School Updates

My dad and I walked my mom through signing up for an RSS feed of my journal a couple of weeks ago so she could follow my profound thoughts, such as they are. So I guess I could try to update a bit here.

I've gone to a month of Finnish classes now, and I've adjusted more or less to sleeping slightly less and even to running errands after class is over rather than collapsing in an unconscious heap. I'm hoping that I'll manage to adjust still further to a) being more active in the remainder of the daytime so that I can go back to collecting/posting plebefic and shoes and updating my Poirot blog on Tumblr and b) start meal planning so that I'll be able to cook during the week again instead of subsisting on sandwiches, cereal, and frozen food 5/7ths of the time.

I've also adjusted (sort of) to being more social! Adaptations that I have made to my natural inclinations include:

• I don't put on my headphones at the bus stop, because I share the bus stop and ride with Natalia, Azra, and Farjana. Usually the four of us sit on two seats out of solidarity, but mostly we're too awkward to have very much conversation - like, an average of one exchange every two days, I guess? Also, though, Finnish is our strongest language in common, and we don't have very much Finnish between us yet (though I have my suspicions about Natalia's English... I can't shake this feeling that she gets more than she lets on, because she has this composed, subtly and deeply amused air that just very strongly reminds me of Black Widow, even if, as mentioned, she's not QUITE that deadly/hot/red-headed).



• I don't read at the lunch and coffee breaks. Instead, I join the largest group or second-largest group of my classmates at the table they share and take part occasionally in the conversation, although it is necessarily dominated by the Russian-speakers. We've had some fun exploring the different Thai, Russian, and Bosnian words for different things, though. And listening to Daoprakai's anecdotes about her husband, who has some extremely intense opinions about very weird stuff.



• I sit with my classmates in the café at lunch, when they're there. I'm there the most often, though. I think it's a kind of cultural difference. The more Finland-integrated you are, the more you take cafeteria-lunch prices for granted and the more you're willing to pay. Pepe, whose better half is also Finnish, is the second-most casual cafeteria customer. Ksenia and Maria go once a week or so, but I think this is because they are each eating for two, and they're vocally dismayed by the prices vs. quantity and selection. Whereas from my viewpoint, the food is cheaper and better than the Finnish average, so it's doing fairly okay.

In terms of the class material, we've reached the Talking about the Weather unit and are 3/5 done with how to conjugate verbs in the simple present tense (we're spending way, WAY too long on this, considering how regular Finnish verbs are: they're pretty regular). We've started to learn partitive (which is necessary for direct objects and some types of plurals, among other uses) and genitive (possessives), but we're not done with them because they are each formed in a variety of different ways, so we're slowly practicing the different categories and going over the explanations again and again for the benefit of the slower classmates. We even briefly brushed over some of the more complex cases that deal with spatial relationships ('-ssa/ä and -sta/ä is for the inside of a house, and -lla/ä and -lta/ä is for places related to a house, but still outside, like the patio. Except when it isn't, which is a lot of the time'): just enough to cause intense headaches, in other words. Meanwhile, I can't help feeling that a limited selection of past tense would be more useful to us, considering the amount of off-the-cuff conversing/explaining we're supposed to be doing. After all, this class is immersion for everyone who doesn't speak Russian.

and the other stuff

1. Wax and her inheritance: We mentioned a while ago about Wax's ancient granny-who-hated-me dying. Well, the sale of the house was finalized this week, and Wax has spent... about the last week putting in mostly-full-days emptying the house of crap. She's been exhausted, and also not at home because she's in Pargas which is 45 min away.



2. Sick: A week ago this past Wednesday my throat swelled almost closed to the tune of INTENSE PAIN. I thought it was some sort of allergic reaction (it's happened 3 times to me before, always in response to certain perfumes in the face) until a few hours later when the flu-like muscle quakes and hot-and-cold took over. The flu symptoms lasted 1 day and the sore throat 3, but I took it easy through Monday. I seem to be okay now except for sinus congestion, but luckily I have a box of Sudafed purchased last summer in the US. (Sudafed is prescription-only in Finland.)



3. Perry: This week he acquired a really bad ear infection: suddenly he wouldn't eat or sit down for more than like 20 seconds at a time all night. I skived off Thursday for an emergency vet appointment and now I've got to squirt slimy medicine in his ears twice a day. I think it's helping, though. Anyway, another thing that I need to get my energy together for is dog diapers. I've seen some tutorials online and I guess I can crochet the diaper cover and you can use baby diapers and cut a hole for the tail... I just don't seem to have the energy/time to determine the sizing and the budget and actually make the cover. Well, that's my agenda for next week I guess.



4. Rupert Replacement: My mom has a big dragon collection dating from before I was born, and my favorite of these is Rupert, a 2' long tabletop Chinese dragon that she got as a wedding present. He's durable and lightweight, made of resin with plastic jewel eyes, and the somewhat rare product of a Chicago-based statuary company that was active from the 30s-60s, and which has now become rather collectible. (Most of her favorite dragons had names, and she made them talk to me in different voices, but my other favorites to talk to were one-of-a-kind ceramics; Rupert I could actually hug and play with.)
   
   
   
   I've been looking online for something sort of like Rupert for five years or so, but without much luck. There are cast stone garden decoration dragons, and there are ceramic and resin collectible dragons, but the latter tend to be smaller and somehow less friendly, and all of them are kind of pricey. But this week I talked to my mom about it and got Rupert's manufacturer information and I found two more Ruperts online. One of them was about $70 USD on eBay with a very ugly paintjob but one of them was more reasonable and mom's gonna try to buy it for me. Even if she can't get it, though, we talked about trying to cast a duplicate of him, or if that fails, I'm now determined to sculpt my own from papier-mache or clay, if necessary (clay's easier to work with, obviously, but more fragile and there's the problem that I don't know anybody with a kiln. But if nothing else, there's mom's kiln). Anyway, just the prospect of getting a Rupert made me happy. I only have stuffed dragons and a lego one at the moment.