Meow?

Cats and dogs. I like them both. Most people are either or, but I prefer both. My grandparents used to have borzois when I was young and when I was living with my mother, we had a cat called Edith. I really loved all those animals plus horses (I used to take riding lessons) plus cows (I used to take care of cows at our cottage's neighbour) plus giant otters :)

So Kassu came into our home for one week. At first the attitude was like this.

New places are always stressful, I know. But then it started to rain and Kassu felt like home immediately.

My first Couch Surfing guest got also his share of Kassu's friendliness. I joined CS recently and almost immediately got requests for surfing and of course I said yes. I'm always free for interesting chats about all kinds of things and that's exactly what we had! The next day he continued his trip to Outokumpu and Kassu was left heart broken.

Maybe someone could explain why animals like to bother you when you're using your laptop? You're trying to check your e-mails and suddenly there is a big furry object in front of you preventing your access to the keyboard. Like this.

Or this.

But we also had relaxing co-existing time :)

In the end, when it was time to go home, Kassu was feeling VEEEERY peaceful at this place. I guess the sofa was perfect for resting his tired bones.

Luckily this was also Kassu's state after I removed a tick from his neck. I'm so proud of myself, because 1) I had never removed a tick before and 2) I was brave enough to succeed with it! Ticks are the most disgusting and annoying insects we have in Finland. I hate them.

As all good times come to an end, it was also time for Kassu to go home. Thank you Tuula for borrowing the cat! The only thing I don't miss are the morning wakings at 4am, 5am, 6am and 7am, because Kassu insisted on sleeping on my stomach. That's not how it works Kassu!

حالت چطوره؟

Yesterday I visited Anna and Shahram in the evening. They came back from Iran about one month ago and had their bags full of foods, books, souvenirs... They served excellent foods again, dried green vegetables were used to make a very tasty (vegetarian!) Iranian soup and my favourites were the nuts and dried fruits always served as a snack or dessert :)

Then we got some souvenirs!

Inside this package there were dried pressed fruits for eating as a snack. The taste was awesome! These snacks should be imported from Iran as soon as possible!

My new book (poems by Hafez) :)

It looks so beautiful, although I don't understand a single word! I hope that one day I would master also these Persian alphabets. Thank you Shahram and Anna!

Today has been a very lazy day, I haven't been even able to finish my knittings because of a sad accident:

I sat (!) on my knitting needles (made from bambu) and one of them just broke. That's what you get when you leave your knittings on the sofa.

Why don't you let it happen

We HAD snow. For a winter person like me it felt so good to be surrounded by white snowdrifts and the calming atmosphere that makes you want to light candles.


Now there's rain every day, black evenings and how it all makes you tired! I've been sleeping 12 hours during the weekends and I have no power to do anything efficient/diligent/sensible.

To put some colour in my life and to get me through these black days I bought red rubber boots.

I've always had the passion for jumping in the small water puddles and now I can do it without getting my socks wet. Why people are not using rubber boots more? They're the most practical shoes in rainy times like these.

I've also knitted colourful things like scarfs and dishcloths. I have big plans about knitting a vest, but I don't have time before christmas.


And one thing that gave me energy during these weeks was school children. I was teaching library skills to 12 classes of 7th graders and most of the youngsters were awesome! I rarely feel comfortable with babies or really small children, but when they get older, they start to have their own thoughts and they start asking difficult questions. Is there a better way to challenge often so stale and stable thoughts of older people? (I also read an interesting book about parenting, Tom Hodgkinson's The Idle Parent, which was excellent! Less work, more play!)

6 weeks left of work. 54 days left in my Korea Countdown. Snow has plenty of time to fall before I leave.

Blue wings

So I've booked tickets to Korea now! And suddenly tiny excitement is starting to grow inside me, this time I'm really going there for 2 weeks! One travel guide came in the post on Friday and I've been reading it all the time, I also have some (old) books about Korea from the library at home. I'm trying to absorb all the information I can get before going there!

But that's all from my plans. Except that I'm going to watch Lost in translation this evening, just to enjoy the sceneries, which are similar to Korea :) My 4th time to watch the movie, which gets better every time.

(and I was cleaning today, also washed sauna for the first time. I never want to do that again, please give me just public sauna where I can go once a week and I never have to wash it!)

I keep my blog so that my friends and relatives can keep up what's going on in my life. But which blogs are my favourite ones that I read often? Or which pages I check almost every day?

1) Grand Narrative tells about Korean pop culture in an interesting way. I accidentally found this blog in summer and I've been reading it since. I like especially the writer's bloggings about Korean women and the world they're living in.

2) Liivian Talossa (in Finnish), just because I like the photos :)

3) Ravelry is for knitting addicts, countless amounts of patterns that are just waiting to be made for someone or for yourself. I go there and dream that I had more time to knit.

4) The Ecologist was a magazine which came to me until this summer, but the paper version was turned into e-magazine so I have to take my daily dose of Ecologist from the net these days. My favourite part of the magazine is "Behind the label", which explains everything you need but don't want to know about basic products, which are not good for you or the environment.

5) Blogilista (in Finnish) is for those days, when I don't have anything to read. Then I check for some fashion blogs (and it just can't stop amazing me how some young girls are so interested in fashion!) or any blog that has been updated that moment.

and finally

6) Osmo Soininvaara 's blog (in Finnish) is one of my favourite's because I like his books and most of the new ideas he has. The best part is the lively conversation which brings lots of different perspectives to the things he's writing about.

and

7) Kemikaalicocktail (in Finnish), which is just basic stuff for people, who are interested in environment and their own health.

Tomorrow there might be snow on the ground, so maybe these are the final times of taking this kind of colourful, stormy and leafy photos :) I'm waiting for snow SOOOO much, so let's hope I'm surrounded by white in the morning...

Somewhere over the rainbow

Thursday. Week almost done, so happy that weekend is coming! Sometimes it's just so difficult to get used to late evenings or early mornings at work. If somebody came today and asked me to continue also next year, I'd say no. It's financially very stupid as well as in all other ways, but that's what I'd answer.


(These photos have nothing to do with my writings, they are from the forest where I was bitten by mosquitos and hit by rain drops, some kind of war monument)

Last week it finally happened, there was one customer at the library who went totally nuts. She almost attacked one immigrant boy, shouted so ugly racist things...When librarian went between them and told to the boy that everything is alright, the woman started calling names of both of them and acted threateningly. Luckily there were also other people at the library at that time and they came for help and finally the woman left.

It's very nice to work alone in the evening shifts, when there is no-one you can turn to if there are any problems. Librarians say that it's going to stay this way until someone gets stabbed or hurt badly...Every year there is talking about how to make work places safer, but nothing is done anyway. It's so different in big libraries where there are many people working in the same building, own caretakers etc.

But well, next autumn I'm trying to have 2 people in the evening shift almost every day. It just means that some of us has to work 3 evenings a week and that means -> no hobbies, no family time. Being home at 9.30 pm.

I bought a new dress! I like the hem :)

And this is something I got from Tanzania, Barack Obama wall cloth! Again lots of thanks to Matti and Merja. Too bad the cloth was too heavy and it dropped from the wall next day, I have to find a way to keep it on the wall :) Matti told me women in Tanzania are wearing this kind of Obama fabrics as dresses and skirts, maybe I should make my own!

But I made my own, this time green socks! It took only 3 months... Knitting is really something that makes you forget everything else. Just as aerobic, singing (I tried to sing this morning in the empty library, nice echo :D) and reading. At the moment I'm reading Rafik Schami's Damaskoksen rakastavaiset (The Dark Side of Love in English) and it's very addictive, it's hard to put that book down and go to sleep in the evenings. It helps a little that the book has almost 900 pages though, so it's too heavy to hold for a long time ;)

Now some tea, aimless tv watching and then reading and then sleeping. Updating this blog takes too much time! I always think I'm going to write about some spesific thing, but it's too difficult. At home I don't have to be in order! I can be as flat as this tyre which exploded last Friday.


PS. I tried to read the last book of Twilight quadrilogy, Breaking dawn, but after violent sex (the best thing that can happen to you when you have sex for the first time [after getting married of course!] is to wake up full of bruises and cuttings! oh gimme more!), getting pregnant (contraception? anyone?) and giving birth to a baby while dying just didn't quite create any interest in me. Oh my, I must be getting old and why I take things so SERIOUSLY!

Truly green

Yay! I finally finished my green green sock (just one...) and the colour is so amazing! It took me 2 months to knit this one, it's just sad that I don't seem to have enough free time these days. I've been reading a lot and of course that time is away from something else. But during juhannus (basically this weekend) I'm going to start knitting the pair for this. Did I already say how much I love the colour? ;) It looks as green as the nature at this time of the year, just more tropical somehow...

When I woke up at 6, it was raining and less than +10 degrees. When I looked outside my window at work, it was raining. And when I decided to go to local hypermarket in the evening, it was still raining. So when I went to the shop, I looked this "cool" (that must be the reason they didn't ask for my papers in local liquor store, no-one under 18 would come to the shop looking this stupid):

It felt like an adventure to walk to the store looking like a ghost. I also kept seeing this boy with red umbrella wherever I went...Thank you Juha for not waiting for me :D




Tomorrow I'm going to cook malesian vegetable curry and bake vanilla muffins with thai basil. True Finnish juhannus food! I bought real English cider to drink with them, because Finnish ciders taste like artificial flavourings. Let's see how Cox apples have been turned into cider by Thatchers and pears by Maguires. Organic white wine is also good especially during hot summer days, so this bottle is going to stay in fridge for a long time...

Speaking of organic, I received a huge parcel from Germany today. It included my BDIH natural cosmetic stuff that I'm using on my sensitive skin. I ordered shampoos, shower gels, moisturisers, cleansers and tooth pastes and paid a lot (I got so many products I'll use these for at least one year), but the prices of these products are half as expensive in Finland. Germany is truly the paradise of all natural and organic products! The webshop I used is Beauty Center Europe, and everything worked well also this time.


The ultimate saviour of my red and flaky (rosacea) skin is this product below. Redness disappears when I use it and I don't look like I have any makeup on, because I don't like makeup stuff. LilyLolo has a stupid name, but it comes in a nice package and works, so who cares about names.

My plants are growing and I have 3 days off! Next week is going to be horrible, only 2 people working in 2 shifts...But I'm not going to think about it yet. Have a nice juhannus you all and enjoy it the way you want to!

Books books books books books.....

Relaxing holidays are soon over. I should soon get back to ordering books (some interesting ones are being published this fall!) and forget my knittings for a while.

Meteorologists promised sunshine, but I haven't seen any sun. (Hmm, how many suns do we have?). I finished my "Kahdesti haarautuva puu" and that's why I'm still living in different worlds. I can recommend that book for everyone, although I remember enjoying it a bit more in English, maybe because the story was not familiar to me when I read it :) Ursula tells about a woman called Sutty, who explores a world where religion, books, old habits and ancient stories are forbidden. The life of the countryside people is still dependant on those old traditions and the rich culture is something Sutty gets interested in. The story is beautifully written and it really makes you think (which is sadly not so common in books these days).

I also read "Terveyden kiinalainen kirja" by Denis Vinokur this weekend and it was interesting as books about Chinese medicine always is. Chinese medicine (if not using tiger teeth or other ingredients got from rare wild animals) is based on thought about energy called Qi, which should flow around in your body freely. Stress, bad food, weather, too much/too little exercise, so many things can affect the flow of Qi and block it in some places and that causes different diseases. Unlike in Western medicine, diseases are treated by trying to change the way of living, not just taking pills. Food is for example one of the important remedies in Chinese medicine. This book told the basic things I already knew about Chinese medicine, but I guess it would be interesting to read for someone, who doesn't know much about the subject. There were also tips for meditating at home as well as meridian points which can be treated when you have certain illness.
The last book I read this weekend was Tommi Uschanov's Mikä vasemmistoa vaivaa? (What's wrong with the left wing?" and although I'd had that book borrowed from the library for over half a year (!), this weekend I finally grabbed it and started to read. Interesting facts and thought provoking ideas as well as good answers you can use against basic arguments used by politicians these days. Sometimes I really need to find this kind of books, which have something else to say than the normal political jargon where people try to hide the real thoughts inside the thicket of useless words.

I've been one month at the library now and now I know something about the reading habits of people using the library. Most of all, it's good that people read! And boys borrowing Ursula's books and women loaning books about organic gardening make me smile. But the fact is that women read mostly romantic books as well as detective stories, where men are most interested in books about war, both fact and fiction. Children still love Pippi Longstocking (Peppi Pitkätossu in Finnish) and funny Puppe -books by Eric Hill (Spot the Dog in English). Also comics are very popular, especially manga books.

That's all about books!

One thing before going to movies (Visitor!). I don't know if I told about Raw Gaia before, but I've been very satisfied with the products I ordered from there. Jojoba oil makes my flaking skin feel better, when I apply it before going to sleep and MSM Beauty Cream keeps my skin moisturised during the day. Ordering was easy and delivery fast and in addition to these I also bought spirulina powder (the smell is horrible, but it doesn't taste when you mix it with smoothies :D) Too bad there isn't any cure for my rosacea though...And antibiotics are still the last opinion in my mind.

Thank you, goodbye!

5 km.

Today I wanted to save 3 euros and walked to the centre instead of taking a bus. Walkway goes in the middle of the forest and I took my camera with me and took a few photos. It took me 45 minutes to walk 5 kilometres.

Spring is coming, so trees don't have any snow on them anymore and it looks very grey. Also the roads are starting to be bare, but still I saw many crosscountry skiers and the tracks seemed to be in good condition :)



I signed my employment contract today, so it's officially true that I'm going to be working as a leader of the library until the end of this year. I'm most afraid of all kinds of meeting I need to participate...And writing strategies! I don't know anything about that. So I have so many things to learn this year.

Last but not the least, I finally finished my pair of socks! It took me 2 months to knit them both, but it was worth it. The colours are lovely, green and purple :)

Tomorrow I'm heading to Kuopio to watch Skijumping World Cup. I'm going to take Juha and Liang with me, so more tea ceremonies coming!