Spring is coming [eventually]

It’s been colder again, after Tuesday. The sunny days are back, and the temperatures have been between -3 and -6 degrees Celsius during the daytime and between -10 and -15 during the nighttime. But they say that it will get warmer again… soon. It snowed quite a lot on Tuesday, especially in the evening. I took the first three pictures in this blog post in our garden on Wednesday.

March

March

Well…

March

March

My refreshment in the car, on Wednesday was this, too. Pineapple, banana, coconut – my favourites, and one of my favourite flavour combinations.

March

I’ve been browsing through this gardening catalogue lately. For flowers, vegetables, et cetera…

March

Oh, spring…

March

March

My morning coffee today, a bit after 9 am, it was -11 degrees Celsius.

They say that the sun already is as powerful now as it is in September here in Finland. So, that’s not bad, not bad at all. 🙂

-Leena

Waxwings in the garden, pictures from the lake…

The weather’s been warmer for some days now, around 0 degrees Celsius, and it’s been snowing and sleeting and snowing again… Buuut they say that it will get colder, again…

We can’t remember when the last time that we had a garden campfire was, but on Thursday we finally had one (just an Instagram picture [owlnatureleena] to that 🙂 ), and on Sunday we had a garden campfire again. The first time that we saw a flock of waxwings in our garden was on Thursday when we had the campfire, and I saw the waxwings again on Friday.

The pictures in this blog post… this happened on the weekend:

March

A fine birch tree… – I took just a few pictures by the lake Pyhäjärvi, here in our home village.

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Behind birch trees.

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And hiding behind alder trees…

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In the car, on the frozen lake. The infinity – the lake Pyhäjärvi is about 30 kilometres long and this is the north end of the lake.

So what happened then – an ice road…? Yes, we didn’t know this, but when I was taking the pictures by the lake there I noticed that there really is an ice road, an ice track, a very curvy track for cars, too. And because we, me and my boyfriend, are a couple of crazy persons who are about to get a new car, we decided to take our 22-year-old VW Golf for a little ride later that day.

March

I took these pics when my boyfriend was driving, but before this… I was driving, and because it was a very curvy track and it was slippery and I was driving too fast and… okay, I drove our Golf straight into a snowbank there on the lake and we got stuck in the snow so badly that we needed help to get us out of the snow. – First I actually tried to dig our car out of the snow, with my hands, but it was an impossible piece of work, and fortunately we got some help – our car had to be pulled out of the snow. Oh, an adventure… 🙂

-Leena

March on

It’s March already – incredible! But the winter weather continues, it’s been even bitterly cold lately, as it has been the case in many other parts of Europe as well. Here in Finland the temperatures have been below -10 degrees Celsius and for some days the temperatures were between -15 and -20 degrees Celsius, and even colder than that. Naturally, it’s been colder during the nighttime because the sun is already warming during the daytime. I mean, the sun’s been shining like crazy! 😀 – So many sunny days lately, it’s been like constant sunshine… And as I am still counting; here, where I’m living, we’ve had snow on the ground for 13 weeks now.

March

I took this picture yesterday, just to show how high the sun already is in the sky here. This was at around 14.10 pm. On the shortest day of the year the sun at its highest point was just above that hill. The increasing daylight truly has made me do all kinds of things, as I already said in the previous blog post, effective. 🙂

March

My morning coffee today, at around 9.10 am. It was -12 degrees Celsius – only -12… 😀

crepes

And crepes with our own apple jam. I used oat flour and a mixture of oat and potato flours. Potato flour is good – it gives the oat flour crepes structure so that they are easy to flip.

Lahti Ski Festival

Did someone say winter sports? – Winter sports is still on. And I love it! This weekend it’s the Lahti Ski Festival here in Finland, it’s part of the World Cup thing. Now there’s Nordic Combined on, with the ski jumping part. Okay, most of us Finns love to watch cross-country skiing and ski jumping, and luckily that’s just what the Lahti Ski Games are about. 🙂

-Leena