Juhannus 2009
Juhannus is the Finnish midsummer party, when people usually go to the countryside to burn big-ass bonfires, eat themselves silly and get totally plastered. This year Susi and I reserved the cabin for our and our friends’ use. The aim was to simply go in there, make good food, laze around, play board games and generally unwind.
As so often is the case, Juhannus was once again cold, rainy and windy, but this is something we had prepared for. So, enter a weekend of saunaing, playing board games, cooking a lot of food, sleeping and eating far too much and even managing to do a short trip on the lake when weather permitted.
In my Flickr there’s a bunch of photos of our activities, including the incredibly lewd looking sausage making. A few samples below.
Peaceful Work Day with Sushi
It’s now my work day number four in the National Library of Finland. The work room is cool and quiet, there are big windows with rain splattering on them and I’m trying to figure out what makes the Aleph library system tick and how does Unicode actually work, especially with Arabic, Devanagari and Cyrillic alphabets. Yesterday we went to visit a librarian who catalogues books in Arabic and assorted other Mid-Eastern languages and got to know the problems concerning those, which I should start fixing in the future.
Birthday-Jori enjoying his sushi
A moment ago I got back from a sushi lunch with Susi and Jori in Kurvi, in the rather improbably named Kahvikulma. I’ve walked past the place dozens of times, dismissing it as just another low-grade and messy cafe for Kurvi locals. Instead the place has a pretty damn decent lunch sushi buffet complemented with friendly staff, so the place is well worth checking out.
The atmosphere in the work room is timelessly peaceful. I have a ton of interesting stuff to study and learn, without any hurry to be somewhere or get anything done within strict deadlines. The novelty value of this for me can not be overstated. A room temperature that is under 26C and the absence of the sound of kids’ TV programs being edited are already a cultural shock of a kind after the last couple of years. Not to mention the lack of a towering pile of deadlines and people asking me stuff every 15 minutes either live or via e-mail.
In the turn of the millennium I didn’t really appreciate the slow and slightly disorganized pace of the academia, but now… I think I’ll like it here.
Regrets over the Illuminatus!-trilogy
This morning I was woken up by our lovely neighbours, who started blasting shitty Finnish rap at around 6:30 and talking as loud as people who’ve been drinking up to that time do. Now that I have my computer in the bedroom, I’ll have to dig up some Bat & Ryyd to play on high volume, loudspeakers against the wall, after the merry youngsters get to bed themselves.
A quick check revealed that the fever is still up to 37,6 C, which casts some doubts on today’s barbeque trip and even Tuesday’s diving session. I got myself a cup of coffee and sat down to enjoy the rising sun and cool summer air wafting in through the window, and to read about Discordianism, ‘pataphysics, situationism and psychogeography after far too long a pause spent concentrating on things that don’t really matter. This made me think of one small regret I have.
I read the Illuminatus!-trilogy in the last years of the 90′s and enjoyed it greatly. Fast forward a couple of years and open the scene with me sitting in New Bamboo Center, waiting for my take out curry chicken. I started paying attention to a guy in a table next to me, fingering a copy of Illuminatus! and talking about it to a girl who was obviously his date. The guy was really animated about the book and I sort of got the vibe of a third date “making an impression” thing going on.
A point to note – at the moment I was wearing a wide-brimmed black hat, oil slick coloured round shades and a long black coat with a smiley button. When I got my food, I got this impulse to walk to their table, lean over it, face the guy a bit too close and say “don’t read that book, man – it will invade your dreams”. I’m not widely known for curbing my impulses, so to my considerable surprise I walked past the table and out of the door before I realised what I had done.
That is something I still regret now and then. A strange regret to have, but I guess I consider it a kind of an early symptom for the years that followed it.
