Rainbows, Kittens, Spiders and Bovines
Last weekend was the first in a long long time I got to spend at the cabin almost by myself. The Friday was full of irritating hassle, which included getting our old big ass table from the house Susi, Jori, Riikka and I had been living earlier. The table was over two meters long and made of proper wood, so it was both heavy and unwieldy. I ended up calling a cab for it, which I had the pleasure of waiting for outside in a steadily worsening thunderstorm. As soon as I got it loaded up and heading for the downtown, I was off for the countryside myself.
The trip itself was very much suitable to end a week of grumpiness. The thunder was rolling, the lightning flashed, the heavy rain hit the windshield like a torrent of gravel and the soundtrack was Viikate played loud enough.
At the cabin site I holed up in the smaller cabin and got out my novel project, which has been on a writers’ blockish hiatus for a year or so. Surrounded by the gray light of a late evening, the patter of rain and a blessful absence of all distractions I got the text flowing again.
The next couple of days I spent rowing on the lake, photographing the nature, searching for geocaches, eating and saunaing. Susi arrived at the cabin site on Saturday, probably lured by the four month old kitten that Susi’s mother had got. I like other peoples’ kids and cats, and the kitten made me go into a kitty psychosis, which manifests as babbling inanely and being unable not to pet & play with the kitty even though you are bloody allergic to it.
Someone else's kids and cats rock, and someone else's four month old kittens rock even more!
I started the Saturday by retrieving a geocache I had placed on a rock wall in one of the islands in the lake. The cache had been found floating on the shoreline a couple of islands away by some girl scouts. Luckily their scout leader happened to be an avid geocacher, who had logged my cache in the wintertime and remembered it. It’s improbable that the cache had fallen out by itself, so either it was crows or magpies, or some moron with an IQ of a bird. I guess we’ll see how long the cache stays up this time.
In the evening there was a massive rain storm with the most impressive rainbow I’ve ever seen. The wind blew the storm over the lake, with the sun still painting the treeline on the opposing shore and islands golden yellow. You could see the rain front advancing and churning the lake into dark greenish gray. The incoming wind carried raindrops with it and almost pushed me down from my unsteady perch on the shoreline rocks. Then, a massively bright double rainbow going from one end of the cabin bay to another.
There was a sudden rain storm that blew over the lake. You could see the lake surface turning dark grayish green as the wall of rain came in. The wind pushed the rain ahead of it and churned the tops of the waves white. Then, a massively bright double rainbow.
I spent a big part of the Sunday looking for a couple of geocaches. The day was mostly sunny and swelteringly hot and humid. There was a constant rumble of thunder and dark clouds here and there in the horizon. I love that kind of weather when I’m out in the countryside. The combination of sunshine and distant thunder makes the world glow, it stops the clocks and makes everything around you hyper focused, alive, active and beautiful.
The first cache was next to a radio beacon used by aircrafts, but the second one got quite interesting. It was in a small grove in middle of a large field where cows were grazing. The grove was reserved for flying squirrels, but apparently the bovines used it as a shade from the sun. I trekked over other peoples’ orchards and fields, copses and barbed wire fences, until I reached the GPS zero point – which was full of young bulls.
When I found the GPS location for the cache, I had company. Company, who was very curious about what I was doing and lacked all sense of personal space.
Well, I think they were young bulls, but I didn’t lift any tails to check it out conclusively. The thing is that the bovines were friendly, curious and had no sense of personal place. I wasn’t sure how safe crouching around teenage oxen would be, plus there were only so many friendly cow noses and tongues you could deal with, so I decided to come back later and try again.
Umm, that's close enough with the nose, thank you.
Personal bubble, personal bubble!
On my way back I alleviated my disappontment by gorging on wild raspberries, that are ridiculously abundant this year.
I had to give up with trying to find the cache, since there's only so much bovine attention you can take. I comforted myself with raspberries, which were - to put it mildly - abundant this year.
In spite of certain unfortunate hassles I had to deal with, and which trashed certain other plans for Saturday, this weekend was just what the doctor ordered. Peace, quiet and nature. And, also, too much food and A KITTY!
Susi with the kitty scarf.
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.
Peaceful Work Day with Sushi
It’s now my work day number four in the National Library of Finland. The work room is cool and quiet, there are big windows with rain splattering on them and I’m trying to figure out what makes the Aleph library system tick and how does Unicode actually work, especially with Arabic, Devanagari and Cyrillic alphabets. Yesterday we went to visit a librarian who catalogues books in Arabic and assorted other Mid-Eastern languages and got to know the problems concerning those, which I should start fixing in the future.
Birthday-Jori enjoying his sushi
A moment ago I got back from a sushi lunch with Susi and Jori in Kurvi, in the rather improbably named Kahvikulma. I’ve walked past the place dozens of times, dismissing it as just another low-grade and messy cafe for Kurvi locals. Instead the place has a pretty damn decent lunch sushi buffet complemented with friendly staff, so the place is well worth checking out.
The atmosphere in the work room is timelessly peaceful. I have a ton of interesting stuff to study and learn, without any hurry to be somewhere or get anything done within strict deadlines. The novelty value of this for me can not be overstated. A room temperature that is under 26C and the absence of the sound of kids’ TV programs being edited are already a cultural shock of a kind after the last couple of years. Not to mention the lack of a towering pile of deadlines and people asking me stuff every 15 minutes either live or via e-mail.
In the turn of the millennium I didn’t really appreciate the slow and slightly disorganized pace of the academia, but now… I think I’ll like it here.
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