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!
Exploring Herttoniemi
When I left the office today, the weather was a bit too sunny and I was feeling a little too jittery to go straight to home. Instead I decided to go and pick up a geocache a couple of kilometers away, near a Bronze Age burial site next to Itäväylä road. Cycling there was very pleasant and the cache was in a fun place to find, although the GPS gave me some trouble. I’m mostly happy with the Garmin Colorado 300, but the electronic compass acts rather funky a bit too often. You have to recalibrate it quite regularily, plus for some reason even minor vibration (such as holding it in your hand that’s resting on a bicycle handlebar) makes it go wonky.
A Bronze Age burial site next to one of the busiest roads in Helsinki. The site is basically just a huge pile of rocks.
I also found someone's lodgings. Nobody seemed to be home, so I peeked in.
Pages from porn magazines, a couple of tent mattresses, an ashtray and empty boxes of ice-cream etc. Looked more like a shack built by kids than the lodgings of a bum.
When I found the cache, I was still feeling energetic and the next caches were only a bit over a kilometer away, so I went looking for them. A very nice thing about geocaching is that it takes you to places where you’d otherwise never go. Going for walks without a point bores me to tears and I rarely go cycling without any aim, but geocaches give you a good excuse to poke your nose into all kinds of places. I used to live in Herttoniemi, on the northern side, but Herttoniemenranta-area really surprised me. It was a completely different world from the area of Siilitie – clean houses, nice yards, lots of kids and a distinct smell of money.
I found one of the caches, the second one was inside a dog park, where I didn’t want to go and the third one was right next to a very busy road with a lot of people (it’s a really fucking cold day in hell before I start calling bystanders ‘muggles’). The people walking past made searching for the cache without revealing its spot pretty hard, so I left it for another time.
Herttoniemenranta seaside has nice tallish cliffs, which I’ve been meaning to check for some time now. When I returned, I arrived handily right above them – on the other side there is a harbor, which is closed with fences and barbed wire. The cliffs were surprisingly clean. I was expecting a ton of old beer bottles and stuff like that after the summer, but either it had been cleaned or it didn’t attract that many people. From the top of the cliff I noticed some old rusty barges and to my surprise a smaller tug-like boat that was huddling quite close to the cliffs.
The barges were rusty and massive. They were behind a serious looking fence, which I didn't want to try and cross in full daylight.
It was full of clothes hung up to dry, boxes of plates and other dishes also set up to dry and so on. There was a gap in the fence on top of the cliff and I just had to go through and climb down to check the boat out. The it was anchored next to a concrete ledge on the bottom of the cliffs – surprisingly there didn’t seem to be any way to the ledge apart from going there by boat, unless there was a door on the cliffside. Somehow the boat with all the stuff and the ledge was the coziest thing I’ve seen in ages.
A view from the top of the cliffs.
The boat was covered with laundry and all kinds of stuff.
There was a barbeque, plants, more clothes, ornaments like the small lighthouse, and all kinds of small stuff on the ledge. It looked like like someone's front yard.
When I was pedaling back towards home, I was feeling good and peaceful. I’ll have to get a few proper urban exploration trips done before the end of the summer – maybe a certain abandoned prison or a factory, or a Russian era ammo dump. Poking my nose into old ruins and often just poking my nose into places a bit off the beaten track always manages to put me in a strange but very good mood. It’s kind of peaceful, timeless and weird in the sense that I feel like I was remembering something very old. I can’t place the memory and strangely enough I remember feeling like that when I was a kid too. I wonder whose memories do I have.
Nevertheless, feeling good and peaceful. Now a bit of gaming, some food and then early to bed.
Geocaching, Raspberries and Rain
Friday
Last weekend I finally had time to go to the cabinside – my fortress of solitude – all alone. I once again got on the way a bit later than I would have wanted, which meant that I arrived around seven in the evening. There was still plenty of light out, so after I got my food in the fridge and everything else unpacked, I pushed off to the lake to case out a place for my first geocache and to pick out one which I hadn’t found in the wintertime.
The evening was extremely relaxing. I rowed about 8km around the lake, climbed on a cliffside of a rocky island which I had chosen for the site of my first cache, and found a great hiding place for it. I once again surprised myself by not being particularily tired after that. I spent time finishing Penny Arcade adventures, but after a very late night sauna I didn’t need much help falling asleep.
A view down from the top of the cliff.
Saturday
Friday evening had been sunny and the lake had been calm, but Saturday dawned cloudy and rainy. I set together the cache, rowed back to the island and spent some time hanging a bit too high for my comfort without a rope.
Climbing to the cache site.
...and there it went.
There were some kayakers having a picnic on the island and we started talking about the layout of the island. They told me about this one island owned by the local church and used for confirmation camps and such. Apparently one of the buildings on the island had burned time some time ago, so of course I had to go and check it.
It seemed that there had been some time since the fire, because the place was pretty well cleaned up and the foundation of the building was used as a some kind of an open air platform for speeches and such – at least judging by the chairs set nicely on one side of the foundations. There wasn’t that much to see there, apart from some charred trees.
The foundation had been cleaned up and the old fireplace used as an open air barbeque.
A nearby shed was as bit charred too.
Plus a large pine some way off the ruins.
It started raining a bit, but not severely. I returned to the cabin, had a very quick and light lunch and packed up some stuff for a trip to another geocache, one that required going through something that looked (and turned out to be) trackless forest. Luckily I ended up taking a rain cloak with me, since the weather didn’t really take a turn of the better.
There is an old road, which hasn't been used in years and the nature is starting to reclaim it in a beautiful way.
Don't know if this happened by itself or if someone dug up the road on purpose.
I ended up trundling through something that was more or less open swamp, very thick stretches of planted birches (thick as in having visibility of two meters), jumping over ditches and going through stretches of chest high ferns. All this protected by just a flimsy rain cloak and wearing running shoes, in pouring rain. The experience wasn’t bad, though – quite the opposite. The air smelled fresh, the forest was quiet and beautiful and whenever I started feeling even a little pissed off, I ran into a batch of raspberries which were so ripe that they fell from the stalks when you brushed the bushes. I must have eaten a liter or two of them during that trip, which according to the GPS took four hours and spanned about eight kilometers.
The small rocky hills covered with lichen practically glowed in the rainy afternoon light.
There were a lot of raspberry bushes nobody had apparently found at all this year. Maybe because they were right in middle of a godawful thicket nobody in their right mind would bother walking through.
For some reason I wasn't hungry at all when I returned to the cabinsite.
In the end I didn’t find the geocache, which was hidden in or near a very small bridge meant for riders. I was muddy and wet, but no amount of crawling around the banks and hanging down from the bridge revealed the hiding place. In the end I didn’t mind, though – when I finally got back to the cabin, I was so wet that I have literally fallen on bodies of water and come up drier. The caffee and the carelian pies tasted incredibly good, not to mention the pork chops.
The rest of the evening was spent waiting for my clothes to dry, saunaing and playing Runaway: A Road Adventure. The premise of the game sounded good and I was a bit surprised about the mediocre reviews it had got. Not so after I actually played through the first few chapters. The game wasn’t bad, but it was old-school in all the wrong ways. By this I mean completely illogical and contrived puzzles, that didn’t make a lick of sense most of the time, plus a shitload of hunting barely visible items and having to check bags and such again and again, because more stuff popped up in them. The game had its good moments, though, so the 12 euroes or so I spent didn’t feel like wasted money. When I realised I was progressing mostly with a walkthrough, I called it a night.
My plan was also to try and look for some mushrooms, but I didn't find any I recognized as edible.
Sunday
On Sunday morning I woke up feeling incredibly good and alert – it had been ages since I had slept that well. I spent the rest of the day chopping and stacking firewood, before it was the time to start packing my stuff. The atmosphere outside was perfect – it was cloudy but reasonably warm, there were high winds that made trees hiss and billow and no mosquitoes anymore. Pure zen.
The weekend was very good, the only thing to complain about was the fact that somehow I managed to lose my iPod. I didn’t take it to the forest trip, at least as far as I remembered, but the damn thing had vanished. I spent an hour turning over the cabin and the car, until I gave up and left for home. This will be making the rainy day trips to work rather boring, though. Well, win some, lose some.
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