Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Middleage! or Old?

Today I was watching the World Music Award on the TV, it's been a few years since I last saw the program.

I have to admire the artists for their perfomances, and talents.

But what's amazing me, is the change in how they classifie music today, compared to, about five decades ago. Can you imagine that just in the midle of the sixties R&B was synonymous to The Rolling Stones, and now the Worls Music Award in the same class goes to Alicia Keys??
Ok! I know that the world is changing, and faster that I can hang on with.

I remember when in the middle of the sixties, my favourite piece of music was the House of the Rising Sun with The Animales, later on this was to become one of the songs I collected, every version that I could find with any band in the world. The Animals was introduced into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. But it took fourteen more years before my favourite band was introduced, The Ventures, that made numerous different versions of that traditional masterpiece.


The theme of the song is marvelous, I can easily make an halfhour jamsession around the theme, and I often do with my old Hagstrom II guitar from the sixties, now even more often after the restoration of the guitar. I managed to find allmost all parts in orginal, last spring when I restuarated the guitar as near to orginal as possible.
The Hagstrom II guitar is absolutely the most easy and the fastest guitar to play, I have tried all the other big brands also.

I personally bought my Hagstrom II from the Hagstrom store in Stockholm, Sweden in 1971, and was informed that the one I bought was the last one of the production year 1965 that was on sale. Here is a picture before the restauration in 2008, 43 years after the production.

The Hagstrom Guitar has been reborn, but havn't had the opportunity to try one yet.

These are thoughts and memories from my lifetime and love to music.

Your Lazy Blogger wishes all of you,

a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Lasse

Ciao everyone,

Velho and Velhotar har been attending am Italian wedding on the 18 octobre in Vico Equense in the south of Italy. Here is a link to a few pictures from the occation

VicoWedding

We also saw a lot of friends from both Finland an Italy at the wedding.

Waiting ...

Hi everyone,

Here at Velhola it's starting to be autumn, the leaves are falling from the trees and it's raining.



Nevertheless, soon we are going on our vacation trip to Sorrento, Italy, where we hope to have a bit warmer and overall better weather. We will also attend an italian wedding, so maybe I'll post some pictures later from the wedding.

Nature Gallery updated

Hi everyone,

I've just updated the Nature Gallery at www.velhola.com

The newest pic's are taken from a distance of more than 15 meters using the lately aquired camera Olympus SP-560 UZ, looks promising!

A more deep test of the capabilities of the camera will be performed in October when the Velhos and a bunch of other finns will visit Sorrento for a wedding, wait and see...

Lasse

Photographs

Ciao tutti,

Velho has just updated his Gallerys at www.velhola.com so why don't you just have a look:-)

The lazy blogger.

Midsummer

Ciao Readers,

It's midsummer over here in Finland, the sun is up allmost around the clock, and Velho and Velhotar have a babysitting phase, Velhotars sons dog is here while her son and family is visiting Greece for a two week holliday in Kefalonia.
Our traditional midsummer is postponed to August when all of our children can be present, so for now we're celebrating a different midsummer, only us and the brother of Velhotar in the middle of our renovation of our Sauna building, pictures of the result later, but here is one picture of the babysitting dog using my t-shirt from years ago:-)

Velho

The weekend is over!
This weekend we've been visiting two graduation party's, one in Kankaanpää, and one in Närpiö, both can be located to the south of Ostrobothnia in Finland.
My notices about them is that pink is a major color for the moment, so instead of showing pictures of participents, I'll show a picture of an old tree all in pink, instead of showing all the ladys.
The tree is in an old willage called Karttu in the town of Ikaalinen at the place where my wifes parents have their house.
We have been visiting first the home of my wifes cousine, her dauhgter graduated from her school the day before. Next we visited my brothers residence in Närpiö to celebrate his sons graduation, present was nearly all of our main family branch, and a lot of other friends of the family. Sargon, the head of my sisters family took his role as the chief of staff and handled the serving and other things just as a butler would have done earlier in the 18'th century, a great Thank You to him for helping Susanna in this.
Sargons daughter, Nicole is also graduating later in june, but due to workreleated matters we aren't able to be present to celebrate her, so we will express our sincerly best wishes to her at her graduation day.

Lasse & Leena

Sis family visiting Velhola

Today my sisters family from Sweden visited Velhola. We've last meet in Stockholm Sweden last september at my brothers wedding.
I took the whole family to visit the house of our ancestors in Porvoo, the house is now a days a museum telling the story how the Holm merchandant family lived in the 17'th century.
I could tell from what my sis told me that she would have picked a few or more furniture pieces with her if she would have could! I also believe that my nieces in the picture got a whole new picture of their ancestral heritage line.
After the museum visit I took my guests to an resturant in the Old Porvoo for a late lunch before we headed to Velhola for good finnish coffe and ice-cream with a glas of good Italian wine from the Puglian area.
My sis family continued to drive up to ostrobothnia to visit my younger brother, and be present when my brothers son Linus gets his graduation papers from school on friday 30.05.2008.
On saturday most of the main branch of the Holms will meet up to celebrate the event.

In the picture there is from left, Nicole, Michelle and Michelles boyfriend Kristian.

Hi,

A short description of our stay in Malta.

On the arrival day and the following day we strolled around in Bugibba, the town where we had our accomodation. Because we visited a bit outside of the main tourist season, there was not so crowdy, and one could walk along the streets fairly undisturbed, observing buildings and nature, taking pictures without needing to wait that someone dissapears from our camera view:-)
On the 1th of May, we still stayed in Bugibba observing how the Maltesians celebrated, it was a whole lot different than in our home country, no big parades, no speeches, seemed that there was no difference compared to any other normal day. In the evening we went to the closest pub for a few beers, and found our selfs in an karaoke evening, where also one of our group member made a few performances receiving lots of applauses and a request to come back the next karaoke evening.
Over the next days we visited the capital of Malta, Valletta. We also visited the town of Mdina, called the silent town.
One day we took the local bus and drove to the north part of the main island, from there we hiked back to Bugibba. The trail went through the the sparse highland landscape of the north west part of Malta. At some point we took the bus for a few miles, and then again walked our way back to our town.
The last evening we went out for a good meal at one of the many restaurants found in the neighbourhood of our residence, after that we ended the evening by rejoining the karaoke gang at local pub with new performances of our singer.
In the morning of our last day at Malta we left Bugibba early in the morning with a taxi arranged by our host at Falcon Court, were we had been staying the whole week, the taxi took us to Malta International Airport for our flight to Bremen in Germany where we had to stay one night before we could fly back home.
In Bremen we had good luck with the weather, so we visited the old town for a few hours, before we went to our hotel sleeping a few hours before our early morning flight back to Finland, facing temperatures 10-15 degrees Celcius lower than we had in Malta.

Your Lazy Blogger.

Hi, it's me again,
I've noticed an other thing on my holiday, the cars here in Malta is a mix of old and new ones, lots of brand and marks that we dont anymore see in our traffic, and lots of new models not so common in our country.
Beeing a fan of nordic cars, I've noticed that after for days in Malta I've seen only two Saabs and two Volvos, both around 5 to ten years old. The other thing noticed is that the buses (pullmans) are very old, but suprisingly working very good, for instance today we went on a few busstrips with those old ones, without any problems even if they are the age of the busses we had in the beginning of the 60's to the 70th's.

Lasse

Hi, we're here at the Malteesian islands, the first thing that catches your eyes is the language, here is an example, english and malteesian about smoking.

I'll be back with more stories when I'm back home due to that our internet connection is a bit pour and breakes every now and then.

Lasse

Vacation!

Velho and Velhotar is going on a short vacation to the Maltese Islands with a few friends of ours between 28/4 - 7/5 - 2008.
Our intension is to explore the islands and some of the historical anicent remains found on the islands.
We're hoping for good weather during our stay, we'we learned that this time of the year there should be around 20-25 degrees Celcius during the days, and around 15-18 degrees during the nights.
We intend to explore the islands by buss ans by foot, and hopefully we will have a whole bunch of new photos to post at the Velhola site after our journey.
Because of lack of direct flights our gang has to stay overnight at Bremen in Germany on both the flight out and the flight back, so with a little luck there might also be some photos of the Old Town of Bremen coming up on the Velhola site.

Your Lazy Blogger

My best winter!

Hi everybody,

The media is going hot about global warming, so who cares?

Well I do! I've been waiting for this to happen since I was a kid, and finally it seems that my dream's coming true.

- I hate winters.......
- I hate to have to clear the drive path to my house from snow...
- I don't need winter at all!!!


This is the second winter in a row, when it's really no winter at all, it's kind of On/Off winter, one day we have snow, and the other day it's gone. The temperature is above zero degrees centigrade allmost all the time, I love it.

Well I do know about all the backsides of global warming, and we do not want them, or do we????

I guess that to get rid of the winters that I hate I most probably need to relocate to somewhere south, and start hoping that the Global warming STOPS in the north.

Your Lazy Blogger.