Cimorene

I've been drinking Decaf Twinings Earl Grey and some herbal blends. I tried the Finnish specialty teashops that I have ordered loose leaf from in the past, but they didn't have any decaf tea that I wanted, let alone decaf chai and matcha, which was what I was looking for.

Today I finally made an attempt with various search terms and discovered that it's pretty easy to get decaf matcha in the US, but I couldn't find a single shop selling it in Europe, not even in the UK. I did find a shop that sells decaf chai, but it seems to be because it's the EU branch of a Canadian company. Also Wax and I both got rage headaches from the horrible pseudoscience and health food marketing gobbledygook on the websites I kept landing at. Ugh!! Why are they taking over tea😭. It's TEA!

Now, I could get my family to send me some matcha powder, but the cost of shipping from the US is prohibitive, IMO, for a consumable product that you would want periodic refills of.

So maybe it's better to not even bother getting a milk steamer... IDK if it's worth it for primarily coffee lattes and the occasional chai? Maybe it is. I hadn't even had a matcha latte till ten years ago and I did like the other kind back then...

I guess I'm just really annoyed by the lack of availability. This is a global economy in all the bad ways but I can't get decaf matcha or Reese's Pieces!

There is a wide distribution of flaky pastries that are very good in Finnish grocery stores, even little ones. The danishes and chocolate croissants and the pecan ones are some of my favorites. I like these more than donuts in general, so it doesn't bother me much usually, but:

The state of Finnish donuts is lamentable.

The most popular kind here is a berry jelly-filled donut rolled in granulated sugar or topped with pink icing. Ring donuts with pink or chocolate icing are not uncommon. But glazed (my 3rd favorite) and Bavarian cream (my 2nd favorite) are unknown, although the plain pastry cream is very occasionally, and I've never seen an eclair (my favorite), not even a frozen one. It's almost annoying enough to get me to try making them (but not quite).

Because I prefer the texture of flaky pastry, I usually like these more than I miss eclairs and Bavarian cream, but. Sometimes I just remember for some reason - usually something I read or watched - and get very sad.

Last time I updated about my learning to drive stick/standard shift I posted this, you may remember:

Total cost:

Application fee: 25€
Driving lessons: 875€
ADHD tax: 152€

Incorrect. That was my total cost thus far, but I forgot the fees for the theory test and the driving test! I have now reserved a time for the theory test on August 14.

Theory test fee: 40€
Driving test fee (not booked yet): 99€

Total: 1191€

I'll have to take the bus to Turku to take it at the nearest Ajovarma office. ( Read more... ) I have been studying the badly-translated textbook that came with my driving class (and also the good Swedish translation and occasionally the Finnish original, for clarity) and going through the test practice questions. I passed the first full practice test I took yesterday, but at about 70%, so I'm trying to make it so I know the answers to all the questions.

Friday I had a second lesson with the driving simulator, and it was much better than the first one. It was fun actually! But I completely failed to manage to start the car on a hill again (I failed to do this in my first simulator lesson like 8 times in a row and the teacher, after coaching me through the steps and explaining it, just gave up and reset the lesson lol) and had to reset it. Now I've read in the textbook I realize it's because the hill in the simulator was too steep for the instructions he gave me the first time (on a gentle slope you only need the brake, but on a steep hill you need the parking brake as well - terrifying).

BONUS OFF-TOPIC FUN FACTS: READING AND BANNING

1. After we watched the season finale of the Murderbot show, and I discussed it extensively with both my sister (who is extremely ALL CHANGE IS BAD CHANGE) and waxjism (who is not, but was annoyed because the show felt too YA for her, although she didn't HATE it), I reread the books. I had reread All Systems Red before the show; last week I reread it again, then all the others, and then I read the newest short story, Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy (about ART and its crew). And after that for days I just wanted MORE and didn't want to read anything else, but the next novel isn't out yet; I reread Artificial Condition again and started Network Effect again, and skimmed through the tags on AO3 and Tumblr to see what people are saying... but it wasn't really satisfying. When I'm interested in a ship that is non-sexual in nature, I rarely find what I want from fandom, and that's what happened again (though there is some gen friendship fic and some queerplatonic fic on AO3). I can't begrudge people their desire to sexualize nonsexual relationships, because I've definitely thought that was fun before. I wrote Finding Nemo slash (and I stand by that). But when you don't want to read that, and I don't, your odds are simply worse, because there's less of it.
   
   Unlike my sister, I didn't hate the show, but I was even more annoyed by what Wax called "YA" writing choices than she was. I'm not sure if she can stand to watch it with me when the next season comes out, because I find it very hard to shut up when I'm annoyed at tv. I am happy with the casting and have no problem with the acting - all the things that I disliked are what I consider objectively bad adaptation and writing choices. But it was still fun and watchable when considered as its own work in isolation from the books! Just weirdly and unnecessarily YA in tone.



2. For fans of banning/blocking, the action, you'll be pleased that I banned someone from my design blog designobjectory last week! I like all ages and periods of decorative arts, but my blog contains a lot of my special interests - midcentury modern, Bauhaus, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, and Swedish and Finnish design (mostly 20th c). Somebody reblogged one of my MANY posts of Finnish midcentury light fixtures by Finnish lighting titan Lisa Johansson Pape (one of the many times I've posted a variant of her 44 cm. diameter metal pendant lamp shade, which is still in production by Innolux)... anyway, somebody reblogged it with a comment sort of like "This is the ONE Scandinavian modern thing I like lol. I hate light birch furniture!" My blog is extremely heavy on light wood because of my strong interest in Swedish and Finnish 20th century design! So I blocked them. First I asked Wax if that was too unreasonable and she laughed a lot and said that it's never unreasonable to block people on your own blog. Maybe a little weird though. I mean, probably. But it's so thrilling and satisfying to block someone.



3. Ever since DW made it so you can type @ + username to create the little username embed (waxjism), I have completely switched to it and whenever I want to use the version that links to another site I forget what the code is and end up having to google it. I mean, to search the DW faqs. This is the third time it's happened. That's because it's user name, with a space between. I always forget that.

A few weeks ago I trimmed my hair slightly too short. My intention is to always be able to tuck it behind my ears, but although I could then when it was all stretched out (right before washing), it shortens a bunch after washing because the front bits are the curliest, and now I have to wear a barrette or a headband constantly to keep it back again.

This has been an exceptionally cool summer so far. I think the season has been drifting later though, and we can probably expect the warmest part to be in the end of July and August again, so maybe it will even out. But right now it's past Midsummer and I have only worn shorts outside twice, and one of the times it was too cold and I had to go in and change. Having the warmest winter ever and then following it with a cold summer... it's weird. It's more pleasant than record highs though, probably (which are still not hot like my childhood in Alabama, but unlike there, there's very little air conditioning here, and there's also a lack of cultural knowledge and preparation for heat: people don't dress appropriately or take advantage of shade, for example, and employers don't make allowances or arrangements to help people cool off). It's definitely better than long droughts like we had a few years ago, but it's still uncanny.

In my dream last night I was trying to remember the correct route through Turku's student village (lived there my first year in Finland and walked all around it with the dog) and stumbled into a bunch of political gatherings both for and against the establishment of a new community of nuns in Finland (lol) that were going to be in the student village (impossible because they're not students), and were causing controversy, among other reasons, because their habits were too sexy (?), only then I walked by them in a procession and they were just wearing normal shapeless floor-length black robes but with yellowed lace tabards over top that looked like someone's granny crocheted them as a table runner.

Earlier this week I dreamed that Turku had a second, cooler castle near downtown. In the dream I suddenly remembered that I would like to go there again. There was a big courtyard café with a radiotelemetry dish above it, and an indoor playground for children with miniaturized versions of bits of the castle, and a large gift shop practically overflowing with stacked displays of plushy castles.

Seeing them, I immediately remembered that I had been seeing them everywhere around town recently, and said "Oh, this is where people are getting them!"

They didn't look like the castle we were in - which was rectangular, made of yellow stone or brick - and they didn't look like the real Turku Castle, which is plastered white on the outside and sprawling. Instead they were dark gray cylindrical towers with crenellated tops and little windows embroidered around them, about the size of a small cat.

I was thinking that I wanted one when I woke up, even though I didn't know what I'd do with it. And then as I did wake up, I thought excitedly that we should go there and was very sad to remember that it wasn't real.

Turku doesn't have any other castles, but the art museum is a national romantic art nouveau granite palace on a hill, built 1904. It isn't golden, it's pink; but parts of the dream setting were borrowed from it.

I'm still watching old movies mostly in order to do my knitting, at a rate of about one finished for each five or six started.

It's a lot easier for me to ignore a certain quantity of misogyny, racism, classism, etc in old movies, if it doesn't go much beyond the standard of the time, than it is in contemporary film. (The DNF rate shows that it only goes so far though.) In contemporary stuff, even nasty things that are completely genre standard will drive me away, like copaganda which has made me pretty much intolerant of any portrayals of them in contemporary tv, even from outside America where it's not quite as bad.

I'm finding it very refreshing seeing women with short hair absolutely everywhere in all these early-mid 20th c. films. Finland has the highest rate of short haired women out and about of any place I've ever encountered, but it's still much lower in my experience than the worlds of 1920s-60s film and tv. And I get a bit aggravated seeing the long hair everywhere on TV, where the Central Casting Style Nexus radiates stupidly identical, implausibly labor-intensive styling, right down to the same diameter of curling iron, out from shitty network tv into the rest of the film world, even affecting prestige tv and characters who textually can't be spending any time heat styling at all. (The long hair I see irl is not aggravating, because it's their own hair, but sometimes it is puzzling - Why? How? Do you think it's on purpose? - or mildly tragic - Oh no it needs moisture! Which is probably easier than they realize! Just switch shampoo and conditioner!)

Old films are generally worse than modern non-prestige film for makeup being worn all the time and by all women characters, but this is also easier for me to excuse. I always remember the picture size and quality they were designed for was generally so much lower that who knows what you'd've seen?

They're not actually new. Those are how postboxes are always set up in rural areas, like farms. But we are only a rural area in the sense that our town is small. We literally live one block behind the town hall, police station, and postal sorting center. They're now grouping mailboxes in the entire town, because the postal service was privatized decades ago, and it isn't making money, because it isn't profitable to run a postal service (duh).

I've written about our problems with the postal service in the past, starting when they closed almost all the branch offices which are the bases for delivery routes and outsourced the local post office services to mostly supermarkets and convenience stores, and predictably, their reliability plummeted. We started having packages and package slips arrive late or never at our last flat in Turku, where the delivery was particularly bad. We had a few package slips go astray after moving to Pargas, but you can now register to get them electronically instead.

Well, when they first started planning this we got a form letter in the mail, along with the rest of the town, saying they were going to mark the spot where our mailbox has to be moved to and that it would be within a certain distance, but as far as I remember it, there was something about this not applying to everybody, so when we looked around the edges of the street and didn't see any markers, we figured they didn't want to move ours. Our tenants in the other half of the house also have a mailbox next to ours, so we thought maybe they were already counting that.

Except then last week the last in the long line of form letters was like, "We see that you still haven't moved your mailbox to the marked place. If you don't want to pay extra for a personal mailbox, and you don't have proof of a physical disability or being too old to walk to the mailbox, you will stop getting mail next Monday (that was yesterday)."

So we were like, "WHAT? HELP? WHAT MARKER?" The letter didn't have any number to call for questions or anything, by the way. It just acted like everybody OBVIOUSLY knew where the marker was. It took me half an hour on the website to find the customer service contact link, and that wasn't an anomaly, because I had to find it again yesterday and it took even longer that time. So I left a call request with my question ("Uh, where?") and the local chief called me up and was very nice and told me where it was and that the other two neighbors on our block will have theirs there too.

Friday Wax had to work late, and we hate talking to people, so we did not talk to the neighbors yet. It took us half the day Saturday to get around to it and it was past sunset when we went to the new next door neighbors' door. They moved in a couple months ago and are not done renovating. I've talked repeatedly about bringing them a welcome gift of baked goods but we haven't got around to it because of The Horrors and also we're very ADHD. Anyway, we talked to them about it and we learned that they have been getting the form letters as well, but they thought they didn't apply to them because just like two months ago when they moved in they had to call that guy about their mailbox, because the former owners had it in the wrong place, and he was like "Oh, just anywhere is fine", and so they pardonably thought that anywhere was fine. But their address was written on the marker with ours, so they had even shorter notice than we did. The last neighbor is the construction guy across the street who has been gradually removing all the nasty asbestos from his house siding and replacing it with beautiful wood by himself, and he's so far done two sides of the house in two years. Permanent scaffolding. He knows how to build stuff, but they were out of town Saturday night so we had to go home.

But Sunday when we looked out the window we saw the new neighbor and an old guy, presumably dad to one of the owners, had already built a wooden stand at the marker, which is on our property a couple of meters away from the driveway that leads to the garage under the tenants' half of the building, right outside our diningroom window. It was raining, but he finished the whole thing before sundown Sunday, which is not only impressive but kind of scary to our ADHD brains. But anyway, we managed to catch the other neighbor as they arrived back home and point it out to them, and both the neighbors got their mailboxes in place Sunday night. We took ours down from the old stand and brought them over there, but by the time we got back from the store with the right size of wood screws it was raining and dark, so we left them there on the ground overnight, and Wax got up half an hour early before her late shift so we could do it yesterday morning.

We also positioned them wrong and so we're going to have to get some plastic washers and take them down and put those in and then put them back, but they're on there now anyway.

Okay, the thing is though, that since we live on the corner, our house is on two streets and it has two addresses, which I will call Main Street 300 and Cross Street 302 A. Our registered address is Main Street 300 and our mailbox has always been on Main Street, but the new location is on Cross Street. The peculiar thing is that our new neighbors, next door in a different house, are Cross Street 302 B and we are Cross Street 302 A, even though A and B are usually used for two different doors in the same building or at least the same complex - apparently the town planning had the two lots as one lot sometime uh, before 1950. Anyway, our mailboxes (ours and the tenants') both say 300 on them (they don't say Main Street because there's a street sign on the corner of the house, visible when standing at the mailbox). But we have repeatedly had people knocking at our door trying to pick up taxi fares or sell products to people living in the apartment block which has the address Cross Street 300, because they see the 300 on our house. So now our mailboxes are on Cross Street, saying 300, I'm a little worried... maybe I need to replace the address stickers again so that they now say Main Street 300 instead of just 300. They are mounted between the neighbors' at Cross Street 302 B and Cross Street 299. I sent another call request to ask the guy if we needed to change the mailbox stickers and he says no, it's fine from the post office's point of view.

The bunny seemed mystifyingly exactly the same after getting his next dose of meds after four hours yesterday instead of eight. That was lucky! He doesn't seem to be improving, otherwise, but also not getting worse. And at least Wax is back now, though she thinks she absolutely CAN'T miss work to take him to the vet again after missing chunks three times last week.

This has impressed on both of us the urgency of my learning to drive stick shift and getting a Finnish driver's license. She has already proven bad at teaching me though, so I will need to take lessons, and the thought of that time commitment has had both of us put it off for a long time. I guess I'd better make enquiries.

It's been snowing for three days now and it's only picking up speed! It's coming down hard right now and there are big snow drifts of fat wet flakes. It's only one or two degrees below freezing.

I had put my winter coats back in the closet last week, and now I've had to dig out two of them.

This song, released in 1990 by Finnish singer-songwriter Pekka Ruuska, was a mega hit. And that's because it's totally a bop.

It reminds me of the "alternative" bands I was familiar with from my teenage years in the late 1990s (sound wise), like Cake and They Might Be Giants and that song called "If I Had A Million Dollars", which I've always hated, but it's undeniably catchy. I don't hate this song, which is also catchy.



There isn't a music video, apparently. I tried to find a lyric video, but the only one I found had some arguably NSFW and kind of fucked-up art of naked ladies with wings who definitely do NOT resemble the angels of Raphael (who, according to Wikipedia, "according to Michael Levey, 'gives his [figures] a superhuman clarity and grace in a universe of Euclidian certainties'").

The song is basically like, "The world is overwhelming, there's all this stuff, sometimes it sucks, sometimes it's confusing, so have mercy on me, be Raphael's angel to me". One of the repeated bits is about children, so I assume it's about his wife and all the emotional labor and/or comforting she does. Maybe not emotional labor though, since I, at least, get a lot of solace from my own wife just by complaining about my day to her without requiring much more than the naturally elicited reactions like "Huh" and "Lol".

But really, this song is catchy enough that it doesn't matter and most people probably don't notice.

***My pitch to waxjism: "Wax, do you know a Finnish song that goes dun, da-da-da, dun, da-da-da, ... something dum-dum dun dun dun dun dun, ole minulle something-something enkeli?"

"Yes, Rafaelin enkeli," she said immediately.

ETA: Wax has informed me that the song refers to Raphael's famous cherubs from the Sistine Madonna. That didn't occur to me because anybody old enough to understand the plea "Have mercy on me" is too old to be one of these cherubs. She says the songwriter doesn't know what it means either, he was just inspired, or something. Ohhhhkay. Well. Doesn't matter! Still catchy.