Helping out

A strange thing I have noticed here in Finland is that sometimes when you are asked to help you are out of some peculiar reason meant to ask when it is convenient for the help you have promised to give. Like for instance when a friend needed help with help with babysitting a toddler with chicken-pox in the early feverish stage just to run a couple of errands on her own like the pharmacists and so on. She never managed to ask me when it was convenient for me to baby-sit, or whether I could baby-sit at a certain time she wanted to go out. In the end she got angry with me as I did not understand that I was expected to have an opinion when she wanted my favour so in the end she told me off by phone in not a very nice way.

How was I supposed to know what she wanted without her either telling or asking me? It’s like when moving your friends don’t arrive to help you with carrying your furniture until the next day when you’re packed gone and unpacked in the new place.

The weather was supposed to be raining all day with intermittent rain showers and as thus the day was completely wrongly planned as most part of this lovely sunny day has been spent indoors cooking after a short shopping trip down to the market when the rain was pouring down earlier this morning.

After a lot of peeling of carrots, beetroots and onions a great deal of chopping were made on the peeled carrots, beetroots, onions and cabbage for the annual bortsch soup. It has now been simmering on the stove in a large saucepan for hours to obtain the right taste. Bortsch soup has one advantage before many other soups, it gets just better for every time you heat it up and most part of it goes in the freezer to be savoured on cold winter nights together with some soured cream. I also managed to get a medium sized pumpkin as pumpkins tend to come in an oversized format, too big for me to handle on my own. So some pumpkin has also been simmering on heat for the traditional pumpkin pie and a very nice pumpkin pickle I learned to know here in Finland and have become very fond of.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a sunny day so the plan is to go mushroom picking but as the weather turned out to be this nice today I wonder if the weather Gods will be gracious enough to let us go out in the woods without getting wet all through.