Happy holidays!

Hyvää Joulua, God Jul, Merry Christmas! Hope you all have a good one, whatever you celebrate and in whichever language you do so.

UWAA!

Oh wow, time really flies, doesn't it!?

Flying back to Finland TOMORROW! We have to wake up a little before 5 a.m. so I'll be going to sleep pretty much now. I'm switching to my Finnish SIM-card as well.

The huge plus is that we are taking a cab to the airport, as it's so early in the morning that a cab actually proved cheaper than train tickets for four people.


See you soon (if you're in Finland)

I have been a very nice girl. . .

The last week has been rather eventful!

Bad things:

- Our oven had a partial breakdown

- Our boiler had a full-scale breakdown (no hot water!)

Good things:

- I managed to repair my other bicycle brake myself (100 Big Girl points, right?)

- The oven got fixed.

- The boiler got fixed.

- We had tortilla today

- We had an Australian guest over yesterday

Time flies, it would seem it's time for the Wish List again! Please note that I gladly accept other types of chocolate than the ones listed here, such as Fazer's Blue, Tupla, Dumle, Toffifee and so on.

The List



Money
Rahaa  
pengar 

Always appreciated.


...

Let's wish for something really girly for once:



Body Scrub
Vartalokuorinta

I just really kind of like it, and I would probably never buy it myself.




Okay, back to normal:




The Elder Scrolls: Anthology

 

Look at all these games! And there are even maps included!
I would never need to play anything else again, not for, like, 500 hours at least!





Angel Chocolate Bars
Enkelisuklaapatukoita
Änglachokladstänger

Mmmm.






Cloetta Center Toffee (original)

 Oh, yum yum yum!



Punch-rolls, or just green marzipan (Sallinen)
Punssirullia, tai ihan vain vihreää marsipaania (Sallinen)
Dammsugarbakelser, eller helt bara grön marsipan (Sallinen)





Naminami.



Arrack
Arrakki
Arrak

For baking (mostly, ahem)





Glögg-concentrate
Glögitiiviste
Glöggkoncentrat

Glugluglug.




Recipe Journal
Reseptivihko/kirja
Recepthäfte/bok










Should have a combination of pages to write in and plastic pockets to
hold cut-out recipes. Super plus if it has different sections for starters,
soups, main meals, snacks, desserts and so on.




Who Cooked The Last Supper?
by
Rosalind Miles


Seems like a funny and interesting book.


Dough
Fyffee
Stålar

Can hardly have too much.

Only two weeks until I arrive, be prepared!

Circular Heating Element.

Another chapter in the "everything breaks down in our final year in this house" story. Apparently the circular heating element at the back of our fan-assisted oven has decided to suddenly stop working. The good news are that the grill element still works, so the oven is not completely useless, and that the reparation shouldn't be too expensive, if it is indeed only the element, and not some strange electrical fault. We noticed this yesterday when we made lasagne, and put it into the supposedly pre-heated oven only to find it cold, although the light was on and the fan was blowing merrily away. 

The next tenants will find themselves in a truly pristine house, at least when it comes to all kinds of appliances, we'll eventually have them all broken and switched to new ones before our time is out.

In other news it is steadily getting colder, someone told me they heard a long time cold scare prognosis of this winter going to be one of the worst in all time British history, with temperatures possibly plummeting below -25ºC. Hopefully it won't happen, for the sake of everyone living in these poorly insulated houses, and England will simply cease to function.

A couple colder days would be nice though, since the freezer really needs defrosting. It builds up frost really fast, due to the outrageous indoor humidity.

Announcement

This beautiful MS Paint still life portrays an earring that seems to have been lost here by one of our guests last spring. Does anyone recognize it?

In other news the dissertation draft deadline is on monday, so this weekend seems to be destined to be filled with writing. Today, however, this dreariness is considerably lightened up by the plan of preparing and eating sushi. We actually bought a tiny piece of fresh salmon to use in it. Wow-ow!

Mera Camera

I've actually been spending some time in the darkroom lately, here are some pictures from a couple weeks back:

Bugs on the water.

Roomie in the woods.

This is what the fifth tenant looks like.

As you can see I took a bite of the big one on the left.

 

This is what happens to a light sensitive paper when you 

mess up and it gets a little too much of not-pitch-black

It has been a lot of fun.

The weather is getting colder and colder. We are approaching "triple sweater plus leggings under your trousers, scarf, and a cap on your head" indoor temperatures. Have I mentioned that hot water bottles are the best thing ever?

Monstercake!

Thanks to Roomie for letting me borrow her lovely sweater.

On thursday we went on a gallery trip to London. A lot of walking it was, and a lot of art as well. After that I, for one, was pretty exhausted, but luckily we had decided to order some Chinese takeaway instead of starting to cook something ourselves around 8 o'clock. It was so good. We were invited to go to a Halloween costume houseparty in the evening. Me and Roomie, we were so tired we decided we probably wouldn't stay for too long. Still, we managed to stay for a bit after midnight. Some of the costumes were really good. I was dressed as insomnia, as you can clearly see from the illustration above, just a slight case of "I have limited props, time and energy to fashion a decent outfit from thin air"

Next day we baked a monster cake:

Me and Roomie baked the cake itself, and then Finnish Friend joined in to help with the decoration. It's a pumpkin cake, very similar to carrot cake, except that this one has a bit of orange in the batter. It's very good, I can tell you. While tasting the cake we watched Nosferatu (1922), grandfather of numerous vampire (and horror) films.

The sound and music in it was really interesting and diverse.

Yesterday we watched Time Masters (Maitres du Temps) (1982). It wasn't that good. Some interesting ideas, but a rather dull storyline, and some really bugging visual elements, mainly unsettling He-Man faces:

Hmm. Anyway, that's it for now. Take care y'all.

Old Mold.

Mmmm, there is some tuna lasagne in the oven right now, can't wait for it to be ready to eat. Here's a goodie from last week - boeuf bourguignon, or beef burgundy.

 You can't go wrong with red wine and cooking.

I had found a HALF PRICE slab of beef in the supermarket a couple of weeks back, some braising, beef stock red wine, onions and mushrooms and hours and hours of cooking in the oven (I even made it one day in advance so it would have time to get really juicy before eating) turns into a really nice change in an otherwise very vegetable heavy diet. To be fair we have been eating many extra nice things lately, there has been pizza, chicken soup (thanks, Roomie), spinach crêpes (thanks Longhaired roomie and Finnish Friend) , vegetable pie (thanks again, Longhaired roomie) and wiener sauce (knackorvssås/nakkikastike). The vegetable soups, sauces and woks inbetween haven't been bad either, especially yesterday when we had some chicken dumplings with the wok, oh yeah!!

In other news Roomie vacuumed the house today, and apparently everything can get moldy in England:

 See those light blotches there?

The hard rubber soles of my slippers can apparently get infected. Granted, they had been lying around for two weeks maybe, since we're in a warmer period right now, but I mean come on! On the other hand, the rubber isolation on the windows get moldy all the time, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

England's rampant humidity never ceases to amaze me, I guess.

Pike

Whoops! Long time no write, once again. Not much to tell, really, not that I can think of anyway, so chew on this comic instead, it is based on a dream I dreamed last spring.

The Riddle

 Welcome to England, where even your food smiles at you (potatoes never cease being funny).

 

Hi there, nice to meet you. I'm sure I will be enjoying your warm company.

I feel extremely youthful. I don't know when the last time I had a plaster on my knee would have been. See I managed to fall from (or rather with) my bicycle. 

It was a strange situation, I was coming out to a small road from an even smaller road, stopped to look for cars and suddenly I was on my face. My best guess is that I was too close to the border of the sidewalk, my wonky basket (which was loaded with a really heavy bag) moved a little, shifting the weight enough to turn my front wheel in an awkward angle causing it to slide down the sidewalk border stone, causing me to lose my balance. The rest is history. I did feel silly suddenly finding myself on the ground tangled in my bicycle with my bag and cereal carton scattered around, but I quickly got myself together and managed to reach home safely. 

My only keepsakes from this marvellous experience are the aforementioned scrape on my knee, a neat bruise on my other leg and a small scrape on my elbow. I really think these would give me some street credibility, would I be able to wear shorts to show them off. Alas, I am afraid it is a bit too cold for that sort of attire now.

Do you like riddles? I have one for you then. This is not applicable to you if you have played Fez and therefore know the answer, not looking for spoilers here. Also, please do not google it, that spoils the fun. Just sharing this brainteaser with you. I'll let you know if I find the right answer.

What's my name?

Hint: 

My first half is what is is

My second half is half of what made it

I know from the mechanics of answering this question that it is probably 8 letters long and does NOT include the letters D J P W.

Good luck.

Flash Photography

Just popping in to show you what's going on in Canterbury:

Cheerio!

There's Whiskey in the Jar

Oh wow, the days just fly by. I shall finally present to you a compilation of things bought in Scotland .

The candy is obviously already gone, there were three kinds, blue ones (pictured, but from a bad angle) with the Skottish flag (Saltire) with the taste of Irn Bru (Iron Brew, it is the colour of rust), a special Skottish soft drink. The other types of candy I bought were blue raspberry thingies (one of my favourite among the British sweets I've found), and hard apple sweets, which were supposed to be sour, but I failed to notice that. They were good nonetheless.

The oatcakes are made of oatmeal, and taste just like that, porridge. I really like them, Roomie isn't too impressed. I should try making some myself.

As I might have mentioned earlier, there was an art material shop in Glasgow, and it had a big sale going on. The big pad is one with special bleedproof paper, so I can use my cool supermarkers on it without fretting about if it goes through (also endlessly cheaper than Bristol board, that I have been using previously). The drawing above is drawn in that pad. Then there's some refill for my mechanical pencils (even the 0.3 ones were only 50p each, which is a fraction of what they are normally priced at) and one tiny piece of linoleum (for printing).

Above the lino you can see a piece of rock and a flower, both stolen from mother nature on Arthur's seat.

Points to you if you can guess what's in the box, saying Caol Ila 12.

Blub

Guess what I did today? Well, obviously I drew this fabulous piece because I haven't photographed my souvenirs felt really generous, but I also went swimming. And went to the supermarket afterwards, and bough one TONNE of food as all kinds of exciting things were on special offer. Then I hauled everything home with my cool bicycle in the afternoon heat and rush hour. Have I mentioned Canterbury has extremely narrow roads even for England? And there are loads of lorries and buses? And that all roads are strange detours because of weird planning and lots of dead ends?  And that it's quite hilly as well? In conclusion, I was a sweaty mess when I got home, instead of feeling fresh and rejuvenated. At least Roomie did the cooking tonight, which was much appreciated (and delicious).

Now for the real reason I post today: I just checked the weather, and guess what? Sunny spells and 19°C over here, cloudy and 9°C over in Helsinki! We won this time, bwahahaa!  >:D (I usually don't mind the cold, but over here I appreciate the warm because it means we won't die of frostbite indoors just yet).


Boom yeah!

Auld Reekie

 

 Whoop de day! Back from Scotland. The house is still standing, and we have a new, really shiny tap. And it actually works!

Edinburgh was nice and I liked all the Scottish things I tried (namely whisky, haggis, oatmeal biscuits and deep fried mars) I'll just cut to the chase and post some pictures:

Right on our first morning we started out with conquering Arthur's Seat (250 m above sea level). The above picture is taken from another, more well groomed hill downtown, Calton Hill (only ca 100 m above the sea).

 

On the way up we found the ruins of an old chapel. The hill is an old volcano, so the rock was really interesting, unlike from anything I've seen before (Finland isn't terribly volcanic).

At this point (chapel ruin height) we had barely started our climb, but the view of the city was already nice. Calton Hill can be seen in the distance to the right, with a tower and a structure resembling a Greek temple on top.

I tried my best to take a picture of a crow flying. This was the best I managed.

There was a really cool craggy ridge. the path underneath it was called Radical Road, but was closed due to risk of huge rocks falling on your head, so we walked along the upper part of the ridge instead.

 

To get down from the top and to the craggy ridge we had to walk along a really zigzaggy set of stairs (marked in orange)

Tentacle cat takes care of your trash!

The Edinburgh Castle was naturally perched high on a hill.

That would be me. We are on our way to find the ocean.

And that would be the shadows of my fellow ocean searchers.

We did find the ocean, but there was always somekind of off limits harbour in the way, and we didn't care enough to find a beach, so we had a look at the mouth of the Water of Leith instead.

During a rainy day we visited Glaswgow. I didn't use the camera much that day. Glasgow was way flatter than Edinburgh, and therefore felt more like an ordinary British city in my opinion. We were good art students and visited the gallery for modern art there.

 

Some shopkeepers are simply more creative than others.

 

And last but not least a slightly retouched image of all of us, from left to right: Me, Finnish Friend (who survived Spain and will be living with us for the rest of uni), Longhaired Roomie, and Roomie (who is considerably harder to draw since she ceased wearing glasses (she had eye correction surgery))

That's all for now, if I am a good person I might post a picture of what manners of nice things I found in Edinburgh later.