Wordless Wednesday

One of the views from our apartment: Merikoskik, Oulu, Finland


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Best Before Date

You know how any food product we buy has a best before date. Well I must admit to being one of those people who doesn't really pay much attention to it. Unless it's milk. I'm always checking that date. My Hubs on the other hand does check the dates on food. Which means he is always throwing stuff out. He looks at me and tells me "It's gone off" to which I always reply in my sweetest voice "Where did it go?". Just drives him crazy...I love to drive him crazy.

So this weekend Hubs decides that he can't find anything in our pantry. To him it was a disorganized mess, to me it was marginally organized chaos. I knew the general area of where something should be and usually found what I was looking for no problem. So Hubs decided to clean out the pantry and organize it.

He brought in the big garage trashcan and got to work. He organized, sorted and every now and then asked me a question. We decided that we could probably give all the baby food away since we don't use it anymore. We (notice how I count my comments from the recliner as help)tossed out two big bags of old food, stale chips and whatever else he saw.

In the process he found my most favorite chocolate bar ever. It's called a Geisha and I can only get it when someone brings it back from Finland for me. It had gotten lost somewhere in the land of macaroni and cheese. So for me, the entire process was now worth it.

The only problem was the best before date was past. Oh what to do, what to do. Well I decided to go ahead and keep it. It is chocolate after all and it's my most favorite chocolate bar ever and no one is going to Finland anytime soon to bring me back some more. So it got put back into the now half empty and very organized pantry where it wouldn't be lost again.

But it didn't stay there, instead my Geisha bar started to call my name, begging me to come and open it and see if it had gone white yet. Because once it had then even I would have tossed it out. So I opened it. And it wasn't all white looking. I still had hope. Would the hazelnut filling still be good? I decided to try it and see. And just as fast I took a bite, I spit it out. The hazelnut filling was old. So I had no choice but to face the fact that my last Geisha bar was most definitely past it prime. I'm so sad, my surprise find was not worth eating and even more humbling than that is that now I must tell Hubs that yes he is right, I really should be more aware of the best before date.

I can hear him laughing now.

Photo Hunters

This weeks theme is classic.

The first thing that came to my mind was our friend Janne who came to the US from Finland and wanted to buy himself an old Cadillac. He would be able to restore this classic car and then take it back to Finland where he would be able to enter it in the American Classic Cars Competition over there. He found one while he was here and he spent many hours restoring his "classic baby". Here is an old Buick that belonged to another friend of ours.



During our time we lived there we went to a couple of car shows. For my husband and I, it was just cool to see the old cars. But for the Finns that we saw at the car shows, it was more than just cool. They were really impressed by them. This is because it's harder for them to get them over there anymore due to regulations required of a classic car. Here are a couple of pictures of the "classic" cars we saw while we were living in Finland.





We even saw some classic foreign model cars (these were of more interest to my husband and I then the American ones).



We also saw some classic tractors (who knew people actually cared enough about tractors to put them in a car show).


And some classic steam engines.


So there you have it, many examples of classic machinery. Hope you liked it.

For other views on this week's theme visit TNCHICK.com or PhotoHunt

Raspberry Days

Raspberries are one of my favorite berries. I love the way they taste and even the little seedy things they have don't bother me much. They aren't cheap to buy at the store so I don't buy them as often as I would a bunch of grapes but I do buy them regularly. This afternoon as I was washing the new bunch of berries we had just bought my oldest son Z. came in and popped some in his mouth. He just went "ummm, I love these". So I asked him if he remembered the first time he ate raspberries. Naturally he couldn't so I told him.

We were living overseas in Finland and didn't have a car. We relied on walking, public transportation and our bikes for getting from one place to another. Z. was only two at the time so he had a chair on the back of my bike that he rode in. Since it was summer at the time I was taking Z. out to the beach to play in the sand.

It was about a three mile ride through forested areas on a bike path. I kept noticing these bushes that people would be at with buckets, but never stopped to see what they were picking until that day. So that afternoon on the way home we finally stopped to see what was growing. It was raspberries and they were everywhere. So we started to pick some. My son just ate as many as he could straight from the bushes and so did I. They were delicious. We picked a few and put them into a bucket and rode on home. Z. just held the bucket of berries in his hands while I rode and ate some more. That was the first of many trips we took to go out raspberry picking.

To this day it is one of my favorite memories I have of being in Finland. Things just moved at a slower pace for us in Finland and we actually took the time to enjoy things. If we would have had a car I never would have noticed the bushes and found the raspberries. So as I eat my raspberries today, I am also remembering the raspberries I ate before which just makes them taste that much better.