Blues Mäysti next Saturday in Oulu

This coming Saturday we have a gig in Oulu with our university time band Blues Mäysti. Last one was if I remeber correctly back in 1991 and actually in our wedding ;o)

BM has been practising now for few months, and last weekend I joined them in Oulu - oh boy it was good to play again, and it sounded really good.

Waiting eagerly for the happening:

Otto's ollie developping...

Otto developping his ollie at home

One more mother's day stuff to remember

A pirate, 85 years old mom/grandma/charming lady and a musician pianist with capital
M and P !

Eatable flowers really make the salad ? ;o)

I cooked for (almost) the whole family last weekend at Mother's day. Even though I was personally suffering from flu which I picked up a day before, the food tasted OK accroding to me. The salad gained lot's of credits ... not really sure why (pretty much exactly what I do always when not following some specific recipe) but this time everybody gave special credits for it. I believe that it was the looks again = eatable flowers which made the difference....

Otto's many faces...

I recently have had the luxury of seeign what's going on in my early-teenage son's Otto's life since my computer is the only one currently having the capability to download pics from our Pentax OptioWpi camera. This gives me the opportunity to see what sort of pics he and his friends are taking and compare them to what we are taking at home.

During the class trip to Helsinki's legendary amusement park Linnanmäki:














At home during the mother's day breakfast:
Not surprisingly there are indeed "some" differences ;o)

Ring III... trying to make to Blues Mäysti practices in Oulu

Had the immense pleasure of trying to make it from Helsinki downtown to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport last Friday. I do know that Friday around 4-5pm is always the traffic jam peak in Helsinki area so I generously (that is what I at least I thought) reserved 2hours for making it into my 17:05 Helsinki-Oulu flight. But RING III is a national small scale catastrophy ! What a waste of human energy and natural resources.
There are 4 traffic lights right in this key motorway leading all traffic from western side of south Finland to eastern side... and most often also back ;o) Practically all heavy trucking from east2west, west2east (including traffic from Finnish harbours to Russia and back) happens there. Shit loads of Capital region commuting happens there = tens (?) of thousands of people are going from home to work and work to home and thus are sitting and cursing this every workingday waste of their precious freetime.
I heard this insanity is reasoned with costs issues - fixing the traffic light crossroads would cost too much money for now.
But what makes this all really sad is that there is really only just one crossroad (Ring III - Tampere motorway) which actually would need to be fixed. 3 of these 4 crossroads are actually used for some "pathetic little shitty other roads with no significance for anything" or to put it more nicely "for roads that could be routed to some other already existing multilevel junctions".
If it's a money issue at least please reduce the traffic light in RING III to just this Tampere-RingIII junction, and re-route other 3 to those near by multilevel junctions.

Ok done it - does not piss me off so much anymore for some wierd reason

Future-punk-future-culinarist

Otto has recently started to show admirable interest in trying out different foods... which is great - when we vote for what to eat he's now in my and Nina's side for something else than hamburger/pizza/chinese ;o) 3-2 to good food !

Btw, Viking Line really suprised us all very positively - excellent food and service !

Suomenlinna...

It just simply rocks ! Like all Finnish castles it's simply done for war - somehow brutally fashinating ?

Stockholm trip

We did a 2 day cruise to Stockholm on a perfect weekend... we had around 20C on both sides of Itämeri. Stockholm is such a gorgeous city !

We did not have time for too much at the city (most of the time in these 2 day cruises goes to ...hhmm actual cruising) so some of us went shopping and some (me, Vili, Valtteri, Outi and Marja (my sisters)) went to see the old Vasa warship from 1628. Besides being an absolute amazing "object" and kept/presented so well, it actually bears a story having some resembles to our lives for us too ?



To keep it short - the ship had been designed to have just one deck full of guns (that was what the swedish warshipmakers had been doing so far) but the king wanted an additional deck of guns. Despite of possibly stated worries, that was then executed (who would and could resist king's wishes ?). When it was finally ready it was initially tested with 30 men which were ordered to run from one side to another repeaditly. It failed the tests - it almost sank from that swinging causes by 30 runnign man. But since the King had ordered it to be urgently launched (and he was at the time in Poland) they went on to the sea. With the second mild freeze and only 4 of it's I-dont-know-how-many sails it sank. Took ~50 men with it too.
Sadly at least to me this does not sound too distant even in current corporate world ?... or in political neither.

Valtsu and his clothes...

Valtteri has had an habbit of hiding (aka throwing) his dirty clothes under the bed instead of ...well putting the somewhere which would require some effort. We've been trying to teach him back to his early kindergarden habbits in this sense which included "vaatteiden viikkaus" = making a neat little pile out of his clothes.

Success ;o) !! One morning I found clothes of 2 consecutine days in one neat pile on the floor:


It made me laugh at myself... again.

Celebrating ...

We received an important milestone in our exciting new web project, and celebrated it with few glasses of nice champange in the morning. My friend from Meidokan Ari Mahlanen is working for Alko and he recommened Nicolaus Feiullatte which I then bought 4 bottles ... Thanks for the tip Ari - great stuff !

Tero-Markus had a perfect idea to have a open doors during the evening in some bar/pub in downtown Helsinki for the whole team. I supported the idea and recommended Punavuoren Ahven which is specialised in Belgium Beers. Time did fly ;o) and we sat in that very same pub from 5pm to 2am. Had loads of good talks and ideas of which to be honest of some latter ones I don't actually remember too much of ... execpt that they were all extremely good of course ;o)

Wappu 2006

A normal Finnish Wappu behind ;o)
On Sunday had lots of fun again with Paula and Juha Elomaa - THX again !... On Monday I did some serious hangover recovery work by chopping firewood (about 1.5m2) and carried/rolled some heavy stones to our stone fence. Stupid (in terms of personal healthy) but effective.
In the evening we went to eat out to Teatteri restaurang which was very nice despite of what the photo is telling ;o) The boys always having their fair share of fight over space...

















Then a late stop over in Cafe Carousel - Valtteri enjoyed it like we did ;o)

















On the way back there was quite an amazing sunset - I could ~photograph it directly towards the sun.


...actually lot to remember again even though it was just another wappu.

Spring is here...

Otto and Vili were in Nuuksio for 2 nights with their boyscout team. I took them there on Friday and fetch thme back on Sunday... Ice is melting away even from small lakes and some first flowers break out from the icy ground.

From Helsingin Sanomat/Nyt

Helsingin Sanomat's weekly addition NYT-liite has run "kuin kaksi marjaa"/"Like two berries" series for several years now... This one about a week or two ago I rank to my personal top 10 ;o)