Fall is letting me know that winter is right around the corner. Although I am not looking forward to the lower temperatures as my show title, I Don’t Like Cold Weather, suggests, the colors sure are beautiful.

I took a trip to Tampere with a guy from Solf nicknamed Masse. He plans to take a trip to London in order to visit his sister. Instead of buying a cheap ticket on Ryan Air he is going by moped. We took the trip to look for a motor scooter for him so he could embark on his adventure. He did buy a scooter and a tent. He plans to leave this weekend for London.

I enjoyed the road trip since I do not own a car in Finland. We stopped buy various tourist sites, a national park and had coffee in the tower in Tampere. On the way back three elk crossed the road. Elk are huge.

Midsummer is a special time in Finland and the other northern countries. Approaching the solstice the sun barely sets and there are many festivals and parties. In Finland most people gather in summer cottages in the country. I went to two separate summer cottages for midsummer celebrations. At both places we ate dinner, sang songs, drank, went in the sauna and then jumped into the frigid sea. I am a sucker for summertime so I had a blast.

I did not take this picture on the solstice. I took it on the 19th and the sun is still clearly visible at eleven at night. It never gets dark here although the sun does set for a bit. It is a surreal atmosphere for me since I have not experienced it before.

I joined an English speaking tour of some of the buildings at the Stundars Museum where I am a resident artist at Ateljé Stundars. There are many buildings on the Stundars property but we only visited a few. We saw an old farm house, a shop and a herbal healer’s house. The rain made the tour move a bit quicker. I look forward to exploring Stundars more when it opens for the summer season later this month.

I visited the Söderfjärden meteor crater just outside the village of Solf. The meteor struck nearly 520 million years ago. The crater is well preserved and in the 1930s farmers dug canals by hand to drain the crater. Now it is farmland and a sanctuary for migrating cranes. The visitor center is a transported building like many at the Stundars Museum and is powered completely by solar and wind power.

This week has been cold and I had hoped that this afternoon would be a bit warmer but it remained chilly. It is strange weather because it is sunny for most of the day. Coming from the dry desert of New Mexico the wet wind here seems to cut right through my clothes.

I rode my bicycle into Vaasa for the first time today. it is about 14-15 km into town. There is a grocery store here in the village of Solf, but the prices and selection are a bit better there. Since I cannot read Swedish or Finnish shopping is an adventure. Yesterday I thought I bought butter only to discover cream cheese when I returned home. Today I looked up butter in Swedish before I went shopping.

After forcing myself to get up this morning in order combat jet lag, I started to unpack the one piece of luggage that arrived. I set up my sewing machine and rearranged the studio. There is plenty of space for my needs. I went into town with Peter Båsk to check at the airport for my missing bag, buy a battery for new inflatable suits, purchase a change of clothes and to receive my stipend. I had lunch with peter and his son at the Swedish University in Vaasa.

Later in the evening I received an invitation from Peter to a traditional smoke sauna. He said that electric saunas were not real. I accepted the invitation and met him and some of the residents at Stundars at 7:00. A Finnish smoke sauna takes about six hours to heat up a cubic meter of stone. There is no smoke stack so the smoke need time to escape through a small port in the back of the sauna before it can be used. Due to the smoke everything inside is covered in soot. It is a tradition in Finland to use a bundle of birch branches to lash oneself while in the sauna. The smell and the sensation of the leaves enhance the sauna experience as well as help to further open the pores of your skin. Bathers tend to enter and exit multiple times. Having enough time to relax is important. A bit of beer in between baths helps.

I enjoyed the sauna very much. After coming home I needed to take another shower to take away the smell of smoke and ash. The sauna house is more than one hundred and fifty years old. It was built by hand and moved to the Stundars grounds.

Mimi and I had the bright idea of heading to the west to have a Valentine’s Day picnic at Bonito Lake. Caught up in the moment we forgot that Bonito Lake is at a higher elevation than Roswell and therefore much colder. After arriving signs that banned picnics, cold snow, and blistery winds greeted us. Although we had packed a nice lunch and were hungry, we decided to bail.

We headed for the greener pastures of BLM land closer to Roswell. There we enjoyed a tasty picnic full of treats and goodies. We learned our lesson that even though it may seem hot in the desert sun, Valentine’s Day is still in February.