremely interesting in a biological sense. The lot is quite big and it contains dry forest, a sandy beachfront, a slightly swampy area with saplings and a deepish and very established ditch with a lot of semi-aquatic vegetation.
I spent a happy couple of hours stalking dragonflies, examining boat bugs paddling away under the surface and snapping a photo after a photo.
Beautifully coloured plants on the shoreline.
There were a lot of dragonflies, rustling and darting around.
I'm a total asshole with nature, I want to touch everything, provided I don't harm it. This attitude will bite me in the ass sooner or later - and not figuratively, I'm sure. Once I almost handled a thing whose bite of neural toxins and digestive juices causes gangrene, but that's an another story.
Semi-aquatic plants.
A bumblebee having its lunch.
Another mandatory autumny mushroom pic.
There was a feather stuck on a lone blade of grass in the marshy area.
Some moss.
Different kind of moss.
On one spot the shoreline was full of small, floating plants, with a lot of small, extremely fast insects scurrying over them. Trying to get a photo of them would have required 20 cups of coffee just to keep up.
My expert opinion is that this is some kind of a bug. Umm... Jere, any help?
A flower fly eating the bumblebee's leftovers.
Horseback Riding
Later in the afternoon the girls and I were off to a nearby horse stable for some horseback riding. I had never before actually ridden a horse, although I’m not stranger to the animals. My step-grandparents used to breed trotters for harness racing in their farm, so during the summers and winter-holidays of my childhood I spent time a lot of time around horses, seeing the grandpa shoe, race and tend them. I actually got to try riding on a sulky a couple of times, both an old chariot-like version and a modern really light and low cart. It’s quite scary to be drawn in a thing where your ass is almost sweeping the ground and the only thing you see is this enormous back-end of a horse and its flying hooves.
So, for me it was the first time actually sitting on a live horse. The stable had their own thing, which is apparently a mix of centered riding and their own hippie stuff. In practice you gave the horse hints of what to do with four increasing levels of strength, starting with very mild and so on. Long story short, I ended up having fun. It was nice to get the horse to do what I wanted most of the time, plus it was a new experience. Also, horses seem a lot smaller now than when I was about 10 years old, imagine that.
Horses - not built to look smart.
A view from the saddle.
Me grooming the horse before riding. (Photo by Ville)
Two things not built to look smart. (Photo by Ville)
Or course, nowadays horseback riding is thought to be a thing for prepubescent girls. In my opinion this is a perfect example of how people just toss around concepts without thinking about the concrete reality. What is it that you actually do when you ride a horse? You climb on top of 600 kg of herbivore, which is one car horn or a dashing dog away from going bugfuck nuts, running towards direction X while dragging you by your foot – or planting a hoof on your face when it wants give a friendly reminder that you are too close. How exactly is this is girly compared to driving a car, which pretty much obeys whatever you do?
Well, in middle of our riding session it started to rain, so when we got back to the cabin, all of us were thoroughly drenched and covered with dust and horse hair. Jori had apparently received a vision that something like this might happen and he had already warmed up the sauna when we got back. Perfection.
So, the rest of the day – sauna, napping, an insane shitload of food, beer, wine, pancakes and reading Fables until sunrise. On the whole, there isn’t much you could have improved about the day.
The Sunday was a little bit wasted on my part. I’ve been pretty stressed and sleep deprived, so combined with the physical exercise, sauna, food and alcohol, I ended up sleeping ’till early afternoon. Generally I genuinely hate sleeping past noon, but sometimes the body takes its toll. After that there wasn’t that much time to do anything apart from eat more food, pack up all the stuff and leave for home.
This was a very good weekend, certainly one of the most relaxing “pals in a cabin” -things I’ve done. I wish I could have got up earlier on Sunday to go and pick up some mushrooms, but can’t have all and there’s plenty of autumn left.
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