Fial part I

Anyone who knows me in real life probably knows that I used to live in England with my mum, a dog and an individual that could be classified as a stepdad, just because it's easier than saying "man-who-for-some-reason-lives-with-us-and-doesn't-get-the-hint-that-we-want-him-to-fuck-off-already". And I've heard a lot of step-parents have problems with their stepkids. I definitely had problems with this one. I don't have a single nice memory of this person, but I remembered two moments that were hilarious. Today I've written about only one of them because then I can write another blog entry this week and you don't explode from the sheer awesomeness of these two fails coming at you at once.

So, here's the first one. Some background information is that stepthing is getting on a bit (fingers crossed, people) and he's also extremely vain. My mum, who was feeling trolly, brought the subject up.
He didn't use lolspeak, but the language was too vulgar to write. He ran to the nearest mirror and started preening himself. That's a head, btw. I don't want to try to draw him because he's fugly and I'm worried the internet would breakz0rs.

I was amused by the vanity considering the person in question doesn't wash or brush his teeth and caught e-coli once just because. Notice the pink shirt. It was referred to in our house as "The Salmon-coloured Shirt. Not the Pink Shirt." I noticed an opportunity emerging, but mum was too quick. Continuing her trolling spree, mum interjected:
We think he thought it sounded regal, but mum was pissing herself laughing thinking about silverback gorillas. I decided to go for it anyway and see if my idea would work.
I posed the suggestion.



And many days passed with him prancing about thinking his hair was light black. The End.

Except for part II which is quite legendary if I do say so myself. Mother, do not spoil it.

I'm lazy

OR, as I like to define it, energy efficient. Adept at procrastination. But I'd like to add a new form of not getting stuff done added to the list and that is "puppystruck". In 12 days I'll be bringing home a gorgeous little ball of black and white cute. This little ball of black and white cute, to be exact:
Her official name is Viiman Tuisku, and if you're Finnish or understand Finnish, there's a blog devoted entirely to the puppies of the litter. The link goes straight to the pictures of puppies just in case you're non-Finnish, non-Finnish speaking or my mum. Hello, mum.

I'm not entirely procrastin..atic. I DID have a lot of work to do last week. And I just had nothing funny, thought-provoking or generally blog-publishing worthy. And doing a blog post with..uh.. "art" means that I have to draw on paper, draw on the computer and then write funny stuff about what I drew. That's fine, I like doing those things, but refer to the top of the post. I'm lazy.

So instead, in my free time, I did the following:

-read the new post on hyperboleandahalf
-found, read and ripped off Bake it in a cake
-did part of a jigsaw. Don't judge.
-read a couple of years of Dan Savage's sex advice column, Savage Love
-pissed myself laughing at my boyfriend impersonating some sort of missile on a chair
-watched, rewatched and "awwed" at the pictures and photos that are on facebook of the puppies.

The latter took up a considerable amount of my time because I discovered a new branch of physics: puppy physics. It's not as complicated as granny physics, there are no hidden dimensions and it centres on one rule: The force of attraction to a puppy is infinite. One does not get fed up with a puppy, even if it does poo and eat your shoes and try to nom your face/toes. I decided that since the puppy means a new family member for us, and I sometimes blog about another family member The Boyfriend, why not introduce my puppy - which is, for all intents and purposes going to be my baby. At least as important. I know it's a dog, you guys. But my (our, ofc) own little fluffball puppy tiny life that I (we, ofc) am responsible for.

And that, for me, is just a hairy baby. <3

Cohabitation

You come to know different sides of people when you move in with them. Boyfriend now knows for example, that I sometimes pee with the door open. On the other hand, I learnt that he sporadically breaks into song.

It happens in a well-elocuted fashion when he's expressing an opinion about something and sometimes a faint 'trololol' wafts its way over to my corner of the room on the breeze. He can't help it anymore. The meme has tunnelled into his brain. I wonder if he feels the same way about my open-door peeing.

My battle with rhinovirus

I started getting excited about Christmas in about October. I guess I jinxed my Christmas right there and then. I was pretty much perfectly healthy throughout the stretch between October and the 22nd of December, when a rhinovirus entered my nose when I wasn't looking.
Yes, I am on my skis indoors. Skiing outside is hard.

Instead of bringing peace and joy to Boyfriend's parents, with whom we stayed for the entire Christmas period, I brought nasal congestion and mucuous. Luckily no-one else caught the bug there since they politely declined from accepting my gift (the opportunity to further strengthen their immune systems by suffering through my cold themselves). Some people.

My cold began and progressed through Christmas in such a way that I didn't taste any of my Christmas dinner (boo) but I wasn't so tempted to stuff myself with Christmas goodies (yay). I bet you're interested, so I drew a picture:
You're welcome. And if you said "eww" or similar to 24-25.12, don't pretend you've never stuffed kleenex up both nostrils. I know I'm not the only one. Between 26.12-31.12 I had a cough that was reminiscent of a goose or a chainsmoker. Or both. Now I'm feeling a bit better, but boyfriend started feeling a bit ill yesterday (as depicted by the swirly line which is to be interpreted as indecisive as to whether or not you're coming down with something).

I've moved house and set up my business in a corner of the living room. This includes having a new computer, with a large screen. It was really hard to draw the cartoons this time because I'm used to using a mini laptop with my tablet, and now there's IMMENSE amounts of space. That's why there aren't more than two cartoons today.

Having set up my business in my corner of the living room, I have a shiny website too. You can visit it at www.kaannostehdas.fi if you speak Finnish. You can visit it if you don't speak Finnish, too, but you'll have to settle for admiring the graphics, which are under construction. I'll get around to translating it into English when my website guy (Leonard, whose name is Ari) gets back from Canada.

In the meantime, I hope that you were able to taste your Christmas dinner and that you have a happy 2011 :)

Where I was and why IKEA is dangerous

Ohai. Sorry I wasn't here. I got lots of stuff done and then regressed into a stressed out heap in a fleece watching hours of Frasier for some days. I got all my papers together and registered for the graduation ceremony on the 14th of December. My thesis got MCLA, which is pretty good :))

Just before I got my papers sorted, my popularity as a noob translator soared and I ended up knowing far too much about bridges. The world of concrete was opened up before me.

I had planned to start my business stuff on the 1st of December but for some unknown (but welcome) reason people wanted me to translate stuff in November already. I'm not one to turn away money that so desperately wants to take up shelter in my bank account, so I started organising stuff. See that chair in the picture there? Its name is Moses. Or something. I've spent a large chunk of my life in that chair, usually leaning back watching TV or spinning around on it because, well, it's still fun to do that. Unfortunately my chair didn't live as long as the biblical moses and I remembered something about not wanting a curvature of the spine so me and Ari set off to Swed- err, Ikea.

I wanted a chair, and more importantly, I wanted Ari to carry it home for me. Ari wanted some kitchen utensils so we were sorted. Ikea would not tempt us with its useless but desirable crap you never knew you wanted.



We were wrong. We totally wanted everything. Well, mostly everything. We sat on beds, divans and at desks. We wandered through the top floor of Ikea marvelling at stuff. Until we came to the armchair section. Ari found a chair that would set us back 6000 euros, but it was God in a chair. Leonard (ari) is about 6'3'' tall and this chair dwarfed him. It was so soft and comfortable it could have been a bed. It had a footstool that came out when you reclined in it. People walked past eyeing us with jealousy because they hadn't made it in time to sit in it before us. Unfortunately as yet we don't have the money for such an immense chair so I just returned home with a Verksam chair. Ergonomics hurt :(

On a lighter note, today is Finnish independence day. The independence fairy visits all conscientious citizens the night before independence day and leaves an independent state under your pillow. The fairy even chooses some people to go to a ball at the president's residence.

On an even better note, it's CHRISTMAS soon. Here's my advent calendar:

It has a mix of Christmassy stuff and stuff that I find interesting (strange quarks, for example). Christmas means that I am moving out of this place and away from stupid roommate, hooray!

On an even better note - I'm getting a PUPPY. Omg. I'm waiting to hear back from a lady who breeds Seiskari dogs, which are an old type of seal hunting dog from Finland. As yet they are an unrecognised breed of dog, which suits me fine. I can happily declare from my soapbox that I am not getting and will not ever get a purebred dog. Waiting to hear back from the lady is driving me nuts, but in a way it's like being a kid on Christmas Eve. Although it sucks to wait, it's kind of nice. You may expect tons of puppy pictures in the blog from now on.

During the week I seem to be glued to the computer with translations, but at the weekends I'll probably have time to update my blog with something vaguely funny. But I'm moving next week, so posting might be sporadic.

(This post is dedicated to Deborah, because she asks me to write stuff when I've been blog-lazy).

Granny Physics

Out of 22 Christmases (really, spellcheck? Just the one s?), I've probably been shopping for Christmas gifts on about 18 of those occasions. During these times I've observed an interesting fact: Grannies seem to follow their own laws of physics which are inapplicable to those under 60. I am the kind of person who decides what they want to buy and finds out beforehand how much it costs and where to buy it. In such cases, for example, Grannies have the innate ability to block exactly enough of a corridor to make impossible for you to get past, should you be in a hurry.
They can sense the speed you want to go at, and the speed that they are going at is relative to yours. Basically, the more of a hurry you're in, the more space the grandma takes up and the slower she goes. Also scientists have correlation between the amount of grannies about and the amount of things you need to get done divided by the amount of time you have to get them done in.

I don't even know if that's an equation, I just wanted it to sound official.

Here's the second thing I've noticed. Having read some material on string theory and finding out that there's a good possibility that there are more than 4 dimensions (and having watched stargate, where there are definitely more), I've decided that grannies have developed the ability (perhaps through cataracts) to see into these other dimensions.

This manifests in the 4 (3 + time) dimensions we lowly whippersnappers can see as a sudden, unexplained and abrupt stop in the trajectory of the granny. Usually this happens as you are planning to overtake the granny (which they can sense, you know) so you end up nearly running the granny over, or crashing into her back. Of course, this would be totally YOUR FAULT. Because you are young. And she is old.

The abrupt stop is followed by some sort of eerie silence where the granny is almost seemingly rooted to the spot. While you may think that nothing is going on upstairs, and are trying to figure out whether or not the old dear has dementia and thus gauging how nice you have to be to her when you ask her to get out of your way, the reality is that the granny is back on one of the other 11 dimensions that M-theory has speculated to exist. About now the granny starts to turn, but there is still no sign of higher-level intelligence or thought processes. You realise that she's just trying to decide which way to go.

Oh no. You've come dangerously close to the event horizon.

The event horizon is the circular region around a black hole beyond which is it impossible to escape the crushing force of gravity and you will become spaghettified (that's a real thing) as you are pulled mercilessly into the black hole. The nearer to get to the event horizon, the more time slows down, and this is the effect that you notice most when in the vicinity of the granny. You know where you want to go and how to get there, but for some reason the way that the granny was going about a minute ago was unsatisfactory and now she's trying to decide on whether or not to pick a new direction or to carry on as before.

Now you're in a lose-lose situation. Either the granny carries on going the way she was before - in which case she just wasted a good part of your day for no apparent reason, or:

The granny is now apparently oblivious to you. She is now entirely in her own dimension. Unfortunately you're stuck in this one, so you just feel the granny banging into you repeatedly. This has ACTUALLY happened. Instead of asking me to move out of the way (or going round), the old biddy in question actually tried (twice) to walk THROUGH me. Her quantum physics needed tweaking, otherwise she'd have been able to.

Of course, there are many kinds of granny. The one described above is reminiscent of an English or Helsinki granny. There are, however, a rare kind of lovely granny called the Finnish rural grandma which appears to have separated from mummo anglicus and mummo helsingiensis before the latter developed the art of being the annoying side of geriatric. :

Among other talents, the Finnish granny, or mummo fennicus is able to make seemingly unendless amounts of coffee and sweet buns appear from nowhere. As soon as you drink one cup, you are offered more coffee and buns, until the minimum quota (the pulla constant) is filled. This hovers at around one litre of coffee and three buns. Should you need woolly socks, locate a mummo fennicus, who will gladly knit you a pair. The mummo fennicus has walking poles for exercise but chooses to use them for good rather than evil, rarely frequenting shopping centres at Christmas and preferring instead to entertain people at home, feeding them buns and coffee. For the love of humanity, please try to aim for this kind of granny and keep your tartan bag out of the way at Christmas.

Some bad art

I now have marginally less to do, having dropped off my master's thesis at the department office of the faculty of arts. It's their problem now. It was an epic journey (from the computer centre to the office, I mean) that I might consider blogging about just because it was so ridiculous.

An eye of calm has transcended over my storm of batshit crazy busy. Perhaps I'll stop almost falling asleep as soon as I sit down (I'm very scared I'll do it on a bus and end up in a neighbouring city) and will be able to process information like a normal person again. I've been cycling about 16-18km a day, writing the thesis, reading for exams and trying to sort out the business stuff. But when I get to bed, I encounter setbacks. I hope - and I'm quite sure - that I'm not the only person this happens to, but I'd really appreciate some reassurance on this one.

Here goes. I come home from cycling and read/clean/write/whatever all day. It's bedtime so I get into my lovely baggy pyjamas, slip into sultan (the name of my IKEA bed) and relax. Then I get up to shut the window, go to get the water I forgot, get back into bed and then get annoyed because it's not parallel to the wall. Adjust. Then I relax.
See how sensible the time is? 11pm. Twenty-three hundred hours. At around this time I am struck with a legitimate worry.
The offending thought is usually something of unsurmounted importance that would surely win me a nobel prize for science AND literature in one go, should I have included it in my thesis. I consider getting out of bed and editing my thesis, but sultan is comfy. The particular incident that made me think about blogging this was that I had run out of milk. Let's stick with that. I was going through a porridge phase and used about half a carton of milk per morning fer me oats. Okay. No porridge. That sucks. I'll buy milk tomorrow. Problem solved.

Seriously milk, you aren't that important. It's as if my mind is playing squash (is that the one where you smack a ball against a wall and it rebounds? Sort of like tennis for people with no friends?) with my awareness of my lack of milk.
Oh come ON. It's not like you can buy milk now anyway, the shop is shut. Write it on a post it so you remember to buy milk in the morning. (You won't see the post it note and will be surprised that you have no milk, even though you're wasting time faffing about having no milk now).

Guess who can't make cereal or porridge in the morning? YOU! Because you have no milk.

Some people probably stay awake at night pondering world hunger or what colour petrol is, but I, my friends, am super aware of dairy. It's crazy o'clock and my brain is a stuck record. Really. I have done everything in my power to ensure that not only will I KNOW upon my awakening that I have no fucking milk, but this fact will only prompt me to buy more. My brain finally gives up and turns off for the night.
You know what's really annoying? I was so concerned about missing out on my healthy nutritious porridge at night time, but I invariably wake up like:
You don't need milk for toast.

On a side note, have you noticed that something can really stress you out in the morning while you're in bed laying down, but the minute you sit up, everything seems much better? You don't even have to get out of bed, sometimes just sitting up works. Wtf?