I'm so sorry you have injured BOTH wrists.  Sorta sounds like me and my ankles!    Hope they heal quickly so you can return to your sewing and other new house activities.

Good luck with your theories/thoughts and your progression with them.... new, original concepts are always difficult, but I'm sure you will do fantastic.

Well, turns out that Tuesday (when I wrote my last entry) was the only day this week I felt well. The flu that had been annoying us last week and then worsened for T during the weekend, hit me with full strength on Wednesday morning. I've not wandered far from bed since- though I'm hoping I'm recovering now as I feel a little less crappy than I did yesterday.

Hair: No rinses due to flu, and my favorite style have been segmented ponytails secured with satin scrunchies (the same style I usually wear for sleeping). Now I've just remade it in the morning. Today I was well enough to fetch some grocceries from the small store across the street, and am therefore wearing a claw clip.
     Noticed that Susan has posted some absolutely stunning Sugarstix. Guess if I could resist ordering...
     I still haven't trimmed. I think I'll have T to do it tomorrow if I feel any better.

Thanks, Curlgirl64! We're recovering but slowly. It's the same thing every fall and spring here- when the time of rapidly changing temperatures and wet weather comes, catching a flu is just a matter of time. At least, this time we have nice woodstoves.

Then to the news.

I'm overjoyed! I FINALLY had a bit of extra time to post to forums other than this journal.  So this flu has brought at least something good with it.

Hair: Today would be a sauna day, but my body tells me that that would be a bad idea, so I think I'll settle for a shower and a quick wash. I really need to wash my hair- it doesn't look too bad (when bunned, anyway), but my scalp is gunky. That's what you get when you skip the rinses. A gunky scalp is, of course, much preferable to otitis, but the WO experiment still in near history I'm officially tired of gunky scalps.
     Inspired of yesterday's hairstick order, I "remembered" that I have 50 pairs of stunning Longlocks hairsticks. I also remembered that wearing them is an excellent way to repel crappy feeling, and now I'm now wearing Pastel Butterflies pair (that will make a great mix with Blue Wings once they arrive). It's still true that it's incredibly difficult to feel like a three times recycled zombie when wearing one of Susan's portable artworks.

I managed to work today a little- just reading, but reading Kant is not something that one can do leisurely while lying in sickbed. So I suppose I am getting better. Yay!

I've also started taking showers whenever I feel like it, and so I have also rinsed my hair both yesterday and today. It's now dry and feels just like freshly washed.   Another nice thing is, that for the past few days I've shed visibly less than normally- that's nice for a change. I wonder, is it just natural or have I been doing something very right during this illness.
 
Country Living: Nights have cooled, and we have starting to use our woodstoves daily. Yesterday I made soup on our cookstove. It turned out well, though I still have to figure out how to regulate and maintain temperature accurately. It's all about practice, especially since there is so little information available on how to cook on a cookstove. I think that once I and T launch our website (we have considered doing one, since there isn't too much detailed information on practical aspects of simple living available in net, almost nothing in Finnish), we will add a page about woodstove cooking there. Once I figure out how the thing really works, that is.

Thanks for the info! I didn't know about the water trick, but it makes sense. I also remember that my grandmother cooked and baked exclusively on woodstove, even though they had electricity. Too bad that grannies still around don't use internet or even write books.
   We burn almost exclusively birch that is most commonly used heating wood in Finland. There's not much choice anyway as there aren't that many common species of trees with leaves and conifers are unsuitable for burning in stoves.

Hair Today: Not much to report: hair is doing well, bunned as usually, today's hairstick pair is Caramello. 
    
Health: I'm doing a little better today- well enough to go to my workroom and do some "workroom work". I'm still going to be very careful for this week.

I haven't noticed problems with birch so far. I've been adviced that before burning wood, one should let it dry in a storage for at least one year- preferably two. The wood we are currently burning was left here by the previous owners, so I'm sure it's dried well. I prefer to insert the pieces with most bark in the beginning as they catch fire more easily, and when the stove is already hot I proceed to add the splinters with less bark.
   Here, the law requires that chimneys must be checked and cleaned by a professional chimney-sweeper every year. At our house, this year's check was done just before we moved in. So in that regard, all should be well- the previous owners even had him to check the baking stove that they hadn't used, and it too was in good condition.

There are pellets available, but all I've seen are small pellets that wouldn't work in our old-fashioned stoves. I think they are exlusively used in modern heating stoves or stoves that can burn both oil and wood.
     Our wood is bought from a local farmer (previous owners gave his phone number) who sells wood as a side-business. He sells both pre-splitted and unsplitted wood. I think that this year we are so busy with everything that we must buy pre-splitted wood. Next year...who knows!
     This house has a double heating system: we could keep this place warm just by heating our stoves, but there is also an adequate electric heating system installed. We haven't yet decided what the wood/electricity heating ratio will exactly be, but as heating with wood is cheaper and not too much trouble, I think we'll be using it quite a lot. Once we'll get rid of all the cardboard and packaging material we've stuffed to our storage house, all the wood we could possibly need fits there.
            It has never crossed my mind to use the word "oak" in same sentence with "heating"! Oak trees do grow here in Southern Finland, but they are rare in nature, and most specimens you can see have been planted as decorative trees or they are trees that have escaped from gardens. They are admired trees that may be kept alive by supporting them even when they have clearly started to rot.

Hair: I got lucky yesterday in Helsinki and found two Fakkares from H&M. It seems that Fakkares have become fashionable! Now I'm a happy owner of a matte satin silver and a matte satin rose pink one. They feel relatively sturdy for Fakkares and are very beautiful.
      The Ficcare GO that I participated in May, however, has gone very badly. My package that was lost in NM mail, then found in an internal audit (along two thousand other packages that they had somehow lost), and finally sent to me (supposedly), hasn't arrived. I've lost hope of ever getting the clips, and though it's good that I got my money back, I'm still a bit down because there's no way I can use it to get Ficcares. *sigh* I am also a bit doubtful about there being Ficcare GO:s in future on LHC, as most of them have gone horribly wrong for one reason or another. I'll have to think of something...

Our "tree selection" is really small. Many species grow in gardens and parks, but the amount of naturally occurring species is pitiful. Most common trees are pine, fir, birch (two species), alder (also two species), rowan, and willows. Of these, pine, fir and birch are most common by far- they are the only trees that are dominant species in forests and the only ones that have commercial value. I think we have only one real oak forest in Southwest.
   In Southern Finland, we have also maples, oaks and some lindens. There are also few elms and ashes, but I think they all have originated from gardens or parks. When one travels just two hour's drive to north, the amount of tree species drops dramatically, and the northmost part of the country doesn't have trees at all.

Wood suppliers sell usually birch, mix that may consist of birch and alder or birch, alder and pine, or alder which is rather expensive because there is less of it available. Of these, birch is the best all-purpose wood and most people buy it. Alder is bought mainly for warming sauna stoves.
   I think that next year we will split at least some of our wood by ourselves. T likes his axe as well as cutting wood.

My cooking improves! Today I made an entire meal (soy chili, rice and apple fritter) on our woodstove/baking oven, and it went much better. Besides being more vigilant with the fire, I fine-tuned the cooking temperature by moving my pans and pots around on the cooking surface. That kept the food cooking steadily, and the result was very good.

This Ficcare GO is my first GO gone badly. The organizer has been a real trooper, but there's only so much one can do for a lousy mail service. NM mail system is just straight out of a nightmare (I mean, how is it humanly possible to just "lose" two thousand packages and need an internal audit in order to discover them ??? ). It seems that it's common there that things shipped via USPS take several months to arrive. So, I guess it's still possible that my clips will eventually show up- the excitement comes from wondering whether or not that is going to happen before I die of old age.