Budding, combing and smiling

These are a few of my favorite things:

Last week the bushes in front of our apartment started to bud.  

This week I walked by the same bushes and...

they've blossomed.  What can I say?  These guys have grown on me.  :)

This is the way I ride (or in the winter, walk) to work. 

 It's hard to believe that a few short months ago it looked like this:

This afternoon Marketta invited me over to enjoy a wonderful summer lunch before helping me with my family history.  

Marketta is one of those people who has a vast amount of knowledge--and you wish you could some how transfer all of her knowledge and skill sets via a memory stick for the human brain (and heart).
For example, she sees this (it's in Swedish as that was the language in which the records were kept)...:

...and reads it aloud as if it were something that looked like this: 

That's because she's one of those people who takes the original records and indexes the names and information so that people like me can make heads and tails of them.  She's been a part of the archiving of Finland's church records since the 1970s.  Currently, she spends 3-4 (sometimes 5) days a week digitizing the records from the 1700s.  One of these days I'm going to get a sneak peek of this project that they're working on at the central library here in Jyvaskyla! 

We found Olof Leskinen's birthdate (18 Feb. 1794) in one of the records.  We're still searching for his birthplace. Marketta said, 'If only he could just tell us where he was born!'  We spent nearly an hour combing through the records (she took the non-indexed, original records written by hand like in the first photo above and I took the indexed records like the second photo above)

I'm starting to see how this can become addictive...
kind of like the addiction of connecting with living family members.  :)

LOVED getting to Skype with Lisa and Sean.  Look how happy they were to see me.  :) :) :)

The girls spent their 'daddy time' washing my car.  

They're almost as excited about me coming home as I am--almost.  I've got them beat, though.  I miss these girls like Texans miss Texas. And--I've got a pretty sweet date lined up.  Before I left for Finland in January, I over heard her tell her mom that when I come back in the summer, she's going to ask me to go with her to her weekly play date (I'm guessing I'll be the 'show and tell'!).  I've been looking forward to this date for SIX months.  Just 25 more days to go!!  :)