Birthday Cabin Trip: Crunchy Snow

I asked for the whole weekend off so that we could spend time at the cabin. Fortunately for us, for the past few days the temperature had dropped down a lot compared to the days before. That meant that it was easier to walk along the snowy path towards the lake he he...because the snow had frozen quite well so that our feet stayed on top of the snow quite well.

We arrived at the cabin at around 5 pm and it was already so dark. There was a beautiful orange full moon hanging low above the horizon and it was a starry night as well! The temperature was -18'C. Funnily enough, the inside of the cabin was only about -6'C he he he...

Here's a pic of R2 trying to get some water from the frozen lake for the sauna. We were afraid it'd be so hard to get the water again, but thankfully the ice layer wasn't too thick. I remember one time it took maybe half an hour for him to use the tools before we could get some water (we almost gave up and R2 was sweating so much after all the hard work!!!):

 
By the time we got the cabin ready, I saw a halo around the moon, but it was SO hard to get good pics of it. One of the reasons was that when it got that cold, it was hard to press the button of the camera after a while. My fingers were freeeeezzzziiinnngggg after taking lots of pics (some of them were failures!). Here are some pics anyway...

Can you see the stars in the next pic? My monitor's setting is a bit darker than normal, so I'm not sure if it's still too dark or not...hmmmmhhh...

Woke up at around 10.30 am the next day. The sun had just started rising by then and it was gorgeous. Here are a few sunrise pics I took.

And we left the cabin at around 13.30 (around the time when the sun was just about to set). Here is a pic of the lovely pinkish sky at sunset:

Oh yeah, on Friday morning I made some cupcakes from a cupcake mix (with sourcream topping plus brown sugar sprinkles). Easy to make and yummy enough for us ha ha...here's the pic!

And here are some pics of tilhi/waxwings. I stood only a few steps away from them, can you believe it? One of the perks of living in Lapland ha ha ha ha...Aren't they SO cute and round??? :-D It got so dark already by then so I had to fix the pics a little...Hope you enjoy the pics! :-D

P.S. As you probably notice, there's not that much snow left 'coz until a few weeks ago the temperature got really warm, so most of the snow had melted! However, yesterday in southern Finland there was snowstorm in many places that brought so much snow (as much as 35 cm or so in Helsinki if I remember correctly).