If the pics are taking up too much bandwidth, I can modify them to links only. Enjoy.
EDIT: Turned last two pics to links, since they are big enough to fuck up the page formatting even at high resolutions. Sorry about the oversight.
EDIT 2: Snipped the pics of my gf, because she asked.
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So, to begin with, let's see how many people perish from cute overload:
That there is Topi, our first cat, surveying his domain. He's a brown bicolor ragdoll.
This one is Pinkku. The regal looks are merely a sham, he's the court jester in this household.
"Hand over the shrimp or forget about mixing that drink!"
Topi examining the toy collection
"Let me go! And get this stupid thing off my neck!" Pinkku managed to climb into a paper bag on the kitchen table, push his head through one of the handles and then got startled at something. He fell to the floor, bag and all, and took off quick enough to tear the handle off, leaving it stuck around his neck.
"How do I get down from here?!"
No respect from the young ones, you always need to shut their meaowing traps yourself...
"Reliable intelligence indicates that the humans are not at home, so there is no danger of them discovering that we are not in fact bitter enemies all of the time."
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My family.
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Next, a series of pics taken at our summer house.
The house itself. Unfortunately, I don't have any good inside shots that I could put online.
The sauna. My father and grandfather built that. Dad dug the foundations by hand, because it's impossible to get any machines down there without wrecking the whole place and even then only in winter over the ice.
A view of the house from the lake, though the trees do a good job of obscuring it. This is from the opposite side wrt the first pic. The sauna would be a bit to the left from the scene in this picture.
The original summerhouse where my dad and his brothers spent their summers, built in the 1950s. It's about 100-150 meters to the right of the lakeshore pic, the places are on adjacent plots.
The sauna of the Old Side, as we call that plot. This pic and the previous one were taken in early spring, 2005.
Speaking of spring, here's a pic the likes of which you won't see very often. The blue flower is Hepatica Nobilis, often called only hepatica, and the white one is Anemone Nemorosa. The hepatica usually starts flowering between two and three weeks before the anemone, and finishes at about the time the anemone starts. In 2005, spring came so late and was so unusual that they flowered at the same time, so there were places that were carpeted with both of them. Looked absolutely gorgeous.
No electricity and no running water, so we get all the drinking water from the well behind the main building of the Old Side. As you can see, a big-ass pole is needed to haul the water out, which yours truly is about to do in this pic.
This is the summer place of my older uncle (middle brother, my dad was the eldest). It's on the plot next to ours on the opposite side of the Old Side. Both the sauna down by the shore and the house up on the hill have a pretty damned spectacular view of the lake.
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Up next, pictures of plants and wildlife (mainly birds). In some threads, I've talked a lot about learning all kinds of things about birds from my dad, and many of these pics show some of that better than words could ever describe it.
My father checking a birdhouse with the nest of a blue tit.
A pair of young blue tits on the palm of my hand. Notice the plainly visible metal ring on the leg of one of them. They are used to mark birds so that control finds elsewhere will enable research into migratory patterns and so forth. Dad's been doing this for fifty years as a hobby.
A view of the inside of the birdhouse with the young inside. These are a bit small, they don't have all of their feathers yet. But they grow incredibly quickly.
A second birdhouse with more blue tits. These are older, more well developed ones and a lot prettier to look at. Sometimes different pairs start nesting at different times, so the chicks in one birdhouse might be too small to ring and the chicks in the next will shoot out like bullets and take wing when you go to get them. Happened to us once this year, though these pictures were taken in 2005.
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We saw this little fellow on the boat dock as we went to see the blue tits. It was completely fearless (or alternatively, paralyzed with fear). The picture was taken less than three feet away from it. I've got a couple of otehr ones as well, but this is the best of the lot. I've never seen these lizards up this close before or since.
The abandoned old nest of an ictarine warbler. Difficult as hell to find most of the time, and the bird is rare to boot. We've got a couple of these hanging inside the house as ornaments.
Did I mention there are a crapload of water lilies as well? Other side of the lake from our house, but easy enough to row over there, it's only about 400 meters away.
And what the hell exactly are they doing now, you ask? Well, there's me holding up the ladder so that my father can get high enough to get the chicks from the nest of a spotted flycatcher. The nest is in the hole very near the top of the dead tree, so we had to be careful not to topple it. Spotted flycatchers are usually easy-going little things, make nests literally on top of doors that are left open for too long and don't give a shit when you walk past just five feet away. Except this one. It made an unholy racket that sounded like a decent sized riot when yoiu so much as showed your face in the general vicinity. Never mind when we went to the nest. It'sa good thing we couldn't understand what it was saying, or we'd have had our ears well blistered. The chicks were big enough that they left the nest later that same day.
The nest of a blackbird with chicks that are almost ready to leave. It was behind our sauna, on a little shelf dad put there specially for spotted flycatchers. The place is pitch-dark normally, but the flash from the camera lit it up quite well. If you like having small birds around, just nailing a little piece of planking under the eaves for a little shelf can attract something to nest if the location is convenient and relatively quiet.
Regular visitors
How these fellows missed the blackbird's nest behind the sauna I'll never know, but miss it they did.
Midsummer 2006
Pic taken roughly at midnight. There's me, my mom at the front, my cousin, and my uncle in the background.
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That's most of them. Hope you liked them. Comments are welcome.
Edi
Look, I appreciate it, so thanks!
I like the one of Topi hiding in the liquor drawer.
Do you mind if I ask where your summer house is located? I've tried guessing, but each time I've given up because the Finnish countryside always tends to look the same no matter where you are - with some exceptions, of course.
