rakkauden ja epätoivon laulu

Now with Linux!
A couple of weeks ago my computer decided that its HDD had developed more bad sectors than it was able to deal with, so it started going U NOE I'M ABOUT TO DIE ANYTIME NOW SO BACK UP UR STUFF AND REPLACE ME KTHXBAI. Unfortunately I also forgot to take my meds that day. But despite scrambling to back up my stuff (thank you 1TB portable HDD), I found that I didn't feel as, hmm, emotionally panicked (i.e. OMG THE WORLD IS GOING TO END) as I would normally have in the past.

After non-panicking and faffing about with the Ubuntu LiveCD for a few days, I discovered that the warranty on my computer goes until the end of August, so tech support sent me a new drive (two-day delivery, wow) and Keith helped me put it in last Friday.

By then I'd already decided that I was going to put Ubuntu on it. After all, that was what I was trying to do when my old laptop was close to dying a couple of years ago. (I replaced it with my current desktop, and the laptop went to Keith's collection.) I like that not only is Linux Finnish, it allows for the use of a little bit of brainpower to make things work the way you want them to (most of the time), so looking for and installing software isn't just a total auto-pilot process.  Ubuntu's interface is kinda Mac-like, but I'm easily adaptable to those things. And I can have a bazillion desktops :D

And I got Guild Wars and Angry Birds to run using Wine, so the money I paid for those haven't gone to waste. I also have all four Humble Bundles, so I have plenty of games to play on Linux :)  I miss the 'shuffle by grouping' function on iTunes, though.

Time-warp back to the beginning of the month:

Finn-Drama Candy Grams
This year at Heritage Days I spent the bulk of my money on tasty food and not so much on kitschy stuff.  I still did some "strategic loitering" but a lot less than last year, since I was enlisted as a volunteer for one evening. My jobs were to fetch a few things from the refrigerator truck and to keep the condiments area tidy and stocked. It doesn't seem like much of a job, but I guess it's important when everyone else is busy serving and prepping food. Crazyfinn says that my efforts did not go unnoticed.

Crazyfinn let me into his "hideout" inside the storage trailer, where, Crazyfinn being a crazy Finn, discreetly downs half-shots of spiced vodka between forays onto the grounds. He drove me home every evening.

I only asked for my photo to be taken with Crazyfinn and Other Viking, but Crazyfinn made me an "invited guest" and let me into the infamous boat.  (I have a nagging feeling that he's deliberately being kinder to me than to other Finnish Society women. Confronted with this opinion, he vehemently denies it.)

Unfortunately, as Crazyfinn expected it to be, his letting me on the boat did not please Mrs Crazyfinn one bit. Not only that, one of the other Finnish women, whom I shall call The Mongerer, used the incident to invent rumours about me.

The Mongerer is sort of the female version of Crazyfinn. I get the feeling that nobody really takes her seriously but she likes to share her indignation as though she has a lot of clout. (I have been told "there's something wrong in her head" by someone whom I shall not name.) I had already been told by Crazyfinn and AwesomeGramps (who are by no means BFFs or anything) that The Mongerer didn't like that I go to sauna nude in mixed company (hey, at least I always wear a towel when I come out for breaks).

Crazyfinn recalls the following conversation from H-days, regarding the boat thing:
Mongerer: "I don't suppose your wife may be wondering whether she's your girlfriend now, hmm?"
Crazyfinn: "Well, I wouldn't know what she's thinking." [takes out cell phone and dials Mrs Crazyfinn] "Why don't you ask her yourself?"

Crazyfinn also tells me that he's received threats on his voicemail from "someone I won't name" (but his story corroborates with AwesomeGramps', so I know it's The Mongerer), about expelling him and Other Viking from the Scandinavian Society (kind of a union between the Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish clubs) for letting someone without a Viking costume onto the boat. (I had a story prepared, Crazyfinn said. You could have been captured in a raid. Innuendo intended and understood.)  He says that it's not like she has any real power, and that he was going to try to get the facts from other people who were managing the exhibit. After all, you don't just kick people who've been around for 30+ years out of the club because of the presence of one young woman and at the suggestion of one other woman.

More relevantly, however, is that The Mongerer has allegedly said that she didn't ever want to see me near the Scandinavian exhibit at H-days ever again. Crazyfinn alleges that she has accused me of getting uncomfortably close - not once, but twice - to some "Finnish girl, who speaks Finnish". As for this, I have NO IDEA who or what she's talking about. I didn't speak a single word of Finnish the entire weekend and only met one new Finnish woman, with whom I was polite, as I am when meeting people. [Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, this may have been The Mongerer's grown daughter? Likely the object of the accusation, then.]. I also chatted with some of the university-age Norwegian dancers, so I don't think that was it.

So yeah, completely unfounded allegations. If I'd done anything offensive, I certainly did not do it knowingly, and it was not brought immediately to my attention. It has been suggested that The Mongerer is just trying to get back at Crazyfinn for all the times he's spread rumours about other people, but then why am I involved? Why this accusation that has nothing to do with him?  I know it's stupid "women's gossip" kind of material, but I can't just ignore it because if the rumours get out of hand, I'll have fewer and fewer people willing to drive me out to the lake.

Wayside School
A mini-project I started doing while I was waiting for the replacement part for my computer is reading aloud and recording the "Wayside School" stories by Louis Sachar.  It's a trilogy of kids' books that I really loved when I was growing up because they were so silly and absurd. Each story (chapter) is very short, so I typically upload a few of them at a time.

Other Stuff
I went to the Antique Mall today. I'd buy most of the place if I could; there was so much vintage and antique ephemera like books, maps, food tins, cigarette cases, and stuff like that. I ended up with a couple of early 20th c. English composition textbooks, a tourist road map of Western Europe (the owner had checked off all of the countries that s/he visited - Finland was not - no surprise given how boring the country appears to be from the illustrative vignettes), and a well-worn Marttiini fileting knife in pretty good shape.  I bet Finnish women are gonna be positively FURIOUS about that, whether or not I ever actually take it to camp.  I was pretty close to buying a badge to sew onto my bag, but the irony of displaying said badge would be completely lost on most people.

Like my old friend Nick, I have far too many essay/post ideas floating about in my head and not enough motivation or imperative to write them. (I suspect that he at least keeps a pile of drafts lying around, though. I don't.) I need to focus. I also need to write; there's a cathartic effect releasing these thoughts into text so I don't have to keep them in my head anymore. It's like thought-overload or something.

Here are some of those random post ideas:
* Things from teacher training that really ought to be in training for prospective profs
* The call of the sea forest: My outdoors(wo)man tendencies since childhood
* Why it should have been obvious all along that scholarship is my calling - it was just a question of which field, and even that in hindsight seems obvious
* When good self-esteem/image/pride causes shame
* A diary of the good fight: Notes on teaching (you've actually already seen some of this; I hope to post the rest once the dedicatee of these papers has had a chance to read the 13-page manuscript)
* The return of Hug-a-Finn

I know that my lack of regular updates and the personal nature of my writing tends to lead to a lot of questions asked and not enough of them answered. So please post below what you want to know more about, be it any of those topics above or something else, and I will do my best to respond.


I bought like 2.5 pounds of Cadbury Mini-Eggs in bulk today. They were like $4-something per pound. It wouldn't be wise for me to eat them all. Will probably leave some out for the roommates.

My internet has been flaking out so badly for the last couple of days that I think it's a sign I'm supposed to go meditate or pray or just be with myself.

I keep thinking it's already Thursday night.

I can't think of a better way to start this post but with an excerpt from some writing:

( Cut for length )

The last days at my apartment were really noisy, because they're building new student housing across from the parking lot outside my window. They had been tearing a huge hole in the middle of the parking lot in order to install plumbing, so there was a lot of noise that Thursday starting at precisely 7AM and continuing until 3PM-ish.

Anyway, it's been nice being at home. Last week we got the garage and front step repaved, and right after that was done and left to dry for a day, it started pouring rain. I've been stalking my email and IM obsessively over my cell-phone, though, and that's been doing not-good things to my right hand. In fact, especially when I do any typing or writing, there's a numbness that I can't describe in any other way than that it makes my bones feel like they're all fragmented.

I also managed to get through "negotiations" over compensation for my editing services, so while there were some difficulties and some disagreements, we managed to define the scope of my work better and bring it back to "editing" at the end rather than trying to do tech-writing/editing/proofing/language-advice/graphics-advice all at the same time while major changes and adjustments are still being made.

I tend to low-ball my prices because I don't want to be greedy, but I guess everybody's happy when they get paid...

It's been rainy every day since the weekend, and it's expected to continue all week. It's been so cold that it feels like late winter again, and just as depressing. I can't even decide between crying because of kaihoa suomen saloille or because of how frustrating the editing stuff has been (with the editing there's also a sense of disappointment with the whole thing, but I've just thought of this yesterday and so I haven't thought it through yet).

But the real reason I've been motivated to write this post is because I'm on my new computer. It's shiny and I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do with 8GB of RAM :)

My parents are in HK right now, you see, and they called me in the middle of the little (freaking freezing) campfire thingamajig I was at to tell me that they bought me one of these (a white 3G one). I had asked them to find me a decent phone that I could use in Finland (and later on back home, because I'm currently not on a GSM network), you see. It's even a Nokia! (Because, seriously, I've always wanted one. For obvious reasons. LOL.)

Hope it works :)

iPods are NOT for the obsessive-compulsive. Especially the new ones with the album-art scroll.

Jakub on the Quotient rule: "Bombs differentiate people. So when a bomb hits a building, the people on the top floor are differentiated first, followed by the people on the second floor. But the air siren's gone off so there are more people in the basement, so you square it."

Jakub on the Universe: "The square root of everything is 42. The square root of the universe is 42...forgottenlord's IQ is 42!"

Henry asked me what my program choices for next year were. At the time I was helping Marc out with his programming assignment. As a result, this was my answer for Henry:
( Warning: Extreme Geekiness )

Hmmm...this CD case is so CranePorn orgasmic [back]. And shiny [front].

Mom's getting me this CD player to replace the other one that broke. And we watched a video in sociology class about the obsession with material affluence in American society, and I think that domestically, the 1950's lifestyle was so much better, but the politics weren't. Meh :)