MY SON, THE TATTOO ARTIST

It does not take much longer than a hair wash for your child to decorate himself throughly.
And when your own canvas is not enough anymore you will want to continue onto the next one - Dag thus gave me a foot tattoo that he got a little eager with and extended onto my leg.

I noticed the kid had managed to "tattoo" himself on the neck as well. Rather impressive, I'd say.

So much concentration.

So now I have a leg full of ninjas.

And Dag has them on his arms and chest as well. Plus in the face.
Time to pour up a bath I think.

OUT IN THE GREEN

The other night when I couldn't sleep I did something I haven't done in almost a year I think: I browsed a couple of the blogs I used to read. I've missed reading blogs.  And both of them were just the same as they've always been, with similar photos and happenings and themes. Which made me laugh a bit at the fact that it's just the same over here as well. So now I'll do yet another post about me having a day off and thus finally get to attend things in my garden. But you know what they say, few things are as important...

We had lunch with Dag on the porch. Fresh tomato-filled pasta with herbs from my garden.
In the background you can see my tomato plants, which I planted from slices earlier this year. They've grown so well!

Here are the herbs "in action". As I suppose their action is growing.
This year I didn't grown them myself though as I was too late, so I bought them ready and planted.
Dag loves to water plants. He also loves to go on excursions and "secret discovery expeditions", which I once used to get him along on a walk and that he now wants to go out on all the time. But it can be turned into making plain things interesting: watering the plants turned into one task we had to do on our secret mission. Well, the kid actually loves to water plants. But it works well with other tasks.

 Dag equipped me with weapons, in case we ran into any bad guys.
(Also note my haute floppy pink home-wear shorts. Or un-note them. Not very picture worthy in any more vivid angles.)

 The cats serve as panthers.

The first thing we saw on our investigating excursion was that the wild strawberries are ready! THey are THE absolute taste of summer.

Noticed it will be a good cherry-year! Wohoo!
Last year we did not get any berries; I am not even sure the trees bloomed then.

And then we ended our mission by harvesting the rhubarb. Pie and jam coming up!


And I'll be bringing some (= a lot) of that pie out with me to the archipelago; heading out there for those classic three days of summer, family, food and wine (in moderate doses only folks!) tomorrow. Happy midsummer!

TWENTIETH OF JUNE

Dag turned four (!!) and we had a big birthday party last Saturday.
...Of which I didn't take any photos but afterwards, as I had my hands full. (It feels like that pretty much all of the time nowadays, too busy to take out the camera to document things, or to even bring it along. Having that said, I do have a big bunch of pictures intended for posts that have never made it that far and most likely never will either...)


I did manage to take one during the day even though I missed the candle blowing with a few seconds!

But here's the little mister instead opening up his birthday present on the actual day (Monday; yesterday). He has a total ninja-phaze going on and got these soft ninja throwing stars that he was very exited to get.

Dag was born on the lightest and thus also longest day of the year; summer solstice, and quite suitable the name 'Dag' means "day"in all Scandinavian languages. We had decided on the name before already, but he sure came out on the right day!

Four years ago he was just a little bundle in my lap and now he is throwing ninja stars (and even doing so in English, because youtube and Lego Ninjago). Although that does feel like FOREVER ago already. The newborn phase; the first months, were so weird and kind of hard to remember by now.

(The blurry photo is from the hospital just moments after he was born, before he (and I) was washed up. I remember being totally beat, obviously, but still mumbling to Eddi to "change the ISO settings damn it they photos will be crap otherwise".)

But everything after the acute baby-phase feels like on long year only. When Dag turned two and we had pancakes? What, last summer, no? Two years ago!? NOW That's crazy.

On a sidenote, as I mentioned I have been going trough laptop hell (rather craptop or lapcrap. Not bitter at all.) and while sorting out some files I came across this folder of short texts I'd write every now and then back in the days, often late at night.
One was about staying out on the balcony of my building with a smoothie and a cigarette (I was always about balancing things up...) at 4am (I've always been a bad sleeper as well) looking at the light summer night sky. It said I had been listening to Röyksopp. There was a man on the opposite side of the street bending over the flower bed along the house wall. It was a nice flower bed with lots of orange flowers; I think they were poppies. The petals were spread out on the sidewalk underneath him like a orange carpet. First I thought he was about to pick some flowers, or collect petals, but then I saw he had a knife and was just smashing them, flower by flower. Why would he do that.ö I was thinking that I should yell at him to stop, but then someone came walking along the street and he put the knife in his pocket and walked away. A swallow flew by and I went inside. Eleven years ago, but I remember that strange incident well; it was dated June 20, 2005.  That year it was also a Monday, like yesterday.

MONDAY IS MY SUNDAY

Monday, wohoo!

During the weekend I went over to Turku with Tinker Bell to teach our posing & posture class.
Kiki snapped this unofficial photo of the class getting ready just before everyone started posing for the actual photo.

We also hosted a pin-up fleamarket sale in our studio. There has never been so many people in there at once before (sadly for us, ehrm...). There was in fact so much fuzz that I didn't have the time to snap any picture of all the dolled up sellers and their nice stuff, neither did I get any stuff myself (that I wouldn't really need anyway so yeye!). Well, apart from a gold lurex overall. Which of course is very essential, not sure how I managed without one until now.

After that I went to film day1 of a music video. This was on stage at the theatre museum and the next location and mood will be something very different. Back to that later!
Photo by Minna Lehtinen @minnaminnanen

But today I've spent my day how most people spend their Sundays. We stayed in bed long with Dag and just took it easy. Because it's Monday and that's my day.

A day when I  can have a long late breakfast and catch up with the weekend's newspapers for example. And water all my plants.

Everybody hates Mondays. Or, not everybody, but you know- Mondays are Mondays and the thought of those are usually followed with a sigh.
Not for me however - that is most often the only day that is a day off for me; as a lot of my work occurs in the weekends. It's been like that pretty much my whole entire adult life actually, the good monday-thing: when I worked in the harbour Monday was off the weekend after the nightshift, and when we did the full 7-day morning shift week Monday was the last day before the glorious six days off. Nowadays it's usually the day I can calm down after the weekend (and wash some laundry. Plus organise my papers and bills and such - although I usually spend Mondays to think about that and won't manage to start doing it until the day after.) Or well, when you run your own business you seldom have an actual day off; I do update social media sites and stalk my email as much as usual, but I really seldom have anything scheduled and that is a bliss.

Finally, after almost a week of waiting, I  got to do a good set of pilates myself, but that does not really make for a good self-taken picture and there's already one here of feet... But more still about feet here anyways - I finally also got to open up and try out the wild-mint foot bath salt my friend and student Melody from Superfiilis gave me. She has her own little well-being centre in town.
Even though it got more splashy than calm; Dag discovered footbaths, joined and stuck his feet in and splashed around like whoah.

Then we played a Lego-game for a while, where you are supposed to build what a card tells you to. I clearly will never be scouted as a builder for Legoland but my son still stands a fair chance. (That's an old-school carriage in the picture btw. And not built by me. I had to make a toothbrush.)

Then the two of us head in to town for our workweek, me the studio and Dag for his day club/play school. And now it's Tuesday already i.e, super late and I am still awake, as usual.

2030

It just struck me the other day that we are now closer to the year 2020 than we are to 2010. Which was like just a little while ago. That also makes us closer to the year 2030 than 2000. Which is freaky.

Altough the yeear 2000 does feel like a very long time ago, when one thinks back on everything that's been in between.

(Illustrating this post is a photo from 1999 - further away than 2030 that is - that has an actual analog light leak in it. No filters here no!)

But the same goes for when you talk about years and you think "10 years ago" would be somewhere around 1996 but that's twenty years ago already. If I really start thinking about it 1996 was indeed ages ago, I was just a kid. And everyday life was very different.  From what you did to how you did it and what you had to go along (no lattes back then no!) But 2006, that was ten years ago already? No way! THAT feels very scary. But, as we talked about this with a friend the other day we started going trough things we did in '06 and some everyday life details, realising that quite many things still have changed in a decade -I didn't get my first computer before 2005 for example; I read my emails at school back then and certainly not ten times per day like now -even though it feels like it went by with the blink of an eye.

I also realised my age is now closer to 50 than 20. Which is both totally something of an of course it is or whatever , and kind of terrifying at the same time. We were talking about age yesterday with Dag; I told him the cats are now ten years old, and then, mainly just stating it to myself, I said that that makes them "pretty old already". Dag then asked "Oh, so they will die soon?" to which I replied that not quite yet, although it will eventually happen one day. To which Dag replies, with his calmest and wisest voice, the one I use when I explain things to him:
"You know mom, one day each of us shall die."
(Then he listed pretty much every person and animal he knows that will all die one day, just to prove his point.) I still remember one night when I was about five, or max. six years old, lying in bed, thinking about how much I loved Christmas. Then I started calculating that my parents were 30 years old and that meant there would only be about fifty more Christmases to spend before they would DIE. And I felt so so sad when thinking about it and started crying; 50 Christmases felt like so little and Christmas was so awesome and it would all happen in no time. My mom came into the room asking what was going on. I didn't tell her why I cried, and I have remembered it like she got a little annoyed at my late-night-whining. I was really hurt that she did not (read my mind, apparently, and) appreciate me crying over her mortality.

It is actually funny how you can remember some thoughts and insights from your childhood, but you still cannot recall how it actually felt, or how you reasoned like that, how the exact thoughts were at that time. The brain can store so much but it can't store, how would one say it, the mind itself(?) as that constantly changes as life goes by. It's not the way you can save and choose to run an older version of your  operating system...  Memories of how one thought are more like headlines-  my parents would die one day, only fifty Christmases left - or a synposis. Well not only thoughs, but whole periods of times feel like a quick synposis when thinking back on them. I wish there'd be some way to record how the mind functioned and how it really felt at a certain time. And not only for childhood, also for the teenage years, (yikes). That  might help with the teenager here at home (during which discussions I always feel so very old). Or to serve as good and painful torture some ten, twenty years later. For oneself, that is. "Did I think like that?" Well, a regular recorder would do for the torturing part, just to get to hear teenage-oneself later in life. Teenage sarcasm is certainly not that refined yet and the lines are less quick that the youngster thinks, I have noticed. "Omg did I actually say that". Sometimes wish my parents would have recorded my shit. Or well, not really. But if it would've been common practice you know. I did keep a diary that I haven't ever really opened afterwards, but one thing I remember telling my self in my teenage years was the following: Remember, when you are fourteen you realise everything. You think so much about it all and you think about everything.
And it worked; I remember thinking that, but alas, I have no idea how my mind actually worked back then and what all those things, apart from the usual teenage stuff and time and the universe and so, I actually was thinking about were. (I was always one to stay up late at night back then as well, thinking about Things.)

When time and age and how fast things go gets to me (summer is on it's way but it will be Christmas  and winter and darkness here again in no time - see, little five-year-old-me was right- and then it will be not only 2030 but 2050 and I will still have the same things on my to-do-list, you know) I just try to think about the fact that time really does not exist at all, everything just is in a constant state of RIGHT NOW and that is all there is.
Which to be honest, does not exactly help me to start sleeping earlier at night either...