Frost & fire

It’s been chilly lately. Frost but no snow. Every once in a while the sun’s been shining through some broken patches of the cloud cover during the daytime, and the moon’s been so bright at nighttime. It’s been rather beautiful and magical, it all. 🙂

The first seven pics I took today.

December frost

Decorated in style, naturally…

oil lamp

December

My land. 🙂

December

frosty clover flower

A frosty clover flower.

December

My land, my power trees… my dreams… It’s good to have your own power trees! Everyone can have those; they are free! – You don’t have to like own the trees… but they are yours – on a much deeper level! 🙂

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The last two pics I took on Sunday, late in the evening. I actually think that I have better pics of these things on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) – you win some, you lose some, when you try to take many pics of living fire with your phone and your camera, both… 🙂

campfire

A garden campfire… with some stars and the moonlight…

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And I was heating my glögi, nicely warm to drink out in the cold.

-Leena

Dark & cold, cosy fires & lights, and creating dream home

The campfire owl here again… 🙂 We’ve had already many campfires in our garden this autumn, too, but I usually just relax and enjoy them without my camera or my phone, but on Friday, late in the evening, I had the inspiration for taking some pics, too. (A pic on my Instagram (owlnatureleena) as well.)

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Campfires in the garden are a part of my, our, dream home…

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So, we have lived in this house for almost two and a half years now. But I still had one part of my belongings in Turku – as I was going on and on here in my blog last summer. 🙂 But since the end of August it has been only this, our country home, for me… and I love it! But this has been quite far from my (or our) dream home; almost everything, every thing, is in the wrong place here inside our home, only like the bookshelf and drawers are in the right spots, there are many untidy and disorganized spots in our home, and partly, naturally, because I brought so many things and pieces of furniture from Turku as well, and so on, and so on… Creating our dream home here now is not about renovating (we have done that, too – more about it later, in some other blog posts, too) and creating our dream home is not, heaven forbid, about buying anything, oh dear… yes, maybe buying some new candles and even more houseplants, but nothing more now… Creating our dream home is now about organizing, tidying up and cleaning up our home – it’s “a bit” of chaos here now… and almost all of our large windows still are without curtains, just window blinds are there… But yes, the only way to start the project for me was, first emptying, then cleaning and organizing, our garage, which definitely is not a place for our car, but for other useful things. 😉

And when we had some room for big items in the garage after rearranging, we removed a big pile of long wooden boards from the middle of our kitchen – they were taking over one third of the floor space there, so we didn’t have a kitchen table and chairs there for a year and a half, or so. (We were renovating some ceilings and walls…)

I now have a tag creating dream home here in my blog, so I’ll be posting, with pics, too, about the project here and there…

morning coffee satsuma

Morning coffee yesterday. And a satsuma! It’s the season of Spanish satsumas again! So juicy and delicious, and cheap. 🙂

oak tree

Under the oak tree…

strawflower

The strawflowers again! 😀 And they are still opening and closing their rustling petals, with the days and nights…

by candlelight

Yesterday evening, now this was in my dream kitchen. 😉 – Finally the big pile of long wooden boards is out and the kitchen table and the chairs are there! And the table and the chairs are the ones I had already in Turku. 🙂 I’ve been dreaming of candlelights in the dark evenings in the kitchen… warm and cosy… And the light of the warm oven can be seen in the pic, too – I was waiting for home-made thin and crisp barley breads to become ready.

lantern

Living candlelights in lanterns outside in the dark… and this lantern can also be seen from the kitchen window when sitting at the table. 🙂

campfire

One more pic of the Friday evening’s campfire to end this blog post… and to celebrate the dark and cold, bewitching evenings and nights! 😉

-Leena

On the last day of July and on the first day of August…

More pics from yesterday, and some I took today. 🙂

monkshood

Monkshood, extremely poisonous from roots to the tiny hoods, and we have so much of it in our garden – this is a very traditional plant in the old gardens in Finland. The man who build this house was very much a garden man, we’ve heard, so, no wonder – the fact can be seen in our garden today…

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marigold

Some sort of marigold, very small marigold.

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We can’t remember what this flower is… I’ve tried to google it, but no luck with that. EDIT: This flower is clarkia or godetia, silkkikukka in Finnish. Thanks for the answer, A! 🙂

cornflower

More pics of my cornflowers. Many charming colours they have…

cornflower

cornflower

cosmos

The first cosmos flower this summer, opened today, missing one petal. I had cosmos flowers last summer, too. These are growing from seeds, of course, and I like them a lot. 🙂

butterfly flower

Butterfly flower, schizanthus, poor man’s orchid again…

strawflower

And strawflowers again. Here it can be seen that our tall strawflowers and the shorter butterfly flowers as well as tiny marigolds are tight neighbours. 😀

strawflower

Pyhäjärvi

Yesterday evening by the lake Pyhäjärvi, after some Nordic walking and eating blueberries again. It was so nice to sit on a bench – the air was perfect, not at all warm, not at all cold. The sun was shining, but wasn’t warming, and the wind was blowing wonderfully. 🙂 And the sound of waves, just lovely…

campfire

A campfire in our garden last night. It can be said that this was my birthday campfire – it was not only the last day of July yesterday, but also my birthday (and by the way, the birthday of Harry Potter —> WTF? -Oh yes, says a Harry Potter fan (that’s me) here, aaand, it was also the birthday of J.K. Rowling herself. 😀 ) And… how old am I…? I’m actually a bit younger than Harry Potter… ;D Just a bit…

-Leena

Very miscellaneous lately

Hi! Things have been a bit hectic for us here lately. Everything like normal things and some extra, too. By the end of this blog post you’ll know why this post is very miscellaneous this time… 🙂

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My pics start on Monday evening… It was the first time we used our campfire coffee kettle that we bought at a flea market last week. We had been thinking about buying a kettle for campfire already for ages, and finally we found the perfect one at a flea market; made by Finnish Hackman and the price reasonable 12 Euros at the flea market.

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So nice! 😀 Perfect. -Water boiling, ground coffee added-

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Coffee was steamy and so good…

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OK, hello! 🙂 My blog is not about killing my darlings, so to speak. I mean, in the miscellaneous part and with my coffee pics I can have the world…. So now, I like cars, too, very much. That’s who I am. This week we had to change our car, get an unbroken car. We had a 1999 Ford Mondeo station wagon with a V6 engine. It got too broken for our patience. I took this pic when it was time for me to remove our Ibiza lizard from it. We were visiting Ibiza exactly two years ago – in the last week of May 2014. Ibiza is swarming with these cute lizards. 🙂 And naturally I still have this sticker as a keepsake.

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This. Is now our summer car. 🙂 Our own car, but it’s supposed to be somewhat temporary. We got this on Tuesday this week. This is a 1996 Volkswagen Golf GL. Very well-kept, very German, very red. 🙂

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Yesterday I took a pic when we stopped by the lake Köyliönjärvi. We live kind of between two lakes here – the other one is the big lake, lake Pyhäjärvi, and this is the smaller one, lake Köyliönjärvi. As I took this pic I was sitting on a bench so high that I could nicely wave my feet without sandals in the air. And the sound of the waves of the lake was nice and relaxing, too. 🙂
The weather has been very warm and sunny lately, today is a rainy day, but it should get sunny over the weekend again, they say.

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The apple trees are in bloom. We have two big apple trees in our garden. The scent of the flowers is lovely…

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Hopefully there’s still some time to take more pics of the apple flowers… this is all I’ve been able to do now… 🙂

-Leena

Campfires and delicacies

So, the campfire people, too, were celebrating vappu on Saturday…

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In our garden late in the evening. We had a campfire also on Sunday night. I love it how every campfire is different and the fire itself is constantly changing. Staring at fire is one of the most relaxing things I know… and the warmth at cooling night-time is nice, too.

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And the food… Just a pic of campfire marshmallows I had.

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Some more delicacies… this is the second chili pepper that we have eaten now, this was yesterday night just before dinner – I was so hungry that I wasn’t able to take a better pic… just needed to have my potatoes… 🙂

Our chili peppers are a bit burning, but delicious. Eating just half the pepper is enough, which is quite good – one pepper for two people… and our chilies are not even that hot types of chili peppers. But they burn nicely. 🙂

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And… today I took pics of the real traditional homemade vappu delicacies; this is munkki – like a doughnut ball, simply a ball (mine is a kind of a ball 🙂 ) of wheat flour spiced with ground cardamom and deep-fried in oil and then rolled in sugar. A sin. 😉

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And here’s some traditional homemade sima. Sima is a Finnish slightly fermented lemon drink, sweet and sparkling. There’s water, white sugar, brown sugar, the flesh of a lemon, the rind of a lemon, a very tiny piece of yeast and raisins.
To be honest, our sima is still kind of fermenting, but this already tastes like the real deal. And sima is a fresh and good drink for the whole summer as well. And it’s not supposed to be an alcoholic beverage, sima is suitable for children, too. 🙂

-Leena

Some things to one’s heart’s content

I visited the city of Turku last week, and visited the garden store Plantagen in the town of Raisio on Friday, too. I met this wonderful plant there… just had to take a couple of pics of it. I like very much going to Plantagen – there are so many flowers, plants, bushes, trees… everywhere around there. It’s actually one of my favourite places in the Turku region. 🙂

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A garden croton or variegated croton are the names I could find in English, in Finnish this plant is literally a wonder bushihmepensas. 🙂

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Just for the colours…

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On Saturday here in the region of Satakunta, my home region.

In the evening we stopped by the lake Pyhäjärvi, the lake that is our great pride and joy here in Satakunta. A lake large in size, a bit sealike. It was windy and the sound of the waves was so powerful and lovely. I like very much visiting the lake in any kind of weather.

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On Saturday, a bit later, a campfire in our garden. We, me and my boyfriend, are real campfire people. 🙂 We build campfires here and there, all year round, and in our garden, too. I love the scent, the sound, the atmosphere…

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The food… We have a wok pan for the campfire. We like campfire cooking very much, too – on a wok pan, on a grill grate, on a stick… all year round.

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The first fully opened flower of the narcissus in our garden yesterday. It was a rainy day again. But this beauty dazzles!

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And yesterday in our garden, nettles – food! Nettles have started to grow nicely, let us eat nettles and speak of them later on. 🙂

-Leena