Good Monday!

Good Morning Friends. Happy Monday! Gab, the current Diva at TSR posted this hilarious bit of March 16th trivia:

March 16th: Feast day of St Urho, the grasshopper slayer

Finland's answer to Ireland's St Patrick, Urho expelled the grasshoppers from Finland. Raising his staff, he intoned, "Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to hell!", and they accommodated him, and the country's wine-grape crop was saved forever. Of course, St Urho is a made-up saint, just for fun.

Some say that a Finnish-American store owner in Minnesota, USA, became weary of his Irish-American employees always asking for a day off on March 17 in honour of St Patrick, and it was he who invented St Urho. Waverly Fitzgerald (School of the Seasons) says that it was at a 1856 St Patrick's Day party that the saint, whose name means 'hero', was first mooted. There are other explanations.

All over the USA, Finnish Americans commemorate today as a national celebration. For example, the town of Hood River, Oregon, celebrates with a parade in which locals are costumed as locusts, shouting "Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to hell!" A large fibreglass statue is at Menahga, Minnesota ('Home of St Urho') to the saint who never was.

Whether Finland ever had a wine industry, and the fact that there are still grasshoppers in that country, are matters to puzzle the scholars."

I found a very cool Ning community recently called 52 sketches 52 weeks. This is my LO based on last weeks sketch:



I'd already printed the photo block and the LO took me about ten minutes. I find limiting myself to a page kit and nothing else really speeds up the process. Sometimes you have an hour to spare - but sometimes you don't. YKWIM?