COLOURS AND FROST

Today it's the gloomy Halloweenish weather one would expect with mid-October approaching (already! What? How?), but yesterday we woke up to a breathtaking colourful frosty sunrise that I even tossed out barefoot for to try and catch with my phone -

The view to the south is often like a painting. This is also the bathroom view, and one day eventually the view from the study-to-be; the brown room which for the moment is just (you guessed it): boxes.

Colourful trees to the west! And the old barn of the farm peeking from behind them.
The study will be the only room in the house, apart from the living room, with windows in two directions. That actually makes it the nicest room in the house. This, plus an apple tree in the front, would be the view from the second window.


Amazing colours to the north!

And the rising sun in the east.

I really love crips autumn mornings like this, when the air is fresh and cold and the light makes everything magic.  But give it a month and we will be up earlier than the sun, wake up to dark mornings, when the universe evens out all those light days we got during summer...

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SUMMER 2018

Summer 2018! And what a summer it has been!

   


           

            

Never before has it been this warm - hot and sunny since May, and such weather for over a month that even a +25c felt like "oh, it's a abit colder today". It has been like the summers of my childhood, warm and sunny forever! But whereas those memories are, if not sugar coated but rather sun-coated, this summer has actually been the warmest ever recorded with around +30c daily.

Not that is is over quite yet, but school started today, and just as the summers of childhood ended as school begun, it still does so today; on a mental level at least. While the weather has had it's downsides (drought, bad crops, perhaps a sign of an alarming change to come) and not everyone enjoys the heat I however bask in it. I said a big F to gardening this year, and haven't thus even felt bad for dead flowers and cherryless trees, but took had the opportunity to spend en exceptional large amount of time with family, visit my close-to heart summer places as well as had a fabulous trip to Italy, while still managing to squeeze in some work in a not-too-stressful way.


My pocket calendar is of such kind that it begins in August en ends at some point of the summer, and I also tend to think the year along the schedules of school and also the studio's school year, which means we are soon in for a new one. There is lots in store for autumn on different fronts, and lets see if I manage to make some of them appear here as well!




Hope you all have enjoyed a wonderful summer, and lets hope the last weeks of it, whatever may have been the case, will be just as good or even better!

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WORK / PIN-UP FINLAND

This summer and fall I have as usual been working with Pin-Up Finland, which is the oldest and biggest pin-up competition for aspiring pin-up models over here,  creating and directing photoshoots for the finalists together with Tinker Bell and planning the show at the Pin-Up Finland finals in Lahti.

This year we shot a calendar old school style for the competition.  It both amazes and pleases me to find how much stuff and how many props one has gathered during the years, as a lot of the things we use for shoots we grab from the stashes at home.

Different skills come in to place. Like the anatomy of lifting skirts for example. (Or how to smoothly blow up beach balls, as un-willingly demonstrated by yours truly over in a video series at IG...)

All set-up and light-check images must always be dorky.

In the end got to shoot a little ourselves as well.

Concepting and styling photoshoots is something I really like to do and would I have more time over from the rest of the eclectic mess of things I work with I would definitely do more of this. But both my colleague and I are people who do not know how to deal with the concept of "time off" so we do have some plans in mind regarding this and the future...

The calendar will be out in time for the finals at the Autot &Viihde-weekend.
You can see some pictures of the contestants over at mtv-viihde for example (under a typical click-bait headline *adding eyeroll*), in a shoot that we put together with Asko Rantanen over at Weird Antiques (but where the finalists otherwise got to style themselves).

See you in Lahti on Saturday!

Phone snaps of the set photos by Mikael Häggblom, the rest is à la iphone from my instagram.

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BACK IN HAMBURG

 At the end of last week I traveled to Hamburg again to perform at the Home of Burlesque.
As we shot the music video the night before I opted on the late afternoon flight; to once not have to get up at 6am with just a couple of hours of sleep to go to the airport. Arriving late when performing the same night is always a bit risky, but with a straight flight on a well travelled route you'd still think you're pretty safe, because things can go wrong but in the end they don't actually do that often.

This time it did though; first the Helsinki airport was shut down due to a rescue operation, which resulted in delays and too many people wanting to get to the same point (=inside) at once. I worked with transportation and travels for over a decade, and I know what it's like to be on duty when the shit hits the fan and you can't do anything to solve the problem, only try to make the situation run as smooth as possible, and boy was I glad I was not somebody working at Helsinki Airport that day.
But well, we made our plane on time but the flight itself did not, so we left a over an hour late.  Was already seeing the scenario of me putting the stage face on in the airplane, but we still time to make the show!

Upon arrival in Hamburg it's pretty easy to get  to the venue; straight with one train and a little walking-and-bag-dragging. However, one situation was not enough; there was (apparently) an incident on the tracks so at some point we found ourselves, our bunch of bags and a clearly added sweat-layer to our foreheads stepping out on some train station in Hamburg as the trains stopped moving. But, there's always a cab to be found somewhere; we made it on time to our show in the end but I am seriously wishing I was able to do all my show travels a day in advance... The rest of the shows went well (we perform for three days in a row) except for one moment when the DJ managed to accidentally mute my track and I found myself just clapping my hands to get the crowd going, starting to do jazz hands (and singing JAZZHANDS YEY) after a while as nothing was happening, and finally getting the DJ, who seemed rather clueless and actually asked me what to do to just play any f-ing music ok? and then improvising myself trough some random rockabilly song to finish my act. But those things have to happen sometimes too. And the bar serves good gin afterwards to cool your nerves.

Otherwise -

- late evenings and late mornings, the usual traveling showgirl nutrition (a mix of yin and yang there I tell you), my have-to-go in Hamburg: Miniatur Wunderland, harbours makes me happy (both miniature and actual ones), Christmas markets and fairs too. Also the Reeperbahn version, because: mulled wine, although I am a little more traditionally put and thus care more for candy apples and gingerbreads than giant inflatable dicks. By large.

Now I'm back home and this weekend it's off to Southeastern Finland to perform. And next Saturday it's time for our fourth (time flies!) Christmas revue, Under The Mistle Tease!  Everybody has to come.

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AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON

I was working from home today and took a long lunch break to go out on a little adventurous walk with Dag.

He had all his gear with him, and warned me not to step on the fallen leaves, as those would trap you and suck you right down to the hot lava core of earth.
(Good to know!)

It got a bit colder here in between and nature shifted colours so quickly - but now wonder; it's almost October by now!

Autumn textures.

Autumn leaves.

Autumn trees.

 We sat down on a rock for a little picnic.
The cats joined in; they often follow us around when out on walks!

 Everything tastes better when outdoors.


The sandwhich was so big for Dag he had to close his eyes in order to eat it.

And then we continued our little afternoon adventure in search of magic trees, watching out for dangerous rock-bombs dropping from the sky, evil cows and all the other things the vivid imagination of a four year old can come up with.

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SHOWPONY SCHEDULES

Ah, Mondays, Tuesdays, beginning of the week. Mondays used to be may day off to adapt from the weekend rhythm to the weekly one, but this year Dag goes to his play-club on Monday mornings too, which means Mondays has become as shitty as everyone else’s, waking-up wise at least.

When you are away performing it’s often odd to adapt your weekend work schedule to your week-schedule. Although I am used to an irregular routine  - the last four years of my harbour work, when I was working as the supervisor, we did five days of evening shift from 15hrs to 1 am, then three days off and then seven days of morning shift from 05:30 to 14:30 (and then we had six days off). I remember reading that mixing shifts like that is not good for your sleep (or for you) as you never really adapt to any regular rhythm, but I can’t really state that my routines would have improved that much nowadays either...

Performing life when away often looks something like this, only the small details vary.

DAY 1

06:00am Leave to airport far too early, especially taking into consideration evening teaching (in this example, you can fill in : performing sometimes too) the night before and late night packing (as always, no matter how well you think you’ve prepared it this time).

Consume crazily expensive coffee and smoothies at airport. 

10:00am Arrive to destination, drag your just-a-few-grammes-below-maximum-weight-suitcase(s) along in public transportation to where you are staying.

(Here we are arriving in St.Pauli in Hamburg the other week. The rest of the details and pics will come from that trip. -)

Wait for about an hour for the man with the keys to show up. Enjoy some coffee and a random baguette (the rest of the trip will be healthier!) while you wait.

12:00pm Then sleep. Sleep sleep sleep

18:00 Get up, do some stretching and go grab something as healthy as possible around the corner. Buy some almonds for backstage snacks.


(a little good-late-afternoon-morning peek-a-boo from the next window)

20:00 Put make up on

21:00 Head over to the venue.

23:00-02:00 Perform. Sip on that one; just one, backstage GT during the evening.

03:00 snack on some almonds, project:wash-your-face-and-roll-your-hair-for-the-next-day and then to bed.

DAY 2

13:00 get up. Do pilates. Colleague does yoga. Have some lemon water, almonds and bio yoghurt. Whoop whoop!

14:00 out for a walk, some fruits and soy latte.

(We saw somebody who'd just gotten married.)

16:00 Soup and summer rolls, yum!

17:00 Back home to do some office work - and have a liiiittle bit of prosecco while at it.
(Here working on the Ruby Knuckles Sextet website, by @ruskarieban)

19:00 Late afternoon/early evening power nap

20:00 make up time!

21:30  Heading over to the venue. No GT today, this evening will be healthier

(Backstage. The usual.)

23:00 -02:00 showtime ok maybe that one backstage GT after all

03:00 SHOTS! (oops) 

04:00 MORE SHOTS (oh shit)

05:00 apparently more shots, or something.

DAY 3

12:00 Lemon water. almonds. Damn it, why don’t we have any chips!

13:00 painful movement from place A to B. About a litre of mint tea and a grilled sandwich that could have had so much more cheese on it.

02:30 realising you are way too tired, even though you just had half a litre of cola, to spent time in one of the most awesome places there is (well nerd-wise at least; MiWuLa) and that you are just going to have to come back here the next time SANS shots the night before instead.

03:00 drag yourself up the stairs

SLEEP

06:00 force yourself out again to eat and at this point anything goes

(But we were lucky that this was really good though. Vegan comfort food at Saints & Sinners. Have to go back the next time and eat up the rest of the menu.)

20:00 A quick yoga nidra to try to even up the lack of sleep from last night

20:30 On with the face again

21:30 stack up on chips on the way to the venue. Arrive. No GT’s

(Arrived. Face glued on. Ready. I can do this!)

22:00 ok one GT.

23:00-02:00 Showtime!

03:00 chips. packing

04:00 SLEEP

DAY 4

(peanut butter and vegan cheeseeeemmmm)

09: wake up, grab soy latte, drag 20-something kilos of costumes and make up to the airport, unpack (well MAYBE, if you’re good to yourself). Go to sleep and then wake up and it’s MONDAY, DAMN!

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