It was a great Saturday. My family and a few of my closest relatives came to my place for a coffe. The excuse was my birthday that's next Saturday.

I don't really care "having a birthday party", but it's still a perfect excuse to gather together to meet people and talk. (Besides, I get a great chance to bake.) There was also a nice coincidence that my cousin who lives in a different city, was here to meet her family right now. So she was able to come too and everybody was thrilled to see her and her little girl they see so seldom. I'm almost the only one who bothers to arrange these meetings but everyone's happy that at least I do it.

Especially after such low and lonely times I enjoy these kind of gatherings. Even if it's just a few of times a year, it's a good reminder that they're there and they love me.

Anxiety, calmness...? Is it melancholy or indifference? Disappointed but not surprised? Pissed off or just sad? Bitter? Relieved?

Possibly everything.

Tagged by ninjoo


Dear Nynke:

I don't really know how to tell you this, but our romance is over. I think I realized it when I quoted Santa in your camping car and I saw you pull the clothes off my father and my best friend. I'm sure you're scarred enough to understand that there is no solution to this. I'm returning your ring to you, but I'll keep your collection of butterflies as a memory. You should also know that I told in my confession today about a new life as a clone .

Greetings to your frog Leonard,
Taru

Here's some modern and liberal Finland for you. Right...

( Go back to your closets?? )

Right...

http://www.spreekillers.org/index.html

Edited: They're not advertising the t-shirt anymore ("show no pity for the majority" and a picture of the finnish shooter), but you can get the idea from the other stuff.

Figures. Someone shows example, others will follow.

People are scared, in panic, everyone's accusing everyone and in the end there's not much anyone could have done... Based on what people now know, the shooter was just another normal guy. And no matter what people say about the police work, they really can't start investigating every single threatning case. Most of them are fake and in the middle somewhere there one is real. How could you know.

One incredible thing after the last shooting was that people started harrassing the parents of the shooter. That's probably the stupidest thing you can do. Hope that won't happen this time...

But since this definitely isn't the end of this, of course it makes you wonder when it will happen near me and when you possibly know people...

...do come, even if only every so often.

I finally got that sun yesterday, so I packed boys, camera and food, and headed to the forest. It was almost too warm and bright but I didn't want to risk waiting in case the weather would have turned cloudy again. We walked around, took paths we don't normally go (which in the end made me feel like Gollum in the Dead Marshes - "we found it, the way through the marshes!"), stopped to eat and take pictures, had a great time and were out for almost two hours.

Even if it's quite colourful around here, we don't get the best possible Autumn colours. It gets very yellow but the best orange and red colours are missing (or there are only few spots), and there are so much conifer trees that the other colours are lost in the middle of all that green.

But here are a few pictures anyway from my little trek. There are a couple more in my gallery.

( Wake me up when September ends )

I went and bought a new computer then. A laptop. It was only a two day offer so I asked a friend (who knows a bit more about computers) if the computer would be any good, and I walked to the store and bought it. Very unlike me to do such big purchases on such a short notice, but then again computers are those kind of things you could compare till the end of time and wouldn't become any wiser. Will see if this one turns out a good deal. It has Windows Vista with that very annoying user account control that asks persmission for almost everything you do, and at the point where it asked a permission to delete a file, I lost my nerve. But I found a way to override it and am pretty happy with Vista at the moment. Happiness is a very own working laptop :)

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I bought the movie Hogfather and watched it last Friday. Had pretty high hopes and it turned out quite good. But I have to say it lacked something... "Magic"? It was pretty true to the book which is of course a good thing, but perhaps here also it would have been a good idea to make some changes to make it work better as a movie.

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Autumn could show the sunny side too. All this greyness is starting to get to me.

I wanted to go the movies today and the choises were mummies, Star Wars or a musical. I felt I wanted to see something happy, something that would make feel good, so I decided to see Mamma Mia! (a musical with music from ABBA, in case you didn't know).

And it sure didn't let me down. Not only did it make me feel good but it was also the first movie for a long time that really brought tears in my eyes from time to time. I think the story was pretty nice even as itself but with the music added it really was a great movie. It was a bit funny to see Pierce Brosnan sing but I greatly enjoyed watching Meryl Streep, and of course "Donna and the Dynamos" :D The perfect target audience would probably be a bit older than I am but hey, I'll be there soon... :p

I have many friends who don't like musicals, in theatre or as a movie, but I can't help but like them. I love movies and I love music so how can it be bad when you combine them. And say others what they say about this movie, but it was the best movie I've seen for a long time :)

I was walking with the dogs and listening to music and I heard this


and I'm tired of this dark place
where hope dies and hope fades
I'm gonna leave these shadows behind

head into the bright lights
head into the bright lights
...

(Tom McRae - Bright Lights)


It was pouring rain and I was all wet but it gave me the best feeling for ages. I almost laughed outloud. :)

So, yesterday I tried the scones recipe from erised_dream and it was a total success. I added a bit of vanilla sugar to it (I add it to almost everything I bake...) and I ended up eating them with whipped cream and jam. The result was delicious. Yum! I'm definitely going to do them again later :)

See pictures of yummy scones here and here.

So thank you erised. And rivrea of course where the recipe originally came from. :)

Snif. Comanche Moon ended. It really was a great series; it totally exceeded any possible expectations I had. There was love, friendships, hope and wasted wishes, funny parts... And of course Karl. Again he was no joyful charmer and gentelman but oh, so sexy...

I was waiting for a happy end for all parties but no such luck. The last episode was all in all anything but joyful and the end was actually very sad but it did leave the opportunity for more. I don't know if they're planning on continuing the series but I hope so.

The Perception Personality Image Test. This one's quite close to the truth again.

( I'm an idealist )

Stole these from erised and sailarmo and everyone to spend time.

( Sense and punctuation mark )

Hehee... Do you know that old children's TV series, Once Upon a Time... Life (Il était une fois... la vie, created by Albert Barillé)? That was my favourite tv series when I was a kid (together with Tao Tao panda) and I think a huge amount of the things I remember about biology comes from that series... :D

Well, my youngest sister has the series on DVD and I decided to borrow and watch it. It's still fun to watch and it strangely creates a desire to respect my body even more. I guess it's because those pretty abstract things like brains or blood cells or viruses are depicted in so simple and concrete way with human-like characters that it makes everything seem so much more... umm... humane and down-to-earth, maybe. It makes me want to protect those little creatures :D

Such an entertaining and fun thing to watch! :D

Well, you didn't think I would leave this be...

1) Go to Photobucket (don't sign in).
2) Type your answer to (each) question in the "search" box.
3) Copy the html of the picture (your answer) then paste, for the answer.

( Here we go. )

Hmm, nice. It seems I've finally lost my photos to flickr... They were moved there from Yahoo Photos some time ago and I did check them every now and then, I even changed my email address there only a little while ago.

Now though, I can't get in anymore. They've always asked for an id and so far I've gone in with a username, but now they ask for a yahoo id that ends with @yahoo.com. The thing is that I've never had a yahoo-email. Even when I first used Yahoo Photos they didn't require a yahoo-email, the username I picked was enough. I tried the "I don't remember my id" but it doesn't find anything based on the info I give... That's kind of really stupid. There was no kind of information sent that things are going to change that way. Or maybe they sent an email to my non-existent yahoo mail... But just like that, they changed things the way that I can't access my photos.

Well, I didn't like the way flickr worked and I was thinking that I should move them somewhere else anyway. It's just that even if those photos were all public anyway I would have wanted to remove them from flickr because now they're there on the internet and I can't control them...

Nicked from ninjoo
Won't blame you if you don't read the whole thing :D This is just to spend time. And some of the silly questions and Nin's answers made me smile.

( All those questions about phones and a few other ones )

They really should include the age of the person who makes these :D But managed to spend almost two hours (with brakes) with this one, so thanks for that.

What a summer it has been weatherwise. The highest temperature in my city has been about 25 celsius and that was one day. There has been quite many days with temperatures of 19-23 degrees but in general it has been pretty cold the whole summer. Usually there is a warmer period that lasts at least a bit longer than a couple of days. And it's been raining. It's been raining often and a lot. But on the other hand I haven't been complaining too much. I hate when it's really hot and the only downside is that I can't rollerskate (or go motorbiking) if it's very cold or wet.

Altough it seems that it's never good... This time two years ago the trees were yellow because it was so dry. So most of the time it's too hot or too cold, or too dry or too wet. All in all the words moderate or halfway haven't been the most used ones when describing the Finnish weather this summer, or during the last few years in general...

Oh well. If the Autumn is not going to be overly rainy, I'm already waiting for it. There's no better weather for walks in the forest than what you have on those cool, bright Autumn mornings.

Meh. My TV is showing dangerous signs of getting broken... Well actually it has been showing the signs for some time now but they're now getting more obvious. I just hope it would last for a couple months and I could buy a new one from the sales after Christmas.

And like that wouldn't be enough, my computer is drawing it's last breaths too. Right now I'm just trying not to stress it too much and what annoys me the most is that I can't use the photo progam because it just kills it. And yes, I have an external hard disc and I'm trying to move things there as often as I remember...

Those two things together mean expenses of approx 1200 - 1500 euros and as it happens, I don't have that kind of extra money. So I just pray those shitty machines will hang together for a little while longer and I don't have to buy new ones at the same time.