How many busses can a girl ride in one day?

Seven is my record, set on Friday. I made two long-desired purchases - a booster seat and a laundry basket - and brought them both back on the bus. Then took Kalee down to see daddy's office and to the red-cross re-sale shop where we bought ice skates for Kalee for 10 euros. Then home. I was pretty proud of myself.

Why do we need a laundry basket, you may be wondering, when we have a washing machine right in our little apartment? Well ... that little old washer broke. I think I tried to put too much in it at a time. Charles told the University people who own the apartment and we discovered the washer was just a left-over from a previous tenant, they wouldn't fix it or replace it. So, now we carry our laundry down to the first floor where there is a washer (free) that holds full-size loads and washes them in 37 minutes (the old washer took 90 minutes, I kid you not). After that, there is a big drying room with lines strung for hanging the wash, and big fans to turn on to dry it. Even a quilt will dry in less than 24 hours down there and we don't have to have laundry hanging anywhere in our apartment. The dead washer has turned out to be a blessing.

Week Three in Finland

Our week in pictures.

Kalee is influenced by Jyvaskyla's most famous son, architect Alvar Alto, and creates a post-modern house. Her aunt will be proud.
And adds a garage.
Laundry. Have I mentioned the laundry situation? Here are our washer ...
and dryer. The air in the apartment is quiet dry so hanging the clothes is pretty quick (24hrs) and improves air quality a bit (when we aren't ducking to avoid the pants). The washer only holds about half what we are used to so every other day our living room is decorated by drying clothing. This adds color to an otherwise drab room.

After writing the above about the "dryer" some angels appeared in our lives bringing a daily ride to school for Kalee (giving me an extra hour in the morning), an assisted grocery shopping trip for me (the translation help was invaluable), and a drying rack. The angels are Kalee's pen pall's family who just returned from their winter holiday trip to California, Arizona and Hawaii. So very generous. And here is the miraculous drying rack loaded up with TWO loads of wash, and still not full. This means we can take down the green laundry line that currently circles our living room ceiling.
Speaking of drab ... perhaps you noticed in some earlier pictures that the living room is quite drab and dorm-ish looking. The couch is not only stained, it is ripped, exposing the inner foam and tempting small fingers to pick it to bits. So I bought sheets to cover the ugliness. The sheets are bright and colorful. However, I'm afraid the total effect is even more dorm-ish, my attempt at covering it up only drawing more attention to the problem and looking as cheep as it was. Ah well. I prefer it with the flowers anyway.
The end of the week brought us temperatures of -14F. I do NOT enjoy these temperatures. It is just rediculously cold. I am dealing with it by giving myself permission to take the bus wherever I go. But you can't stay inside this little apartment all weekend, not even all day, so today (it was only -6) we went for a walk. Kalee had a lot of energy so we headed out on the lake and actually walked all the way across. It's not that far, but it is a pretty cool thing to do. In this picture Kalee and I have just started across the lake. You can see it's not all that far to the boat on the other side. This is the narrowest part of the lake.
The sun is just starting to go down around 3:30 and is reflecting beautifully on the bridge and hills.
We have reached the other side.
Behind the boat is the cutest little round wood hut where you can buy hot chocolate and coffee on the weekends. We hadn't brought our money so we came home and had hot chocolate at home. Although hot chocolate has become a daily beverage for Kalee, this was special because Charles actually melted chuncks of a chocolate bar into the hot chocolate. Kalee liked it.