window screens, new tenants and sleeping on the floor

Since waxjism did most of the work in creating our window screens, I've been trying to get her to post about them. She reacts with complete blankness, as if she can't even hear me, so probably that's a no go, but here's a picture of Tristana helping out (Tristana must ALWAYS be included in any situations or activities) and also a picture of Chief Inspector Japp in the bunny fort under the plant table.




Tomorrow the movers are coming to take our (current) little old lady tenant's stuff. She originally told us the moving was going to be completed on the 29th and merely "suggested" that she come back to do "cleaning" in the apartment "in the following days", and later even confirmed this date schedule, but when we told her the Ukrainians were planning to move their stuff in on the 30th and simply help her out with the scheduled cleaning, she responded it would be totally fine if they wanted to come help clean, but she couldn't have them putting any of their stuff in the apartment at the same time because there "wouldn't be room yet". So... in other words... "cleaning" was always code for "moving out so much stuff that there won't even be space for a suitcase or two"? This is annoying, but not entirely unanticipated. I seem to remember that when she moved in, she was still making trips back to her old apartment for a few weeks with additional loads of stuff. So we told them that if worst comes to worst, they could sleep in our downstairs guest room Thursday, and that they could put stuff in the garage in the meanwhile and we'd help them move it up the Friday. They said that wasn't necessary though - the guest room, that is. They can wait till Friday. (Rental contracts start on the first of the month, so Friday it's legally theirs regardless - I'm far from convinced that all her stuff will be gone by then.)

We retrieved the bits of the futon-sofa from the garage and discovered our first attempt to identify the correct assembly instructions misfired. (There wasn't a clear label.) I DID manage to find the correct instructions eventually, though, which is good, because it was looking slightly intimidating without them. We should be able to put it together tomorrow, hopefully, and give it to our new tenants on Friday.

And meanwhile I guess we will be sleeping in our downstairs guest room, which is just the dining room, because that's the room where there's enough empty floor to put a double/queen mattress, and also the coolest room in the house: right now our bedroom is the hottest room in the house, and while it's bearable at night, it's not pleasant. It's just got warm enough the last couple of days to make us think sleeping on the floor would be preferable. (We also considered sleeping on the balcony, but we don't have a mosquito net yet.)

Even more reasons to stay home all the time since the pandemic isn't over

We had to go to the biggest mall in the Turku area yesterday because it was the nearest place to cut copies of keys for our new tenants. As we were walking through the parking garage - which is open to the air but underground - I suddenly realized: "The worst thing about going here is going to be the rage." The rage about everybody not wearing masks, that is.

You can go to the grocery store here and see nobody wearing masks anymore - that is, almost nobody. But the grocery store is not crowded when we're there, especially as we try to go very late. Also, we're in a tiny little town of course. Turku is the third-largest metropolitan area in Finland and comparatively a hotspot for infection, one we've been avoiding for literal years now.

Well, sure enough, as we walked down the halls in the mall, we passed tons of people (though it wasn't crowded in the sense of the building being full, the mall is the size of an airport, so the total number of people we saw was twice or three times what we usually see in a week of errands here in our town) and literally none of them were wearing masks. "Maybe the infection rate has just gone really REALLY down," Wax muttered. "I feel weird... is the infection rate THAT low?"

"No, the problem is going to be the same thing it is in America: shitty public health messaging," I said.

But then I experienced another moment of doubt. Not ONE mask? We both were overcome with curiosity and stopped to look up the statistics simultaneously.

But no, our region still had a rate of around 200 infections per 100k residents in the last two weeks.

Most of those won't have required hospitalization now, because vaccination mostly prevents that, but there's, what, a 20% chance of long covid and some (%?) risk of permanent damage to the heart, lungs, and brain even in asymptomatic infection?! The infection rate has fallen sharply in our region in the last month or so after a high spike, and of course in the hottest part of summer that helps too, but still... I'm putting my money on poor public health messaging, ie, vast failure of nearly everyone to understand the amount of risk to the fully-vaccinated. Probably here, just like everywhere in the western world apparently, the current popular (incorrect) understanding is that the risk to a fully-vaccinated person is merely a risk of getting a bad flu.

Also I like to think that public health messaging is to blame for the complete lack of concern for the immunocompromised and disabled. Probably most of these people who stopped wearing masks did so under the mistaken impression that the immunocompromised can just put on a high-filtration mask themselves without being put at further risk by exposure to unmasked vaccinated adults? Again, an incorrect impression, but more or less in line with the other misinformation. There's some evidence to indicate an uncomfortably large portion of people are just callous about it, though. I get blank looks when mentioning the risk to them to people like... my own family, even though my dad is actually a high-risk immunocompromised person who has already got covid twice. (I'd bet that even though this fact has demonstrated that prior infection doesn't protect, they've all probably assumed there's no point in trying to avoid further infection for him.)

We went to the pharmacy to get my meds refilled, and saw the only two people in the whole mall wearing masks: two pharmacists behind the pharmacist desks, one in a regular surgical mask and one a high-filtration mask, positioned behind those plexiglass partitions that have been shown over a year ago to do more harm than good. But the cashier at the same pharmacy wasn't wearing a mask. So.

Anyway... I'm mad.

I ran out of malapropisms, eggcorns, and homophone substitutions last week, but then...

...I spent the last three days reading Stranger Things fic on and off, so have some more:

• his shirt had the band's logo printed largely across the front



• No pause, just petal to the metal,



• the small hymns of satisfaction he would let out



• a job, a car, and decent hygiene regiment,



• pleading eyes barring right into his soul,



• Two boys go on a roadtrip. Shenanigans ensure.