It’s been a few months since I posted here.  It’s not because I didn’t have topics or time but just….life happened.  Sometimes when that happens, best thing to do is to take a step back, recover and move forward… I even halted 4Scifun FB and Instagram posts right in the middle of a project (posting one element a day) and will be resuming them next week as well.  After a few weeks of break, it took another few weeks to finally sit down and write.  You know how it goes right…you take a break from exercising for a few days/weeks because of legitimate reason but then takes even longer to get back into exercising again…

Spring went and summer came.  Another school year finished .  And just as the schools were finishing up here (almost 6 weeks ago), I officially became a student.  I am now a Doctoral student of Technology and Business Management at Tampere University.   Not only I get to become a student again, my interest in science education, hands-on learning, science fairs became part of my research!!  Looking forward to an exciting journey in the following few years.  This topic is close to my heart for more than a decade now.  I am thrilled I can combine my experience in high-tech world with Science & kids as part of research.

Summers are always so beautiful in Finland.  This year summer is wetter and colder.  Rain in summer is something I have hard time getting used to.  Both in India and California, summers it rarely rains.  But in Finland it’s quite common to have rain in summer.  All this rain of course made the forests beautifully green, flowers blooming and berries growing in abundance.  It also means extra supply of mosquitoes but hey! nothing good comes for free right:) . While mosquito bites are annoying and initially body reacts to the bites but at least we don’t have to worry about diseases from them.  Maybe it’s the cold winters that does the trick but they are just a nuisance and nothing else.   It’s also an amazing time to go fishing in the lake.  Peaceful lakes with birds chirping away, I started to really like fishing.  A few weeks ago, we went fishing and on a rock in the middle of the lake, we saw a gull egg with no gulls nearby:( . It is sooo pretty!

This year, we built a greenhouse to attempt growing tomatoes, eggplants etc.  So far they seem to be doing well although I still need to perfect how to pollinate the plants more effectively.  Tomatoes cannot grow outside in Finland.  It’s not warm enough.  I do see plenty of “Finnish grown” tomatoes in season.  One of my friends told me about a “Tomato festival” in Finland!  So, we did go check it out.  It’s not as big as say, the Garlic festival in Gilroy, California but got some good tomatoes and tips to grow them in greenhouse:) After that trip, did some hand-pollination to tomatoes and eggplants and finally seeing the results!

If you ask my son, what his favorite memory of Finland is before we moved back here, he would always reply with “going to beach sauna at grandparents home, swim in the lake, go back to sauna (and repeat) followed by eating the sausages cooked over fireplace by grandpa”.  It’s awesome to witness that happiness in all the kids (and grandpa) every year!.  While having one of those visits early summer, grandpa was showing the kids how to make a whistle out of Willow branch!  I recorded it hastily with my phone just in case I forget how to make it in future.  Quite cool little handy thing to learn!

And Oh! While on the break, I was also thinking of the topic(s) I would like to add to blogging apart from my life in Finland. It might not come exactly as a surprise but the topic of “Science”, “kids” and “innovation” kept coming to my mind.  So, I will try to share a few thoughts on that as well.