That pretty much does describe this blog.

I really do love checking what search terms have lead people to my blog. Here's the ones for today.

...thanks, I guess. Sorry for the lack of Pamela Andersson, I will make up for it right away:

The day's good deed is done.

And then for something completely different, we just had bolludagur yesterday, a day when you're supposed to eat the above delicious bun things until you triple your weight. They're like giant choux filled with whipped cream, jam, berries, fruit etc. and covered with powdered sugar, chocolate, caramel or royal icing. Or you know, whatever floats your boat. Then you eateateateateat them all day long, which makes Bolludagur a supreme holiday in my opinion. :3

Crown fit for a king of the garden.

Today I decided to finally weed the lawn of at least some of the dandelions on it because they're now in full bloom, and when dandelions bloom your time is running out. If you let them get to seed you'll soon have no lawn and all dandelion, and though it's always more or less a wasted effort I plucked out as many as I could. What to do with the flowers then? Well - a crown of course.

They weren't quite enough for one that would have been properly my size but no worries, I found more candidates who wore it better. 

Jury's comments: 

"Does she really think it even fits her big head? It's like it's floating on top!"

"I'll give it s 5/10, at least she's got a good sense of balance if she can keep it on for even a single photo..."

"Look at those bare arms, this is a disgrace! Obviously trying to sway the judges by immodest behaviour!"

"Much better, young Sir; the only problem would be your lack of socks."

"...and shoes. That is so not loli."

"Am I the only one who's concerned about how big the crown is? Sure it stays on but that doesn't mean it's the right size."

"What beauty! What posture! What amazingly flattering colour combinations!"

"I daresay we have found the winner. I vote we let him wear the crown he deserves."

"Definitely the best fit too if you ask me..."

Let the winner keep the crown though his other little garden friends might feel slighted by his glory - but who needs backstabbing friends anyway?

Searches that have lead to my blog part 2.

 Hay remember that one time when I made an entry on what searches lead people to my blog? Time for another one because seriously, Dear Random Visitors, sometimes you make me wonder about life and its meaning.

Here's the searches of this week!

Wa lolita/kimono lolita: well, there's that tag on the side. Note though that the use of a kimono in wa lolita is entirely voluntary and not necessary in the least.

Breiðholt Iceland to bubble tea cafe: YES DO IT. I mean sorry, the bubble tea cafe is not in Bholt but downtown Reykjavík on a street called Laugavegur. Start at the bus station called Hlemmur and walk towards the City Centre (Rvík is tiny, walking from H to CC takes abt 20 min) on the left side of the road. You'll not fail to see it. The bubble teas are delicious and so are the crepes. :3

Kakkugalleria: YES DO IT. Just remember you have to go to Finland to do it. Try the cake buffet I triple-dog-dare you.

Musubi knot kimono tutorial: sorry, I got none. But hey how about I link you to some of my own favourite musubi tutorials instead?

* Kaino kuchi musubi (very elegant)

* Kamifusen musubi part 1 and 2 (playful, super cute!)

Karuta musubi (excellent yukata choice)

One note though: I mostly wear informal kimono or yukata, to which these knots are all suitable. For a formal kimono style you'll have to look elsewhere. A furisode has a trillionbillion different options for the obi to be tied whereas all grown-up formal styles should wear otaiko musubi (which by the way suits informal styles as well).

Tying a scarf around your head cult...:  whoa, three dots mean the search term was longer than fit the field. Please say you didn't write cultural appropriation. Say it ain't so. Doubting people is a bad habit but let's just assume it was the fearsome CA and not f.ex. "cults", "culture" or "Cultus Lake".

Before anyone attacks me on tying a scarf around my head, which I do on occasion, I invite you to look at exhibit A) the national dresses from the area in Finland that I'm from, B) my ancient Finnish dress, again for a grown woman instead of a girl (girls typically wear silk ribbons around their head and show their hair, and most often when you see photos of Finnish national dresses the models wear ribbons regardless of age and/or marital status, which imo is a big mistake since the veils are lovely and elegant) and C) the typical, traditional clothing of a Finnish woman. The example is from the late 1800's but in my childhood in the 1980's a headscarf that covered your hair completely was not an unusual sight, especially on older women. Younger women wore scarves too but usually only during winter - I had a winter headscarf too, a heavy, woolen one.

TL;DR: headscarves are quite an international thing actually.

Annnd then the searches of this month. You won't get yearly searches this time, there's way too much Pamela Anderson there for my sanity.

Wa/kimono: check above.

Dark green: ? Er, good luck I guess... (seriously how did that term lead here I do not understand)

Patrick Woodroffe: YES DO SEE HIS WORK.

Puppet Circus dress: alas I do not own a PC dress and double the alas, if I did I wouldn't be able to squeeze myself into it. I own one replica dress - can be seen here - and one authentic PC skirt - the rose one in the same entry.

Audrey Tautou Un long dimance de...: I liked the movie but Amelié was better. :Þ

Bodyline yukata: generally a disaster spelled in two words.

Bubble tea cafe: nom nom nom.

Checker: wat. Ok.

Visiting Silent Hill.

I began to play MapCrunch for the hell of it and it landed me straight into the weirdest, creepiest place imaginable. Rules of playing MapCrunch for those that don't know them: go to MapCrunch, make sure you unselect every country, hit Go -button and see where you end up. Once there move around until you find an airport. Googling etc. strictly forbidden!

Sorry about the images stretching all across my layout, I don't usually post images quite this wide but any smaller size doesn't really show the whole weirdness well enough.

O... k... not creepy at all. The grey weather adds up to the awful feeling. But hey every country has torn apart houses here and there, Reykjavík City Centre has them too (and a quite impressive albeit hazardous collection if I may say so).

But wait, the whole village/town is like this. Shacks, rusted iron, ruins, broken windows. It looks as if it had been abandoned in a haste.

Not a soul was in sight, and what's even creepier not a single car. I'd be willing to believe this is a dead village abandoned ages ago if it weren't for the gardens. This one seems to grow grapes or something else that needs that sort of support, and at least it shows signs of human activity that the gardens were clean, ornamental plants well trimmed etc.

Is this a church? Idk really. I did see one graveyard but that, too looked a bit shabby... thought I saw some bright colour among the headstones though so could be that there's fresh flowers there.

Finally a road sign! Now if I only could read the Cyrillic alphabet...

Ok for some reason this was happening a lot: random blur-outs in places where there was nothing special to blur. Prolly just a bug but combined with the increasingly creepy feeling I jumped a little every time I saw something, f.ex. a roadside bush blurred. I mean who am I to say there was no face there...

More ruins. Shame too, it looks like it's once been quite a beautiful building.

Another road sign that tells me absolutely nothing at all. Then again even the locals, if they exist, might be somewhat agreeing seeing how it's half rusted away.

OK FINALLY. A sign I can read. I quit my MapCrunch soon after and just googled Malko Sharkovo. Turns out I was in rural Bulgaria the whole time and google even insists there indeed are people living in this area. Must have been a quiet time of the day when the cam cars were touring the place...

I've played MapCrunch several times before, once even ending up almost to my own summer cottage, but this time really took the cake. Seriously creepy, I'm so glad I wasn't playing this at night as I usually do!

All the Breiðholt banners.

Inspired by a comment I figured it would be a good time to look back at the short-ish history of Breiðholt the Blog by that Random Finnish Immigrant and see just how many headers I've gone through so far. I found both more and less than I though - more than I remembered having, but less in the sense that I seem to remember some that I could not find. Most likely they have a file name that's not related to them being a header and therefore lost somewhere in the depths of my laptop - but I digress. Here are the ones I did find, possibly in order of appearance (although I'm not making any promises).

The first Breiðholt banner ever to appear was this one. It was short-lived because it looked so messy and unorganized, as in "would I myself want to read a blog with a header like this? HELL NAH" -kind of way. Somehow seeing it now makes me feel really nostalgic though, all those feelings of having a brand new blog and not quite knowing which direction I should take it.

(In the end I chose photospammy + nonsense, in my opinion this was a wise choice.)

The second one that was around for a good deal longer. Definitely an improvement in terms of design and tidiness but still somehow really impersonal. Eventually it began to feel like just the top decoration instead of the first invitation on browsing more of the blog that it should be, so I kept the raven theme and changed it to -

this one. This is the first Bholt banner that featured my own mug (from an interesting photoshoot we did somewhere I did not know where, only I knew there were lava fields and it was a short drive away)(Hafnarfjörður?). In the background picture you can see Kronkku and Raakku, two Breiðholt ravens that I keep seeing here every year. Kronkku is very easy to tell because he's HUGE. Tall and fat, and he sings in a slow KRONK... KRONK... KRONK... voice. 

Kronkku once tried to steal our bin bag that I had left outside for one effing minute while I turned back to get something else. By the time I returned he had successfully dragged the bag across our front yard already.

Hmmm, come to think of it I haven't seen them yet this year. It's about time they make their appearance!

The thing that usually prompts me to change the banner is a seasonal change. It would feel weird to have a summer-y banner in the autumn/winter and vice versa. I stuck with this one for a long time too, though.

Continuing on the theme - I just realized it would be easy to time these based on the photos I've used in them, although sometimes I do use older material too. I could still say though that this banner cannot be younger than year XYZÖ because that's when I bought that Lady Sloth JSK and the Mrs Parker's Millinery & Mercantile bonnet.

Mwahahaha I remember when I took this photo! I was wearing a corset, extra amount of petticoats (I wear any number of petticoats between one and four depending on the outfit and how much support it needs - they're all quite thin though and in my own coords I prefer A-line to cupcake any time) and tall heels and taking photos on carpeted floor. In short, I could not bend my back or see my feet and took a majestic fall right as the self timer went off. :D

Not upside-down of course. Some things will always be GIMP shoppery. Many things, in fact.

Another banner that I felt I had had for forever, but I can see why. It's quite a good one - simple, all the info's there and an inoffensive colour combo. I have no idea who the Alf in that photo is, I found the pic glued to a lamp post and took a photo of it.

All of a sudden I realized that it was already early summer and did I really want to have a winter coat in the banner - NO.

THIS is what I wanted for a summer. A summer that, in essence, turned out to be only two days of sunshine or something of the sort. Old Icelandic grandmas are saying the last summer that we had, boy, that was one bad weather summer and no mistake, the news sites state it was the worst in... 17 years if memory serves. Anyway, awful, awful summer. Wish I had been in Finland instead.

At least I could get that summer feeling for the banner, so I chose one yukata photo that looked suitable and ran with it. 

And so we have come to the current one. Again prompted by the changing season because I also don't want to have a yukata banner for cold seasons. By cold I mean seasons that are and should be cold, not summers that just are cold to annoy you. D:( We'll see how long this one lasts - could be autumn, could be until spring, could be until summer - could be until December. No promises, even when I decide on a schedule such as "change the banner once a season" I can never hold onto them. :3

Hello homeland, hello homeland.

So I visited Finland again. A bit suddenly, for a bit too short a time, but that could not be helped - my grandma is doing poorly and it may have been a now or never situation, we do not know. She's almost 90 though, so I can't exactly say I could see her too often at this point anyway.

After visiting her I f.ex. went to my summer cottage where we pulled the water pump out of the lake for winter. If we don't it'll break when the lake ices over, but eurgh dragging that ice-cold lake-slimy hose full of water and therefore both heavy and spitting it out and on you at random - yeaaaah not my favourite thing to do. Regardless, we got it up, had a quick coffee and then headed back south.

Another panorama, this time the lake side. The water's pretty low at this part of the year - at summer it reaches that large stone on the right side.

Another, a bit clearer photo of just how far away the water has gone.

Sign of a doge. Another sign of it were occasional barks from somewhere between the trees.

Dad was following a shellfish's trail and managed to locate it and dug it out. We admired it for a while and then dutifully dug it back into the sand on the bottom of the lake. 

A pretty mushroom.

A pretty leaf. I take photos of pretty things yes.

My plan at trying on a bra - foiled!

Thanks Obama.

On the way back home from the cottage the sundown turned out exceptionally beautiful!

And now: the weather.

A random photo of a shop window in Helsinki. I used to love maps like this when I was a kid. Well ok I still love maps like this.

This is why Iceland has waterfalls...

...and Finland does not.

On the bus, going to the airport on Monday. I spotted this ad and giggled like a very mature person for a long time and then took a photo of it. It's difficult to translate, but each vehicle is making an apologetic comment on having accidentally let out a fart - only the car's fart is the largest, whereas the tram lets out barely a poof or carbon dioxide.

This is what I found at the tax free and technically speaking I don't have extra money to burn but this beautiful example of cultrulll approprisshun could not be ignored! Btw it's delicious too, sort of licorice-y with a touch of herbs. :3

To name it Valhalla is not yet enough to count for the CA  of course, because even though our native religion was not the same as with the Scandinavian countries we're still close enough to be counted among the same cultural group (iow the Nordics). It's not even rare to see people mistake Finland for a Scandinavian country. What does count as CA is this slightly decorated magic stave that's strictly of Icelandic tradition. 

It's a well-chosen one too, a vegvísir. It supposed to keep you always on the right tracks so that you'll never get lost, and I can only imagine that it'll come in handy for people whose drunken tours end them in strange towns, houses, beds or countries. I know some people like that.

 YEAAAAAH I mean hi.

The hair that needs a warning sign.

How can you tell you've had an absolutely magically awesome hairdo all day? :D?

Answer: it won't stop being absolutely magically awesome even after you take it down. Btw I did not Finglish that, I quite literally took that do down. You'll understand when you'll see photos of it.

Snu's parents returned from Europe and this... thing had appeared in the tulip pot.

It changes colours!

Oh. My. Bob. How precious is this I cannot count the ways!