![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe went to my oldest friend's wedding on a mountain outside San Francisco last weekend.
According to the news, they've been having the same weather as us lately: around 20°, kind of. On the day of the wedding it was actually way hotter than expected, but when we went back into the city on Sunday it went back to the forecast. The problem is that Turku is nowhere near as windy as San Francisco in this time of year, apparently. (In the autumn and winter Turku is VERY windy, though.) There was a constant hard, cold wind that made it feel like it was firmly below 15° the whole time, and I didn't have adequate garments for layering with me at all.
Sunday we went to the Aquarium of the Bay. Then I went with my family to Ghirardelli Square - we wanted the old factory to still be open but apparently all it is now is a collection of giftshops so crowded you can barely walk into it. It used to be home to a tea salon I have been dying to visit for over a year called Crown & Crumpet, and I was super excited to go there, mainly because you can't order the teacups with the pink crown teapot over the internet; but when we got there we looked up their website and found out they're closed for moving and I didn't get any awesome tea swag at all. :(((
I want this teacup and also I want it on like a shirt or possibly on everything
Monday we were supposed to just meet Dad's internet fandom friend (his fandom is original sf poetry and it's mostly old people and doesn't overlap with our circles much) at an sf bookstore in the Mission called Borderlands, and then spend the majority of the day exploring the Castro. But some things came up:
The Castro wasn't really all that far away, but it was getting legit cold by the time we started that way and everyone was kind of tired already by the time we got there. It turned out the particular gay bookstore mom got from her actual printed-on-paper guidebook because she has something against the internet was out of business and I think I was the only one who really wanted to wander up and down aimlessly and explore.
It's kind of hard to do that with a power wheelchair along anyway, let alone a train of five people, and the sidewalks were kind of crowded, Wax had a headache, Lilly and I were shivering intermittently, and nobody could hear anybody which kept resulting in slightly short-tempered, shouted conversations trying to decide where to go.
We eventually found a gay bookstore, but we only bought Tipping the Velvet because all the gay supernatural romances I flipped open were kind of mediocrefic and I just couldn't see paying $14 for them. We did go to a Random Miscellany shop, see a bunch of totally naked guys in lawn chairs in the street as well as a gym that just had a bunch of stationary bikes full of hot sweaty gay guys and a rainbow flag in the picture window, and buy a Rice Krispies treat from the naughty macaroon bakery, but then we went back to the hotel. By the time we got off the tram a hundred hours later, it was so cold that my teeth chattered all the way back to the hotel even though I rode on the back of Daddy's power chair, which is admittedly really fun. It would be nice to see the parental units more often if only for that.
We had to wake up at 4 am for our trip to the airport and I was out of cash to tip the bellhop, and then there were no Starbucks in our concourse. My earbuds had started to hurt my ears so badly that we only watched 1 episode of Game of Thrones, and we were unable to locate a deli with bagels OR a Starbucks or indeed ANYWHERE to sell us tea during our layover in NYC; and the world's rudest, most obnoxious American jerkface lady had the seat in front of Wax on the Helsinki leg. She kept her seat all the way back, which is so far that to get out of our seats we had to climb OVER THE ARM, the entire time, and had to be told by the flight attendants to straighten it up when they served food both times. To which she responded respectively "Why?" and "Who, me?" So her seat was literally pressing against Wax's knees the entire time and Wax is only 5'5". There LITERALLY wasn't room between the seatback and Wax's abdomen for her laptop!
So after this 7-hr interval of BOILING RAGE we got to Helsinki completely exhausted and promptly got lost on the way to baggage claim. While we were trying to find it and on the verge of collapse, Wax's backed-up SMSes arrived and one was from her mom saying that the dog hadn't drunk or eaten anything since Thursday! Making 5 days! And we were still trapped in the airport. When we found someone to lead us out, Wax was freaking out because they delayed us TWICE at the stupid passport control even though we'd ALREADY BEEN THROUGH IT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE, and the said someone gave her attitude about it (srsly fuck you dude; she wasn't even flailing at YOU). Still not having eaten, we piled onto a (VERY HOT) bus for a 2½ hour commute...
...and then went immediately to meet Wax's mom to take Perry straight to the vet. I stayed there with him for two hours or so, almost completely zombified and having come out the opposite side of hunger so that I didn't even know I was hungry, while they gave him an IV to prevent him from shriveling up and floating away, took a blood test and urine sample, and ultimately prescribed some antibiotics for a UTI.
I gave him his medicine and he ate and drank Wednesday night before I fell asleep, but I think I got a broken 7 hours of sleep altogether, and Thursday morning I kept staring at the computer, unable to remember when I needed to leave to catch the bus.
So I was late to class, and then I found out that we hadn't learned anything all week and the substitute didn't intend to start now. It was so boring (and overcast outside, and nearly deserted inside the school) that I sort of felt like I was dreaming, just floating along blankly through everything with a severely delayed reaction time. That is, until I got home and found out that THE DOG HAD STARTED PEEING BLOOD! I didn't really have a panic attack, but I think I just couldn't anything anymore. I just sort of sat there moaning and nearly crying in response to every single thing that happened, including when Wax started (FINALLY) playing the latest episode of Teen Wolf.
Eventually (after talking very incoherently on the phone to the vet, and giving the dog some pain meds) I took a Xanax and slept. And, yes, we did spend 3 hours today covering 'to get from [person][case]' and 'to give to [person][case]', which, yes, we had actually already seen before, and, in fact, the substitute DID demonstrate using the clever device of pretending to hand her pencil to at least six different people, and she did explain 'take' and 'bring' a LOT of times and tell Loud Girl to be quiet when, for the first time ever, I didn't even want her to shut up because nobody was actually saying anything that conveyed any information at all; but at least I finally got to come home and sleep another four hours. Oh, and we didn't even do so much as a worksheet in that time, just looked at the overhead while she yapped. I'm bitter.
But whatever, at least it's the weekend and the dog seems to be getting better. And my mother-in-law did the dishes for us while we were gone. She's a champ.
According to the news, they've been having the same weather as us lately: around 20°, kind of. On the day of the wedding it was actually way hotter than expected, but when we went back into the city on Sunday it went back to the forecast. The problem is that Turku is nowhere near as windy as San Francisco in this time of year, apparently. (In the autumn and winter Turku is VERY windy, though.) There was a constant hard, cold wind that made it feel like it was firmly below 15° the whole time, and I didn't have adequate garments for layering with me at all.
Sunday we went to the Aquarium of the Bay. Then I went with my family to Ghirardelli Square - we wanted the old factory to still be open but apparently all it is now is a collection of giftshops so crowded you can barely walk into it. It used to be home to a tea salon I have been dying to visit for over a year called Crown & Crumpet, and I was super excited to go there, mainly because you can't order the teacups with the pink crown teapot over the internet; but when we got there we looked up their website and found out they're closed for moving and I didn't get any awesome tea swag at all. :(((
I want this teacup and also I want it on like a shirt or possibly on everything
Monday we were supposed to just meet Dad's internet fandom friend (his fandom is original sf poetry and it's mostly old people and doesn't overlap with our circles much) at an sf bookstore in the Mission called Borderlands, and then spend the majority of the day exploring the Castro. But some things came up:
- By the time we finished breakfast we were almost late anyway, and when we called all three of the wheelchair cab companies in SF, one of them didn't answer, one referred us to another, and the last one said they'd call us back when a cab was available but it could be up to 1½ hours. (If the demand for wheelchair cabs is that great, why aren't there more of them?!)
- We took the cablecar. It was cute, but it was a loooooong trip. I've had shorter commutes to Pargas. Also it was crowded as fuck and my visceral feeling in response to large crowds of humanity is similar to a lot of people's reaction to, like, spiders or snakes. I mean, I don't necessarily want to swat them, but I'm very uncomfortable and increasingly grossed out the longer I look at them.
- Somehow the walk from the cablecar stop to the actual bookstore was another 15 minutes or so. We were completely justified in spending several hours in the bookstore! Also, we all bought a ton of books, including three werewolf-centric modern fantasies, a used vintage edition of one of Saberhagen's mythology novels (not the Greek ones, The Mask of the Sun, which is quite plausibly faily but I did really like it when I was a kid, so we'll see?), and an NK Jemisin. (We've never read her before.) The store had a giant poster of the Michael Whelan cover painting for All the Weyrs of Pern and they only wanted $18 for it, but it was shrink-wrapped to cardboard and would've been awkward as fuck to carry on the plane so I restrained myself. I'm still deeply regretful of this now even though we actually have negative wallspace right now. (DRAGONS, okay, and that is possibly my actual favorite dragon painting in ever, because I'm a huge Whelan fan, even if not so much a McCaffrey one? I really love the cover of Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern and this edition of Dragonsong, but the composition of Weyrs is so great...)
- We wanted to meet
razzlecupcake too but it took her a while to find us there. Then we all went out to lunch, which was delicious but lingering, and suddenly it was like, late.
The Castro wasn't really all that far away, but it was getting legit cold by the time we started that way and everyone was kind of tired already by the time we got there. It turned out the particular gay bookstore mom got from her actual printed-on-paper guidebook because she has something against the internet was out of business and I think I was the only one who really wanted to wander up and down aimlessly and explore.
It's kind of hard to do that with a power wheelchair along anyway, let alone a train of five people, and the sidewalks were kind of crowded, Wax had a headache, Lilly and I were shivering intermittently, and nobody could hear anybody which kept resulting in slightly short-tempered, shouted conversations trying to decide where to go.
We eventually found a gay bookstore, but we only bought Tipping the Velvet because all the gay supernatural romances I flipped open were kind of mediocrefic and I just couldn't see paying $14 for them. We did go to a Random Miscellany shop, see a bunch of totally naked guys in lawn chairs in the street as well as a gym that just had a bunch of stationary bikes full of hot sweaty gay guys and a rainbow flag in the picture window, and buy a Rice Krispies treat from the naughty macaroon bakery, but then we went back to the hotel. By the time we got off the tram a hundred hours later, it was so cold that my teeth chattered all the way back to the hotel even though I rode on the back of Daddy's power chair, which is admittedly really fun. It would be nice to see the parental units more often if only for that.
The Return Journey from Purgatory
We had to wake up at 4 am for our trip to the airport and I was out of cash to tip the bellhop, and then there were no Starbucks in our concourse. My earbuds had started to hurt my ears so badly that we only watched 1 episode of Game of Thrones, and we were unable to locate a deli with bagels OR a Starbucks or indeed ANYWHERE to sell us tea during our layover in NYC; and the world's rudest, most obnoxious American jerkface lady had the seat in front of Wax on the Helsinki leg. She kept her seat all the way back, which is so far that to get out of our seats we had to climb OVER THE ARM, the entire time, and had to be told by the flight attendants to straighten it up when they served food both times. To which she responded respectively "Why?" and "Who, me?" So her seat was literally pressing against Wax's knees the entire time and Wax is only 5'5". There LITERALLY wasn't room between the seatback and Wax's abdomen for her laptop!
So after this 7-hr interval of BOILING RAGE we got to Helsinki completely exhausted and promptly got lost on the way to baggage claim. While we were trying to find it and on the verge of collapse, Wax's backed-up SMSes arrived and one was from her mom saying that the dog hadn't drunk or eaten anything since Thursday! Making 5 days! And we were still trapped in the airport. When we found someone to lead us out, Wax was freaking out because they delayed us TWICE at the stupid passport control even though we'd ALREADY BEEN THROUGH IT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE, and the said someone gave her attitude about it (srsly fuck you dude; she wasn't even flailing at YOU). Still not having eaten, we piled onto a (VERY HOT) bus for a 2½ hour commute...
...and then went immediately to meet Wax's mom to take Perry straight to the vet. I stayed there with him for two hours or so, almost completely zombified and having come out the opposite side of hunger so that I didn't even know I was hungry, while they gave him an IV to prevent him from shriveling up and floating away, took a blood test and urine sample, and ultimately prescribed some antibiotics for a UTI.
I gave him his medicine and he ate and drank Wednesday night before I fell asleep, but I think I got a broken 7 hours of sleep altogether, and Thursday morning I kept staring at the computer, unable to remember when I needed to leave to catch the bus.
Purgatory Still Not Over
So I was late to class, and then I found out that we hadn't learned anything all week and the substitute didn't intend to start now. It was so boring (and overcast outside, and nearly deserted inside the school) that I sort of felt like I was dreaming, just floating along blankly through everything with a severely delayed reaction time. That is, until I got home and found out that THE DOG HAD STARTED PEEING BLOOD! I didn't really have a panic attack, but I think I just couldn't anything anymore. I just sort of sat there moaning and nearly crying in response to every single thing that happened, including when Wax started (FINALLY) playing the latest episode of Teen Wolf.
Eventually (after talking very incoherently on the phone to the vet, and giving the dog some pain meds) I took a Xanax and slept. And, yes, we did spend 3 hours today covering 'to get from [person][case]' and 'to give to [person][case]', which, yes, we had actually already seen before, and, in fact, the substitute DID demonstrate using the clever device of pretending to hand her pencil to at least six different people, and she did explain 'take' and 'bring' a LOT of times and tell Loud Girl to be quiet when, for the first time ever, I didn't even want her to shut up because nobody was actually saying anything that conveyed any information at all; but at least I finally got to come home and sleep another four hours. Oh, and we didn't even do so much as a worksheet in that time, just looked at the overhead while she yapped. I'm bitter.
But whatever, at least it's the weekend and the dog seems to be getting better. And my mother-in-law did the dishes for us while we were gone. She's a champ.
(no subject)
Date: 27 Jul 2012 06:51 pm (UTC)*dead* THAT IS MY FAVOURITE PERN COVER OF ALL TIME.
I bought the hardback just so I could have that picture in a larger format. I kid you not.
(no subject)
Date: 27 Jul 2012 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Jul 2012 02:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 30 Jul 2012 03:35 pm (UTC)Just so I can comment
Date: 3 Aug 2012 03:57 pm (UTC)Re: Just so I can comment
Date: 4 Aug 2012 08:28 am (UTC)I'm not offended, just musing over my coincidentally having a completely different estimation of the time and stuff involved than Wax and Daddy did. It happens.
You can comment anonymously too, or using the Post a comment From: field you can sign in with Twitter (Ticking the OpenID box and then you can choose Twitter name/password). I mean, if you don't want to use it as a blog you don't have to sign up for an account, but I guess now you have one it doesn't make a difference.
What is that icon picture?
(no subject)
Date: 5 Aug 2012 06:01 am (UTC)thought the second: :( your poor dog! i hope he feels better very very soon.