Sun & Moon

Raise Your Hand by Steve Cropper, Eddie Floyd and Al Bell. I really do like James Jamerson's beautiful, intuitive and visionary bass lines on Motown. Still, I've always clearly been more into Stax soul. I love Dunn's earthy, sturdy bass work. This Southern soul/gospel groove is great fun to play. It has a special feel to it, as Stax songs in general. (This song could easily have been on my 27 song list for the summer, since my teacher is a soul music lover, big time. But I somehow came back to Eddie Floyd after many years a few days ago and decided to learn how to play this tune. The whole album Knock on Wood is full of classics. And the Stax catalogue is wide, so I will have a great time digging deeper into Duck's grooves. )

Thank you, Rhyta. This is heaven on Earth. Yesterday I watched a few gulls fly after a big common buzzard high in the sky. It was almost an air fight. My dad has a pair of good quality binoculars (mine are in the city), and I could see the chase very clearly.

Fried & strongly seasoned chicken with yasmine rice, topped with fresh tomatoes, a spoonful of teriyaki sauce and a handful of almonds and pecan nuts. I cooked by myself on the porch.

I'm sad to hear of the loss and illnesses of your loved ones. Take care of yourself, these must have been tough times for you. I spend as much time with my parents as I can without ending up in a burnout again. We have a distance of around 400 kilometers, and with a work in two shifts and with only the option to travel to my parents by using public transportation is not very easy for me. I see my father taking shorter steps year after year and my mother losing bits of her concentration. They've both stayed in a pretty healthy condition, but having reached their early eighties comes with changes that make me feel sad and confused. We never know how much time we have left, but this is a new chapter in life. I still don't know how to relate to it.

Right now I'm sitting on the front porch of our summer house in the countryside. The porch is 10 meters wide and is aligned with the river which runs another 10 meters from the house. A summer day could not be any more beautiful than this. A warm wind feels soft and refreshing on my skin, and there's no cloud in the sky. I hear the constant, soothing sound of the nearby rapid and many kinds of birds singing. Common house martins have at least one nest under the eaves, and probably one more under construction. Common sandpipers, ducks, curlews, European pied flycatchers, chatfinches, common buzzards, Northern lapwings, swans, cranes and many owls can be found here among other species. There's a tiny wetland area a few hundred meters from the summer house, and it's a perfect place for small hawks to catch something to eat. Butterflies and bumblebees easily find nectar in the flowers and the blossoming trees. I spent an hour playing my Geddy Lee bass on the porch while surrounded with all this. This verdant river valley that is my childhood home is a place where I feel the most connected with the land and the water, and with myself.

Congratulations! Sounds great!

Cannonball Adderley: Mercy Mercy Mercy. One of the 27 new songs that I'm happy to learn to play during the summer. My bass teacher has a very good taste in music, these are all great summer jams. Come August and we'll see how many of these I've nailed.

Happy Birthday, Jamie!

It's easy to see that you have interest in history. You summarized the events of those wars nicely. The amount of casualties of the Lapland War in comparison with the Continuation War was dramatically smaller but the duration of the war was significantly shorter as well. The German troops burned down or otherwise demolished pretty much every building, bridge and railroad in most of the vast Lapland area, leaving great masses homeless. It took more than a decade to rebuild everything - except the broken, war-torn minds of the locals and the soldiers. It starts to be the generation born in the 2010s that no longer is haunted by the memories and reflections of the three consecutive wars. What you wrote about your father, and the story of my grandfather both show the coincidental nature of life. If my granddad hadn't been seriously wounded on the 12th July 1941 in the very beginning of the Continuation War he might have been killed a few days or months later in the battles. His brother, a very clever young man, died in the war. The majority of the soldiers were reservists. The families were not the same when the war ended. They never are, no matter when or where the war takes place. By the way, I got the Sisu book you recommended. Seems like an easy read with a comfortable layout.

How did you like the latest Wick? I've not seen it yet.

Carrots. They are of the sweeter variety.

This positive science news "Researchers discover a potential cause of Parkinson's disease": https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-05-potential-parkinson-disease.html https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2023.1181315/full

Aaaand the Scudetto goes to... It's been a bit of a ruckus in Naples. I hope not so many more people will be joining the company of Maradona during the celebration.

Haribo Stjerne Mix sour. They should be sour but to my taste, they're not sour enough.

I'll give the book a try as it arrives. Maybe I'll learn something new, or get a new perspective. In the movie the power of sisu will be demonstrated in it's most extreme. Not quite an accurate depiction of how the German troops were expelled from Lapland, the north of Finland. The director was inspired by the first Rambo movies and didn't forget the tongue-in-cheek humour. The music is composed by Tuomas Wäinölä who's a helluva guitar player himself but also composes a lot of other stuff. (As a possibly triggering sidenote, being a granddaughter of a Lapland war veteran I never heard any stories about the war. Both of my grandpas fought in WWII, and what happened was widely not talked about in post-war Finland. The veterans could only share their stories with each other. My other grandpa was seriously injured by a grenade in the stomach and was literally rescued from a pile of dead. A guy from the neighboring village fighting in the same group happened to notice that my grandpa was still alive. Without that guy I wouldn't be writing this, as my father was born a few years after the war.)

That's awesome! I love birds, and as BigMontanaSKY wrote, it is such a joy to watch them build nests. A few weeks ago my spose and I saw two pigeons making a home in a nearby linden tree as we were having a breakfast. The first one collected the sticks and flied them to the building site, the other carefully placed them in the nest. They ended up abandoning the nest very soon, however. I wonder if a squirrel took the eggs, or there might have been other disturbing things in the surroundings.

She looks beautiful. Thank you for sharing a link that shows the picture of the statue. It's always interesting to see how people are connected to the traditions.

Thanks for the review. It's so cool that your father still has a spark for reading about new skills and areas of life. I haven't read books about hygge, lykke, ikigai or omoiyari, for example, and I thought the sisu book would be of the same type. Hard to tell, but I found the book in the collection of the library group I work in. My reservation should arrive within a few days. Although printed books are not very accessible for me I'm curious to take a look at it. Speaking of sisu, I haven't seen the new Finnish old school action movie of the same name yet. It seems like the right time to export sisu, since the box office in the U.S. has been pretty good.

A cup of hot peppermint tea with a big teaspoon of local honey. A few slices of toasted oatmeal bread, also topped with honey. This will warm me up on this freezing day.

As a Finn, I'd like to know how to find "courage, wellness, and happiness through the power of sisu". Seriously speaking, sisu (determination, grit) can be both a well of extreme stubbornness leading to desperate attempts in making it in the society, and a serenity that leads to individual, unconventional decisions and well-being. How was the book, textwise?

How was she like?

I hope it will be some peace-loving persons that will create a feeling of safety in the neighbourhood for their part.

Sorry for a late response. A part of getting prepared for colonoscopy for me was to try think the whole thing as a privilege (as it really is). Somewhere else, say, in the countryside of Afghanistan, I probably wouldn't be examined. I've found any positive thoughts and especially practicing visualization helpful in advance. And during the preparation and the examination self-soothing words play a great role.

A large bowl of Gabalong tea. I love the green, fresh, sweet taste and scent of it. I often brew the leaves two or three times to enjoy the changing taste. For my breakfast I also have a cup of fat-free cottage cheese and a big slice of traditional thin, unleavened oat bread with Emmentaler.

Lately, I've listened to some audio books by Jenny Colgan again in Swedish. Swedish has become The Language of Colgan books for me for some reason. I've felt like reading some entertaining feel-good stuff recently. The Quiet American has remained untouched in my audio book app almost for months. The story seems not to make any progress, and I'm feeling a little frustrated. I may give it a try some day, anyhow.