Bicycle

It's time to whip out the bicycle and go pay a visit to my parents. Minna's working, so I have all the time in the world to do whatever suits my fancy. I picked up a new memory stick today, the little bugger cost me 70€. My parents are thinking of buying a new digicam, so I'll have to go and talk some sense into them - so that they won't buy "the one on sale at Gigantti" or whatever. A good place to start www.dpreview.com... Anyway, I better get on the road, I promised to show for coffee between 2-3pm. I'll get a good 15km worth of cycling today, yay! One-way shouldn't take longer than 20 minutes. Adios.

Last week

If I nothing proper happens this week, I'll be doomed to go back to the warehouse on monday... that's when I'm supposed to start my 11-week grind there. Fucking hell, and I've tried to _hard_ to look for a job. I need to get out of this country. Where the grass is greener, and proper jobs plenty! Who am I kidding? Ahh... Maybe when I graduate, I'll be finally able to get a decent job. Not a proper job, but a decent one. This is my last week of freedom for the whole summer, unless of course I end the Odyssey short. I might be happy with working just 2 months, or just 1 month... to scrape together enough to survive the summer. Though how much fun is it just to 'survive'. Need skills to pay the bills, and preferably then some. Weekend went by fast, didn't even notice it. Picked up a few books from the library today. One is on war prisoners, it'll set the mood for going back the warehouse :X

Computers suck

Great day today. It's been sunny outside. But guess what I've been up to? Last night, one of my 512Mb DDR sticks decided to go nuts. To make a long story short, it totally fucked up my Windows partition with all the weird errors it was causing. Of course I didn't immediately figure out just what the hell was causing all the weird errors. Luckily, I had two sticks, so it was fairly easy to test which one was the evil bastard, by using memtest. Now all I had to do was just revert back to a backup copy of the partition. But guess what? My backup was almost 6 months old! But have no fear - I always knew I was a louse backup-cloner, so I had a backup batch file running nightly, which copies all the important documents, files, settings, etc.. that I have one the windows partition. Now I just have to do the grievous task of putting everything back in it's right place.

I could have been outside enjoying the sun if it was not for two things: 1) I managed to burn myself pretty damn bad already on sunday, when I went to the local cliffs to do some reading, for about 3 hours worth. With no sunlotion, or t-shirt. The night towards monday was spent in agony. Yesterday I stayed indoors for the most of time, except for going to play squash. I still resemble an indian with my torso, though it's starting to get better.

Tomorrow I'll have a job interview for a fund-assistant job. Let's hope all goes well. This friday I have a re-exam in swedish, have to find the motivation to study for it from somewhere. It's a 5 credit-unit course, which ran a bit over half a year. I do not want to re-take the course. There! That's my motivation. It's 22.5'c outdoors.. terrace time, big time. But alas, poor me has to study, pooey pooey. Might as well get to it. Adios!

School's out for summer!

Yes ladies and gentlemen. The exams are over, the coursework is done. It's time to relax for a while. I ended up with pretty decent grades I have to say. And it's not too bad to notice that you're already 2/3 done. I'm a little ahead of schedule, and things are going alright. One thing that's been a constant cause of concern for me, however, has been the summer job issue. Yes, so far I have not secured anything better than logistics work. Meaning very basic logistics, mind you.

I'm terribly sorry for the lack of updates, but I have no spine. Err maybe I do, but not enough for daily/weekly updates. I'll try to fix that. Honest! Let's see.... what has happened since the last post. First week I had 2 exams and finished most of the coursework. 7-8th May we were at my parent's summer cottage in Perniö. That was a great time. Sauna, burning brushwood, target practice with a "22 scoped rifle & walks in the surrounding forest paths. Just what I needed to recharge the batteries for the coming week! Monday I had Business Strategies exam, which was a bitch, I ended up writing 7 pages... On Tuesday I had another exam, this time in Quality Management.

Wednesday
May 11th was my 25th birthday. I did not celebrate it much, as I had a databases exam during the day, and squash in the evening. But behold! When I came home, Minna had fixed a wonderful meal, which we then proceeded to feast upon, accompanied by a rather good red wine.. When it got close to midnight, we went to the balcony and I opened a bottle of sparkling wine on the minute that I turned 25. Romantic? Silly? The bottle was expensive, but turned out it had a poor taste. And! I also managed to break a champagne glass, as I was reaching for matches which were on the other side of the table -- and the lapel of my leather coat tipped the glass... which of course went into smithereens. I hope broken glass does indeed bring good luck, as 'they' say. Thursday was a quiet day, spent studying for the final exam in Cost Management.

Friday
I had the exam in the morning, and after it spent some time in school, drinking coffee, chatting & smoking cigarettes. It felt surreal that school was over. And that two years had passed. It took a while to sink in. Later on in the evening I went to Osku's place for a bit of pizza & alcoholic beverages; which was his & Jenni's way of saying "thank you for helping us move on Vappu, despite the fact that you were hangover/drunk at the time!". We had a blast, and I really didn't want to leave the place (I was there from 7pm to a bit after 10pm I think) - but I had to get to Valtava (or whichever way you type it --- the new 3-story bar/diner that has opened between the railway station & main post office - I think it used to formerly belong to Finnair.)
I met school comrades Ville, Carina, Tara, Niina & Leena there on the second floor. I ordered some Budvar. I don't think I had too much to drink. Conor showed up a bit after midnight, after he had finished work. (I see a pattern here, by the way... whenever Conor shows up after work to a bar where I'm at, all hell breaks loose later on..) - Anyway! I believe everything went fine & was under control until it got close to 1am, and the devil incarnate, senor Osku made his entrance (with Jenni of course). This evil man was on a mission to get poor me drunk as a skunk. To succeed in this fiendish task, he began injecting alcohol into me, in the shape of shots of varying kind. Frankly, don't ask me what they were or how many there were, because it all starts to get a little hazy for me after the 2nd or 3rd shot. See, I'm not even sure of that. Anyway! The 2nd floor bar closes at some point, so we were asked to move downstairs. Apparently while there I managed to stumble into a waitress - all apologies, miss. I didn't remember us going downstairs, so it's hard to say anything more about it. But we stayed there until the bar closed, and Martti, bless his soul, walked me all the way home. I managed to fall twice on the way. I also walked into a streetlight. Well anyway, I got home around 5. Minna wakes up. There's some hassle. I throw up, crawl to bed. 6am: Lights off.

Saturday.
Birthday party. I woke up initially around noon, feeling surprisingly okay given the circumstances. Minna went to the shop, and got some Jaffa (soda) & Sparkling water for me. She fixed me a meat pie with two sausages & brought it to bed, too. Ahh, lovely creature! I stayed in bed & managed to catch sleep again, while she left the house with our upstairs neighbors Karo & Eeva. They went to shop around, trying to find us a new garden table (for the whole house community), some plants & seeds, and finally some food and beverages. This Saturday was booked as a community effort/work party. The idea is to clean up the large wooden house where all of us (6 apartments, 10 people) live, and then after the chores are done, have a good time. I woke up around 5.30pm. This work party was supposed to start around 6. My birthday party was set to start at 8pm, with some of the first guests arriving a bit earlier. I rushed to the shop, bought some more sparkling/mineral water, and you know, the usual hangover cure-kit. After I had gotten all the stuff in me, I started feeling a bit better. The next two hours were spent cleaning, vacuum-cleaning, and mopping the place. I almost started to lose faith when it was a bit after 7pm, and it felt like the whole thing was so unfinished. I wanted to have the work bit of the work-party over by the time my birthday party was supposed to start. See, my idea was to have the work party & my birthday as a sort of combined grill-fest-free-for-all. The neighbors are such good people & friends, that I would have invited them anyway. The house budget really ran out after we had gotten the gardentable, the plants & a proper Winmau dartboard & something to drink (12-pack, some ciders). So the barbecue foods, salads & booli was on us. I am letting you know all this just so you kind readers are not tempted to think that: as there is/was a housebudget for the 6 apartments, of which some of it is commonly used for partying & boozing, that I would have the evil mind of putting my birthday on the same date to save money! There, I’ve said it. Anyway, moving on. The time between 8-9pm was a bit of a hassle, with half of the guest having arrived. I rushed out of the house to do some work on the balcony, or downstairs… But luckily it all worked out perfect. We fired up the grill a little after 9, and had a GORGEOUS time. The evening consisted of eating (duh), drinking, sauna, darts-games, playing Alias as pantomime. People started going to bed after midnight, but the some of us kept going. Conor & Jonna, my brother & Jarno were there until around 6am. Me & Minna stayed there for 3 hours more, just by ourselves. I guess we talked, danced & drank whatever was left. Sad affair! Oh dear… last time I checked the clock, was when we were already in bed: it was 9.30am. Ouch.

Sunday
Slept late, managed to go to Minna’s parents. Lovely dinner. Fairly uneventful day otherwise.

This week has been spent mostly on recharging batteries, applying for work and sneezing. Birch trees are messing with me, but I’ve got the meds now. It’s starting to level out. Long update, you can probably see that I ran out of energy. I typed it all in one go. Hooray! Thanks for reading if you made it this far!

Vappu

Wow it's been almost a month now. A lot of things have been going on and I just never got around to typing about them. I should get a phonecall early this week, to let me know if I got the job or not (doing purchasing at a publishing house). I skipped going to my swedish exam today, because three days of drinking and partying finally caught up with me. How lame. I'll take the re-exam date & ace it there. No worries. I did not have time to prepare for it anyway, what with Vappu and everything going on. Cross fingers that I get the job :D I'm hungover, tired, bored, and feeling guilty. What a great way to start a week! I have a couple of papers to hand in mid-week, plus it's final exams time.. Where's the motivation? Hello? Two weeks, and "school's out for summer", yeah!

I think I'll just fire up Stronghold II and built a few medieval castles.