When I landed at Charleston’s airport the temperature was listed as 85 degrees.  However, in South Carolina, the air is saturated with moisture… so the heat feels heavy and hot, and this water-logged “stuff” presses against your body and, movement slows, like walking through a mass of invisible quicksand. Connie, my daughter-in-law, says that people develop gills after living here for a few years. I know she’s kidding, but my eyes dart to her jaw-line, for a quick check, (just in case).

She’s making boiled green peanuts for tomorrow’s barbeque. I never saw a “green” peanut before today so, I furtively tear back the covering of one in the Super Wal-Mart, only to discover, they are brown—not green as I expected. Hmm. We certainly don’t have things like this “up north.”

When we’re far away from home, It’s comforting to find the known in our strange surroundings. When I started my son’s computer, I knew without a doubt, he would have E-sword on it, as mine does; their bookshelves are filled with Christian books, as are mine, and many of the wall decorations are Religious--the familiar provides us with safety and assurance.

In Christ, I am strengthened by His promise that no matter the circumstance or how frequent the changes in my life, He is always there, as He was yesterday and will be tomorrow. He doesn’t have bad days or renege on His promises; we can count on Him, and for that, we can be certain.

Dear Lord, thank You for Your unchanging nature and Your love for us. You alone give us certainty in this sometimes chaotic world. Amen

It's really a nice Sunday today ,however I had to stay at home and fix a laptop. I wish I could go for fishing but who can trust Auckland wheather?

It's absolutely lovely outside today. I've just spent an hour in the garden and it's lovely! The birds were out, the sun was out, the little grape hyacinths are out. Lovely.

Something else that is lovely in our bookcase:

Happy Spring Time everyone!

I like extra-ordinary things. Snow falls into that category. This is why today was such a wonderful day, because even though I didn't get anything done, I had something different to look at.

Simple, eh?

Just as in Tallinn (image), a snow storm left Helsinki covered with more snow than we have had during all of this exceptionally mild winter. There has not been a winter to talk about as the temperature has never stayed below freezing point long enough so that any snow would have stayed. And now that the spring is supposed to be around the corner we get the lot of it during 24 hours.

In early February, which normally would have been the peak of the winter, the ground was bare, the temperature went up to + 10 °C and some early flowers made a premature attempt to blossom. As everybody thought that this would be one of those rare winters that never came, spring season preparations were being made as can be seen in the picture above. This late winter is particularly bad for the business of bars and pubs, thanks to anti smoking laws both in Estonia and Finland. Who would want to have a pint and a fag at an outdoor table under such weather conditions?

While kids and cross country skiing enthusiasts certainly say better late than not at all, I hope this misplaced winter would go away rather soon than late. Be it cold or warm, some sort of stability and predictability in weather conditions would be appreciated.

So today is Good/Awful Friday, Spring Equinox and to me - Almost Cheese day! I have not been eating cheese since Ash Wednesday - apart from mascarpone in Tiramisu twice. I'm pretty proud of myself, and I think I have broken my habitual continuous cheese eating. I do so miss cheese sprinkling on pizza though. I haven't had pizza since Ash Wednesday either!

We are going to spend Easter Weekend painting the walls of our new house. We already painted one wall in the kitchen and it looked so pretty! I hope it will look pretty still when we see it again today. A cousin is coming over to help us and my parents and sister&boyfriend are coming to help too, so fingers crossed that we get all the painting done this weekend. With the extra day on monday it should be okay.

And then it will be my last week doing my current job and our last week in this city! It's amazing how fast it has all gone by. I thought it would be slow and I would have plenty of time to get used to the idea of leaving, but as usual it has crept up on me.
On the one hand I'm so glad to be leaving (which is why I chose to leave in the first place), but there are so many things that I will miss too.

A stoic move of boxes
But the real me weeps
I am not a nomad
I was meant for keeps
-2002-

I have an intense hatred of moving house. Yet it will be the tenth time I'm going to do it now. Despite having done it so often, I can't seem to get used to it though. I get very attached to spaces and places and faces. Thankfully we'll be moving to a place that I know very well too, so I suppose that will help. I'm really not looking forward to all the physical hard work though, and the stress of planning everything and on top of that the emotional side of the saying goodbye to this house, this city, this job and to my colleagues.

Yuck.
The weather fits my mood.

To make the idea of 'winter approaching' even stronger, I went ice skating this weekend! Whooo! There is an ice skating rink - well - basically in our back yard. But I've been too lazy/otherwise occupied to visit it. Last sunday I did go though. And it was such fun! Well, apart from being used as a slalom flag by terribly fast skating six year olds for the first half hour. I felt very old and silly! But after a while I began to get the hang of it again, and it was so much fun! I can't believe I haven't visited it sooner. And I will definitely visit it again some time soon!

Last but not least, this time of year is approaching again:

http://www.nanowrimo.org

Yep, time once more to believe I can write 50,000 words in one month (only to find out I can't get past the 20,000 ). But of course I still very much think I'm going to make it this year! Go me!

It's starting November 1st, and ending the 30th.

I'm still looking for nano-buddies... Anyone care to join me in this global novel writing fest? It's a lot of fun, I promise!

It's autumn. Well and truly.
I always very clearly feel the change from summer to autumn. Much more clearly than any other seasonal change. I get more introspective and I suddenly feel like staying inside all day, curling up with hopelessly romantic novels (a.k.a. lezzy smut) and doing lots of knitting and needlework.

I made Mr. Squirrel (above), a cousin of Bob the Squirrel, a couple of years ago, and now he adorns our little bookshelf altar. (Which currently has an autumn theme, of course.)

And yesterday my patterns for a Waldorf felt autumn family, autumn house and autumn mouse house arrived in the mail!! I couldn't help getting started right away on creating Autumn Baby no. 1. Tadaaa:

Isn't it super cute?

The autumn family pattern consists of a mother, a father and two babies. I'm contemplating creating a two mother family instead though. Hee hee!

I also just found out I'm one of Hugo Ferdinand Popples' godmothers! What an honour! I'll have to think of an appropriate baptism gift for a hedgehog now! :D

I'm in a way more sunny mood today. Outside the sun may still be in hiding, but at least it's shining in my head today!

Ah bleh.

Mysterious, eh? :D

Apart from that, we've watched our new favourite show "DanceX" on BBC 1. We still don't understand at all what the show is about, but we love it. People dancing beautifully, people singing out of tune, people shouting at each other and lots of drama. Perfect saturday night entertainment.

Also,  I bought a book that only just came out called "Bend the Rules Sewing", which has lots of nice projects, and for a major change also has actual helpful advice on how to make your projects look nice(r). So I tried one of the projects and made this bib for my friend who recently gave birth to a baby daughter named Marit:

I'm all proud of myself. By far the least wonky item I've made using my sowing machine!

And look at what we saw out of our living room windows last evening:

A double rainbow!

Originally uploaded by derek on flickr.
This is just a quick post before I head off to bed. I got to watch this storm roll in and got a good portion of it on film. I really can not help but stand in awe of the raw power of God. This is it! No photoshop, no manipulation (the pink came from the low shutter speed), just pure power. What was really amazing was this was just an electric strom, the thunder rolled in about 30 minutes later. It is hard to imagine so much energy surging through the sky. Really, I can not even say anything else. Well, actually I can. The power just went out, which around here is not that uncommon, and so I can not even post this! Well for what it is worth I will post this blog as is tomorrow morning as soon as wake up and pretend it was posted last night. However, most of my family and friends, whom I try to inform about my days, will just have to wait another day seeing as they will most likely be asleep when I wake up... and I am up.

SUNSET, originally uploaded by naashna.

This is a beautiful post from my flickr.com friend naashna!!