nearly 8

It probably is something close to Nancy's 8th birthday. She was pretty certainly born in 2014, maybe around this time, going by the fact that she seemed to be a kitten around mid-year but the vet who desexed her said she was almost certainly older, just malnourished and stunted. We will never know anything about her birth, but on the plus side, who wants to know anything about a cat's birth? 

There are a few things that remind me sometimes that Nancy is a cat. One is that she often cleans herself on the couch on this nice crocheted rug, and then she forgets where she ends and the rug begins, and she gets the rug caught in her tooth (or something). If she is really full-on doing that I usually pick her up and put her on part of the couch without the rug, an action she accepts entirely as her due and she just goes on washing herself. But it is a little depressing to me that she apparently has no volition when it comes to rearranging her circumstances: everything that is, is, unless someone or something changes it. 

The other thing is that even though I tell her and Helmi that they have to become friends, they refuse to do so. It pisses me off. Though I was reminded (by a grody photo exhibition my phone made for me) that at one point they did bond over a toy where something that looked a bit like a mouse tail popped out of a unit. I suppose I should resurrect that and keep it going, though Nancy generally has a short attention span for new things.  

mid to late jan 2011

25 Jan 2011: I am trying to start the habit of blogging into the future. If I keep this up I will NEVER REALLY DIE, at least not in blogworld, except of course my blog posts into the future will eventually run out and then I WILL REALLY DIE. I wonder what blogger actually 'is' and whether it will outlive me.

I am in the final throes (I hope) of finishing my short book currently known as The Bogan Delusion. I am at the point where I am 4/5 finished but feeling a crisis of confidence, now being so immersed in what I have to say that I feel like it's not worth saying and uncertain whether I believe it or not. I am at the point where I have railed against class hatred, but then go on to talk about why I have every reason to feel class hatred if anyone does. I'm glad I wrote that down, it now seems a lot more easy to deal with.

I am also over where I would expect to be word count wise at this point in the book, so I can start pruning and culling a bit, which is a relief and a pleasure. This morning I have taken Barry and Charlie out, put some washing on the line, put some clothes away, thrown some mouldy things out that were in the fridge, and fussed around on the internet putting up pictures of Barry etc - time wasting.

I wonder what it will be like in 10 years' time and whether every second conversation will be about Facebook. Annabel last week said she was fed up with facebook and it was a great relief to not have it in her life and I thought about this for a couple of days and then emailed her saying however much you hate/blame the messenger you are cut out of people's lives if you don't get involved in things like that. Hopefully in 10 years we won't be talking about it constantly however.

17 October 2019

Yes, a year ago I was in Helsinki. I had an air bnb house for a couple of days in one of my favourite places in the world, Puu Käpylä. I don't know for a fact but I imagine that this was one of those situations where the home owner(s) just disappear to their weekender whenever someone wants to book their house. Because the house was clearly lived in, but sort of lived-in lite, if you know what I mean. Like they treated it like an air bnb too. 

Love the caged Moomin, though, I'd forgotten about that. 

It was a small house and looked out into this communal garden, shared with I think two other homes (not sure about that entirely, it wasn't obvious). I didn't see another soul. 

This is me using the google translate camera to figure out how to use the washing machine. What did people do before... civilisation? (That said, wtf is 'take up space'? Just don't select that option, I guess). 

If I remember correctly this is just a yard (or space) as seen from the street outside. Not sure why it appealed but it did and on reflection it still does. 

One of two or three statues outside (I think) (or at least near) a school. It might not have been this moment, but I do recall a little kid wanting to pat one of these pigs. 

I'm as sick of the 'I could be wrong's as you, but I think these are some of the 1950 Olympics apartments, which are just nearby Käpylä (actually maybe a part of it; I have trouble distinguishing Puu Käpylä from regular Käpylä and I think for many the distinction is a bit amorphous). Just regular housing today and while they were a bit of a showcase for, I guess, post-Nazi, USSR-resistant Finland in the early 50s, they don't stand out massively now from hundreds of thousands of similar buildings (at least from the outside). 

A place. 

Another place. Or the same place. You can see it's getting twilighty. 

I am the worst for letting the mundane get me sentimental / sentimotional 

A 'koulukasvirtarha' is a 'school nursery' which I think means a nursery school, not a school for people who want to learn about how to work in a nursery. 

I only remember that the cool tower was somehow a marker for me, I was heading for that across this open space, some of which, as scrubby as it looks in this picture, was in use as gardening allotments. 

This was funny. This bell end in monkish garb (munkin vaatteet) shooed me away from taking photographs of whatever the fuck was being filmed here, secret fool's business (sailaisen typerän liiketoimintaa) I suppose, under the overpass which was to the left of the above picture. 

I think soon after this time it either got too dark to photograph anything or I got preoccupied by whatever I was doing - tbh I don't remember - to take more pictures of my 17 October, 2019 but it was wonderful and just to keep restating the bleedin' obvious, one bleak afternoon in suburban Helsinki is worth a year in most other places I can think of, in my opinion (minun mielestäni).