Flash Photography

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

Cheerio!

Ladybird of Luck

It appears to be ladybird season right now. I saw several while cleaning the clothes line in our backyard, with all kinds of dot combinations. I wonder if they consider it beautiful to have super many or super few dots. Or maybe something in between, or a certain amount. would that amount be six, as the amount of their legs or seven for the days of the week?

Bright

 

Brighton was a nice break, but it's good to be back. Now we've got some unnaturally sunny weather for a couple of days. We also had lovely weather on the first day of the trip (although there was a freezing wind of death ever present), but it kept deteriorating as the days went on. Luckily, we didn't experience much rain. I'll stop being such a weather fixated Brit now and throw some pictures at you:

Brighton has a beach! Who would have known!

 Where there's a windy beach, you'll inevitably find

mermaids with super flowy hair!

 Naturally, an ocean-inspired town is not 

complete without some whale-graffiti.

 The sun sets even in Brighton.

 Guess what? There was a beach!

 This was our hostel. (not)

 Experienced travellers extraordinaire.

Not much interesting to report otherwise.

Wok Warrior (and taxidermy)

Above it was happens when an idea festers in my head for some time, and I get inspiration to draw late at night. . . Anyway, better not mess with her. She's got detergent in those balloons. Really bad for your eyes.

Last week I had a taxidermy course at uni. It was really interesting, as I've never had a chance to do it before. This was the result:

This mouse had a hard time.

I guess it's not bad for a first taxidermy, but it does look a bit miserable and pathetic. Its name is Humphrey, by the way.

Oh, we also had a chap over to fix our boiler. Apparently what was going on actually was some kind of connection error between the thermostat and the receiver on the boiler, so now we got both parts switched out, and its been working like a dream since then. The new thermostat is so cool, it shows temperatures with an accuracy of half a degree, and there's a holiday setting. So, if we, say, leave for one week, we can program the thermostat to keep the house cold while we're away, and start heating just before we get back. So no coming back to a freezing house anymore! Yay!

Flakes

There was a light snowfall today, nothing that would stay on the ground. seems like winter's still trying to remind us of its presence, however slightly. I think it has pretty much given up already, which is all for the better, with our lousy insulation.

It makes, however, for a marvelous opportunity to spam you with some wintery photos from a couple weeks back:

 A snowy path, where might it lead. . . ?

 Oh, look! Two friends!

 

 

 Here's more sturdy fellows at their favourite game, hide and seek.

Not much further exciting things happening here, 'cept on the foody frontier. I'll do an update on that later, as the camera is downstairs, and I am, regrettably, upstairs.

Gimme an S

Our bathroom window is.. how do you put it, well it has a broken surface (intentional), some kind of relief pattern, so you can't see through it clearly. Moving on, looking through it I wondered about how both of our neighbours manage to dry a lot of white sheets at the same time, until my sleepy head realized that the "white sheets" in the middle must be our lawn and the roof of our shed. Then I realized it must be snow.

And snow t'was.

We're having a friend from school over for lunch today (a young British lady), let's hope she hasn't run into too many problems with her bus and train. Britain usually doesn't take snow very well.

Hasta La Vista, Betty!

 Going to the train to Gatwick in half an hour, so I'll be in Finland soon enough. I've switched to my Finnish SIM now, and thus can't be reached with my English number.

Here's a taste of how good I've been:

So if you're still wondering about what to get me, and nothing on the list tickles your fancy this far here's two final thoughts:

Fiskars Nail-Scissors

Fiskars nagelsax

Fiskars kynsisakset

I'd really like them to be the slightly bent type. And they've gotta be Fiskars,

they're simply the best. Colour doesn't matter that much.

Movie Tickets

Biobiljetter

Leffaliput

 

Always useful, especially now that there are a handful of films I'm interested to see right now!

All right, I'm off! Away from the damp and into the snow.

Bonjour à tout le monde!

Today was a marvelously rainy Sunday. The weather was terrific for sitting inside doing nothing. A perfect day to get better. And I have literally just loitered, see, there's no treatment like loitering when it comes to colds. Good old lazing.

I'm trying to justify my not writing a beautiful picture riddled update here. But hey, I've got you something to get started with, a shot of me and roomie:

It is only very slightly photoshopped with a mousepad.

Green thumb

But, I don't know if I have thumbs!

Ahem.

I just planted garlic, spring onions and carrots in the garden! So in a couple of months we'll have five fresh vegetables to eat, if lucky! We had a friend (and Finnishfriend) over for lunch and cake today, as she had her birthday recently, she brought leftover christmas crackers with her, so I got to crack one for the first time.

I got a set of tiny cute screwdrivers (quite useful!) and the best joke ever:

Why do ghosts live
in the fridge?

Because it's cool

Hmmm.

Oh yeah, and green thumb reminds me on an old PC game called Green Thumb Cards (oh my god, you can apparently get it for free nowadays, we just had a trial version back then). The game was about managing a garden, you plant flowers and so on. Then you could attack your rivals' gardens with different pests, and if they had (the right kind of) pesticide they could repel the attacks. They could attack you too. What you could do was determined by the hand of cards you had. . . oh gosh, it was so good! Oh yeah, the objective with attacking another's garden was stealing their flowers, because, if I recall correctly, when you had enough of the same type of flower they became sort of "protected" and no one could steal them anymore.

Such were the days.

Valentine's Head

Not much to say really, sculpting a human head exactly and meticulously is a giving but exhausting experience. Valentine's day is a superb reason to eat chocolate (as if one ever needs a reason for that)

I was also delighted to find stroopwafels the other day (thanks Tesco):

I really love them!

Oh yeah, I've completely forgotten to tell you about a strange thing. Exactly a week back I woke up with a mystery scratch on my nose:

I look exactly like that too.
Mousepad pictures really are the best thing.

I don't know how I got it. Nocturnal knifefight, self-destructive subconcious and radioactive kittens are all probable causes.