Gray paper towels

Since having become a single again, I have occasionally been out with friends for a drink or two and never seize to be surprised by the lack of style in even more posh and expensive bars pubs and establishments. They have no serviettes to offer you!
If you ask when ordering your drinks in a bar, and as I am quite accident prone I always ask.
The closest they can come up with is gray towels from recycled paper. I mean the paper towels come good in hand when ever an accident happens, and you need something to wipe with fast, but I can under no circumstances see them as serviettes or paper doilies.
Anyway, I am still single and looking, so no luck with the bar hopping so far.

Laying off

Best friend of mine, actually resident here in Finland for some time now, just had a rough day at the job.

Or maybe it was more a rough moment at the job, the rough comes, when finally realizing what really took place at work earlier today. Or if realizing it is taking longer, maybe, what yesterday took place at work...

She was a about 6 months ago promoted to head of office and got the appropriate pay rise to go with the amount of working hours required. At beginning of December she was told she would keep her salary but was demoted and got a new boss. Today an hour after having arrived on the local she was fired without notice.

She was told to just pack her things and leave as they wanted to become more cost efficient.

Having called her after her e-mail where she told me about her notice I told her it was better today, as she still has until end of January to get a new job and being a single she is easily relocated to any city in Europe. Her being a homesick girl I told not say the world but I meant it with all of my heart, and she now has two more weeks to play with compared to having had her notice before Xmas. So, something good with hearing the news. More time. So now she is leaving the city in order to get some forest cleared out of small bushes growing, one hell of a good way to let go of any aggressions, I must say with a thorough sauna to relax with afterwards.

So this is really the reality of the Finnish people, and according to recently done Gallups, most people are afraid of becoming unemployed or getting laid off for some time.

At the same time the prime minister is asking people to consume as much Finnish produce and products as possible.
And here finally comes my question, with what Euros are we to consume anything?

No time to waste

I have lately been quite busy with getting my book ready to present for publishers, and now it finally is ready in three languages.

Just to slip in the post and mail to hopefully well chosen recipients, or to THE one that will publish it. And preferably by Christmas time as it is a book about Xmas.

The tedious bit about it has been printing all the copies, sorting them out with the illustrations and accompanying letters and presentations. I would have gotten it ready by end of the week but run out of envelopes and problems to sort out jammed into the same time and I had to prioritize the more acute things. But I am glad this is no professional envelope licking, like a political campaign I have volunteered to stuff envelopes and fortunately now I can get some pre-taped envelopes as I ran out of the old fashioned lickable ones. Colour cartridges for the printer and paper to print on it with were the other things I run out of, so I have some acute and serious shopping to do.

Time flies by and now we are already into end of May, soon to begin June. And I have forgotten about three dozen of good subjects to blog about have. Some made it to getting written down on a piece of paper, others I just thought about and forgot. All the same, you can never get time back and the time I have been spending off line has not been wasted.

School will soon be out with all the traditional festivities that come along with it and the beginning of the summer season with the occasional weddings and a few confirmations compulsory to attend to together with one “big” anniversary during the Midsummer weekend that might not be celebrated at all, as the person in question has been hospitalized for some time now and is more or less presumed not to return home anymore.

A girlfriend that just had to attend to a funeral on Friday has been so stressed with overtime at work that she was happy to have it to attend to get at least one day off in order to get rest some.

Knocked off my feet

I really had no idea of how hard the death of my dear friend would affect me until it one day did hit me and almost knocked me off my feet.

Just keeping going with my ordinary daily routines for normality’s sake was maybe the thing I needed to do right then, but now I seem to be surfacing from my deep grief and become normal again. Somehow it seems that a really bad flu did the trick and gave me the time and needed slowing down to realize what had happened and gave the necessary time to get through my feelings.

Anyway, while my Blog has been inactive, I still have had ideas of what I have wanted to write about, so even if I might not have put them down in letters in rows forming readable words, I have been thinking. So now I hope I will be able to maintain my normal blogging routine unless this spring hits me with massive doses of pollen and knock me down a second time.

Offspring has been quite worried and even went down to the market to get me some smoked herring to cheer me up, but unfortunately my throat was too sore at the time being I did not enjoy them as much as I ordinarily would have. But they say it is the thought that counts, and the thought was beautiful.

Nouveau traditions

Since moving to Finland our family has acquired some new traditions, some are quite nice and others come out of the necessity to stay sane.

One more annoying one is the ringing early in the morning on Palmsunday, at lest according to the offspring. Some of our neighbourhood's kids are quite early risers and that annoys the most our offspring who would like to stay in bed late. Currently the new tradition is to remember to remove the doorbells cover in order to avoid it from making the ringing noise it produces with the cover on before entering bed early in the morning, or late in the night, depending on how you look at it.

I guess this would normally mean no harm, we would just have less kids ringing on the door, but it does not erase the knocks on the door which I find more annoying. Palmsunday, which is the Sunday before Easter and was last Sunday, is the day for kids to go out and collect sweets going from door to door the neighbourhood all day long and doing a few re-rounds if only possible to the good places they got the best treats.

This particular Sunday it causes us a bit of discomfort with the doorbell out of function as we had some friends coming over for dinner, and them having left home without a mobile phone in order to stay out of touch in order to be off duty we did not know they were behind the door ringing the dysfunctional doorbell. Took a while for them to come to think of the old fashioned but for so many centuries functional way of knocking on the door instead of the ringing wonders of the modern world. Or maybe they were just hungry?

Anyway, today is long Friday, actually not the longest day of the year, that is midsummer’s night this year, right on the dot in the almanac where it should be. Today is the other day of the year when the day and night are equally long. So up from this day there should be a difference to the days really getting longer and longer.

And that not just in the biblical sense.

Lock and key

In Finland there is one big lock manufacturing company whose locks are in estimated 90% of all doors in the country.

Now this company has for two years been scrutinized by the Finnish Competition Authority as they have been accused of charging higher prices as punishment of lock-smiths who have has other products manufacturer’s products on display in addition to their brand. Some so called copy-protected keys sold by the manufacturer now turns out not to be copy-protected after all, and locksmiths certified by the company in question have not been allowed to copy keys of which the copy protection have already expired. As a matter of fact the keys are not in any way protected from copying and the patent runs out in five years and that it then apparently can been copied without any key coder, which is the general consumer is not informed about.

Anyway, a very close and dear friend of mine has for some time been terminally ill and he has now developed multi-organ failure and it is now only a matter of days or maybe weeks if lucky at most and increasing his life quality and making his last moments in life remains the on thing that still can be done for him so he is currently saying his goodbyes to his family and life itself.

I know there is a time to say goodbye, in many ways during our lives, people divorcing, moving away but death is absolutely definitive, there is no more. No chance you might accidentally ever bump into some long time lost friend as he will be dead and gone.

Loosing our dear and near ones is always sad and I will especially much miss this dear friend, as he is one of them who has been there for me through thick and thin for decades, which I can unfortunately not say for all of my “old” friends. Some good friends we seem to miss along the course of time.

This friend of mine has been there for me when he has been needed even now that we live in different countries and the distance is long, and our friendship has lasted undisturbed through ex-wives, ex-fiancés, husbands and even one current very suspicious and extremely jealous wife.

By the way, is he living abroad or am I living abroad?!?

Still my fond memories of our nightly phone conversations going on for hours over the years will remain with me for as long as I live. The two of us have celebrated many things and life in general together with hundreds of kilometres apart with the aid of one spectacularly innovative invention, the phone with the aid of some wine to make the occasion even more festive. And as our phone calls have been free of charge now for some time with the ever so useful Internet they have been able to go on for much longer than they used to when either of us still had to pay for them.

It is sad that I can not be there with him, to see him one more last time now, but we have already said our goodbyes some time ago but I still feel very sad as this is a definitive one, one goodbye for ever long.

I can’t say I won’t be sad when the time finally arrives, nor that I won’t cry, and a lot if I know myself at all but at least I am as prepared as I can possibly be for the inevitable thing.

Dear friend of mine, I will miss you and our long conversations…

Too much of the good

Having had a very busy autumn and Xmas time an acquaintance of the family just got one weeks sick leave as she cut his finger on chip and not of course being allowed to work in her profession with open wounds because of the infection risk with his four stitches right next to his left hand thumb, she was ordered one week to let it heal, remove the stitches and then go back to work.

This actually came in very conveniently for her as she had not had any vacation and only a few days off once for almost two years and here am I being busy entertaining her. I would not quite say she is a pain in the a** but she is a bit tedious right at this instance as I have things I would have needed to be done, my special favourite hate object number one, official paper work with of course a deadline to be handed in promptly, and being brought up to be polite I have no idea of how to tell her about it. She is a good friend, and I love her dearly but as I am used to being home alone minding my own business all day long, she is a drag to have to entertain as she has thought of nothing better to do than visit her friend. At least she goes home to her family in the evenings and is not spending the nights here as well, so I might catch up with the deadline in time anyway.

Having a friend over is nice of course for a while, but her spending the day here with endless chats over coffee that keeps on going for days is not my cup of tea, if you get what I mean. Thank god there still was some cake left over from Sunday to go with the endless cups of coffee, and tomorrow I have a previous appointment I can not get out of.

Sometimes there can be too much of good things.

It’s a secret

I was having lunch with one of my girl friends the other day and all of a sudden her mobile phone rang, which is not that unusual in itself but her answering it while we were having a nice lunch and an even better discussion of our respective spouses not to mention all about our offspring’s’ latest explorations into real life and relationships.

As the sounds on her mobile had been turned up loud enough for me to hear the caller’s voice and as I thought I recognized the voice on the phone I made a joke about it being Brad Pitt as she put her phone down on the table. And my funny remark fell limply on the table to continue straight for the floor as my friend me that it really was him and I was totally flabbergasted. I could not believe my ears; she had been on the phone with one of the most recognized men in the whole world!

My friend told me that she had known Brad Pitt since their early childhood and as such had forgotten to mention about it to me, as he is just Brad for her and always has been. Well, I am no big fan of Brad Pitt anyway, I would much have preferred it to have been Sean Connery for whom I have had a soft spot since my early teenage, and anyway, to tell you the truth it was not really Brad Pitt, but it was someone just as famous as Brad Pitt, and he is not a film star but a world famous rock star instead and as I am not at liberty to tell you who it really was it will have to stay a secret.

At least until the day I run into him which was the reason for the call in the first place, that this childhood friend of my friend’s is coming here to Finland, and of course incognito to everyone’s great disappointment so no one will know except the few chosen ones to meet him in real life.

Anyway, Cow & chicken, my favourite cartoon is back for me to enjoy and I am very lucky to be the only one in the household to like the show so I am always left alone at 2 PM to watch it which is a nice change now with the Xmas vacations on and full house with offspring to my daily nuisance. I have for a long time been wondering about the minds of these people who come up with these ideas for various cartoons such as Cow & chicken or even South Park which I am not that great a fan for. Making the cartoons for years and years and always coming up with fresh, new ideas for the shows, the crazier the merrier.

And talking about TV, I always thought MTV was a music channel but to my big surprise there was a movie on one of the Xmas holidays, My Sweet sixteen. I have never understood why there are the reality shows on MTV either, but then I do not understand reality TV anyway. At least in my youth there was music, even though they tended to be the same songs over and over again, the times played determined by how much the artist in question apparently had paid to get on air, it all resulting in the same unequal distribution of good music and great artists or bad performers and hideous songs.

Even the personal choice lists of songs on MTV made by viewers themselves must have been chosen in the same manner, keeping in mind that is paying the big bucks, the record companies of course. And to let you in on a big secret, you have certainly been seeing this rock star; that I am about to meet some day in the near future, many, many times lately, both on MTV and the Finnish channels as his band has just released a new album.

Beaujolais Nouveau 2007

The strangest thing happened today I was actually ten minutes too early for the Alko shop to open but at least I did know to get to the right one!

The same one will be kept open today and the rest of this week for that matter which might be good to know if any unexpected overnight guest surprises us, even if I doubt that.

Anyway, Alko did not open until 12.30 pm differing from the usual 9 am with the strike of the employees beginning this morning to end on Saturday, and so I had to stay in line outside the shop in question with about three dozen people for about ten minutes. In this particular shop the staff consisting of the supervisors of several other shops in the near by area had apparent difficulties in getting the lights on and the cashier’s into working properly and they opened three minutes past their opening hours. During this awaiting the comments in the queue were quite harsh.

There were no happy faces and nobody was smiling or laughing, this was serious matter!

Someone said in honest between his firmly clenched teeth that if he got into the shop he would no go out without having purchased all he could carry and on his credit card. Severe looks and growling sounds were thrown at the passers by as they disturbed the queue that had formed waiting for the shop to open. I was about the tenth to get into the store and was second in line to get out as the Beaujolais Nouveau I was there to get was right in front of me when entering. It took me about 30 seconds to get in and out of there and get in line for the check out.

One strange Finnish custom is to not keep the receipt, and I have been wondering about that as you can never prove that you bought anything, as even the wine or liquor bottles might be deficit.

Anyway, the cashier was quite happy with punching in the two very first bottles of this year’s Beaujolais Nouveau. After that it was time for mum to go and buy some new books for the offspring to use in high-school and get home early enough in order to get everything in order for the often not until nocturnally ending tasting of the wine. Fortunately this is the one day in the year the offspring has learned there is no use to talking sense to dear old mum. She is probably too far into tasting the wine with her friends, and you'd better be quiet and safe out of sight or otherwise you'll be asked unwanted questions if not by her then her friends.

One thing, I miss the popping of the corks like on the bottles of last year.

I know, I know, the screw tops are much better to keep the wine in perfect order, but still the popping of the cork was an enjoyable thing to do. Kind of made it more festive.

So sad

It is a terrible thing to go on the last trip with your beloved pet to get it cremated. The trip to the crematorium was one of the longest ones I have ever been on, not in miles but in time and emotion, having to leave her there to never see her again. Guess the funeral wont be any less easier than this drive was.
And our other now orphaned cat is expressing his feelings of missing his mum by meowing loudly all of a sudden, waiting by the door for his mum to reappear from somewhere.
How sad can life be?

Helping out

A strange thing I have noticed here in Finland is that sometimes when you are asked to help you are out of some peculiar reason meant to ask when it is convenient for the help you have promised to give. Like for instance when a friend needed help with help with babysitting a toddler with chicken-pox in the early feverish stage just to run a couple of errands on her own like the pharmacists and so on. She never managed to ask me when it was convenient for me to baby-sit, or whether I could baby-sit at a certain time she wanted to go out. In the end she got angry with me as I did not understand that I was expected to have an opinion when she wanted my favour so in the end she told me off by phone in not a very nice way.

How was I supposed to know what she wanted without her either telling or asking me? It’s like when moving your friends don’t arrive to help you with carrying your furniture until the next day when you’re packed gone and unpacked in the new place.

The weather was supposed to be raining all day with intermittent rain showers and as thus the day was completely wrongly planned as most part of this lovely sunny day has been spent indoors cooking after a short shopping trip down to the market when the rain was pouring down earlier this morning.

After a lot of peeling of carrots, beetroots and onions a great deal of chopping were made on the peeled carrots, beetroots, onions and cabbage for the annual bortsch soup. It has now been simmering on the stove in a large saucepan for hours to obtain the right taste. Bortsch soup has one advantage before many other soups, it gets just better for every time you heat it up and most part of it goes in the freezer to be savoured on cold winter nights together with some soured cream. I also managed to get a medium sized pumpkin as pumpkins tend to come in an oversized format, too big for me to handle on my own. So some pumpkin has also been simmering on heat for the traditional pumpkin pie and a very nice pumpkin pickle I learned to know here in Finland and have become very fond of.

Tomorrow is supposed to be a sunny day so the plan is to go mushroom picking but as the weather turned out to be this nice today I wonder if the weather Gods will be gracious enough to let us go out in the woods without getting wet all through.

Off for the day

Today more and more foreign-born get employed here in Finland as the lack of workers has begun to show, where as in the 1990’s recession you could not even get a cleaning job if you were not fluent in Finnish. The biggest problem seems to be getting new trained employees out into the countryside outside the main city areas.

Anyway, now it is hot and the sun is shining from a clear blue sky and I am off to the countryside to visit some friends spending the day there with them together with the offspring so daddy will be home alone tonight. We will just see what state our home is when dear spouse of mine has been home alone with the cats!

Adjustments needed

How well do we know the people living with us our daily lives?

What do we really know about our own family, friends, relatives, neighbours and colleagues?

When a person you know pretty well hit the headlines, is news on all the front pages having done something extremely violent you just can't believe it is true. Someone I once knew quite well, once years ago indeed, just hit the headlines in another European country.

The place mentioned in the papers in the stories telling what happened is right, the pictures prove it even though no faces are recognizable and no names are mentioned and the violent temper was there all along but I still have problems to believe the fact, as it is a fact, someone going to those measures and now spending time in prison.

The offspring was supposed to go visit there, well guess the vacations plans this summer need some adjustment and pretty fast.

Lost friendship

Friendship is a strange thing, it can stay strong if you work on it or you just leave it and it withers and dies.

There are different types of friendships, friends that you get along with your social status, they come with the family you were born in and who they used to socialize with. Very few friends are truly chosen by our selves and most of our friends come along with something else, there are classmates and friends you had in school, the ones you studied along with to get a profession and your colleagues, the ones you work with and your former colleagues.

Then there are the friends of your spouse, his fellow students, colleagues from work and the clubs you socialize in, the parents from your children’s school, your neighbours and so on.

I have moved around quite a lot during my life time, so my closest friends were the ones that normally lived the farthest away. They seemed to always live elsewhere than where I was living, but they always stayed closest to my heart. Meeting them has always been like just seeing them yesterday and catching up with news has been great fun.

Some friends I am sad to have lost contact with during the years, and some I could not care less about, life being an ever changing element and us having to adapt with it to all its’ changes. We sometimes loose what is essential in our relationships and it all becomes so material and the essence, or the soul, of the friendship is lost.

I am especially sad about one friendship gone sour, having been friends for over 25 years and been the closest you can get, sometimes even closer than my proper sister. It really hurts, and I do feel let down, I miss our friendship as it used to be. I ask myself if it ever was what I thought it was, if it all was pretending from the beginning. It is not that we have lost contact completely, it is not just worth the while anymore, just “hello, nice weather today” things that I do not care much for and just keeping in touch out of an old habit.

I need more substance to a friendship than that. Friendship is about caring and giving, about listening when needed to and just being there…

We have a saying in our family, and that is “better guests” and this goes for “better friends” as well, I have noticed.
The “better guests” are the ones you invite out of etiquette because you have to, because they expect you to invite them as you are frequently invited to their homes and they are most probable to stay out of contact when you really need a friend or something bad happens to you. Like loosing your job or becoming ill.

Your real friends might not have a fancy car, or have well paid job, but still they are your friends, you might have known them since your early childhood, or pre-school years and they know who you really are. They do not even see the façade you are trying to put up with your “social” friends. Life is so short, and our time is limited, and we waste most of it making it more hectic than it need to be, tending to forget the most important and precious things in our lives after our own well-being, our families and our friends…

Condensed friendship

Do you suffer from migraines?

If you do not then you will probably not understand why I have not been able to post lately. Migraine is something I do not even wish my worst enemies, that is if I had any.

I sometimes wonder about people who do not suffer from headaches at all, imagine, there actually are people who do not have headaches, so how would they understand if your head hurts like the only thing you wish for is to die? And that you would do just anything to die when a real bad migraine hits you?

The closest I can come to think of to explain migraine to anyone whom do not suffer from it would be giving birth to a child, but hey, how do you explain that even to your own husband?

Well, as it happens my husband has migraines too so he gets the idea. As a matter of fact he used to have worser spells than I and he also suffered from the more often than I did. One thing that is good with getting older though, you dot not get your migraines as often as when younger.

I am happy to grow old!

Baking a cake

I wonder what is with us people as we always tend to leave the things we have a deadline for to the latest possible moment to have them done?

As I once made a delicious cake and promised to bake on for the birthday of a friend once, it now has become a tradition for me to make the cake every year for the celebration.

Well, in between the baking I today found out that it is not only the liquorice-wrapper that is going to be changed into something new after having been the same for 80 years. Last year the candy-bar named Geisha from the same manufacturer lost its’ beautiful geisha-girl from the wrapper.

Anyway, as I am not the candy eating type as you might have understood as I did not notice it before it was mentioned on the news, it came as a complete surprise. The candy-bar is quite delicious and I do buy it now and then, but as you might guess have not done so recently.

The geisha-girl was probably on the wrapper for 80 years too and the producer Fazer removed her “to be able to expand on the International market” and not to spread "racial stereotypes". Who can be offended by a Japanese girl dressed in her traditional kimono on a candy-paper? The coloured boy I can somehow understand.

Anyway, got to go now, cake cooled down and ready for the icing.

We must do lunch one day!

Isn’t that the most convenient and nice little phrase to say just being polite and without meaning it.
“We must do lunch”, or “Call me next week”!

But just saying that without meaning it can cause you problems here in Finland. People here take your word for more seriously than just politeness. Saying a courteous non-committal “we must do lunch” the Finns really respect that you have made a promise to have lunch and they expect you to have the lunch with them!

So keep in mind what you say and how you say it, and also be in time for your lunches.

Invitations by texting

The weather has been really nice this weekend. It has not been too cold for any outdoor-sports but I have stayed indoors anyway, cuddled up in my bed reading a good book and a nice cup of tea feeling lazy. I am glad there are no dinner-parties needing to attend to neither to host any.

Just in two weeks time there is an occasion I have to host, a birthday-party, so am doing some planning already. The invitations were already sent but I have not yet got their answers back and they are not due until next Sunday at latest by either e-mail or SMS or text-message.

Text-messaging is quite handy in these matters, absolutely ghastly impersonal, but still it is in the persons hand and can't be forgotten about in the same way as an invitation card could get misplaced.

I actually made the invitations by phone, but sent a reminder about it by e-mail as this is more a casual gathering and not THE social event of the year.

As rest of Europe has become more snow that usual, at the same time we have just had our even every year share of it, even though they say it is more wintry now than usually this year of spring, cause it is spring here even as you can't see it yet.