Cimorene

So, when you print a pricetag at the Red Cross thrift store where I work, you have to navigate a hierarchical tree using arrows and Enter. An example would be "Apparel>Women's Clothing>Undergarments" or "Apparel>Accessories>Children's". Now the department is in the barcode, and the store/chain know what was sold, how long it was on the shelf first, what it cost, etc, and they use this to produce statistics.

And as a result of this, the cash registers can be programmed to automatically discount a whole department, like Women's Clothing or Furniture or Sport, all at once. This is useful for promotions like "ALL CLOTHING -50% THIS WEEK ONLY" - nothing for the cashier to do. (In contrast, with something like Buy Two X, Get the Cheaper ½ Off, the cashier has to check which it is and click 'Discount'.)

Well, this week, my department, Accessories, is on sale. The problem is, my department doesn't have a department in the store like the others. Socks, undergarments, and pajamas are in their respective clothing departments. Hats are there and also in sports. Scarves are in 4 different displays. Jewelry, wallets and sunglasses are in 3 displays unless they're designer or for special occasions. Swimsuits everyone just forgets about until the season. And most of the cashiers can't pass a test on whether all these items are part of the Accessories department or not.

Unfortunately, they need to know, because some (undergarments and swimwear) are officially categorized as clothing instead on the tag according to edicts from the chain level. So these have to be individually discounted anyway (and why not just leave them off the sale? Nobody asked me, that's why). BONUS: we just discovered my coworker in Accessories has been mistagging everything, up to and including jewelry, as clothing.

So that's hundreds of mistagged tiny items scattered throughout the store for the cashiers to (a) identify as accessories and (b) remember to check to make sure the discount rings up and individually discount it if not. Being a cashier here doesn't have any educational or experience prereqs, but it certainly requires certain abilities.

For bonus stress, I'm a cashier as well, and all week when I was at the register it meant I wasn't putting out stuff for the sale.

My mother-in-law finally got a tenant for the home she moved out of a year ago & we went on a flat-emptying roadtrip yesterday (because it's an hour and a half away from us in Ekenäs, halfway to Helsinki). It was really almost empty already, with just a washing machine, a bookcase and tv/media shelves, the light fixtures and the odd plastic bin remaining. In <2 hrs, mop & rubber gloves were being wedged into the van and I was done sweeping up the dust bunnies. We didn't have to pry anything out of the walls because they're being professionally redone.

Coming back to Pargas (20 minutes away from us in Turku, waxjism's childhood home and MIL's new digs), we drove right through an intense blizzard of big, fat, fake-looking snowflakes that hung swirling in the air over a surprisingly large area encompassing most of the town, both the bridges and a big chunk of rural mainland. It was two degrees below freezing when we got dressed in the morning, but with glaring sunshine all day, most of our work was done above the freezing point, with the furniture-carrying members of the party (including waxjism) leaving their jackets indoors. So while the temperature may have dipped a degree or two in the storm area, the flakes were vanishing as they hit the ground like soap bubbles, but sticking to the noses of the cars driving out of the gale in little white patches like they'd been pranked with a towelful of shaving cream.

While driving in the middle of the blizzard, there was a clear sense of moving through the inside of a cloud, which is of course literally true, but not usually so visibly so. At the treeline it looked like fog; up close the flakes were streaking past like the stars past the windows of the Enterprise; and in the middle distance you could clearly catch individual big flakes in isolated moments, making out the size and shape and he weird little giddy swirling trajectories they made coming down.

We watched the storm die down out the window of MIL's new flat while drinking tea, with the last snowflakes literally steaming off the roof of the house next door.

There's isolated snowflakes falling outside our livingroom window today too (currently -1° C), though nothing like a blizzard. They look like dandruff falling from a bright blue-gray sky. Or ash, as waxjism observed.

So, Happy Easter, as the Finns are all saying ironically.

It snowed after Easter last year too. I maintain that Easter is too premature for spring in this climate. May Day is more legitimate, or the traditional pagan spring carnival of Walpurgis, but they're still on the chilly side and not really showing enough new growth from nature to inspire the proper springy feeling yet.

The vibe is less the joyous verdant carpets of new grass and daffodils in bloom and heaps of blooming flowers and buds on all the trees which one pictures, and more a sort of cautiously hopeful donning of sneakers instead of insulated boots, sweeping mud and gravel off the streets and waiting for the grass to come back to life. (To be fair, there are buds - the little furry ones - on the trees. But not baby leafs yet. The bunnies weren't very keen on the twigs we brought home last weekend.) Spring clothes and sunglasses and sunhats and thin cotton scarves are selling briskly at the Red Cross, but the customers are still all coming in bundled up.

Sooooo, what's going on with me is that I'm with the Red Cross for the next... 6 months or so.

The last time I was in a work practice placement it was a daycare ( The equivalent of The Previouslies, a short summation of how I wound up switching Employment Goals )

I decided to do some retail for the time being, because I have some experience of it and it's doable without any certification or training, unlike many other fields.

My Finnish isn't perfect - it's what you'd call "fine" or "pretty good" probably, and I'm still terrified of someone unintelligible due to mumbling or regional accent coming along, but I don't have trouble ordinarily. It's also been 13 years since I was a cashier though, and the technology has changed since then, and I've never done it in Finland anyway. So when the little group of social workers, employment bureau caseworkers and mental health professionals that my therapist's workgroup belongs to heard my explanation, they swiftly concluded that a few work practice placements in different areas of retail would be best, because it would provide the best chance to polish my Retail Finnish language skills and appease my anxiety by familiarity with environment and expectations of the field.

They also sent me to a new department of the Employment Bureau, which - okay, let me just pause here to note that this is amazing as fuck: The Employment Bureau has a SECRET DEPARTMENT where they give slightly more help to people who need slightly more help. In the ordinary run of things, caseworkers there have 500+ customers apiece and are overworked and underfunded to death. I've had like four caseworkers in the last few years before this already. And when you go to their information desk, or to their ordinary caseworkers, and ask for more help, they typically send you to that Career Planning course that I was sent to a couple years ago, which wasn't useless but was aimed at people who needed help navigating the bureaucracy and things like that more than people suffering from social anxieties and culture barriers and uncertainty about their language skills.

But even though I had previously inquired in multiple places about help, nobody at the Employment Bureau had been empowered to tell me about the existence of this department, which I gather you get sent to only with the referral of a psychologist or psychiatrist? That's where the representative came from who was at the the meeting with my psychologist I mentioned, and he immediately put in a request to have me transferred to that department. I got a new caseworker from there who was calm, friendly, brisk, and reassuring. She said that if I hope to work arranging the little showrooms at Ikea there's a certification for that (Somistaja, a window dresser/display maker) which depends on the certification for being a salesperson.

So she sent me to the Red Cross's thrift store, Kontti, which is staffed with students, volunteers, work practicants and people eligible for the thing where social security reimburses the employer for their salary. So it's almost entirely charity, with most of the proceeds going to the Red Cross's various projects in Finland (50%) and abroad (25%), plus it's very diverse and friendly and generally a pretty nice place. Their reputation as a training ground for retail and warehouse workers who then move on to employment elsewhere is so good, in fact, that they are fairly selective with their new trainees - the big boss told us in our introduction on Tuesday that our group of 8 represented over 100 applicants over a couple of months, which is like... a Harvard-like acceptance rate. (The Swedish language got me in the door here, I'm pretty sure: EVERYBODY who hears that I'm interested in retail and speak fluent-ish Swedish gets excited, because there's a huge demand for that skill due to the legal and practical requirement for stores to have someone who can speak it on hand - there aren't really many Swedish monolinguals around, but there are still a few.) You can also get salesperson certification on the job there, as well as a long list of other certifications - the lady who was supervising me and my fellow new-cashier trainees yesterday is on the verge of finishing one in business admin. (Hence why it was my caseworker's first choice.)

We spent the first couple of days on the warehouse side, where the donations are processed, sorted and priced, and it has to be seen to be believed. It's just such an unbelievable quantity of stuff. The area around the station where the bags are emptied and unpacked is just like something out of a movie, walls made out of racks and shelves and carts packed solid with bags of donated stuff waiting to be opened - cases four feet deep and six feet tall, banana boxes towering up towards the warehouse ceiling, and an overflow area with just a five or six foot high mountain of bags just... piled against the wall like a heap of snow. But that's only the beginning of the journey, because once they're unpacked and sent to the proper departments there's yet more sorting to do. The front half of the warehouse is also packed with racks, crates, shelves and bins of objects on their way to the store front, so it's a bit like an antique mall except cleaner - one little room of china, one little room of books, one little room of paintings, one little room of toys, one little room of electronics - where the walls between them are once again made of storage packed solid on both sides with stuff. Walking in for the first time felt a bit like, I don't know, visiting Willy Wonka's factory, or one of those quaint little Museums of Curiosities.

Scribbled on the now-retired calendar. 2015

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I just had a pretty surreal experience.

About 10 years ago, in a long-abandoned fandom, I had one of those ideas that you talk about in chat without meaning to write because it seems unmanageable for some reason, like maybe too long or too much work or too angsty, and in this case, it was because I had a vision of a 20-year-long plot arc but with a giant puzzle piece missing from the middle. I had a vague sense that the answer should be obvious to me, that it was staring me in the face somehow or I was looking at it upside down, but the whole idea was silly anyway. However, I was easily persuaded to write a few individual pieces from it as vignettes (oh, and apparently the last bit was only 7 years ago).

I hadn't given the story any thought in years, and I was never particularly stressed about figuring it out, but just now I was reading something by somebody else in a completely different fandom and I suddenly looked up like my ears were ringing, and then, prompted by an abstruse connection between the reading material and a couple of conversations I had last week with perhael about yet a third fandom, I suddenly knew what the missing piece was.

In fact it seems both laughably obvious and inevitable, like I can't believe I didn't figure it out before, like I had a key in a lock upside down. I haven't even heard from the friend I was writing it for in years, I think...

I hope my brain hasn't been wasting resources running that process in the background all this time.

Last week when we were reading in bed I said to waxjism, "Can you believe when we first met in person I thought you were cool?" ... and we both almost laughed ourselves out of bed.

It's actually quite a strain to remember my first impressions of someone I know so well, though they were extremely vivid and I still have a lot of sensory memories of the occasion, no doubt due to neurotransmitters and teenaged emo and stuff like that (I was 20, probably still teenaged-emo if not technically teenaged).

I thought my 2nd favorite quick pasta dish - ( sauteed chanterelles and spinach topped with parmesan and lemon juice over pasta )

- was the perfect umami, but if you put two slices of buttered bread, thick slabs of gouda, slices of turkey, and leftover chanterelle-spinach-lemon-sautee mixture in between, and then melt the cheese in a skillet/microwave/(panini press??? I've never used one but probably the best way?).... it's maybe even better. Or just as good at least.

I think it would be even better with tiny slices of dill pickle though. Failing that, one could add sliced olives, but I don't have any at the moment.

I don't actually RECOMMEND melting the cheese for a sandwich in the microwave, and if you do, make sure you toast the bread first and turn it after 10-20ish seconds to make sure the bottom piece of bread doesn't get soggy from steam. But sometimes you just don't want to use a skillet.

Unlike the majority of the Ubuntu user population, I preferred the Gnome 3 desktop from the beginning. I'm really attached to it and have gone through a bunch of different distros trying to find one that works correctly in all the ways I care about. I couldn't get everything I needed to work with Debian.

Now waxjism is running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 LTS, and the differences are more apparent:

+ Ubuntu Gnome:

• Panel indicators show up in a single integrated menu for the most part in Gnome.



• The Calendar widget displays events from my Google calendar.



• There's a new, native calendar app that does the same, and is more convenient than the web interface or the previous Linux apps. (The new native world clock/clock/timer is useful too, if a bit rough around the edges, and there's a new to-do app which could display google tasks and provide an indicator applet, but is neat.)



• The top panel is easily themed with CSS and a variety of extensions let you add applications and places menus and a number of useful toggles and indicators. You can't do anything about it in Unity but adjust the opacity, where you also can't do much about how hideously ugly and unthemeable the application launcher has always been and remains.



• The application menus display seamlessly in the top panel and native gnome programs integrate title and menubar. The corresponding function under Unity looks stupid and takes extra screen real estate.



• Gedit is my favorite editor and it's streamlined but just as functional now, which I love (an older version is packaged with Ubuntu Unity).



• waxjism is having some kind of driver issue with Unity that makes some flash videos, depending on what the site is running (eg HBO Nordic and Viaplay - so: hockey - but not Netflix), crash the entire computer so it suddenly and without warning shuts down. I had this for a while about a year ago under Gnome 3 on Debian, but apparently not anymore. Wouldn't want to switch and suddenly have this problem start back up again, though.

+ Ubuntu Unity:

• The standard Ubuntu & Gnome file manager - Nautilus - packaged in Ubuntu Gnome is so slow it's basically unusable. A lot of changes have happened under the hood with the new versions of Nautilus apparently? Whatever, it doesn't matter how much better it would work if it never finishes doing it. Alternative file manager Nemo, forked by and for Linux Mint, mostly works in Ubuntu Gnome, but for example, it doesn't handle symlinks to folders correctly under Ubuntu Gnome (a functionality that's been perfectly fine in every Linux I've tried since like 2007), it set up Samba but not without giving me some trouble, and it doesn't look right because it's designed for another distro that has its own themes (it works flawlessly in Mint, as far as I've ever noticed). - Meanwhile Nautilus is fine under Unity, although complaints about functionality that's been removed are still germane.



• The greeter/login/lockscreen (LightDM) is better in Unity.



• The quicklists, which add extra indicators and right click functionalities to running apps in the launcher under Unity, can be legitimately useful. There's nothing like that in the Gnome shell dock.



• Terminal refuses to remember my preference to not display the menu bar under Ubuntu Gnome, another thing I've never had a problem with before.

Actually, the media I've most enjoyed consuming recently was The Prisoner, the classic British weird/genre series from 1967. I had never heard of it until an anniversary post came across my Tumblr dashboard, and I looked it up and was intrigued by the article's comments about its seminalness and aesthetics, so I watched it (it's all on YouTube, and it's only got 17 episodes).

I mean, what little waxjism saw she couldn't even stand, because of the changing television conventions since the 1960s - everything that old seems hokey to her. I like things from that period, though - I grew up on second wave sff that was mostly written in the 60s-70s and watched a fair amount of Nick at Nite for a while. And seeing it and recognizing its seminal quality from the bits of it I'd seen elsewhere was really cool, but it was also SO AESTHETIC (which was hilarious enough to have entertained me all on its own, but it actually was nice, too) and SO CONCEPTUAL (another thing that's very characteristic of the period, but at the end it goes even further off the rails than late season 3 Star Trek TOS, which is really saying something, and then goes even more Allegorical and Symbological in the final episode than CS Lewis) that it was fully worth watching on that basis.

My favorite part was how much the SUPER 60s interiors could have basically come right off a present day interior design blog. That, and how within the context of 60s mid-century modernism, Finnish & Scandinavian bleeding-edge modernist design from the 1930s is associated with the most sinisterly ~high-tech~ Bond villain stuff (when it's actually older than mid-century modernism, I mean).

That was more than a month ago, though. I was just thinking about it the other day when we were talking about all the things we've watched in the past few months - other than the hockey, it's been mostly filled up with waxjism's horrible movies and my rewatching Lewis when she's not around. When I finish that and the rest of the Morseverse I still need to finish my Poirot rewatch too.

Although! We forgot to mention that we watched Kinky Boots! It was good and I did really enjoy it, but the shoehorned in heteronormativity was very disappointing. I mean, even in a landmark drag queen film with the beautiful and talented Chiwetel Ejiofor - and a film that is about adulthood, father figures, finding oneself, and plotwise about creativity and a struggling small business - what about this said to anyone that it would benefit from, or needed, a het romance stuck into it? Or any romance, actually? Like, there were two main male roles, and they like each other and work together, but they didn't really have a dangerously romantic interaction or anything that needed to be leavened??? And it's not like the whole thing was boring and they needed another B-plot. On the contrary, there was barely time for the romance.