Stormy weather

Today a storm has been making trees fall over power lines causing power cuts in Southern Finland as well as much of the fast ferry traffic between the Finnish capital Helsinki and the Estonian capital Tallinn have been cancelled.

The distance between the two capitals is just a three hours voyage by ordinary boat, and as far as I know their traffic has not been disrupted. The fast ferries reduce the trip into an hour and a half and many Estonians work in Helsinki commuting by boat as well as many Finns do business in the southern neighbouring capital over the day.

Guess this is some change with the crossing of the Finnish Gulf from earlier decades when hardly anyone could get across the Gulf as Estonia was a part of the Soviet Union. Even I have had the opportunity to visit Estonia a couple of times and a new trip is in the planning in the near future.

I am not a great fan of watching winter sports but as it happens I did see the bad fall of the American skier Macartney’s in Hahnenkamm slope in Kitzbühel earlier today. Must have been awful for the family and relatives to see something like that on TV and as there have been several fatal accidents in this particular slope over the decades it seems especially this slope is quite a dangerous one. Guess it does not do you any good with having a helmet is it comes off, nor do the nets surrounding the slopes do much when falling inside the track instead of been thrust off it.

I am glad the offspring is not into alpine skiing, at least not serious enough for entering any competitions.

Water and power

Finally the inhabitants of the Finnish town Nokia can begin to make use of their tap water after sewage had leaked into the local water supply one week ago.

The municipal tap water quality is beginning to improve, and it can now be used once for drinking and cooking if it is for at least five minutes. The tap water is now safe to be used for in washing machines and dish washers and to shower in. hand washing is still recommended to be carried out in boiled water. On Monday there will be an update on water quality and usage recommendations from authorities and the current recommendations apply for the almost entire town Nokia except fro some small parts.

I have hard to imagine how to cope for more than a week without any tap water, being as preoccupied in my own thoughts as I sometimes tend to be. I wonder how many times I would have washed my hands without thinking about it, made some coffee in the percolator, washed some dishes or run a washing machine.

It is the same with electricity, when you have none you can only come to think of a thing that needs it, like watching TV, making some coffee, washing something or using some other kitchen appliance. What would the modern man do if cut off from both clean, running water and electricity at the same time?

Read a book in candle light maybe…as working with photography digitally has its' downsides when no power supply at hand.

Recycling is not easy

To be able to follow up your electricity consumption, a dozen of households in the capital area have been able to get the meter readings real time by their home computers on the net and as the pilot project try out has turned out so well this is soon going to be reality for all Finnish homes in order to save electricity.

I am looking forward to be able to see in real time what turning off some home appliance will do to the electricity consumption, maybe this would spur even the offspring into doing something about their lights being turned on even when nobody’s in the room.

A lot of TV programs today in Finland are about the issues of how to become more environmentally conscientious. We are taught how to choose the clean form of electricity, how to shop making the proper choices, what produce are environmentally good, what produce have been manufactured in ways thinking of the environment and we are also made believe that recycling is good. Well it would be good if there were enough capacity to recycle all the household waste in an easy way sorting all your waste instead of just chucking it all in the dustbin, which seems to be the general way of treating your garbage.

Sorting your own metal scraps, paper, cardboard, glass, plastics and so fort is hard at present as there are no separate containers in each building, you always have to take the car to do the sorting somewhere centrally, like by the local supermarket.

How hard can it be to have more containers available for the households to do the sorting ourselves at every house?

At present there normally is just is the ordinary bin, one for composting materials, another for recycling of paper and a third one for cardboards. All glass bottles and jars, old batteries have to be taken else where and the hardly exist any recycling of plastic materials or metal from households today. And the left over medicines are to be taken to the pharmacists for extinction.

I am quite confident that in due time people will range their own waste, if provided with the proper facilities in for recycling and the municipalities can stop complaining about not having enough resources. Collecting the garbage several times per week, or maybe even keeping it in separate containers on the trucks could do the trick. As it is now the paper and the household garbage is collected on separate trucks.

I guess it might be time for all of us to begin to act in environmentally good ways on all areas of our life.

A no gain situation

Nokia is the world’s 5^th most valuable brand. It is trademarked and almost everybody in the world probably knows that Nokia is a manufacturer of mobile phones, but how many know that the company is Finnish and that t is the name of a city?

Nokia is a little city right next to Finland’s second biggest city, Tampere in south-western Finland, and the company Nokia began once by manufacturing Wellington boots and car tyres. The city centre of Nokia still today smells of rubber from the still running tyre factory and of course of the fumes from the paper mill. Traditionally the reason for situation of old industries has been waterpower in the Nordic countries and in Nokia it was the same, the rapids supplied for the power and later on for the electricity for the whole city.

Beggars in the streets have not been as common a sight here in Finland as in other parts of Europe until in recent years.

Of course every part of town has their own originals and the usual street musicians play their music in their accustomed places, some more foreign street musicians occupy their spots during the summer and they get their fare share of pennies but to get back to these beggars again.

The reason why the street begging never will be a success here in Finland is quite straight forward, those foreigners, as they are never Finnish these beggars, they obviously are outlandish according to their apparent way to dress, probably from somewhere from eastern Europe I would guess. According to most Finns I have spoken to the Finns think that the beggars only came, they had to have money to get here, so they must have the means to get out of here.

Today when walking down town for the weekend’s groceries as we normally do, dear husband of mine and me, there was this woman who was standing on her knees praying like for her absolution for her sins in a Catholic Church, begging for money in the street. Quite theatrical and a new way to do it I have not previously seen in this country before.

There are the ordinary winos begging for money for food of course, the kind that gets mad at you when you offer to buy them food as they really wanted the money to get some more booze to pour down their throats but that’s about it.

Anyway, there are some things that work in some countries, and just don’t work in other countries and as a fact it is not always about getting any money the begging is done for, just out of a habit sometimes. I happened to know a pair of women that have been living in a cardboardbox in the same streetcorner for twenty years now, and they refuse to budge. They have been replaced by the police for countless times but they always turn up a in the same street corner where they probably will stay until they die, even the police nowadays has resigned and the only trouble they get is when some fresh policemen want to make their mark on the territory. And for the record, for them it a way of living in the street, they do not even want anything else. They have been there to stay for two decades already, everybody knows they are there, and they will stay. And they get no money form the passers-by as they know they have always been there.

It is a no gain situation.

Thunderstorms

The weather has been quite windy during the night and many locations were cut off their electricity supplies during the early morning hours. Over 30 men were injured by a sudden thunderstorm and lightning hit on two different locations 15 kms apart on Thursday night. The men were out on a military exercise out in the woods in southern eastern Finland. Most of the men were not seriously injured and about 10 of them had to be hospitalized with only three being seriously injured. There were about 300 thunderbolts hitting the ground in the area and the storm is considered to be “modest” in its’ force and people being struck by lightning only rarely leads to death.

Worst row this year was fought between off-spring and mummy dearest yesterday. When two as stubborn people as the two of us are refusing to confess their mistakes then just war breaks out and there is no logic in anything that happens after that. Luckily dear spouse was not out fishing when we were struck with thunder and lightning and could negotiate the disagreement into a more pleasant tone of voice and a while later we were business as usual. I even was hugged by the off-spring in the end, which is a good sign.

Why do people you love most annoy you more than anyone else? Some days are just fine and we all get along but then there are days that sometimes stretch over weeks when there is no one home.

Someone once said then adolescents are not at home in their minds and only after they have gone through their adolescence they turn into interesting people. Well, guess this is the “no-one-at-home” faze and I hope someone soon will be home. I do not enjoy loosing my temper in the way I just did earlier.

The wrong time

Summer savings time was introduced in 1981 in Finland to “save electricity”; well the cows still had to be milked when they feel it is their time so I wonder where it was useful, if at all, to change the time. The only thing I have noticed about changing the clocks is that it takes about a week for your body to adjust to the new earlier time when changing the clock to an hour earlier, and adjusting into having changed the time one hour later is much easier, even though it is more depressing to suddenly find out that it is darker than it used to.

I just found out the Finnish winter time is not the correct time either. When it is noon, 12 am here in the summer the correct time is about 13.30 am, so the Finns have been thinking about changing their time to the CET that is the European Central Time, as it would be nearer the “real” Finnish time. So then the rest of Europe is on the wrong time too!

Anyway, Madonna has been around now for decades and still is going strong. Now she is once again featuring in an ad for H&M, and this time even has designed some items for them. And a lot of the world famous artists have been touring in little Finland lately. This summer is going to be full again with the usual, annual various festivals and also big rock concerts. Aerosmith is coming again; Iron Maiden just was here, as well as Uriah Heep, (who even remembers them anymore?) George Michael comes this summer and so does Black Sabbath and David Bowie were here a couple of years ago. And not too many years ago no big artist had ever been touring in Finland before, the nearest was Sweden or Denmark.

Wonder why? And has Madonna been here yet?

Safe disposal

The newly elected government has now agreed upon their Ministers to the cabinet and the president will officially name them on Thursday.

The prime minister will be the same as before as to my surprise he got elected by the parliament in a voting. I thought that was decided in the public elections and not by the parliament. And imagine, this is the most feminine government ever here in Finland, as there has never been as many female ministers in office before 42%, and there were also created two new offices for ministers!

Anyway, two of the biggest electricity suppliers are planning to build one more power plant each, one to run completely on biological fuel and the other one on nuclear power. The nuclear reactor would be the 6th of its kind here in this country. Well, guess this is a good step towards the end of carbon oxide using oil into non-polluting energy sources as planned to cutback with the carbon oxide emissions.

But how environmentally friendly is this, as there is only a temporary and no final solution of what to do with the waste, just "temporary storage" in the meantime?

Well, the capital area today got its’ millionth inhabitant, a little baby girl was born as first in the hospital, so Now Helsinki can call itself a metropolitan area. Maybe she will live to see what way they come up with to safely and once for all dispose of the nuclear waste one day in the future…

What a waste

The electricity companies want to build more reservoirs up in northern Finland to regulate the water flow in some rivers.

The reason is that today at high rising waters and flooding occurring every spring at snow melting time, a third of the water is just let through without passing the power generators at the plants. That means that a third of the optimal electricity goes to a waste.

The building of reservoirs would also be good from the greenhouse effect’s point of view being a renewable, non-polluting energy source. But what would it do with the environment from the fish’s point of view? The salmons would no longer be able to swim to their origins somewhere up the rivers to breed and we would have no more salmon to eat, nor would the bears have any to eat either for that matter.

Another thing that worries me, if foreign companies begin to mine uranium in Finland they can according to law, dispose of their used nuclear waste in Finland. To my surprise uranium seems to be counted as a non-polluting energy source, but that must be only seen from the carbon oxide point of view. Things always seem to be left out of their real context, just taking in concern what is convenient to know and not all the facts, guess this is what statistics is all about.

There is big money in uranium, coal, gas and oil for the suppliers of them, no wonder they are lobbying for the use of the to car manufacturers for example and work against development and innovations on alternative energy sources.

I just heard that they have found a planet 20 light years distance away outside our own solar system where it seems like probable that life could exist. The planet is believed to be very similar to our own planet earth, and that kind of feels good, maybe there is a chance for the human life to continue even after this planet has been exploited to the limits for our selfish purposes.

Scary advertising

According to statistics 50% of the Finns die of heart related illnesses, and to make people more aware of the fact some quite disturbing advertising has been shown on the TV. Four people getting strapped in for a ride in an amusement park, but only two of them get their safety equipment strapped, and the other two just disappear during the ride. Well guess that is in a way true but quite awful to show it anyway.

And a Finnish electricity company has made an ad about global warming, showing a fictional weather forecast from the future with tornados and the disappearance of the Åland archipelago as a result of flooding, asking what your electricity company does do to minimize their contribution to it. And here we are now living the coldest winter after the longest and warmest summer I have experienced in Finland so far.

Saving the environment

We actually just had a discussion about what we in our family can do to do our bit for saving the environment.
As the experts point out, global warming is a fact, the question now is how we can minimize its’ effects.

So we sat down all of us, and guess what, teenagers are not that concerned about doing anything for them to have an earth to live on, the two things they thought of to save on is the one thing they will not do less of!

There was a unanimous no to shorter showers than half an hour to save hot-water.

Okay was to turn off electric appliances from their stand-by power, or to take the bus instead of making mum drive them and buy more local produce or Finnish products to reduce wasted energy on transports. Another thing was to switch off electricity that was not needed, turning off lights and even to use more candle light, as if making candles would not need any heating at all.

And to do my bit I avoided to washing and heating up the sauna during the cold, even though we also have picked up the custom to have a sauna on Saturdays as most Finns.

If everybody did small things they would all add up to a bigger saving of power and electricity, but hey, how many more apart from us even thinks about it? I mean even here in Finland, which is one of the highest educated countries in the world and also doing quite well economically and also considered to be environmentally counscious?

Anyway, now with the temperatures rising to only about -10 degrees instead of the -30 degrees last week, at last I now can get back to my normal household chores with good consciousness, as they tended to pile up during last week.

Fire-freezes

It is right now it is colder than normal after a warmer than usual summer and autumn. This might be the winter with the coldest weather so far as long as I have been living here in Finland!

In the old days when the most of the houses were wooden most homes were lost in raging fires in very cold below zero in February, normally the coldest time of the year hence the term “tulipalopakkaset” which would mean fire-freezes in English. The reason for the bigger incidence of fires when it is very cold is that the cold dries up all material and fire was easier caught if not handled careful.

As it happens I quite recently read a book by one of Finland’s most famous writers, Aleksis Kivi, “Seven brothers”. (A must if you want to get to know more about what makes Finns Finns, by the way.)

Anyway, in the book the boys had trouble getting back to the village from the way back woods barefeet in the cold and deep snow when their house was caught on fire during the fire-freezes. They were quite a bundle of boys, these seven brothers in many ways.

Today with the temperatures creeping well below zero, I am free of doing any washing just to save some electricity, at last one good reason for not doing any housework!

Electricity shortage during the winter?

Last winter there was a shortage of electricity in Finland and the country is preparing by getting reserve Power-plants into stand-by mode to be better prepared than last winter.

There is now even talks about “fining” the industry and ordinary people if they have to use their washing-machines or dishwashers at cold-peaks by having to pay for extra expensive electricity. A kind of a fine when there is a shortage.

Well, how are you supposed to know when it is going to be extra cold if making your Christmas turkey in the oven for hours and hours?

One thing is for sure, the price of electricity has been increasing lately.

Guess we’ll just go bankrupt this year! Or maybe it won't be until next year?