Sini Tuulia

I and a bunch of friends were staying at a criminally badly run rented forest cottage somewhere in Lapland. Criminally quite literally, it was very negligent and terrible because it was an exploitative and money laundering operation by the local rented cabins and AirBnB mafia!
Eventually someone called the lads on us, and then we were running away through cellars and the snow and such because who knows what they were going to do to us, but the four rough looking men caught up anyway. Two of them had dogs, and they were restless.

Me, suddenly overcome by Presence of Dog: "Oh, sweeties, it's okay! It's okay! Are you rattled because you did such a good job of tracking us and didn't get thanked or treats yet! Good dogs!"
One of the men discreetly and subtly gives his lovely Finnish Spitz some treats from a pocket, dead silent. The other man is also silent, but instead drags his barking German shepherd to his flank by the collar. I instantly deem this first man probably not a bastard and the second man almost certainly a bastard. This second man and his two friends no longer existed to me except as vaguely threatening background noise. Dog!

The rest of my friends then worriedly looked on as I started telling the Spitz what a good dog it was while not trying to touch or get closer, and started asking what its name was and so on.

I swear, I'm even more like this when I'm asleep! 😆

Mar 16 at 10:39amWeb
Show threadSini TuuliaMar 16
They're very very pretty and potentially very very good dogs, in general. But it's regrettably easy to ruin them, and they're very very loud. Wikipedia: “The breed barks at anything perceived to be out of the ordinary. -- The Finnish Spitz can bark as many as 160 times per minute.”
Show threadSini TuuliaMar 16
There's this old Finnish measurement of distance, peninkulma. It's about 10 kilometres, and is said to come from the old form of the word dog peni, and kuuluma, the distance you can hear a sound at... So it can be said that it's about a cool 10 kilometres that you could hear the bark of a Finnish Spitz, and this feels very accurate based on every one of them I've met 😅
Show threadNiko PoikulainenMar 16
@sinituulia Jos koira tulee sanasta koiras, mistä tulee sana peni?
Show threadSini TuuliaMar 16
@niko Oon 101% prosenttia varma että en tiiä mistä kumpikaan sana tulee, lol
Show threadMartin Vermeer FCDMar 16
@sinituulia @niko Pentu = young mammal?
Show threadEivind (like the Terrible) ✨Mar 16
@sinituulia suspected the unit might be connected to the Scandi mile that's standardized to exactly ten kilometers now, but used to have a myriad (pun intended) different definitions in the past.
Show threadSini TuuliaMar 16
@eivind The thing that was called peninkulma meant different distances in different regions before the Swedish Crown decreed that it was time to stop that nonsense and let it be the same as it was in Sweden - as did pretty much anything in Finland at the time 😄
Show threadSimon dē Gulielmō 🐧Mar 16
@sinituulia Ouch!
Show threadWonderdog 🏳️‍🌈Mar 16
@sinituulia ARF! (This post brought to you by my meeting a Finnish Spitz on my recent holiday. I got to pat a lot of dogs, mostly poodles, but the Spitz had OPINIONS.)
Show threadMartin Vermeer FCDMar 16
@sinituulia And then there is poronkusema 🤣