antigravity wax and red carpets

Up is the new down for wax drips in Finland

Yesterday was itsenäisyyspäivä (independance day) - and is understandably a special day in Finland.
This leaves me with two questions:

1. Why do 2.3 million Finns (out of 2.4 million TV households) celebrate by watching linnan julat the most boring television event imaginable? (Live coverage of a queue of 1800 overdressed people arriving for a party...)
2. What do they put in the celebratory sininen ja valkoinen candles? (See picture above). 

Any scientific/rational solutions for either would be appreciated...

Pumpkins and mitre joints

Well the new seasonal header image from the Linnänmäki Valotkarne kurpitsat photo seemed appropriate for the weekend. You won't be surprised to hear that Konna has bough a mini one to make a lantern from.

With Konna busy at work and me busy preparing for a new 'project' not much we can write about at the moment... except that as Konna is ironically doing project information in English (again) she keeps asking me what the English for such-and-such architectural term is, either by description ("you know one of those metal bars that presses the timber down" which turned out to be a compression rod/bolt) or by it's Finnish term - "what's Haapa and Terva Leppä - they are good for sauna's as they don't have much pihka - and I need to say make jiiri corners".* Usually after a bit of head scratching, leafing through dictionaries and quizzing wikipedia (suomeksi ja englanniksi) we work it out. Maybe I should start an English-Finnish Architectural Terminology Dictionary website/wiki...

*That's Aspen, Black Alder, Resin/Amber and Mitre joints, in case you were wondering.

Lost in Translation

-  I think I might try making some mince pies for Christmas for people to try. I'll have to make the mincemeat from scratch though.

- Ihana. Can you get all the ingredients here?

- Most of them are fairly easy; but I haven't seen candied peel or suet anywhere. What do you think?

- Mitä heleveti on suet!?

- It some sort of shredded fat. In the dictionary it translates as tali, if I ask in the shop do you think they'll have it?

- Ehkä... in a pet shop. That's what we call the ball of fat we put out for the birds!

- Perhaps we'll stick to joulutorttuja...

But is it as good as a mince pie? via by Robmcm

PS: Somehow I managed to scrape a 5 in my latest Finnish exam. 

Well actually I know how really: a) it was a fairly easy exam (compared to the course ); b) they lowered the pass mark for this grade as it has so many new grammar concepts in it. I would have got a 4 normally, which is still better than I expected. They are actually going to split it into two modules in the future (i.e. 8 weeks to cover instead of 4) this make sense as we had to cover - passiivi present & it's three past tenses, i-monikko one the plural forms (there are at least three I know of; this one applies to the 6 local cases, partitiivi and genitiivi, and is probably the most complicated thing to learn the rules for), the imperative, and more sentence types e.g. prediktiivi; all in only nine lessons. Actually maybe the sentence types are the hardest thing.  Although it was the passive I messed up on in the exam, so maybe... oh, never mind.

Anyway, this was the last part of the intensive basic grammar course I was doing, so next year I am looking for something more about actual spoken and written communication.  I'll probably will go back and do their advance course (levels 5-8) sometime though...