It was always possible

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The photographs were taken at Korkeasaari Zoo on July 2nd.

(Posting title is from the poem Eight Ball by Claudia Emerson.)

Entangled in one another to form

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The photographs were taken at Tropicario in Helsinki on January 4th.

(Posting title is from the poem Rattlesnakes Hammered on the Wall by Ray Gonzalez.)

In a small, dusty, rather gritty, somewhat scratchy

Zoo 1

Zoo 2

Zoo 3

The photographs were taken at the Tropicario Zoo on October 13th.

(Posting title is from the poem A Man in Blue by James Schuyler.)

Showing where he ended and the world began

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The photographs were taken at the Elma event in Messukeskus, Helsinki, on November 11th.

We got 15 cm of heavy snow today. I didn't commute by bicycle, which was a wise decision as the road conditions were challenging in the afternoon. There is some snow shoveling in the program for the evening.

(Posting title is from the poem The Ancestors Explain How Envy Grew by Afaa Michael Weaver.)

Make once more my heart thy home

Lizard

I'm still posting photographs taken over a week ago. This lizard was warming up in the evening sunshine at Salmi, along a walking path southwest of lake Salmijärvi.

(Posting title is from Song: Rarely, rarely, comest thou by Percy Bysshe Shelley.)

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall

Water

Waves

Reflect

Spider

Shadow

Clouds

Lizard

Flowers

Sometimes I got the feeling that the world has gotten much weirder than science fiction. Namely, I ran into a story titled "Physical assault by McDonald's for wearing Digital Eye Glass", telling of Steve Mann, who has digital eye glasses fixed to his head - "permanently attached and does not come off my skull without special tools". McDonald's employees (in Paris, France) assaulted Mann and broke the glasses.

Thinking about a future where each of us might have surgically implanted cameras (not to speak of other stuff) gives me shivers. But I also find loathsome how McDonalds handled the situation. Is there any human being in the corporation?

Today I went picking blueberries with my oldest daughter to the Nuuksio forests, starting from the west side at Siikajärvi. Today was a fine sunny day, it wasn't too hot (about 21 °C) and there was wind which kept the mosquitoes almost completely away, at least in the Nuuksio forests up on the rocky hills where there is space between the trees.

This is also an excellent place for blueberries, which were very tasty and - thanks to the rainy days - rather big. We ate a lot of them in the forest, and also brought some with us to eat this evening.

Picking berries is for me a rather nice experience, there is something almost meditative about it. When I was younger I did quite a lot of picking berries, blueberries and cloudberries especially.

There was one year (maybe it was 1985 when I had started my studies in the university) when I picked a lot of cloudberries. It happened that the price for the berries was rather high, and I sold quite a lot of them. Selling berries you have picked in the forest is tax-free, and so this was rather nice extra income for a student.

I spent hours and hours picking berries, and during that time I got into a strange kind of mental state in which there didn't seem to exist time or thinking as one usually experiences them, one was just picking berries.

(Posting title is from the poem After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost.)