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Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Kesäloma = summer holiday

Ahhh.... at last the long awaited kesäloma!
This year's loma is a bit unusual compared to previous years. This will be explained in the next entry. We only got to have about eight days at our cottage. I think it is the shortest we have ever stayed a summer at the cottage since purchasing it in 1998. Well it isn't going anywhere. We have some good news concerning the property. We were finally granted the permission to split the property from that of the person from whom we purchased it. This has only taken nine years to accomplish. Our property is less than the minimum that the municipality requires. So with this permission we will be able to have it split with the boundries drawn on an official map and most importantly we will finally be able to rename it from that of Luhtala to that of Kujala! We will probably have to wait until next summer to do this but at least we know we can.

We didn't do much this year because of the short time and some rainy weather from time to time. We managed to do some real spring cleaning inside the cottage. It needed it pretty bad. I have never seen the place so clean! We visited with the neighbors who are distant relatives of mine but family all the sdame to me. I think they are the closest I have to MY own family here in Finland. I am very thankful for this as I always feel I am returning home when I visit the cottage.

I spent some of my time helping the relatives with their computers. It is something I enjoy doing. I taught their son how to back-up DVD's to the hard drive or burning them. All legit of course. They had some problems with getting the new laptop connected to the wireless network. I started out working on it when another friend of theirs came along to work on it. For a while we both worked on it. You know the saying, "two heads are better than one". We had to call it quits around Midnight as the son and mother had to get to sleep as they both had to work the next morning. By the time I got over their the following morning the other guy had it pretty much up and running. So that was good.

We went to visit a friend who lives in Jepua. We finally got to see her little son and had a tour of the fine, old house and all the improvements that had been made to it. The last time we had visited that house was in 1992. It was a nice day trip. We had last tanked up the car in Espoo the day we left on the 13th. We tanked up in Jepua on the 18th with 48 liters. The car holds 60 liters. We had gone 543 km on that tank. We are quite happy with that. The Volvo would have used much more. We even had the air conditioning on most of the trip.

Our last full day at the cottage we had invited the relatives over for sauna and food to honor the 100th anniversary of my great-grandfather leaving Finland (see earlier entry) for the USA on 17 May 1907. The sauna was ever so great. I think it has become quite popular with everyone. We are very proud of it ourselves.
So now we are back home in Espoo. We did some gardening work but that is about it besides the ton of laundry that needed to be washed. Got it all washed but then it began to rain and rain. I think I will have to take the sheets in and hang them in the sauna to finish drying. No, the sauna isn't turned on ;-)

I still have two weeks of holiday left so I will have some things to do as well as taking care of the boys and Tiina.

1 comment:

Jemayá said...

Nice to see what the cottage looks liks - and quite funny to suddenly see us here :). It was nice to see you all after all these years!! Pls pop in more often :).