- Last weekend Wax spent about 20 hours watching videos about Scania trucks (a make of semi trucks made in Sweden). She has never had any special interest in trucks, shipping, or even cars before, but Youtube suggested one video and she watched it, and then watched the rest of the guy's channel for two days. The Youtuber was an American truck fan who was just obsessed with Scanias and had imported several from Europe at great expense and his videos were about taking them to truck shows, talking about them with other truck fans, and tuning them.
- We got a notification from the city that they've rezoned the opposite side of the street from us and are going to knock down two of the abandoned houses they (the city) have owned and kept standing there as a public hazard for the last few decades, and put a new fire station there. Obviously this is a bit of a long-term plan. I guess it will increase the noise level on our street. And they will probably fix the potholes! And even better, they're going to close the outlet where the street opens onto the highway, and semi trucks won't be able to illegally go down our street and access the back of the parking lot of the shopping center down the hill anymore! So no more waking up to all the china in the house vibrating because of some asshole illegally driving down our residential street. Uh, whenever that actually happens. Probably a few years away.
- Wax's union was on strike a few weeks ago for two days but it didn't work so they might have to go on strike again in the next month or two. Yay! Extra weekend in the middle of the week!
- Uhhhh Sweden is sending a Finnish band to Eurovision this year (they won Sweden's Melodifestivalen and are a favorite for the whole thing according to
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
waxjism, but don't ask me about it, because I hate Eurovision and I don't know. NM, though... I guess you can talk about it in the comments if you want and she'll see it since she has writer's block and can't update her journal anymore). These guys are a band from the Western hick coast of Swedish-speaking Finland who have been making humorous pastiche/parody songs for years and have like fifteen albums and have even had songs chart before, she says. Their dialect/accent is so dense that I can only casually pick up like one word per song in some of them. Anyway, they worked with a Swedish songwriter and that apparently made them eligible? LOL. - Wax's current shipping OTP looks like... about 90% plausibly going to go canon really soon? She's watching this cheesy dumb primetime soap called 911 about emergency responders in the LA area and shipping a melodramatic guy named Buck whom she calls a "crazy girl" with his BFF, Eddie, who has a teenaged son with CP. Anyway, the show made Buck come out as bi and date a horrible guy played by an alarmingly bulging chunk of beefsteak actor who is apparently... the son of
Hulk Hogana guy who played the Hulk, WHAT???... and a character who previously appeared on the show just to be a racist and bully everyone, and they brought him back to date one of the leads? Uh, but he broke up with him and now the last episode was clearly deliberately written like they are Going There probably in the next few episodes. Mazel tov, I guess.
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.
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.
They don't have candy canes.
I was never a huge fan of them, but now I'm thinking I just never had to miss them because you can't turn around without tripping over them.
Wax says they have them in Sweden and you can totally buy them here, "like an old-fashioned thing, like at fairs," but that's no use, as there isn't a fair here. Our two supermarkets - three if you count the Prisma hypermarket (I always refer to our hypermarkets - Prismas and Citymarkets - to my family as 'like Finnish Super Target') where we did our Christmas shopping - did not have them.
I threatened to ask my parents to mail me some so Wax is now hurriedly searching the web for a Finnish source (hampered by the fact that she can't remember or discover a Finnish name for them; in Swedish they're 'polka grisar'), because it's always better to ship things as short a distance as possible etc.
It seems Finland doesn't like peppermint candy or cinnamon candy at all, actually, because they also don't have:
Cinnamon gum and red hots were some of my favorite candies as a kid. Funny that I never noticed that gap before last Valentine's day! The huge variety of high quality fair trade domestic chocolates blinded me, I guess? I've hardly eaten any other kinds of candy in the last twenty years. (There's plenty of mint gum and breath mints, but the only peppermint hard candies I can think of are Marianne, which are filled with milk chocolate ganache.)
There's a class of "spicy" candy that's named as if it is made with pepper usually here, but I've never tried it or seen anyone eating it or been offered some.
Anyway, that's a big gap in Christmas decor as well as in Christmas candy, although in general the available decor here is much more to my taste. The only other big decor that I miss are those big bulb light strings, the retro kind, and we never had any growing up, I just liked looking at them.
I was never a huge fan of them, but now I'm thinking I just never had to miss them because you can't turn around without tripping over them.
Wax says they have them in Sweden and you can totally buy them here, "like an old-fashioned thing, like at fairs," but that's no use, as there isn't a fair here. Our two supermarkets - three if you count the Prisma hypermarket (I always refer to our hypermarkets - Prismas and Citymarkets - to my family as 'like Finnish Super Target') where we did our Christmas shopping - did not have them.
I threatened to ask my parents to mail me some so Wax is now hurriedly searching the web for a Finnish source (hampered by the fact that she can't remember or discover a Finnish name for them; in Swedish they're 'polka grisar'), because it's always better to ship things as short a distance as possible etc.
It seems Finland doesn't like peppermint candy or cinnamon candy at all, actually, because they also don't have:
- cinnamon gum
- red hots (cinnamon hearts)
- peppermint drops
Cinnamon gum and red hots were some of my favorite candies as a kid. Funny that I never noticed that gap before last Valentine's day! The huge variety of high quality fair trade domestic chocolates blinded me, I guess? I've hardly eaten any other kinds of candy in the last twenty years. (There's plenty of mint gum and breath mints, but the only peppermint hard candies I can think of are Marianne, which are filled with milk chocolate ganache.)
There's a class of "spicy" candy that's named as if it is made with pepper usually here, but I've never tried it or seen anyone eating it or been offered some.
Anyway, that's a big gap in Christmas decor as well as in Christmas candy, although in general the available decor here is much more to my taste. The only other big decor that I miss are those big bulb light strings, the retro kind, and we never had any growing up, I just liked looking at them.
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?
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?
In Finland dried oregano is shaken like a topping over finished pizzas the way you might put extra salt on your movie theater popcorn. There are giant oregano shakers available for this purpose, the way you have ketchup or hot sauce bottles in some restaurants in America.
(In Finland you rarely find ketchup bottles even at places that serve burgers. They do put the ketchup on burgers generally, but they do it in the kitchen. However, this doesn't stop ketchup from being a common Finnish plebe/redneck alternative to spaghetti sauce.)
Anyway, the point I was coming to was this: we have two supermarkets in town, and the largest quantity you can buy dried oregano in are little milk carton packages that hold about half a liter (2 cups).
But this does not extend to any other dried herbs, even the to my mind equally or more important basil. The largest amount of dried basil I can buy in town is a little envelope that contains about two tablespoons.
Of course I can still get dried basil - there's bigger supermarkets in the next town and in Turku, and you can have an order from the big supermarket delivered for pickup to its local little sister in the same chain, so I could have all the deli delights stocked in the Turku region delivered if I wanted to go to the trouble to make the online order. And in fact I can order bigger quantities of spices by weight from one of those specialty spices shops, which I started doing during the pandemic and found to be quite convenient, which is how I happened not to notice that I'd finally run out of basil.
But if I've just noticed today that I accidentally let myself run out of dried basil, which I usually keep in a mason jar on the lowest shelf because, unlike Finland, I use it and dried oregano in more or less equal quantities... well, then I have to just fill the cart with a bunch of little envelopes. I wouldn't mind so much if the envelopes weren't plastic, like all the other unnecessary and excessive packaging in our lives.
The other puzzling thing Finnish people put on pizza is fresh arugula (rocket). They put it on after the whole pizza is cooked, like a garnish, so by the time it gets to the table it's all wilted and pathetic.
(In Finland you rarely find ketchup bottles even at places that serve burgers. They do put the ketchup on burgers generally, but they do it in the kitchen. However, this doesn't stop ketchup from being a common Finnish plebe/redneck alternative to spaghetti sauce.)
Anyway, the point I was coming to was this: we have two supermarkets in town, and the largest quantity you can buy dried oregano in are little milk carton packages that hold about half a liter (2 cups).
But this does not extend to any other dried herbs, even the to my mind equally or more important basil. The largest amount of dried basil I can buy in town is a little envelope that contains about two tablespoons.
Of course I can still get dried basil - there's bigger supermarkets in the next town and in Turku, and you can have an order from the big supermarket delivered for pickup to its local little sister in the same chain, so I could have all the deli delights stocked in the Turku region delivered if I wanted to go to the trouble to make the online order. And in fact I can order bigger quantities of spices by weight from one of those specialty spices shops, which I started doing during the pandemic and found to be quite convenient, which is how I happened not to notice that I'd finally run out of basil.
But if I've just noticed today that I accidentally let myself run out of dried basil, which I usually keep in a mason jar on the lowest shelf because, unlike Finland, I use it and dried oregano in more or less equal quantities... well, then I have to just fill the cart with a bunch of little envelopes. I wouldn't mind so much if the envelopes weren't plastic, like all the other unnecessary and excessive packaging in our lives.
The other puzzling thing Finnish people put on pizza is fresh arugula (rocket). They put it on after the whole pizza is cooked, like a garnish, so by the time it gets to the table it's all wilted and pathetic.
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.
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.
Paypal and Banking Woes
25 Jun 2024 02:01 pmMy new ("") bank account that I've had for six months SAYS it's registered with Paypal, but it doesn't actually work: Paypal can't withdraw from it.
I had a bunch of Paypal balance left for a long time which made it non-urgent, but now that's run out I can't use Paypal for anything and it's really annoying, because I have to get Wax any time I need Paypal, but my only alternative is wading into the bank's customer service to get it to work. (I sent them a request, but I haven't read the response yet, because it means checking an Inbox, which is already hard for me, and it's the online banking Inbox, so a BONUS Inbox besides the other Inboxes that I have to do battle with regularly. I'm afraid of Inboxes.)
My bank, Ålandsbanken, is a very small bank and they have the most personal service and highest customer satisfaction in Finland. However, they seem to have the most outages and problems in their web apps and card payments (I assume this is because they're smallest but who knows), which is, needless to say, sub-optimal.
They're the ONLY bank that has an office in our town in person anymore, and they're the only bank I know of that has tellers open without appointment twice a week, since all the other ones have downsized, pushed everything online, and outsourced customer service to the point that you have to reserve time in advance and wait in a crowded queue to get service now as if you were trying to apply for a license from the police or city goverment. That's annoying, and after I had a few months' experience using this local bank's office for work, I started to feel so much warmth and goodwill towards them that I switched. Our mortgage is through them already. Nordea's card payment system is very reliable because they're huge, but they're also big enough to have been explicitly caught being evil a bunch of times and it feels extra galling that a company raking in cash on a much larger scale has much worse customer service when they could certainly afford to be better. Wax still has a main account at Nordea and a second account at S-banken (because it comes automatically when you join the Sokos co-op for half the grocery stores in Finland and Prisma, which is like a Finnish Target) and a third account at Ålandsbanken (mortgage and home renovation loan money in that one). I suppose I could switch again now that I know it isn't too difficult, if this doesn't work out: I've heard a lot of good things about OP, I guess, because it's actually a credit union. Maybe I'll try that. Sigh.
I had a bunch of Paypal balance left for a long time which made it non-urgent, but now that's run out I can't use Paypal for anything and it's really annoying, because I have to get Wax any time I need Paypal, but my only alternative is wading into the bank's customer service to get it to work. (I sent them a request, but I haven't read the response yet, because it means checking an Inbox, which is already hard for me, and it's the online banking Inbox, so a BONUS Inbox besides the other Inboxes that I have to do battle with regularly. I'm afraid of Inboxes.)
My bank, Ålandsbanken, is a very small bank and they have the most personal service and highest customer satisfaction in Finland. However, they seem to have the most outages and problems in their web apps and card payments (I assume this is because they're smallest but who knows), which is, needless to say, sub-optimal.
They're the ONLY bank that has an office in our town in person anymore, and they're the only bank I know of that has tellers open without appointment twice a week, since all the other ones have downsized, pushed everything online, and outsourced customer service to the point that you have to reserve time in advance and wait in a crowded queue to get service now as if you were trying to apply for a license from the police or city goverment. That's annoying, and after I had a few months' experience using this local bank's office for work, I started to feel so much warmth and goodwill towards them that I switched. Our mortgage is through them already. Nordea's card payment system is very reliable because they're huge, but they're also big enough to have been explicitly caught being evil a bunch of times and it feels extra galling that a company raking in cash on a much larger scale has much worse customer service when they could certainly afford to be better. Wax still has a main account at Nordea and a second account at S-banken (because it comes automatically when you join the Sokos co-op for half the grocery stores in Finland and Prisma, which is like a Finnish Target) and a third account at Ålandsbanken (mortgage and home renovation loan money in that one). I suppose I could switch again now that I know it isn't too difficult, if this doesn't work out: I've heard a lot of good things about OP, I guess, because it's actually a credit union. Maybe I'll try that. Sigh.
Inspector Japp continues the same
5 May 2024 12:37 pmThe 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.
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.
Back on track for spring?
26 Apr 2024 10:30 amMost of our second post-thaw snowfall has now melted, after two days in plus degrees; it even rained yesterday. Today it's overcast so it might rain again. The daffodils all over town in people's outdoor planters seem to have survived, and so have our little dwarf irises I think.
There was so much snow that we put the tallow ball feeder back out again after having brought it inside, and we've seen even more jackdaws, wood pigeons, and songbirds (blue and great tits, robins, and some sparrows) the last few days, when it was harder for them to find the insects and worms. Hopefully they can also get back to eating their proper diet now.
And maybe more of our bulbs will make themselves apparent. The lilies in the big old perennial beds are coming up energetically, but there is no sign of any more buds yet. The grass is still brown and the trees bare.
There was so much snow that we put the tallow ball feeder back out again after having brought it inside, and we've seen even more jackdaws, wood pigeons, and songbirds (blue and great tits, robins, and some sparrows) the last few days, when it was harder for them to find the insects and worms. Hopefully they can also get back to eating their proper diet now.
And maybe more of our bulbs will make themselves apparent. The lilies in the big old perennial beds are coming up energetically, but there is no sign of any more buds yet. The grass is still brown and the trees bare.
Still snowing
23 Apr 2024 10:07 amIt'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.
I had put my winter coats back in the closet last week, and now I've had to dig out two of them.
This is the real meaning of Easter!
31 Mar 2024 01:23 pm(Not really. I mean,( Read more... ) The spring equinox still feels like a way more interesting and inspiring holiday, but it's not well supported to call it 'Easter'. It's just more clunky to say "The really moving part of the time around the spring equinox".)
We went to the open house at a local sheep farm, Stentorp, for all the new lambs and bought a lot of wool yesterday! I've been wanting to work with more undyed Finnish wool, hopefully for some colorwork, and the wool from Stentorp is especially soft even by finnwool standards. In general finnwool is slightly less smooth than blue-faced Leicester, but very close to it, which is to say, second only to merino. The combed skeins we bought yesterday are just as soft as the blue-faced Leicester sweater Wax recently finished making me, and more lanoliny, which is a big plus because it smells nice, is good for your skin, and helps the wool be more resilient against both physical wear (like pilling) and dirt and microbes.
The Stentorp house, a charming little 1907 villa with adorable rustic Art Deco details, was also open and we got to walk around the downstairs. I was enraptured. The doorways! The windows! The door handles!!
Boulder arena, a great little natural stage where they hold small concerts, and their guest house on the water which they rent in summer. It's also got adorable Art Deco details. (Wax has a knack for taking a picture of me at the absolute most unflattering and awkward-looking moment, but the other picture didn't show the porch.)
The lighting wasn't great inside the barn and it was crowded, so no lamb pictures, but I got to hold one and it peed a little on my jacket sleeve! So cute!
And we both still have two days of vacation left right now, but Wax almost immediately after that sproinged her back out trying to pick up too much cat food at once at the grocery store. That didn't prevent her from making an English chicken mushroom pie and some peanut butter cookies yesterday, but it does put a crimp in our activities and her enjoyment.
We went to the open house at a local sheep farm, Stentorp, for all the new lambs and bought a lot of wool yesterday! I've been wanting to work with more undyed Finnish wool, hopefully for some colorwork, and the wool from Stentorp is especially soft even by finnwool standards. In general finnwool is slightly less smooth than blue-faced Leicester, but very close to it, which is to say, second only to merino. The combed skeins we bought yesterday are just as soft as the blue-faced Leicester sweater Wax recently finished making me, and more lanoliny, which is a big plus because it smells nice, is good for your skin, and helps the wool be more resilient against both physical wear (like pilling) and dirt and microbes.
The Stentorp house, a charming little 1907 villa with adorable rustic Art Deco details, was also open and we got to walk around the downstairs. I was enraptured. The doorways! The windows! The door handles!!
Boulder arena, a great little natural stage where they hold small concerts, and their guest house on the water which they rent in summer. It's also got adorable Art Deco details. (Wax has a knack for taking a picture of me at the absolute most unflattering and awkward-looking moment, but the other picture didn't show the porch.)
The lighting wasn't great inside the barn and it was crowded, so no lamb pictures, but I got to hold one and it peed a little on my jacket sleeve! So cute!
And we both still have two days of vacation left right now, but Wax almost immediately after that sproinged her back out trying to pick up too much cat food at once at the grocery store. That didn't prevent her from making an English chicken mushroom pie and some peanut butter cookies yesterday, but it does put a crimp in our activities and her enjoyment.
Karaoke Mondays: Raphael's Angel
12 Mar 2024 05:39 pmThis 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 towaxjism: "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.
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.
It's not fun to see three posts that are mostly about work in a week when I look back on my blog. For one thing, it's an unpleasant sign of how overwhelming it's become and how exhausting. For another, any week where I write about work three days is bound to be bad for my peace and equilibrium.
But also, I didn't really do nothing but resent work that week (or any week). It's just easier to post about my grievances and the bizarre things that happen, since they come together naturally in anecdote form.
I have lots of shorter anecdotes throughout the week about things like by-play observed among passers-by on the street, and things I humorously forgot due to ADHD, and hundreds of things the cats do that I just tell Wax. At the time of wanting to tell someone about these little tidbits, though, I don't think about blog posts. I'll just include five other things from this week to make myself feel better.
§ The local business owners had one of their little events, in this case an event called "Kärringkväll" (Swedish) or "Akkainilta" (Finnish), in which all the small businesses in the town stay open late (usually they close at five or six because they're so small) and offer deals aimed specifically at women. As a result, somebody actually came and swept all the gravel off the sidewalks in the center part of downtown! It collects there all winter, with more being added every time there's fresh ice on the sidewalks, so when it finally melts (it isn't all melted from the streets and driveways and lawns yet, but most of it is worn off the sidewalks, where it melts faster) there are piles and piles of it. Regular nasty road dust of gasoline, microplastic, and carcinogens settles along the roads and gets stuck to the snow all winter, trapped with the gravel, which gets ground into dust and sand from being walked and driven on, and they have accumulated a truly incredible amount of airborne black nastiness by the time of the spring thaw. So we're about two weeks now into this period of extreme airway irritation, which continues usually until well after Easter.
§ Met a beagle outside when I was walking, and got to pet it! It jumped up at me with that flattering and so relatable doggy excitement (I was excited too obvs), and the owner gave me permission to pet it. It left a cute little paw print on the knee of my jeans.
§ My sister recently had bunion surgery on one foot and has started working from home again. In celebration (she felt too anxious to ask for time off when she wasn't working lol) she bought plane tickets for her and my BIL to visit us for two weeks at the end of August!
§ There's definitely a leak in the roof. The melt made this clear. It's not a huge emergency one, but it's made a stain. We were planning to have it fixed soon, anyway. We don't really know who to hire, though. However, a couple weeks ago we were out walking and met an old schoolmate of Wax's, and exchanged greetings, and as we were leaving, we noticed that his house was pretty recently remodeled, including the roof, and it looked good. So our current hope is to see him outside again so that we can ask if they can recommend whoever did theirs. This means walking more, and specifically down the part of our street a few blocks away near the top of the hill.
§ I have been thinking some more about how incredibly wrong the voices sound in historical fiction a lot of the time, and it's always because it's a period where I'm familiar with the literature written in that era and the characters sound wrong. (Why I love Catriona Macpherson's Dandy Gilver and haven't liked any other recent mysteries set in that era that I've looked at.) It's an easy fix, albeit clearly not one everyone is interested in - you just have to read a lot of stuff written in the period. When you're talking about the 19th century onward in the anglophone countries and reading in English, this task is trivially easy; as you go further back, or try to cross language barriers, it gets harder of course, but there's not much excuse for failing at Victorian England, IMO, and far less for failing at the period between WW1 and 2. ( Read more... ) Anyway, all of these thought processes have been bubbling for years, and I recently decided to look for some more novels from between the two wars from different genres, to get a wider sample of the sound. So far I've been a bit frustrated by my attempts to narrow by publication date (you can't filter by it at Project Gutenberg, for instance, but their transcriptions are much more easy to read than the scans at archive.org), but I've also had a bunch of fun and bemusing encounters with books that I haven't finished. Edwardian romances, for example. Yikes, and yet, haha. And now I've started the first of EM Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, which I had heard of because of the tv series without quite knowing what they were about, and the beginning has a whole section that's like a client I would make fun of on This Old House, remodeling a historical house pretentiously and removing original features that didn't look olde timey enough, then building a new wing with a fake Tudor fireplace and refusing to put electricity in it and covering the floor with rushes. I can practically see Kevin O'Connor politely asking if she's sure and explaining why electric lighting is so popular and convenient in living areas, and then saying "Well, if you're sure! You like it, and we like decisions!" with his eyebrows in his hairline.
But also, I didn't really do nothing but resent work that week (or any week). It's just easier to post about my grievances and the bizarre things that happen, since they come together naturally in anecdote form.
I have lots of shorter anecdotes throughout the week about things like by-play observed among passers-by on the street, and things I humorously forgot due to ADHD, and hundreds of things the cats do that I just tell Wax. At the time of wanting to tell someone about these little tidbits, though, I don't think about blog posts. I'll just include five other things from this week to make myself feel better.
§ The local business owners had one of their little events, in this case an event called "Kärringkväll" (Swedish) or "Akkainilta" (Finnish), in which all the small businesses in the town stay open late (usually they close at five or six because they're so small) and offer deals aimed specifically at women. As a result, somebody actually came and swept all the gravel off the sidewalks in the center part of downtown! It collects there all winter, with more being added every time there's fresh ice on the sidewalks, so when it finally melts (it isn't all melted from the streets and driveways and lawns yet, but most of it is worn off the sidewalks, where it melts faster) there are piles and piles of it. Regular nasty road dust of gasoline, microplastic, and carcinogens settles along the roads and gets stuck to the snow all winter, trapped with the gravel, which gets ground into dust and sand from being walked and driven on, and they have accumulated a truly incredible amount of airborne black nastiness by the time of the spring thaw. So we're about two weeks now into this period of extreme airway irritation, which continues usually until well after Easter.
§ Met a beagle outside when I was walking, and got to pet it! It jumped up at me with that flattering and so relatable doggy excitement (I was excited too obvs), and the owner gave me permission to pet it. It left a cute little paw print on the knee of my jeans.
§ My sister recently had bunion surgery on one foot and has started working from home again. In celebration (she felt too anxious to ask for time off when she wasn't working lol) she bought plane tickets for her and my BIL to visit us for two weeks at the end of August!
§ There's definitely a leak in the roof. The melt made this clear. It's not a huge emergency one, but it's made a stain. We were planning to have it fixed soon, anyway. We don't really know who to hire, though. However, a couple weeks ago we were out walking and met an old schoolmate of Wax's, and exchanged greetings, and as we were leaving, we noticed that his house was pretty recently remodeled, including the roof, and it looked good. So our current hope is to see him outside again so that we can ask if they can recommend whoever did theirs. This means walking more, and specifically down the part of our street a few blocks away near the top of the hill.
§ I have been thinking some more about how incredibly wrong the voices sound in historical fiction a lot of the time, and it's always because it's a period where I'm familiar with the literature written in that era and the characters sound wrong. (Why I love Catriona Macpherson's Dandy Gilver and haven't liked any other recent mysteries set in that era that I've looked at.) It's an easy fix, albeit clearly not one everyone is interested in - you just have to read a lot of stuff written in the period. When you're talking about the 19th century onward in the anglophone countries and reading in English, this task is trivially easy; as you go further back, or try to cross language barriers, it gets harder of course, but there's not much excuse for failing at Victorian England, IMO, and far less for failing at the period between WW1 and 2. ( Read more... ) Anyway, all of these thought processes have been bubbling for years, and I recently decided to look for some more novels from between the two wars from different genres, to get a wider sample of the sound. So far I've been a bit frustrated by my attempts to narrow by publication date (you can't filter by it at Project Gutenberg, for instance, but their transcriptions are much more easy to read than the scans at archive.org), but I've also had a bunch of fun and bemusing encounters with books that I haven't finished. Edwardian romances, for example. Yikes, and yet, haha. And now I've started the first of EM Benson's Mapp and Lucia books, which I had heard of because of the tv series without quite knowing what they were about, and the beginning has a whole section that's like a client I would make fun of on This Old House, remodeling a historical house pretentiously and removing original features that didn't look olde timey enough, then building a new wing with a fake Tudor fireplace and refusing to put electricity in it and covering the floor with rushes. I can practically see Kevin O'Connor politely asking if she's sure and explaining why electric lighting is so popular and convenient in living areas, and then saying "Well, if you're sure! You like it, and we like decisions!" with his eyebrows in his hairline.
Last week after overhearing bits of karaoke from the next room at work, at one point I asked Wax if she knew a song that went "Da-da-da-DUM, kitara soi... dum dum dum DUM... da-da-DAAAA, da-da-DAAA".
Wax laughed and asked if I knew anything else about it, so I said that it sounded vintage, sort of chanteuse-era, with a guitar and some other folk music type instruments and sounded vaguely like the ensembles used for Finnish tangos.
If you didn't know, Finnish Tango is a big thing. Finland has been crazy for tango, both the dance and the music, since it took Finland by storm in the 1930s. There are tango clubs and tango competitions and there's a whole genre of tango bands and Finnish tango artists who compose and sing Finnish tangos. (According to Wikipedia, the dance is an Argentine tango but the rhythm follows ballroom tango, whatever that means.) Aside from the lyrics being in Finnish, while Finnish tangos are clearly tangos, they also have a slightly different flavor which seems a bit more slow and a bit more relaxed or staid: perhaps that's what the Argentine/ballroom distinction is getting at, but I don't care enough to research it right now.
Wax's suggestion was that if it sounded Spanish or Italian to me it might be a Finnish translation of an Argentine tango or Italian dance - there are oodles of these, even more as you go back in time, because of the tango's popularity.
She named a song which is apparently basically known to everyone in Finland, "Hopeinen Kuu" (lit. "silver moon").
This is Olavi Virta's 1960 translation of the Italian Guarda che luna:
She hummed a bit of it to me and I said, "You know, actually, I think that's probably it!"
But then this week at karaoke somebody sang it, so I came over to get a look at the lyrics as they went by, and later I googled them, and it totally is not.
It IS a big song in Finland, though. It's called "Surujen kitara" (lit. guitar of the sorrows), and the first result you get for it is a hilarious-looking band of guys called "Topi Sorsakoski and AGENTS", who released it on a hit album in 1986, but I found a 1963 recording that sounds very much like Mexican folk music:
So I looked a bit further, thinking I'd find a Spanish-language original... but what I found out instead... is that it's the translation of a theme song by PEGGY LEE for a 1953 JOAN CRAWFORD Western called "Johnny Guitar". The original! Is actually called Johnny Guitar!
Interestingly, I think it's quite understandable why Surujen kitara was a massive hit and Johnny Guitar (the song) apparently wasn't: I think it's a much better song, even though musically they are the same! The lyrics are a lot stronger without the character's name, which, you gotta admit, is pretty goofy; they thus manage to sound more poetic and have a more universal appeal. The summary of "Johnny Guitar", song, is kind of... "My man, Johnny Guitar, is absolutely the best for various reasons and someone just killed him". In contrast, you could summarize "Surujen kitara" as "This mournful guitar used to sound beautiful and joyful, but you (vague, mysterious) left and now it sounds sad and dark and cold instead."
I don't think I've ever actually seen a Joan Crawford movie, but the cover image from Wikipedia has a fabulous, albeit ahistorical, outfit on her:
She also wears, apparently, a black blouse and jeans and a little gray or green ribbon bow necktie with a big thigh holster to hold people at gunpoint, and a strangely 1950s gown with a gauze bodice and kind of cottage core collar for playing the piano in her saloon that she owns, and also a denim button shirt with a floor-length skirt and a red bandana around her neck. And at some point, a maroon housecoat with a... hot pink lace-edged camisole...? And in this cover image she also seems to wear slim high-waisted jeans which is hilarious for an apparently 19th century western.
Also, according to Wikipedia, Johnny Guitar (the character) doesn't actually die AND isn't the main character, rendering the title of the movie weird and the content of the Peggy Lee theme song even weirder. Maybe there's a minute in there where she thinks he's dead before being reassured, idk.
Wax laughed and asked if I knew anything else about it, so I said that it sounded vintage, sort of chanteuse-era, with a guitar and some other folk music type instruments and sounded vaguely like the ensembles used for Finnish tangos.
If you didn't know, Finnish Tango is a big thing. Finland has been crazy for tango, both the dance and the music, since it took Finland by storm in the 1930s. There are tango clubs and tango competitions and there's a whole genre of tango bands and Finnish tango artists who compose and sing Finnish tangos. (According to Wikipedia, the dance is an Argentine tango but the rhythm follows ballroom tango, whatever that means.) Aside from the lyrics being in Finnish, while Finnish tangos are clearly tangos, they also have a slightly different flavor which seems a bit more slow and a bit more relaxed or staid: perhaps that's what the Argentine/ballroom distinction is getting at, but I don't care enough to research it right now.
Wax's suggestion was that if it sounded Spanish or Italian to me it might be a Finnish translation of an Argentine tango or Italian dance - there are oodles of these, even more as you go back in time, because of the tango's popularity.
She named a song which is apparently basically known to everyone in Finland, "Hopeinen Kuu" (lit. "silver moon").
This is Olavi Virta's 1960 translation of the Italian Guarda che luna:
She hummed a bit of it to me and I said, "You know, actually, I think that's probably it!"
But then this week at karaoke somebody sang it, so I came over to get a look at the lyrics as they went by, and later I googled them, and it totally is not.
It IS a big song in Finland, though. It's called "Surujen kitara" (lit. guitar of the sorrows), and the first result you get for it is a hilarious-looking band of guys called "Topi Sorsakoski and AGENTS", who released it on a hit album in 1986, but I found a 1963 recording that sounds very much like Mexican folk music:
So I looked a bit further, thinking I'd find a Spanish-language original... but what I found out instead... is that it's the translation of a theme song by PEGGY LEE for a 1953 JOAN CRAWFORD Western called "Johnny Guitar". The original! Is actually called Johnny Guitar!
Interestingly, I think it's quite understandable why Surujen kitara was a massive hit and Johnny Guitar (the song) apparently wasn't: I think it's a much better song, even though musically they are the same! The lyrics are a lot stronger without the character's name, which, you gotta admit, is pretty goofy; they thus manage to sound more poetic and have a more universal appeal. The summary of "Johnny Guitar", song, is kind of... "My man, Johnny Guitar, is absolutely the best for various reasons and someone just killed him". In contrast, you could summarize "Surujen kitara" as "This mournful guitar used to sound beautiful and joyful, but you (vague, mysterious) left and now it sounds sad and dark and cold instead."
I don't think I've ever actually seen a Joan Crawford movie, but the cover image from Wikipedia has a fabulous, albeit ahistorical, outfit on her:
She also wears, apparently, a black blouse and jeans and a little gray or green ribbon bow necktie with a big thigh holster to hold people at gunpoint, and a strangely 1950s gown with a gauze bodice and kind of cottage core collar for playing the piano in her saloon that she owns, and also a denim button shirt with a floor-length skirt and a red bandana around her neck. And at some point, a maroon housecoat with a... hot pink lace-edged camisole...? And in this cover image she also seems to wear slim high-waisted jeans which is hilarious for an apparently 19th century western.
Also, according to Wikipedia, Johnny Guitar (the character) doesn't actually die AND isn't the main character, rendering the title of the movie weird and the content of the Peggy Lee theme song even weirder. Maybe there's a minute in there where she thinks he's dead before being reassured, idk.
Organizational dysfunction
20 Feb 2024 05:13 pmThe academic field that I abandoned after a couple of years all those ages ago, without writing a bachelor's thesis, was sociology. In recent years, when it occurred to me to potentially (someday) finish the degree now that it's easier to study at a distance, I've started occasionally gnawing away at what (sub)fields there are of interest to me, if any.
And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.
There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?
And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.
And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.
There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?
And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.
Mardi Gras and whipped cream
19 Feb 2024 10:12 amI was born in New Orleans! My parents lived there briefly before my dad got laid off by Shell in the early 80s oil crash thingy, but just long enough to create vague memories and photos of me in costume on my parents' shoulders collecting beads. I had a big collection of plastic beads growing up.
My sister later went to school in N.O. and she and my parents now live in Baton Rouge, which also has parades, but my mom is sick and my sister just had surgery so none of them have gone to Mardi Gras this year.
There's a traditional pastry called Lenten buns in Sweden and here that are basically like a round sweet yeast roll topped with cream and jam like the scone toppings of so much debate in Cornwall and Devon. (Whipped cream though.) And there's another version with marzipan instead of jam, which is the one Wax likes. They have little packages of two from the various nearby bakeries in all the supermarkets around this season, so we've bought them a few times. Wax is hoping they keep it up for a while even now that Lent is over. (Lent is not otherwise a thing here. Nordic cultures don't go for giving up chocolate and carbonated beverages like my Catholic relatives.) I like the cream and jam, but the buns themselves being cold from the fridge really takes away from it. I'm sure they're way better fresh and still hot from the oven, but you can't heat them with the cream on, so you'd have to bake them at home. We haven't done that, because when we bake it's usually sweeter desserts than that, like cake and cookies.
My sister later went to school in N.O. and she and my parents now live in Baton Rouge, which also has parades, but my mom is sick and my sister just had surgery so none of them have gone to Mardi Gras this year.
There's a traditional pastry called Lenten buns in Sweden and here that are basically like a round sweet yeast roll topped with cream and jam like the scone toppings of so much debate in Cornwall and Devon. (Whipped cream though.) And there's another version with marzipan instead of jam, which is the one Wax likes. They have little packages of two from the various nearby bakeries in all the supermarkets around this season, so we've bought them a few times. Wax is hoping they keep it up for a while even now that Lent is over. (Lent is not otherwise a thing here. Nordic cultures don't go for giving up chocolate and carbonated beverages like my Catholic relatives.) I like the cream and jam, but the buns themselves being cold from the fridge really takes away from it. I'm sure they're way better fresh and still hot from the oven, but you can't heat them with the cream on, so you'd have to bake them at home. We haven't done that, because when we bake it's usually sweeter desserts than that, like cake and cookies.
talking about the weather
12 Feb 2024 10:01 amEven if I didn't get too little sleep, when the weather's miserable I never want to get out of bed. Because everything out there is less cozy and warm! It's probably bad for my will power to uh, do other stuff, being cat divorced, because I have to hang out on my bed instead of a separate sofa. But it is definitely easier to get warm enough. (It's the warmest room in the house.)
It's supposedly -9 C right now (the weather station isn't close enough so it's usually off by a few degrees), which is to say, 16 F. There's been a biting wind for the last week or so though. Too cold not to wear a skirt again. And worse, gray and dismal again. At least we had some sun last week.
Speaking of seasonal affective issues, sort of?, I'm down to a little more than 75 mg in tapering off of venlafaxine. No striking side effects, though I've been going very gradually. Also there are a few headaches, but I get those sometimes, so they can't necessarily be attributed to it.
It's supposedly -9 C right now (the weather station isn't close enough so it's usually off by a few degrees), which is to say, 16 F. There's been a biting wind for the last week or so though. Too cold not to wear a skirt again. And worse, gray and dismal again. At least we had some sun last week.
Speaking of seasonal affective issues, sort of?, I'm down to a little more than 75 mg in tapering off of venlafaxine. No striking side effects, though I've been going very gradually. Also there are a few headaches, but I get those sometimes, so they can't necessarily be attributed to it.
It's been a slow conversion, but I think I want to only buy new clothing that's made by microbusinesses and small brands in the future. I can't really say 'in Finland', because the Finnish jeans brand that's converted me (Very Nice Jeans) manufactures their jeans in Estonia. That's still nearly local, though. It's even like half mutually comprehensible with Finnish.
Or to make it myself, maybe, some of it. I've been trying to find a secondhand linen short-sleeved blouse, mostly failing, and going into that frustration spiral where you think it can't be that hard to just make yourself. (There are some beautiful ones on Etsy from little shops in Lithuania and Ukraine, but none exactly what I had in mind.) (Knitting counts too, and I do intend to knit some cotton short sleeved shirts eventually, but woven linen is by far the best when it's hot.)
Also once again trying to find over the knee wool stockings, but I still can't find any Finnish shops besides Säihkysääri (sort of twinkletoes, lit. scintillating calves, which is a fantastic name for a hosiery store), and they are out of everything but navy and black. The only other option I can find is that I could order wool blend stockings directly from Trasparenze in Italy, apparently. For now I can make do with the one pair and some cotton ones with legwarmers, though.
Or to make it myself, maybe, some of it. I've been trying to find a secondhand linen short-sleeved blouse, mostly failing, and going into that frustration spiral where you think it can't be that hard to just make yourself. (There are some beautiful ones on Etsy from little shops in Lithuania and Ukraine, but none exactly what I had in mind.) (Knitting counts too, and I do intend to knit some cotton short sleeved shirts eventually, but woven linen is by far the best when it's hot.)
Also once again trying to find over the knee wool stockings, but I still can't find any Finnish shops besides Säihkysääri (sort of twinkletoes, lit. scintillating calves, which is a fantastic name for a hosiery store), and they are out of everything but navy and black. The only other option I can find is that I could order wool blend stockings directly from Trasparenze in Italy, apparently. For now I can make do with the one pair and some cotton ones with legwarmers, though.
Oh boy, it's back down to -10°, feels like -16° C! And I still haven't received the green skirt that got turned around in the mail, or started making the striped one, so I just have the two until it warms up again (and one cotton one that can work when it's a bit intermediate). It's getting a little old, tbh.
All this wool I've been wearing is starting to show the effects of living with angora rabbits. I need to find a wool comb and a tape roller soon. Yesterday I kept seeing little tufts of angora fluff in the air at work - hitchhikers! There's no air circulation there to help filter or collect it.
I feel exactly the same as yesterday, after napping all evening basically. No sore throat, just a stuffy nose. Am I having some sort of unusual allergy attack instead of getting sick? I guess we'll find out.
All this wool I've been wearing is starting to show the effects of living with angora rabbits. I need to find a wool comb and a tape roller soon. Yesterday I kept seeing little tufts of angora fluff in the air at work - hitchhikers! There's no air circulation there to help filter or collect it.
I feel exactly the same as yesterday, after napping all evening basically. No sore throat, just a stuffy nose. Am I having some sort of unusual allergy attack instead of getting sick? I guess we'll find out.
I didn't want to iron on a weeknight and it was warm so I spent the week beginning to knit my next cardigan (a sport weight Guernsey in sage green alpaca) instead. But then the temperature dropped again and it's back below -10 and my petticoat is still half finished, so I'm wearing the tartan skirt again. I should've just made a second petticoat with another old sheet in the meantime.
The four days of Icy Times meant three days of wearing my new lace-up boots to use ice cleats, which don't fit neatly onto my snow boots. But those boots are still new, and now, after the extra walk to the health center yesterday, I have blisters on both heels. 😣
I took iron supplements for three months and my iron is still low, so now I'm on it for the foreseeable. Sigh.
The four days of Icy Times meant three days of wearing my new lace-up boots to use ice cleats, which don't fit neatly onto my snow boots. But those boots are still new, and now, after the extra walk to the health center yesterday, I have blisters on both heels. 😣
I took iron supplements for three months and my iron is still low, so now I'm on it for the foreseeable. Sigh.
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