FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: SUNDAY LUXURY

Filling this one up.
I took a walk in the woods today, and walks this time of the year - although this winter is very much warmer than normally - always makes me chilly and calls for a warm bath.
(Will also add that here I am carefully balancing and cropping out husband's mini-motorcycle workshop that has appeared on the bathroom floor, with it's tires resting here for their second week already...)

Meanwhile, filling this up too.
The rest of the family is in the north skiing so might as well do a little bubbly by myself.

In with this golden Lush bath-thingie!

On with some opera in the background (with more volume than otherwise, as, alas, I am indeed the only one in the house for now) and then in in the bath with me!
Not coming up until I have reached full-on raisin mode.

FOUR THINGS THIS SUNDAY

In between of being away working on Friday and Saturday, and before starting rather hectic May, this Sunday was a day off, letting the to-do list be for a little while.

From snow to flowers in a couple of weeks! Apart from coltsfoot the scillas are always the first to bloom.

The cows are also out now. A sure spring sign!

Dag's bike is out as well. Practice-time! We haven't really been biking a lot out here as everything is so far away and there is not really much to bike to over here. This summer however I intend to help him ride properly and fix up my old bike as well (someone stole the saddle the year before we moved away from Tapiola and I haven't ridden it since) so we can bike to the little lake.

Then we had a popcorn lunch (because that is awesome!) and made Bear Grylls eat various yucky things and piss on a scarf to wear on his head. (To keep cool from the heating sun. You learn new things every day! )

It was really fun to watch / do You vs. Wild with Dag though! But the things I have learned, or come to realise from watching various shows with Grylls are:
1) I would so die in no-time and
2) not sure I ever want to get more than a hundred meters away from any main road, ever.
(Ok, I do live more than 10km from a main road, but the Ingå wilderness I can survive.)

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: SUNDAY EVENING

Sunday evening moments -

Corrected a final seam to a jumpsuit I sew myself last night and intend to wear to the very last filming of Vintage Valtakunta season 2 tomorrow.

I also sew Dag a plush seal. It was the first plush toy I ever made. Dag has this new phase where ninjas have had to move over for seals! It's drawing seals x100 and facts and pics and videos about seals all the time.  He had even made me adorable instructions on how to make hime the seal.

Now it's hair colour time - roots and ends! I always mix a lot of different hair colours to maintain my hue, but the colour I've used for my roots for the past year and a half is Shcwarzkopf Live in the 'cool rose' shade.

And I intend to enjoy some tea, peanut butter-banana sandwhices and reading about space while the chemicals do their thing.

How was your first November Sunday?

520 SUNDAYS

Considering how rather unstructured my day-to-day life's routines are, as in not-really-there and lets-see-what-happens-next-week-in-life, and supposing it is not the first impression I tend to give, I am actually rather un-enthusiastic about change.  It's not that I am reluctant to change, just lazy about it. Mainly small everyday bits, perhaps as a balance to even out the lack of certain routines and certanties. When the big thing is messy and loose around the edges, keep the smaller things intact.
Like tending to stick to one and the same lipstick or nepalese dish or handbag once noticed that it works. (I'd probably always do the same nails too if I would not force myself to get a bit creative there.) You know - if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

And thus I have been adding to the same playlist for ten years. Ten years folks!
That is some 520 and Sundays! It is weird how time flies, isn't it.

But that is because it is the best playlist for soft and mellow, daydream-filled Sundays there is:
Soft Sunday.
With some 11 hours of music I usually tend to listen only to parts of it; often the latest ones that I felt like adding now, or a section that reminds me of a summer a few years ago for example. Sometimes I think about taking some song from that list away, but then I don't because they all had a reason to be added back when they were. And I just can't make a new similar list, nope, that would be cheating.

Here's the latest addition to the list, a video that I really liked back when it came out, but then forgot about, and that fit the mood and Sunday-test today:

BLUE MONDAY

Lets end the week with some creative music playing. Or making.

Orkestra Obsolete play Blue Monday using 1930s instruments  (BBC Arts)

In Swedish there is actually a separate verb for playing and making music on an instrument, more in the sence of performing it or playing together: musicera, as can you say 'musisoida' in Finnish. One can refer to that as musicerande (kind of like something that someone or some people were occupied with, or "the music that they were making" as in the present particle of the word. < I had to look that term up, as it is after all almost 20 years since I last had grammar, erhm). But there does not seem to be an English equivalent for such a word... Briefly and totally non-academically based on how other words and endings are used (for example a demonstration of something - to demonstrate), I would make the word musicate up, but it already exists on the internet (not in Merriam Webster though) and means something else: to be absored in music. But well, why not:
Let's end this week with some creative musication shall we?

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW - IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE

Four things right-right now.

The books above my head.

A cat in the after noon sunshine.

Reading the Egytptian Book of the Dead (but now I got distracted with a documentary on Marie Antoinette's coiffures.)

I want Mikael Hadreas pants.

As a side note; this was the first time I made a post in one sitting without moving anything else than my arms to take photos and grab the laptop. So now we know that!

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: SUNDAY

In a time when I kind of dream I would catch the flu so I could lay in bed and just watch Netflix  with a clean consciousness (that wouldn't be able to happen even if it did happen) a weekend off is a truly amazing thing.  Being in a rather constant mode of constantly needing to perform and produce things, even anticipated events in the free time start feeling like something that you have to accomplish rather than get to experience and thus becomes harder to look forward to. They turn into another task to manage yourself trough. This weekend however was totally off-duty-time and on Friday I got into a real relaxation-mode as I attended the first night of the Superwood-festival (more on that later). And then I got to spend the rest of the weekend at home! Eddi is off on a three-week work trip to Yazd, the stepsons away for the autumn holidays so it's just been me and Dag (and some to do's and work which I have exceptionally well been able to neglect) enjoying the late autumn sunshine.

 The first frosty nights have arrived and left traces that won't melt away until the afternoon.

 Picking rowanberries, the last ones available, to dry for a tea infusion.

Enjoying  a chocolate-lingonberry cake that we baked with Dag!

And working on a new dance partner of mine for our up-coming Halloween show. Ergonomically on the kitchen floor; I've used up all other workspaces and surfaces available in the house.

And come evening, I might allow myself some non-guyilty Netflix time as well!

ALL THOSE SOFT SUNDAYS

I have this one Spotify list for soft Sunday music; for those days when you just want to - and maybe even have the chance to - take it easy, tune down and listen to mellow music. But it just struck me that I have been adding songs to that list for as long as eight years! That is quite a long time already. It's more than six hours of the last eight years and looking trough the list it serves as a reminder of times that have been. I mostly listen to just the latest fraction of it, which often equals songs I've added during the past year, but sometimes let the whole thing play in the background and be reminded of how things once were and how they felt.

There's The Specials that we'd listen to in the summer of '08 when we hit the town with Ina. And Air's Playground Love that's always been one of my favourite songs and that I remember playing on repeat to when having the lone shift at Vuosaari harbour back in the winter of '09, sitting in the small little gate box by the sea, and for that time being very heartbroken. It was one Saturday morning in particular that I remember, an early, eerie foggy one when everything was white outside, snow and ice and an thick air, I was sad to begin with and read fractions on Facebook that in the end cleared out to be the story about how a friend of mine had found her boyfriend who had hung himself the night before. Whenever I hear that song now I think of that white lonely morning at the docks wen everything felt weird. And there's Chet Baker from when I used to take some long city evening walks in light pastel shaded May evenings later the same year thinking about THINGS and what to do with them. Lou Armstrong that I listened to when my grandfather had just died and Wandering Star that my cousin sang at his funeral, and Mother and Alphabet Song that I played when I was expecting Dag and Shades of Cool the summer that I misscarried plus a lot from late nights when I've been driving my car along road 51 from the city to the farm. I know it sounds like a mainly a lot of sad or blue memories but that's just when I write it out; I guess those are the things that are the easiest to pick out and spot. There's a lot of good one from sunny days and cosy rainy breakfasts too.

I don't add to it that often, just a handfull of songs per year whenever I am reminded of or stumble across something that suits my mood for the moment. Let's see what song will be next, and what it will make me think of a year or two from now...
(Soft Sunday on Spotify)

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: INDEPENDENCE SUNDAY

It was the Finnish Independence Day today.  One custom is to light white-and-blue (the colour of the Finnsih flag) candles in the window, but I just had a huge white one, that got to make company with the cactuses on my window sill.

We are back in town now for the following week. We have not been here properly for ages. I had to search for matches like crazy - as I no longer smoke (never was a heavy smoker,  but did have an occasional one every now and then, sometimes more frequently sometimes less) and as the one that does carry a light all the time is now at the other side of the world I was scratching my head wondering if it really was so that we had nothing to light stuff with in the house. But then I went trought my old handbags and purses stuffed in my closet (that all contained the following: bobby pins, emergency tampons and 5 cent coins, the ones you never really use) and ta-da, in the bottom one was a box with matches.

We baked an apple cake with Dag on things I could pull together out of the cupboards (the stores are closed on Holidays like this).

As we have indeed not been living here in the city apartment for quite a while, just a night here and there, the whole place has looked like shit for the past six months. The flat is still what I've considered my real home so far, so it feels good to get to clean it up and spend some time here other than just dropping in to get something or just to sleep. Making it cosy and enjoying having everything in one place for a while. And cooking food in my pastel pink kitchen. Eddi lives at the farm all the time as the older boys lives with us now constantly instead of every second week -their mother moved out there a year ago and the boys switched schools to the countryside. A couple of months later she moved back to Helsinki and as you can't really yo-yo kids from one school to another they remained with us. We stay in town with Dag every now and then as I have my studio here and work late, and as Dag already had a spot in a playschool in the city a few days of the week. (That's a lot of driving back-and-forth with a lot of ikea bags on the back seat. ) But now Dag and I will be in town for the whole week while Eddi is away on a work trip to Australia!  (The older boys will stay with their grandparents who also live on a house in the farm; I have a lot of work in the evenings so we won't be going out there. I even brought the cats back with us to town.)

So as it was rainy and really stormy outside we cosed up and stayed in baking. Dag really loves to cook. He was very anxious for the cake to be ready in the oven.

So while waiting he set the table and made us a fancy Independence Day dinner. It had broccoli, porridge with strawberry jam, carrots, egg and a "garlic he had fried in a special way so it was not so strong in taste".

And then finally  the cake was ready (yum) and we had it while we watching the Independence Day reception on TV. (That's really the only independence day how-to-thing I managed to do, it's pretty much the same every year. Or well, I did get a fancy mini-family dinner  ;)

SOFT SUNDAY TUNES

There hasn't been any Soft Sunday music* here for quite some time. Probably because there has not been that much of softness for the Sundays lately, but work -so on this one; rehearsing Spectac-O-Rama. But here's some music nonetheless:
So many beards...bears...whatever, John Grant is awesome! And he had a hedgehog cake!
*)I've been adding to that same list for six-seven years already!  And I still do, and still return to play it, because it reminds me of what I used to do and what things were like and what I though about at the time I added the songs. Like a music diary.

SUNDAY BAKING: QUICK VEGAN BANANA CHOCOLATE CAKE

I run one of those households that often (or well, always) ends up with a banana or two turned so ripe they're too yucky to eat. But they can happily go in a cake!

So today we decided to bake one with Dag; a quick banana based chocolate cake that is - for being a cake, -not too unhealhty. Kids can easily participate here as things like getting to mash banana is fun and easy to do, and with a big enough bowl not necessarily even that messy.

It's a cake easily altered, for example, I add some more spices to this during the colder season.

You will need:
3 ripe banans
around 50g of dried dates + a hint of water
1dl coconut sugar (or brown sugar)
1-1,5 dl cocoa
3 dl spelt flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 dl oil  - I use coconut oil
(+ a dash of cinnamon)

Now, to make the easy things hard, or at least a bit more confusing for you: I have made this with four small bananas and with just two bananas and both versions work as well. The more banans the less dates you need, so when I had four banana-nanas I used just five dates. Also adjut the amount of cocoa powder to your own taste; 1,5 dl of cocoa makes the  rather dark and strong so you can go with less if that suits you better. I have also made this without the soda and it turned out fine. I you don't care about it being vegan or not you will get a nice cake by using butter instead of oil too (and you can of course toss in an egg for more fluffyness but then again that is already another cake). For more spices try some ginger and clover and perhaps a little cardamom.

First,  pre-heat the oven to 200c. Chop the dates and put them in a pan with a hint of water so it covers the dates, and heat up. Let it boil for a little while so you get a sticky paste. Add a little water if needed so the dates don't burn.

Mash the bananas with a fork or a masher. Add the sugar and cocoa, then the date-mass, then flour and finally the oil (in a runny state). Put in a greased cake mold (or fold it with baking paper).

I don't think the batter on this one is very good raw (which is a good thing, because that means more cake later) but Dag was eager to lick the bowl.

Bake for 35-50 minutes in 200C, depending on your oven and the size of your mold. Try it with a stick and take out to cool.

You can eat this warm, as it is or with ice cream. I prefer it after a day or two in the fridge.
Pimp it up with salted peanuts (no that's not crazy!), jam or with a bunch of cherries and some chocolate coconut cream  frosting!

SHADES OF COOL FOR THIS SUMMER SUNDAY

Most Finnish people will still be out of reach of -or not interested in -the internet right now, post drunk and hungover from Midsummer, but for everyone else in the world, here is some Soft Sunday music.

No one can make living in a valium haze, getting shitfaced on daiquiris by 2p.m. or haunting your old lover's life with the bittersweet memories of you look as good as Lana Del Rey. I don't like all of her songs, but the ones I like I love. This is such a sad and beautiful video I've watched over and over; I've always loved Lana's appearance and also how she makes her videos look just like she sounds.

FOUR THINGS RIGHT NOW: SUNDAY

 Having an autumn filled with performances and workshops around town and from city to city it is such a relief to have a day off that really is that; off everything. Dag and I are cosy in the countryhouse kitchen listening to the radio, with the nasty weather outside.

The cats are enjoying their breakfast. Or brunch. Or snack. A little hard to say what they consider it.

We had a late breakfast; porridge with homemade strawberry jam and banana. Although the kids have some several times a week, I haven't had porridge myself in ages.

We're going to go out a bit and then I intend to take it easy and go trough lots of interior magazines that I havenät had the time to browse trough. Ah, Sunday!

SLOWER, BUT BETTER

We haven't had some soft Sunday music in a while over here!
(Although the actual list itself over at Spotify gets and update every now and then)

Soft Sunday Song of today is what was referred to as the "Brokeback Mountain version of Jolene". What makes this different from any other cover of the song is the fact that this is not a cover at all, just Dolly's record played at a slower speed. And it sounds pretty awesome.

SUNDAY / (MY FIRST) MOTHER'S DAY

SUNDAY SNAPSHOT

Sunday. Dag sleeping, a bread in the oven, the whole internet in front of me, a cup of tea and whatever's on the radio.

SUNDAY / MOSTLY IN THE KITCHEN

Today when I woke up it was all white outside! Very pretty yes, but it's still only October! Way too cold too soon, brrr!

After a short walk amongst the white I spent most of my day in the kitchen.

The light in there was quite nice today.

It's surprising how strong the late autumn light can sometimes be, when it happens to come around. 

(And hey, only 8 weeks and we start going towards longer, lighter days again!)

I made a set of fig fudge to snack and lunch on for the week to come.

And put some mint from the garden I've dried into jars. Mint tea sessions ahead, oh yeah.

I put Dag out on the kitchen cold porch to sleep, after he'd been trying out different moods.

I've been cleaning up and organizing in there (the porch). The old postcards I've had in my kitchens before will hang there soon. But let's check back on that space some other time.

Back to the kitchen! I tried out a raw pumpkin pie, using pretty much this recipe from Jolie. Halloween!

And pumpkin-tomato soup for dinner with the rest of the pumkin. The soup got a nice full taste by adding uncooked bellpepper, onions and garlic plus a few dried apricots, fresh herbs and sun dried tomatoes just before mashing it all together. With lots of garlic, to keep the Halloween vampires away. Haha. (I often add some sundried tomatoes, a few apricots -or dates- or olives as spices in soups and sauces.)

I served the soup with popped aramanth, hemp seeds and chipotle tabasco. 

Possible leftovers works well as a pasta sauce.

The pumpkin pie was ment to be eaten with (a raw food) licorice sauce but I didn't have all that was needed for that s made mine of coconut cream, anis, some of that mint, agave and a hint of chardamom. Turned out rather nice togehter with a cup of black coffee!

And little monsieur shoutey kept quiet for a while and sported his smurf / Snowwhite and the seven dwarfs look.