Where is Gali(nette)?

Muumi likes going on cruises to Stockholm and getting drunk. He's a naughty boy.

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In other news, I rewatched part of Avalon the other day, it's still by far my favourite film of all time. Oshii outdid himself on that one. I still like to think that I now do understand the final scene/screen ("Welcome to Avalon").

I need to rewatch Cube, that's probably my second favourite film although most things are blurry here.

I also got extra icons because I paid one more year here, I think I'll bring my old Ghost icons back.

Alright, it might seem like I have a thing against Finland these days and trust me, I don't. I still highly enjoy living here, it's just easier to rant than to praise.

I'm fucking tired of the snow. We were so close to not having any anymore and then it snowed a bit yesterday and overnight. It is fun? Nope. We're at the stage in the weather where it's warm during the day, warm enough to have some snow melt and then it's -10C or colder during the night so of course everything freezes. It's so much fun walking on that. Really fun.

So I went back in journal a bit to 2008:
- on the 20th of March we had clear skies, can't see snow on the ground.
- it snowed on the 23rd - a lot it seems
- on the 26th one had to wade through snow
- on the 30th I ran on soggy ground/half melted snow
- it was 9C on the 31st!
- on the 4th of April, the snow had mostly gone
- 7th of April - rain, not fun.
- it rained and snowed on the 9th

And this is where I end this review. They're predicting more snow for today and tomorrow and some for the end of the week and warmer temperatures for then too. Make it be the 9th of April already so that I can enjoy some good old southern sun!

Guess who had about half a mm of snow this morning? That's right, us! It's now melting but I took a picture of the yard/parking lot just to remember that today is the day that it snowed. I do hope it snows more because right now all it's going to do is kind of melt and then refreeze and it's gonning to be one hell of an adventure to walk outside.

It's amazing the lack of sun here. You can only tell that it's day because it's not pitch black, just kind of blank. Even the street lamps are still on and it's 11am!

I've concluded that from now on I won't even try to bike to work every day, there is just no point and it's been two days in a row that we get this drizzle that's really annoying. Plus with an unlimited bus card I can go have some retail therapy whenever I want. Well, not really retail therapy since I don't actually buy anything, I would have to throw stuff out to have more space for more stuff. And maybe I'm just lazy. In the spring I'll get on my bike every day again but for now, the bus it is for me!

I'm at the library this afternoon because I just can't stand being in a closed environment (read: work) and I can only work at home from around 8pm (read: otherwise I just do nothing). So I'm at the Tapiola library. Nice shiny internets here and lovely air conditioning sounds... or rather heater sounds given the weather we've had lately.

The good part is that I got some major work done this past week, a whole article translated from French to English. I didn't think it was going to be easy but I did not expect it to this so hard. The article was interesting but the author had such a random writing style, he loved run on sentences. Plus it wasn't from my field but I still managed to get most of the vocabulary questions right... but it showed my main problem, I don't have a "native" language into which it is easier to translate. I think for me it's hard to translate from French to English and from English to French and let's not even talk about translating into Ukrainian, that would be a massive fail.

Now I only have to finish off my "what I've done these past 6 months" thesis and start off my PhD thesis and that's it. I think given the amount of reading and cogiting I've done in the past month or so, I could totally finish of my PhD by October... too bad that I haven't even officially started yet. A more complete entry on my fucked up state of mind on this whole "3+ more years of research" coming up one day because it's really fucking up my life. Seriously. I was watching this film the other day, terrible film, but at one point they mentionned that the main character's mum got into severe depression while on her PhD and you know what, the more I look up stuff and try to create things, the more I realise there is so much more to learn and analyse and it's slowly but surely starting to make me mad. I'm pretty sure that I'll be glad when it's all over but I can feel that once I'll have that PhD I won't be able to go back to a regular job, how can one do that? So yes, so much more to say about that and so much more to see.

Yesterday it rained the whole day even though the FMI said it was going to be sunny. As the summer is almost over, seeing the sun is getting quite something... I had to wait till around 2pm to see something that looked like it.

You know they say that when you move to Finland you become lactose intolerant? It's true for me. I fucking had two slices of cheese at lunch and for the god of me, my stomach is being annoying now... It's not the bad kind of horrible intolerance but it's still annoying having one's stomach always gurgling and feeling bloated for a couple of hours.

Well, I haven't updated in ages... really in ages. So here is what I was up to Friday and Saturday: camping fun! It was really fun and it made me realise just how much I missed the whole adventure thing. We were in the Nuuksio national park and we camped on an island! I'll upload some pictures from there later on but here are some that have been uploaded by others.

Of course this is me just "helping out" by pretty much saying "yeah, that kind of looks right" :p