Winter flowers, no mice

Finally, in mid-January there’s so much snow that it looks and feels like winter in Southern Finland. The whole week has been below minus 10 degrees, and the sea is almost frozen, with some open spots under the bridges.

We made one hasty visit on Sunday to check that everything is OK in the house. Piping and heating was normal, and no mice in the cupboards (thanks to a massive amount of ‘hiiribaari’, little boxes with poison inside which makes the mouse so thirsty that it quickly runs back outside to die). 

JD organized his old vinyl records (and listened, too), whereas I went out to check the flowers and bushes and the beach.

The little snow that covered the bushes and earth was like cotton. There were animal tracks, mainly of hare, deer and fox, all over the garden. I would recognize lynx tracks, but unfortunately there weren’t any. Kemiö island has a wide population of lynx, and our neighbor saw once a lynx walking on the ice. We managed to saw the tracks next day. 

This time we didn’t cook. After all the cooking, eating, drinking, chocolate and other goodies during the Christmas time, we are both, JD and myself, on a diet. JD keeps the calories below 1000 and I keep the proteins high and carbon hydrates low, and, of course zero alcohol. Combined with 3 times gym and twice aqua jogging a week, I really expect some results soon. However, Sunday is the exception, we allow ourselves a cinnamon roll with cafe latte.