Moving makes my head hurt. I mean, moving from one house to another, packing and unpacking, hauling all the stuff around. With all the “paper work” – moving insurance, electricity, etc. agreements to the new address – and making the deposit payments, planning the actual moving, getting a truck or van of sorts, sorting out schedules… I get so stressed out I feel like bursting. And if that's not enough, this time we (i.e. my husband) need to redo the kitchen in the new house before moving in.

It's two weeks to the weekend when we're supposed to be moving to the new house. The girls came on Friday to stay with us again (it goes fifty-fifty, every other week with us, every other with their other parents). Next time they come here after this week, it's time to be hauling stuff to the new home. No other activities, no procrastinating, full blown work for everybody.

Before that, this house we're moving out of obviously needs to be packed up. The amount of stuff we have! Just the thought of it overwhelms me and makes me just want to bury my head in the sand like an ostrich. This weekend has been (well, it's only Sunday morning now, so I have a day of packing still ahead of me) dedicated to packing up the kids' rooms. Two of them, anyway.

Yesterday I worked my ass off for six hours strainght, only taking a break to take the dogs out for a fifteen minute walk and having a rye sandwich. I got probably 3/4 of the two youngest girls' rooms done. They did their fair share going through their stuff with me, hauling trash out, sorting through their clothes etc. A whole lot of garbage (worn out too small clothes, broken toys, this and thats etc.) and several bags to be taken to the second hand stores.

I made the executive decision, that all the toys like Littlest Pet Shops, Bratz stuff and so on, will be put away. They don't play with them anymore, it just takes space in their rooms. I put it all in a box and I'll try to sell them after moving, now I don't have the energy to do that. Legos, GeoMags and board games are staying, or rather coming with us to the new home.

Oldest daughter has been away all weekend, out at the stables yesterday, overnighting at a friend's house and today she's being the personal assistant of her friend in a riding competition. Her room is probably the easiest one to pack in the whole house – she's the only one who doesn't hoard stuff and puts away anything she doesn't need instead of just storing it somewhere – and she is fully capable of doing the whole thing by herself in probably less than two hours.

Next weekend, when the kids are gone, we'll start on everything else in the house. Probably I'll do something about my stuff upstairs already today. It seems like an endless job, like we'll never be able to make. I feel like that every time I move, and it's been way too many times during the past 10 years. I know it always happens – there's really no other choice, so one way or the other, things are moved from one place to the other when it's time. But still. Desperation creeps in.

Just need to do a task at a time. I. Hate. Moving.

The reward in the end will be a more affordable house with a bit more privacy, a big yard, a patch of forest right at the edge of the yard, a couple apple trees, a wood stove sauna, enough space for all of us if not as much as here in the old home. This one is a newish house, with modern interiors and all the commodities. Our new home is an old house from the fifties, practically in its original state. It's got something to it, though. Some sort of homeliness and cozyness. It's got character. But it needs (quite) a bit of renovating here and there, the kitchen being the first thing on our list.

Oh well, back to the packing.

 

It was just another Tuesday. Our new bright light lamp woke me up at 7:13, my phone alarm went off two minutes later like every work day. I let the bright light slowly get me started, wake up my brain. At 7:38 I finally dragged myself out of bed and to the kitchen to fix some cappucinos and dog breakfast while husband took the dogs out for their morning pee.

The morning air was damp. Not cold, but with a cool breeze. I have already switched to autumn wear; my new California style boots and favorite leather jacket. I was feeling stylish with my little skirt and boots and jacket. Off to the office. It was the second and final day of a training.

After a day of teaching, I was walking out of the office and towards the bus station when my phone rang. Husband was calling. He was taking the oldest girl to the stables and between the middle one being at dance class and youngest bicycling somehere with her friend, the dogs were alone and screaming and in need of a walk. I concluded that I'd be home in 45 minutes, the dogs will just need to hold until I get there.

I heard two sets of paws running to the door as I fumbled with my keys to unlock it. Meggie was jumping on two feet, Timmy was going around in circles. I shooed the dogs away, telling them to calm down (with Timmy, it actually works, but with Meggie, yeah right, LMAO!), took off my boots and jacket and pantyhose, trying to protect it from getting runs from the dogs' toenails.

And it started raining. I settled down on the sofa with the dogs, waiting for the rain to cease. It didn't. I was thinking of the girls out in the rain, when the thunder struck. Husband came back home, daughter called that she and her friend were stranded at a beach a few kilometers from home, sitting in a little changing booth, waiting for the thunder and rain to stop.

I told them to lock their bikes and hold on. I was coming to pick them up. In the end it was husband who did, while I took the dogs out in a light drizzle, and then started cooking dinner for the girls and the dogs. Husaband came home with a girl whose pants were totally soaked. She was barefoot, holding the pants in one hand and drenched shoes in the other. I ordered her to take a hot shower.

Having finished cooking, I hopped in the car and set off to pick up the oldest girl from the stables. Car radio was blasting an old(ish) Foo Fighters album that took me to times and places from years ago. “Why'd you have to go and let it die” took me to the traffic lights on my way home from work, the moment when I heard the song for the very first time. “What if I say I'm not like the others” had me traveling beyond Lahti towards Lehmonkärki.

At the point of my exit from the motorway to Klaukkala, the album had advanced to “Long road to ruin”. I was driving on, remembering how I had been listening to the same song on my way to work so many years ago. That is, driving that same road to the other direction, towards the motorway.

I picked up a happy girl from the stables. No thunder during their riding class (whew), and it had been a good one. My little girl (haha, she's taller than me 😉 ) had been riding a horse as tall as me again. I tell you, it's scary business for a mom! But she loves riding, and whenever I see her on a horse, I can see her connection with the animal.

Today I worked at home. Took a break at lunch time, long enough to take the dogs out with husband. It was almost sunny after a morning of constant rain. Youngest daughter came home after school with her friend and husband took them to the beach to get their bicycles. Sure enough it started to rain again; the girls rode home a bit later, when the sun was shining for a while.

Right around that time I decided to call it a a day and take the dogs out again. I left in sunshine, with my sunglasses and all. Halfway to our walk it started to drizzle again. The sun was still casting shadows, but rain was falling. I didn't have my rain coat, so I was totally wet by the time we got home, since the rain rapidly became harder.

I'd been home for maybe five minutes when the first lightning and thunder cracked around us, once again. Rain fell down hard, the thunder was pretty much right above us. Hail started hitting our yard, ice balls with a diameter of 1cm or so. The youngest daughter went prancing our in the rain, collecting ice balls from our deck. She even had a a little ice ball fight with husband 😀

And then it was over. It was still (or again) drizzling a bit when we went out for the last walk of the day, a couple hours later. Probably will be, for most of the night. The weather forecast is predicting thunder for days to come. I don't remember another thunder season like this in my life!

 

 

It's August already, but the summer still goes on. The weather forecast for next week shows slight cooling, but 22-24 degrees C is still uncharacteriscally warm for mid-August. Even more so is this near 30C we have been experiencing for weeks already. I don't complain! Au contraire! I wouldn't mind summer all year long.

Be as it may, summer is slowly but surely trotting towards its end. Next week the rains will be setting in, as usual in August. Even the skies cry when schools start 😉 This weekend has still been wonderfully sunny and warm. Today, I guess, we'll just be taking it easy at home, but yesterday we went for a little outing by the sea in Porkkalanniemi.

When I was young, we – my ex and me – used to go there a lot with our friends. The scenery is beautiful, it's fun to hop along the rocks, there's fire places to cook sausages in. We even used to take the girls there sometimes, once having our cat with us when it was very small (it was only 8 months old at the time of the divorce). My ex knows the little roads and ways to the nice places way better than I do. Probably that is exactly why we haven't ventured out there before yesterday. I've been unsure of where to go there.

Last week one of my friends at work started talking about Porkkala to me, telling me about their outing by the sea the previous evening. I got the spark to go there, try to find the way to the spot I wanted to find. So yesterday we packed some lunch with us and drove down to Porkkalanniemi. Me, husband, the dogs and the two youngest girls. Our teen claimed that she needed to chill at home to prepare her mind for the new school year. So be it then 😉

We drove down the windy road, husband saying that if he had a manual transmission Maserati, that was the road he'd take it to test the corner hugging capabilities. Automatic transmission is not exactly the best thing on a road like that. I take his word for it, since I've only driven that road (or anything similar) myself with a stick shift. I've only had my automatic little car for two years; drove a manual until then.

We found our way to the general area of the trails and parks, the very tip of the peninsula. We parked the car in the spot where I vaguely remembered it should be parked to get where I wanted to get – there are many sites there, some more and some less suitable for dogs – and we started walking down the dirt road. I checked the info map which was not informative at all and we continues until we came to bridge with a sign that the public area ends.

By that time husband had actually retrieved the car already to parking place closer to that area, but we were disappointed when we realized it was not the place where we wanted to be. I tried to google a bit with my cell, and finally came to a conclusion, that we should just pick any trail, but they all start from the vicinity of our original parking spot!

At that point husband recalled the sign he had read out loud, somewhere there near that parking area. “Porkkalanniemi 13km”. I had dismissed this because of the insane 13km, but finally my brain connected the dots and I excalaimed: “That is the trail exactly!” “13 kilometers!” screamed the girls from the backseat. “Nope, 1 point 3 kilometers! 13 km is already way out to the sea. That sign must have a point between the numbers.”

Sure enough it did. Reading it from a distance you can't see it, but up closer, there it is. 1.3km. We started down the trail, letting our dogs loose. Huge mistake! Leave it to the little rascal to find other people down the trail and start yapping and barking and raising hell, the other one following suit. Meggie is a bit poor at listening in those situations, but when Timmy started back to us, Meggie followed him, and we snapped the leashes back on.

We walked that 1.3km down to a cooking area and past it to the seafront. We camped there on the rocks, tossing our backpack, sandals, extra shirts etc. in a corner on the shore, and let the dogs loose again. Huge mistake, again! Timmy went to beg some attention from this party and that, sitting in other peoples' laps and whatnot. Not that anybody seemed to mind too badly; he's a friendly dog. Meggie started off to the unknown, Timmy soon in tow. When husband finally caught up with the two, they were leashed again.

Tied up to a rock, our two rascals lay down to chill, had some water and snacks. Timmy effectively napped there, but Meggie was always the alret guard dog. Our blondie girl went for a swim, sliding the slipperi rock to the sea. Husband soon joined her, while I sat there next to the dogs reading my (e)book and the almost-teen napped in the sun like Timmy.

After we had our lunch, I went to explore the surroundings a bit and found the steep hills on the other side of the tip. I regeretted leaving my camera behind, so I retraced my steps to retrieve it. That's when our blondie-girl decided to come explore with me, and with Meggie being eager to join too, off we went, me blondie and Megs (very much leashed 😉 ). We traveled the rocks bare foot until we came to the edge of a forest and decided it was time to head back.

It was already almost five in the evening, the sun was still hot, but we knew it would be over and hour before we were back home again, and we still needed to prepare dinner once we got home. Blondie went for one last dip and then we packed our stuff and started back to the car.

Right there by the cooking area, the trail sort of vanished. We were too much to the right, I realized, and going a bit to the left I did indeed find a trail. “A” being of essence here. For after some time, we realized it was not the same trail we had walked before on our way to the seaside. Since it seemed to lead us to the right direction, we decided to just keep following that one.

There was a point, where none of us new exactly where we were and whether the trail had already taken us too far, beyond the parking area. I dug out my phone and checked my gps; still sort of in the right area, but soon the path should turn down the hill. It did too, and finally intersected with the original trail we'd traveled. And there was the road and the parking area, right around the bend.

Tired from the day in the nature and the hot sun, we scrambled into the car, both dogs accompanying the girls on the backseat since there was room there, what with the teen staying at home. It was a good day out by the sea 🙂 Saturdays are the best days ❤