Cimorene

I. The End of the Job

My contract expired last week, on October third, but I had about six days of "minus hours" to make up after that. My sick leave was written to cover one more day past the end of the contract so that I could ideally do one week of work. I can't do this extra work until I have a new employment contract (for insurance purposes, not for any additional renumeration) and it seems like my divisional supervisor boss on paper has had her hair on fire for a couple of weeks and hasn't been able to carve out any time to have this meeting with me until next Monday. ( Read more... )

II. Sipuli and Tristana

Last cat update covered the truly disastrous encounter where Tristana had a panic attack and peed on the bookcase and the wall. Since then Sipuli and Tristana have been separated with Sipuli in the diningroom and the kitchen. The door between the diningroom and livingroom is kept open at all times and is blocked with a gate. The cats can see each other through this gate; they eat two of their three meals of the day on opposite sides of it, and we have been gradually edging the food dishes closer to the gate.( Read more... )


The radiator tent from a distance and Tristana inside it this afternoon


Sipuli and the turtle bed

III. Mental Health

I just managed to overcome like three weeks of avoidance and book the blood tests my doctor ordered at our last meeting! I haven't spoiled anything by leaving them this late, just annoying procrastination. Other than that, I have been feeling more okay again, not beset by huge waves of anxiety all the time, just regular seasonal winding-down. Wax has been going through a period of elevated anxiety alongside me though, at first much less severe, ever since... well, the same as my big nervous breakdown, the Snookums/Anubis disaster concatenation, so a couple of months now: not severe enough to seek medical help, so unlike me, she didn't have any medication or medical leave and she's now feeling significantly worse. ( Read more... )

This was the third day this week on which I thought it was Friday and then realized it wasn't, and it's only the third day of the week.

There IS now air conditioning at work! It's set to 20° which is about 78° F, I think. So not extremely low and not SUPER effective. But it's detectable!

I really don't want to start the whole process of washing the floor at work, enormous and tiled, with bad grout and dings and cracks and fully exposed to the huge glass picture windows: it usually takes at least two days and leaves me all hot and sweaty and the floor usually looking pretty bad still. Also I have to stay open if any customers come in, and stop cleaning to help them while all sweaty and out of breath. That's why you don't normally do a cardio workout while working a reception desk!

I have realized there's a bunch of built up floor wax that the Enjo mop doesn't seem to remove perceptibly, even though it's supposed to be like Super Microfiber. Possibly because you're supposed to use it with cold water, which doesn't soften the wax. The wax gets moved around a little bit and looks streaky and then more dust just immediately sticks in it. But I need to at least do the basics. Uggggghhhhh.

My charity is part of a cooperative group of organizations incorporated as a volunteer search and rescue organ that responds to calls for help from the police and government. The organizations include all kinds of different specialties like hunters, competitive orienteering teams, rescue dog trainers, the volunteer fire department, and a bunch of boating and sea-related organisations because we're in the islands of the archipelago. This morning there was a missing person alarm at six... or something? And the volunteer searchers were coordinated out of my office, so I got to work at eleven to find the floor covered in gravel, the big marker flip pad on the stand in the middle of the room, and two trash cans full of crumbs and paper cups and napkins and coffee grounds. (I heard this afternoon that the police found the missing person after a couple hours.)

I spent quite a while tidying up and doing dishes and taking out trash, and I didn't manage to find the time to go talk to my next-door neighbor in the strip mall until after lunch. I had built up quite a head of social anxiety by that time and had to take half a benzo first, even though I didn't realistically expect her to be anything other than friendly and accepting. We nod and wave at each other regularly, since we finish work and lock up at the same time usually, but I didn't know her name before. She has been in that shop longer than I've been working here, and she said she's never heard of a drunk person coming into a shop in Pargas before, which is reassuring! (Although I do think my office is in more danger than the shops are, simply because of all the people who for some reason think it's a representative of the local government and therefore the proper place to direct complaints about the government. That seems to be what was behind my visitor yesterday.) But anyway, at my boss's recommendation, we have agreed we can each call the other if something like that happens, and I've saved her phone number with my bosses' numbers to the work phone's home screen.

I only managed to dedicate about an hour and a half to my current project, which is trying to make a brief introduction to all our volunteer groups that will fit on both sides of an A4 paper, folded into a little A5 booklet. And now I have a headache. It's raining today, which is a bit sad because it's gray and damp instead of sunny, but I do hope this will help melt more of the snow and ice away. And Wax has today and tomorrow off, and works the weekend instead. I hate when that happens, because we already get so little time together; she's off at the movies now (I didn't want to go).

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.

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.

February is the worst month of winter because it's just 100% dirty ice and snow coating everything (here). It's guaranteed already fully coated in snow and ice by the beginning of it and guaranteed that there's still snow and ice and the end of it (though it's totally likely to have thaws in between; they simply don't last long enough to get rid of the built up snow and ice before it snows or rains and freezes again, trapping the previous layers of gravel under layers of more ice). It's been cold but not SUPER cold most of this month, above freezing quite a few days, rain, snow, hail, sleet, slush, and what feels like whole weeks without a glimpse of sunshine.

Last week was particularly exhausting, with a super-social long day on Tuesday full of interacting with people and then another super-social long day on Wednesday where I was only alone at work for about ten minutes in the morning and twenty before the end of the day, with a Valentine's Day party in between and a bunch of people to converse with. Thursday and Friday I was mostly alone but I got an unexpected quantity of tasks to do all at once that interfered with my plans to start to clean the floor. Sometimes the floor just gets dirty enough that you actually want to live with it less than you want to get all gross and sweaty futilely struggling to mop it. And then sometimes you have an advanced plan of mopping and have totally steeled yourself to embark on the distasteful project, and then something comes up, and it's all very anticlimactic.

Also I keep staying up way too late trying to finish this sweater I'm knitting. The fabric is so beautiful and I just really want to wear it! But I was somehow thinking I would have time to start sewing better flannel bloomers and cutting out the striped wool skirt this weekend, and that doesn't look very likely anymore either.

It's funny that Music Monday is a thing in the blogosphere because I actually have a Music Monday now - a local karaoke group has their meetings at work from noon to two every Monday. My job is just to unlock the door, help them plug in the karaoke equipment to our bigscreen tv in the conference room, and keep them provided with coffee, sandwiches, and cookies - I'm still working while they're there, but my office is just a sort of alcove off the main area and the volume of the music is uh, VERY loud. Possibly I should wear earplugs for my health, now I think about it.

But it's really fun. They're all so genuinely happy to be there, and it's a kind of diverse group of both Finnish and Swedish-speaking adults. The meetings have been going every week since the second week of the year, with eight at the most and five at the least. I would say that there are only two singers with really good voices - not training, and they still hit false notes occasionally, but good. A couple of them are cheerfully off-key, and one reminds me strongly of Bob Dylan, but since he literally goes outside to smoke a cigarette between every song, I guess that isn't much of a surprise. But the mediocre singing isn't painful to listen to for me, which I guess is a lucky escape since my sister suffers from some extreme audio sensitivities. One of them rides his bike there every week and he even rode it to and from a couple weeks ago through a blizzard, the madman.

I think the group range in age from their thirties to maybe seventies, and a lot of the music they choose to sing is familiar to me, including some Finnish classics like Yö's Rakkaus on lumivalkoinen, which has been sung at least four times.

They've also introduced me to some older Finnish music that Wax didn't recognize when I asked her about it, though! This week's bemusing discovery is Georg Ots' Moskovan valot, apparently translated from Estonian: a mournful, stately crooner waltz. Apparently this guy's popularity started in the 1940s and he died in the 1970s.

It's two degrees above freezing and all our lovely white snow is in the process of turning into slush and slippery compacted ice through being squished underfoot and then freezing at night. I had to use half a bucket of gravel and a trowel just to get down the driveway this morning!

And since it's the last week before Christmas, of course most of the preparations are done now at work and I pretty much have nothing to do except cleaning. Mopping this entire floor is two consecutive workouts and takes hours, leaving me covered in sweat, on the best of days, because it's a huge open space with a stone tile floor that people are regularly walking through in their outdoor boots. But it's even worse since it's warmer now. I'm already down to a tshirt without having done any working out!

On the plus side, they finally emptied the recycling dumpsters behind work, so I was able to carry out three months' worth of paper trash.

It snowed this weekend just a bit, but enough to produce slush this morning, so I'm sure in a few days the hill that they never put gravel on will be impassable.

For now it's still picturesque. And still hot at work. I'm gonna bring a thermometer today to confirm my intuition. Friday it was too hot for long sleeves even though it was literally freezing outside and I didn't have to move around all day!