Cimorene

It was REALLY cold today so we decided to just walk down past the Local Ugliest Building that's being built near here. I was thinking we'd take some more pictures, but actually it was SO cold that I didn't want to take off my fur mittens the whole time, or really to stop walking for very long. Here's a couple of pictures from yesterday instead: I noticed Wax had gotten a picture where you can see my ugly snowboots. And my long down coat is actually quite funny. (I had the hood up most of the time today, unlike yesterday.)



I do have some pictures of today's route and the Ugliest Building from when I walked the same way last Wednesday, when it was much warmer. The first one is the gate and wellhouse of the local history museum; the second is the Ugliest Building (in progress).

We went on a walk yesterday to the big outdoor staircase that the town finished building in 2021 near here. It's on an old slag pile from the limestone quarry and apparently it used to have a tiny railroad track that ferried the stone away and the little rail was called Hundbanan (Koirabaana, dog track).

So I've been hearing news about this dog track around for years and assuming it was a path for walking dogs on! Wax told me yesterday that it was connected to the quarry and that the name comes from the little rail cars, called "dogs". When we got there and I saw the sign that says no dogs allowed on the stairs, I just cracked up!

It's 470-something individual stairs, which takes you to a sightseeing point about 60m over sea level (and we're an island, so the sea is also visible all around. Most of the town is on hills though, so it's not like we're in great danger of flooding). In fact, the heap was begun almost a century ago, and today you can't even see the whole length of the quarry from there, let alone down inside it. The much lower official viewing spot is better because there aren't trees in the way. As a bit of cardio it is actually quite nice though! But because it's all ergonomic for people of different fitness levels the stairs are extra deep and shallow, which makes them actually quite irritating to walk on because they don't suit the natural stride of a typical adult.

We didn't remember to take any pictures, which is funny because we so rarely go anywhere or do anything outside. But it also was overcast so it wouldn't have made very good pictures; we'll have to go again on a sunny day soon.

We are trying to walk together regularly and have been trying to establish the habit for several years. Just really badly. We're both adhd and the threshold to starting off on the walk is very high. This might work slightly better since it's a definite destination, though as a walk it's a little short.

me: Gotta call the Kronbergs tomorrow! Do you know them?
waxjism: The family? Yeah, they're my cousins. Well, some of them. One of my grandmother's sisters married one. For example, Whatsisname Johansson, he's my second cousin. He's a Kronberg. His mom was.
me: Yeah, well, no, it's their company. They do IT stuff. Yep, here we go, the CEO is Kasper.
waxjism: Oh yeah, he's one of them.

However, she is not aware of the nature of the controversy surrounding which local taxi firm is hired. I'm really curious because people made "Ugghh" and "Oooooh" noises about the board of directors' stated taxi firm preference, and then instead of explaining it to me someone said "there's some controversy" and someone else said "They're fine! They're perfectly fine."

O... k

I've been feeling a little blue the last few days, or morose, or mopey, or down in the dumps. I think this is partly hormonal but partly because I'm feeling especially frustrated with my executive dysfunction again, after a talk with my sister about how we might persuade my mom to see an adult ADHD specialist. My mom's is much worse and much more clear-cut than mine, though. I don't know if a doctor would think she warranted medication or not, especially as she is retired and all, but there's never been a time when it wasn't a problem in her day-to-day life and for the people around her. So I'm pretty confident that she at least won't have any difficulty being diagnosed.

I, on the other hand, probably would, but I've been chafing more and more at my inability to create functional strategies to work around my own executive dysfunction in recent years, but my symptoms were always highly atypical.

Not only was I never hyperactive, I never garnered any negative educator feedback for inattentiveness either. I was so bored that from about age 8 I read from 1-2 novels per day more or less every day of my school career until ~12 (and that just marked a division where some classes sometimes required my full attention so that I could rarely actually start a novel at school and finish it before school was over; sometimes they took days in middle and high school, because the dominant paradigm in advanced courses at that time and place was to give as much busywork as possible). But I also did all my schoolwork: I could usually put the book aside briefly to do each assignment (often before the teacher even got her momentum explaining it), and then pick the book back up again. It also wasn't all that difficult to get my attention when I was reading - I didn't have that thing my mom does where it's like she can't hear you. Personally, I would put this down to anxious hypervigilance, because I hated being at school and didn't relate to the other people there, but I clung to the books even when my surroundings were being threatening enough to make it difficult to concentrate on reading; the books were a shield and connection to my identity and the world outside the school, creating an extremely inconvenient counterphobic coping mechanism that still makes my life difficult now, since I feel a near-unavoidable compulsion to read fiction when I'm too anxious.

You can see that I was extremely inattentive, since I was usually paying more attention to my reading than to my surroundings, but I didn't have any trouble in school - on the contrary, I was a compulsive overachiever. And I never had enough trouble managing time and tasks that I completely failed at it until I moved away from home, because my parents acted as sort of gentle executive function coaches. (I have to have like four separate alarms to space out the tasks I have to do to get ready to leave the house in the morning as an adult, but as a kid - and I mean, also through most of high school - my dad did all of that. He would provide gentle repeated reminders for each one, while often making lunch for my little sister and sometimes bodily dragging her out of bed.) Even with that help though, I had a couple of spectacular nervous breakdowns before high school was over, which I uniformly got through by eventually dropping the rope on some particular asignment or other (at my mom's repeated encouragement). (That's how I got a B in one high school class, because I got a C on the exam: I was crying hysterically and my Mom told me I didn't need to be any better at Algebra 2 than I already was and I should absolutely not study it at all and I listened.) Anyway, I've investigated books and articles and all kinds of resources about adult adhd on and off for years and I'm still not sure if I have it (or just some other sort of extremely life-ruining executive dysfunction).

I decided before I moved here, to Pargas, in summer 2019, that when we settled in and I eventually got a new GP I would bring up the idea of getting ADHD testing. But then the pandemic happened, and for quite a long time the idea of going to teh GP for non-urgent checkups of any kind seemed ludicrous. In fact, our local health services aren't overburdened right now, and depressingly, going to the health center is one of the few indoor activities you can do and be assured everyone around you will be masked. So perhaps I should have a go at that, even though the pandemic is definitely not over. One terrifying task at a time, though. Right now the most urgent terrifying task is dealing with the employment bureau again (I still think it would be less terrifying to just try to get a job without them, but I do trust that my career advisor is wiser than me on the subject). Of course, executive dysfunction is making this terrifying task more difficult too.

There are large flocks of ducks and geese in our town and they are my heroes because they are a recurrent "problem" for the golf course users who cut down a bunch of trees in what was wild animal habitat and then added additional ponds which ducks and geese are known for liking, and then have the nerve to act surprised about ducks and geese using the ponds while the rest of their stupid hobby is a giant bald patch eyesore right along a huge chunk of what used to be a scenic bike and car path. (Also horse path that the bridle schools use for exercise, but I guess they probably don't tend to take their horses to poop on the golf course because they'd have to leave the path and go over a ditch. Bummer.)

So far, mostly I just cheer the ducks and geese when I see them and read about their activities, specifically their golf-course activities, but I wonder if there's some expert on wild duck and goose behavior who could be consulted for the best ways to lure additional ducks and geese to a golf course and reinforce the behavior. Apparently not bread, because that's bad for them, but that's the only thing I ever learned to give them when growing up...

... I probably don't really have the revolutionary spirit to sneak into the golf course to feed (or whatever) ducks and geese, but it's a nice thought. It seems like they're doing such a service that applause just isn't enough.

(Normally I wouldn't let out a photo of me making this goofy of an expression, but I specifically asked Wax to take a picture too because most of the time there's only evidence that she was present since I'm the one taking pictures...)

This was their third day of operation, and everything wasn't quite settled yet! It still smelled like paint and lacquer inside and they didn't have speakers hooked to the stereo on the half of the café where we were sitting - all the sound was drifting along to us from the other leg of the big L-shaped room. It wasn't crowded enough that they had to turn people away (with covid regulations their limit is 40 customers), but there were people in front of us and behind us waiting to order when we got there. There's a wine fridge and a beer tap along with a case of sandwiches and pastries, but they were running out of snacks quickly and the menu boards weren't fully lettered yet. We deliberately went early, before the tickets-only album drop event they had later in the evening (because tickets, but also because it's some kind of avant-garde duo and I don't jive with that kind of jazz). The stereo was playing a mixture of instrumental and vocal melodic jazz, so just the styles I prefer. The decor was great - there are some little (presumably rentable?) rooms off the main L on each end furnished as a living room and a dining room and they've got to-die-for vintage furniture in them.

It will be lovely to go back some time in the evening with the brothers- and sisters-in-law, I hope!

... for us that's 14 kg of wooden pellet cat litter, and a bunch of the food the cats eat for a treat at bedtime, if you're going by the heaviest part. Most of the bulk was things we don't actually need, like fresh fruit (we have plenty of frozen and canned fruits and vegetables) and bread and yogurt. The only thing we intended to buy that the store was out of was powdered milk, so for once we substituted the liquid kind.

The grocery store was fully manned with lots of stockers in uniform everywhere looking alert and efficient, and a table offering hand sanitizer by the carts and baskets. The pharmacy has a lady at the door letting in only 5 customers at a time, and they've taken on extra help and installed plexi shields at the register and the prescription counters. In spite of this, I was in and out very quickly (I just needed some emergency insulin pen needles for Snookums because I didn't notice I was low in time to mail order them). All the other customers I saw at the pharmacy but one were elderly.

But what did we see in the parking lot? A Tesla!

This is the first time we've seen a Tesla in Pargas, and given that we've been here since last June and Pargas has literally one main street in the downtown, we have good reason to think the Tesla doesn't belong to a permanent resident. (Of course it's possible the car belongs to a resident of one of the islands further out who is on their way out there, but that is still not likely.) With the huge amount of summer homes throughout the archipelago, it's most likely a city dweller going to their summer home against all government advice... and if that's the case, there's a slight possibility they're from Turku or one of the other cities around here, but the biggest likelihood is surely that they're from Helsinki and therefore at high risk of having been exposed already, squeezing out before the borders of the region are potentially frozen on the weekend precisely to prevent people from spreading infection faster to the parts of the country (LIKE HERE) with less medical infrastructure.

Do you ever just sit around thinking about how around you are tens of ponies, horses, and cows - INCLUDING HEILAN COOS! - who have tons of time where nobody is paying attention to them and probably don't get petted and scratched as much as they would like, yet here I am just sitting here NOT PETTING HORSES OR COWS OR PONIES, even though I would be happy to, and what a tremendous waste it is?

I think about this at least twice per day.

There was a slight fuckup in returning the dishes to the funeral caterers Monday (I didn't spot the last thermos in the trunk), and we had to make another trip to their downtown café, Hallonblad [Swedish: Raspberry leaf... though the owners seem to be Finnish-speaking], to give it back and retrieve a tray that we gave them accidentally when it actually belongs to the diocese meeting house (this is a thing they do in Finland where the sanctuary bit of the church is in the historic building and the congregation owns a separate building which is typically also old but not AS old - definitely none of them are like, medieval, which most of the churches are - which is used for social gatherings and stuff like that) where the funeral reception was held. (MIL was not religious, but like many Finns, remained a registered member of the state church — which entitles one to church space for the sacraments in exchange for one's tax money, which is all that most Finns use it for.)

We've been to the café in the summertime, when they do lunch specials, which I conjecture are cooked at their large restaurant and driven in since the café doesn't have space for a kitchen; but in the summer it's kind of... warm everywhere, and the sunlight is so bright you can barely see, and it's crowded, and you are hastening back outside to sit at the outdoor tables... so I didn't even notice that they have an amazing selection of pastries and cakes, and their interior is incredibly charming and cozy. Now I really want to go back there, and I could walk there in probably... five minutes? And it's not like I'm afraid to go to cafés by myself or anything. I just have so much ennui and yuck that I can't really overcome the initial reluctance to get moving and go outside and go out in public around strangers and... stuff. And I can't go there with Wax until she has a weekday off (and then we'll be too busy trying to renovate the house probably).

Also, I found out last night that our old but completely functional HP printer-scanner won't work with the latest version of Ubuntu. I upgraded recently, and now my machine can't automatically find the drivers, and when I went through a whole rigamarole and finally installed what purported to be the correct ones, it couldn't detect the scanner. We have MIL's laser printer, which is newer, but even though it's HP (which is supposed to be the magic bullet of Linux printer compatibility!) I already failed to install it on my computer a couple of months ago (maybe because HP contracts the manufacture of their laser printers to Canon?). We hardly ever need to print things, which always makes printer stuff feel like a ridiculous expense, but if nothing else we definitely need the scanner.

But! I did rearrange the stuff in the bunny area yesterday and today and Chief Inspector Japp was extremely happy about it this morning:

We wanted to start painting last week, but it's been raining every day and the humidity has been too high. The living and dining rooms didn't have anything else that needs to be done before the radiators could be put back in, so we started papering the attic bedroom (which we originally were going to leave until the downstairs was finished, but everything else downstairs can't be done until the contractors are done with their bit in the bathrooms and kitchen).

The attic bedroom contains one feature added by the contractors: a new door into the unfinished attic area under the eaves of the house, which is currently storage for some random stuff (eventually we are going to stick a closet behind this door with another door into the unfinished attic from inside it). The door is in a door frame, the same way it was removed from its old home at the other end of the storage area, but it hasn't been trimmed out because we had to strip and paper the wall around it. Therefore, there is a deep gap about 1 cm wide all the way around the door frame where it meets the rough planks which make up the structure of the wall and then the stretched cardboard of the wall surface. This will be behind the trim after we put trim on, obviously.



But in the meantime it's in the attic, right up at the eaves, of a 70-year-old wooden house in Finland, and is going to be in our bedroom, so it needs some insulation. At first I thought of the foamy stuff you can pipe into that type of gap which I've seen at home stores and on This Old House, but then waxjism pointed out that we've found loose combed flax insulation elsewhere in the house and it's a natural and breathable alternative. We are all about the natural alternatives here at Knypplinge, because breathable is important for preventing your delicate wooden house from contracting mold. But then I remembered seeing on one of those Australian weird home building shows that somebody had insulated their house with sheep's wool, just basically in the freshly-sheared state, when it more or less sticks together in a layer of fluff much like a bat of insulation. Sheep's wool is an obviously superior choice to flax for insulation! - Because, I mean, we all know that wool does a better job than linen in cold weather (that is, it traps more warm air with the fibers while still letting moisture through, and has antibacterial properties).

So when Wax's mom stopped by later in the day on her way to a meeting, Wax relayed this idea and she immediately said that she DID know somebody local who has sheep (Wax used to babysit for her as a teen and we went there in lambing season once some years ago and cuddled a lamb), so she called her immediately (Right There, In Our Attic: It's More Likely Than You Think!). "How much wool?" the lady wanted to know, but it turned out she had about 2 kg of it, which is to say, the leftover belly wool from shearing her two sheep, which she keeps as pets now that she's old, instead of the flock-y quantity of sheep she used to have. Sometime in mid-October, she said, when we happily accepted. So we're going to have some spare insulation besides the stuff to go around the doorway, but we still have an unfinished attic and a closet to build, so I'm sure we'll put it to some use.