163: Winter's knocking on the door

It was -5°C this evening and +2°C in the afternoon. I'm advised to start wearing my winter jacket already. I guess it's time to start bulking up with all the layers.


It rained sleet on Sunday (quite heavily too), and the jakun me ran down the stairs asking, 'Is this hail? Is this hail? Is this hail?' Cos it was small bits of frozen water and it was making noise on the window :P And yea, I damn hadap wanna see hail la. It turned everything white afterwards; the lawn, the roofs, the roads, and the car. The road was a little icy from the heavy sleet in the afternoon, so I was told to try to drive around nearby to have a feel of it.


But first, I had to scrape and brush the layer of ice away from the windshield and windows. Man, it was both freezing cold and tiring! I had my jacket and snow boots on, and 2 pairs of gloves. Yet, my fingers were painful from the cold. And this is only a very thin layer of ice. Come real winter, it's gonna be worse =(


This was the most whiteness I've seen so far, for this season at least. It's still autumn, technically. Winter starts in December and in Finland, November is a month where you'll get lots of rain and sleet. Not the best month. A lot of Finns travel south during this month for quick, warm getaways.

I still get excited every time it snows. Or in this case, see white fluffy things raining from the sky. This time, the white stuff stayed and changed the landscape, brightening everything even when it was near sunset. It literally put a smile on my face, made me get up every 30secs just to check out the view from my window, and I made shoe prints in the white lawn.

It has been a day since, and the sun was up today. Still, the white stuff stayed, at least in Nummela. But it was different in Helsinki. It's not white yet.


It now gets dark at about 4.45pm. The picture above was taken at about 3pm, when the sun was setting. And we've shifted our time back to GMT+2:00, which means we're now 6hours behind Malaysian time. Longer days, shorter nights. But honestly, it doesn't feel very much different now that it has been a week.

Funny though, I thought I would now be able to wake up earlier since the sun would now rise one hour earlier. But I still can't. And I get tired way earlier. Is it because of the 1hour change or the lack of light? *shrug*