Only the wind...

I'm declaring this blog officially dead. Only three people amongst my LJ friends are active (and therefore likely to read my entries) anymore and I don't really see any reason sharing my life in here anymore. The little that I want to share can be shared more easily on Facebook (as annoying as the place is). This isn't to say I wouldn't continue to visit LJ to look at the entries of the aforementioned three friends, but I think it's high time I make it official that there simply will be no more entries to this journal.

If you came stumbling in here thinking I might be an interesting person to follow, tough luck. Try another castle.

I've started a new (well, it's not so new anymore, but anyway) photoblog for my ship photography, which can be seen at kships.blogspot.com. Now obviously most of you probably don't care a rat's ass about ships, but I've been told they're attractive photos in their own right, so please give them a look.

In other news, seeing that my last entry was from June, the water damage has now been dried, the floor repaired and essentially the place is ready. Japes!

We've got water damage in the apartment. The water intake pipe of our diswashing machine has apparently been leaking. We had a plastic thingy under the machine that was supposed to cause any leaks to come on the floor in front of the machine, but for some reason it hasn't worked and instead the machine had been leaking between the plastic thing and the wall, and from there under our less than a month old floor. And from there though the concrete to the apartment below us.

Of course, since the whole thing happened out of sight, no-one noticed anything until water started coming down from the ceiling of the apartment below. And even then two people had to come here separately to check if anything was wrong and decide everything was OK. Only when Maria started looking into it and moved the diswashing machine did we discover the truth.

Well, the good news is that she called the insurance agency and our insurance should cover this. The bad news is that the concrete needs to dry for an undefined time and we might have to move to a temporary apartment. Which would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that we just moved here a month ago and the cat decidedly hates moving. I'm not looking forward to the process of moving him away and then back again...

Well then, update time!

I'm done with my first Uni degree. If all goes to plan, in month at most (hopefully sooner!) I'll be a Bachelor of Arts (Humanististen tieteiden kandidaatti). Then onwards to the Master's degree... I am a bit stressed out though, worried that something will pop up that I should have done but haven't and therefore the Uni'll tell me to piss off. Like not having a good enough grade from the courses is Swedish, as a study mate of mine claimed it's not enough that you pass but you must have a good enough grade. We'll see...

Things with stress haven't been improved by the fact that Ville the cat has been sick. He had some kind of a skin and/or ear infection, which we treated with antibiotics. Everything went fine at first, until we switched to a different antibiotic, after which the cat started throwing up essentially everything he ate. So yesterday we packed him to his carrybox (an operation which resulted in Maria being bitten and clawed quite badly) and headed off to Maria's work. Ville's bloodwork indicated he might have Addison's crisis (Addison's being extremely rare in cats). We gave him some liquids and ran more tests, and he did recover somewhat. We're hoping the lab tests were faulty, as the results were generally a bit weird. We ran a test to see if he has Addison's, but won't have the results until the Wednesday a week from now. A likelier diagnostic is simply that his stomach couldn't stand the antibiotics and the resulting vomitting left him dehydrated.

Unsurprisingly it turned out Ville is extremely resistant to sedatives. He should have been knocked out for 1½ to four hours... we had to sedate him four times during the three hours we treated him. Yesterday evening he ate quite well after we got home (though he's extremely suspicious of everything now), but he hasn't pooped and today he hasn't been eating that much. But that might simply be an after-effect to all the sedatives.

In somewhat less stressful news, to celebrate not having anything new to study for a while, I went and bought the book Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It promised to be an absolutely brilliant book, set in the Moscow Metro (the world's largest nuclear shelter), where the remnants of the human race are living after a nuclear war. What it essentially was was a basic fantasy plot, a guy going on a quest to save the world from forces of darkness. Nothing against that, especially in such an interesting setting. The problem is that Glukhovsky isn't actually that good of a writer. His characters are really thinly written, you feel almost no connection to them and because of their thinness, their actions appear random. This is accentuated by the author's habit of hurrying over supporting characters and situations. The main character, Artyom, visits every notable place in the Metro during the book. He had about 20 different travelling companions, most of whom he meets randomly, they have no real reason to be travelling with him and eventually most kick the bucket to allow artyom to randomly meet another person. Plus Glukhovsky's grasp of the "science" side of science fiction is thin at best, which can be annoying at times when he's trying to give a scientific explanation to something... and fails terribly.

Staying with books, after getting finished with Metro 2033 I happened to drop by at the Academic Bookstore and bought something more to read: namely, Tad William's Shadowrise (the third book in the Shadowmarch series) and a Spirou et Fantasio omnibus edition in Swedish, containing La corne de rhinocéros, Le dictateur et le champignon and La mauvaise tête plus foreword to each of them containing excerpts from an interview with Franquin. Haven't had a chance to begin Shadowrise yet, but the Spirou & Fantasio omnibus is excellent. To start with, for some reason I've never read La corne de rhinocéros or La mauvaise tête. Additionally the forewords are truly excellently written, giving a good analysis of and insight to Franquin's work. And I can understand the Swedish text surprisingly well. Den ena svarighet är att Fantasio heter Nicke på svenska. ^_~ Funnily enough, even though the omnibus editions are published by a Swedish firm they've been printed in Finland. If only we'd get something similar in Finnish as well. Especially as the series starts from the very first Spirou strips by Rob-Vel, something that has never been published in Finland as far as I know.

Yeah... plenty to say when I bother updating.

Meme time! Haven't done any in ages...

The idea is, comment here and I will give you a color. Then, in your journal, list ten things you love that are that color.

anglepoiselamp gave me blue... which is actually pretty damn hard. I like the colour blue, but very few things I like are blue.

1. The sea (though here on the shores of the Baltic, the sea is usually a dirty greenish brown...)
2. The book Baltic Ferries by Bruce Peter (he gets an extra credit for being named Bruce and having what looks like two first names with no surname!)
3. The wall of our new bedroom (I'll picspam some more of the renovation project later)
4. Stockholm and Gothenburg trams
5. The middle totoro
6. Jeans!
7. Helsingin bussiliikenne's new colour scheme (don't tell me this don't look neat!)
8. The glam-era Bowie badge I got from atomic_moog.
9. Blueberries!
10. The TARDIS

Renovating really does seep the juices from you. We spent the whole day washing walls (and ceilings, and floors), afted having spent much of yesterday doing the exact same thing. Apparently the previous tenants weren't very keen on keeping the place clean; we though one of the walls in the living room was painted with two different shades of white (the whole place has been a bit haphazardly painted, so it wouldn't be a surprise if they had just ran out of paint mid-wall). But it turned out that the part we thought was painted with a darker shade was just incredibly dirty. Not a pretty sight. Until now that we've washed the place, of course.

Next up will be filling the various holes in the walls and after that finally repainting the walls in something more attractive than mustard and brown.

On a completely unrelated note, the list from my last entry is now out-of-date as I went and bought Il y a un sorcier à Champignac, L'ombre du Z and Panade à Champignac (I had of course read the middle one before, but that was ages ago). I'm not quite sure about Sorcier and Panade though... the former felt still like the series was still very much in development and Franquin hadn't found the final, ideal form for it, while in the latter Franquin seemed bored with Spirou and Fantasio. The extensive usage of Gaston Lagaffe in both of the stories in Panade also seems to indicate this, him being Franquin's original character (unfortunately for me, I don't particularly like Gaston). Similarly the way cars are used in the story could be sympton of Franquin's boredom. Franquin being a car enthustiast, the fact that Spirou now drives a random Honda (instead of Turbot 2) and the way an even more random old Mercedes is introduced strongly seems to hint at Franquin looking for something - anything - that would interest him more than just drawing another S&F story. Which in case of the actual Panade à Champignac story is a bit of a shame, as the actual story of a former Zorman trying to capture Zorglub and restore him to glory is actually quite interesting as an idea, but the realisation doesn't really reach the full potential of the idea.

In related news, I'm contemplating bara-esque Zorglub fanart. A beefed-up younger Zorglub advertising a protein supplement called Zrubol G... or something along those lines anyway.

I finished a 12-page essay today on the Swedish East India Company and it's effect on the consumption of luxury goods in 18th century Sweden. As that brings to a close my most immediate causes of stress (obviously, I'll be buying a new apartment in three days, so not all causes of stress are cleared).

Anyway, on the continuing adventures of jossujb made me do it, I've been getting more Spirou & Fantasio albums recently. Quatre aventures de Spirou et Fantasio (Kehän kuninkaat) and Tembo Tabou joined my collection from Kirjatori. I also strongly considered getting one of the omnibus editions in Swedish that contain all S&F stories in chronological order, but the price on those was a bit steep. Then I noticed that Semic's Egmont's webshop is selling their Tempo magazine, in which they've published the two first installments of the Une aventure de Spirou et Fantasio par... -series. Of course I had to get those, too. So now I've also read Yoann & Vehlmann's Les géants pétrifiés (Kivijättiläiset) and Frank le Gall's Les marais du temps (Ajan pyörteissä). The former is of course especially important as Yoann & Vehlmann have apparently been selected as the successors of Morvan & Munuera as the main artists of the series. Therefore it's a good thing I rather liked Les géants pétrifiés.

That's not to say there wouldn't have been elements I didn't like. The way the story jumped from place to place in the beginning was a bit too much (first we're in the Med, then in Champignac, then in Jakarta, but with the action taking place in New Zealand? WTF?) and in places the jokes were a bit bleh (I mean, Lord of the Rings? Right, funny in 2006. Already a bit old in 2010 and it'll only get worse with time). And for some reason I'm not entirely convinced with Yoann's art. I can't really put my finger on it though, because overall his style is likeable and his Spirou is by far the best I've ever seen. And speaking of Spirou himself, I really digged the way they've made him slightly younger (both in appearance and mentality) and the way they're clearly distinguishing his age from that of Fantasio. Obviously Spirou was younger than Fantasio in the early stories, but this seems to have been left in the sidelines since then.

Never the less, even with all the criticism I'm definately looking forward to more albums by the duo. And I'm hoping that with Tempo we'll get to see more of Une aventure de Spirou et Fantasio par..., as the stories not yet publiushed in Finnish also seem pretty damn good.

And now, just for the sake of it, ( Collapse )

It's surprisingly hard to essentially re-start this journal. There's so much that has happened during my inactivity here that it's hard to know where to start and what parts to explain (or not explain). But here goes.

In the beginning of January ladywaterlily, my brother and I were on Malta for a week (which was great). The relevance of that for this journal was that while there, I bought a copy of Men's Health (the magazine has been called Cosmopolitan for men - I'm not sure which mag that insults more ^_~). Perhaps the reason why I bought it there was the lack of inhibitions in a foreign place; I still have a somewhat low self-esteem viz my physique and as such I might not have bought the mag in Finland. But I digress (again). The point of my buying the mag was that it had the beginning of a 12-month workout plan, the slogan being something like "Get in the shape of your life in 2010 months".

I thought, why not? I had been working out with Wii Fit for closer to a year and I felt I wasn't progressing much with it. The dumbbell exercise routine I had picked up from the net around the beginning of last year was also starting to reach it's limits (plus it wasn't really a muscle-building regime, which is more what I'm interested in). So I bought the January/February issue of MH, which had the initial six weeks of the 12-month workout.

The Jan/Feb workout was great. It had been designed to be done in a gym and and therefore I had get a bit creative in a few of the movements as I was doing the whole thing at home (and one the moves was so difficult I just scrapped it). Never the less, the workouts were fun, suitably difficult and yielded visible results - this despite the fact I had to keep a week's break because of falling ill.

Two weeks ago I moved to the next four-week phase of the 12-month plan. According to the magazine, this section of the plan is about building muscle fast. Okay, I'm smart enough to realise that the claim I could gain 5 kilos of muscle in four weeks is not going to happen. But apart from that, at halfway point of phase 2, phase 2 feels less effective than phase 1. Despite the fact I'm following the workout plan more closely this month (OK, this month required more creativity in adjusting the regime to just dumb-bells and chairs, but this time I'm doing all the moves and following the instructions more closely), I feel I've archieved less than I did during the first two weeks of phase 1.

It could be that phase 1 was such a big shock to me that it yeilded more results. With my body being more used to the constant excercise by now, results could be harder to get. On the other hand, the whole 12-month plan claims to be designed (also) for people starting from a fairly low level and such I would have presumed they'd have taken this into account when planning the regime. Then again, the workouts in phase 2 were apparently designed by a different person from the one who came up with phase 1. Phase 1 mostly used combination moves (training leg muscles and biceps with the same move, for instance), which for me at least was very effective. Phase 2 doesn't do those, which could also be an explanation for the relative lack of results.

Well, we'll see where the 12-month plan takes me. I started it out partially out of scientific curiosity anyway, so if something doesn't work, it's not that much of a big deal. Maybe at the end of the year I'll have gathered enough first-hand experience to came up with my own workout regime from the most effective moves from this year.

I sent out half a dozen (no, more than that) summerjob applications today. If I'm lucky I get a job at a libtary, in Korkeasaari (Helsinki Zoo) or a store selling shoes. If I'm unlucky, I'll get a job in a warehouse or as a gardener. Something's better than nothing, of course.

Tomorrow's programme includes the beginning of a new course, picking up a book and starting to work on a 12-page essay that needs to be done next monday and sending out more job applications if I have the time. The programme for the rest of the week also includes getting measurements for our future kitchen and scouting out for the best deal on that (plus the lime-coloured doors, obviously ;P). Then at some point I'd love to find the time to draw some more...

Hopefully I won't get too much of a nervous breakdown this week. Well, actually right now I feel fairly positive about getting all that done. Certainly the job applications were a big step forward. Now if I'd just sleep properly at some point...

We were visiting various tores selling kitchens today with Maria (as well as Bauhaus to see linos, paints and glazed tiles). And now I'm soooo exhausted. While doing the kitchen shopping we realised we hadn't taken all the required measurements from our future kitchen, so we'll need to contact the seller of our future place again if she could arrange another chance for us to get the measurements.

The plan for a lime-coloured kitchen does seem to be somewhat challenging. Very few firms manufacturing kitchen cabinets offer lime-coloured doors (which are what we'd really want). Another option would be getting white doors for the cabinets and lime-coloured glazed tiles. Those don't seem too easy to come by either, at least at a passable price. But we'll see how things unveil.