Tallinn

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In mid June I visited Tallinn, Estonia with my girlfriends. In March I suggested we’d go for a hanficrafts shopping trip to Karnaluks, a huge shop with three floors full of all kinds of things for knitting, sewing, beadworks etc. So in June we finally did go.

Me and H stayed the night while K had to go home on Saturday night bc her mom is over 90 and K didn’t want her to spend the night alone.

In the morning we took the ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn and in Tallinn we first took our bags to the hotel for safekeeping.

Me and H booked a room in Metropol Hotel which is nicely located between the harbour and the city centre.  The hotel was nice and clean and quiet and on the other end of the building is The Metropolitan Hotel+Spa which is it’s own complex.

Then we found the right tram stop as Karnaluks is located a bit further from the city centre.  The tram rout took about ten minutes (three stops) and it was easy to pay with contactless payment. We spent couple of hours enjoying everything crafty, I could have stayed longer but my friends were already waiting for me for a while.

After visiting Karnaluks we went to dinner to ViruKeskus, it’s about five minutes walk from the hotel.

Amarillo, Tallinn

The dinner was very good and we enjoyed some frozen mojito Margaritas to cool off. Afterwards we took a stroll in ViruKeskus shopping centre and then walked to one of the most well known cafes in Tallinn called Maiasmokk and then we walked K back to the ferry.

Maiasmokk is the oldest cafe in Tallinn,  it dates back to 1864.

H and I did a bit of grocery shopping before heading back to the hotel and putting our feet up. After  a while we started looking at the Spa’s adverts in the room and went to book some treatments for the morning.

On Sunday morning after the breakfast H went first to the Spa and then me. We both had a kind of feet massage, her’s was a bit longer than mkne, but it was so nice. I also had my eyebrows done and it was pretty nice.

Next to the hotel there’s a Kalev shop, Kalev is Estonian chocolate factory and much better than Fazer imo. They had some nice chocolates for sale so we did some shopping.  Then we went to ViruKeskus to the big bookstore which was awesome. 

Paper bag from the book shop with text ”I read” in Estonian.  It’s almost same in Finnish.
Rotermann area

Around noon we took the tram to Telliskivi, the artsy side of city. There we strolled around for a while and looked around the huge second hand market before we decided to go and take the tram to Kadriorg Palace and park.

We walked in the palace grounds for a while but it was a pretty hot day so we ended up in a very nice cafe which had probably been a gate guards house earlier. 

Then we took the tram back to our hotel to get our bags and went to the harbour side for dinner and a walk through a grocery shop before the ferry trip.

We had nice weekend trip with girls and I might take another day trip to Karnaluks shop in the fall  (if I run out of yarn 🤣).

It was nice to start my summer holidays with this short trip. 

Well Hello!

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I thought I’d write a quick update since I kind of promised to Guylty that I would and also because I’ve felt that I need to for a while now since I’ve been away about 18 months. How the time flies and all that.

I noticed the flags this morning on my way to work

I feel like nothing much has happened and at the same time a lot has happened. My youngest son graduated from high school with very good grades and got a place in the Tampere University of applied sciences in the software engineering program. He’s very happy but now we are hunting for an apartment for him and a friend, they’ve planned to share a flat which would be great but since Tampere is a university etc city there’s a lot of other students hunting for the flats too. So yeah, another stress factor added just as I thought it’d get easier.

Next year me and hubby are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary and I said to him that we’d go to Bora Bora which has been on our bucket list for a long time. We’ll see what happens. Probably we’ll just go to summer cottage anyways.

Eldest son is continuing his studies in software engineering since the work situation is not very good at the moment there either. He still lives with his friends which is okay I guess, of course he’s hoping to find a job and get a home for himself some day but for now things are all right.

Middlest son lives still with the same girl in Jyväskylä which is good so nothing major there either.

At work we finally got new library ict-system called Koha installed and working after six (!) years of waiting for a new system and after a week’s use I think it’s pretty okay. Next fall we have the happy occasion to start guiding our patrons how to use it (we are now closed for summer). The best part is that now we have all our collections available for browsing throu net. We are also restarting our library and literature blog which has been on the works since I started working here in 2010. So a lot new things happening here too.

What else? I got diagnosed with high blood pressure last November. I had just thought that I was a bit dizzy bc of low bp but it was the other way around. My medication seems to be working so I’m okay with it for now but in the near future I need to start doing something for my weight. My osteoarthritis agrees. I also got statins because both my parents died of heart attack so I’m kind of in the danger zone.

Now I’m just waiting for this week to end so I can begin my summer leave. Hubby’s leave begins next week so we and the cat are going to move to summer gottage after Midsummer. I’m not sure if youngest one comes with us or if he wants to stay in the city and enjoy time alone at home for the final summer.

I’m always glad is you want to leave a comment and I’ll try to remember to answer too.

Happy new year

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I have been pretty tired all autumn and also busy so I haven’t been much here. I’ve been way too much in Reddit and on Twitter but I hope to start doing more ’live’ things now as the spring approaches.

I feel like I have only been to work or going there or going home from work lately and it’s not good. I’m a bit worried how this beginning year will go, I’m a bit bored at my work and now my colleague has the last training to do for her studies which means that I’ll probably need to attend to more work than previously.

I managed to read or listen to 111 books last year. I blame Chief Inspector Gamache for that partly because I found the books by Louise Penny so charming that I couldn’t resist reading the ten first of them during November and December. Of course I read other things too but these were like drug to me.

Anyways everything is fine, eldest son spent all of December in Japan and just came home on New year’s eve. Middlest son was here for the Christmas and left back to Central Finland with his gf today and youngest one keeps mainly to his games these days. I managed to get him to movies, before Christmas we saw Wonka which we liked very much and after Christmas we and hubby went to see Napoleon which was okay.. the costumes were really awesome and the cinematography too.

Earlier this fall I went to see the new Kaurismäki film called Fallen leaves and I can recommend it. It’s on board for the best motion picture category in Golden globes’s and the female lead actor Alma Pöysti is nominated in Golden Globes too. It’s a lovely movie of two people in the sidelines. Go see it if you can.

So I hope to get better at updating this blog too. If you want you can add me in Goodreads too, here’s a link to my profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/5830297-susanna

Oh and if you want to you can follow me in Instagram, my nickname there is also nokisuu as in so many other places.

Hello hello hello, where is the cat?

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That used to be a line in a Finnish children’s program in the 70’s, the kids watching tv were taught English with a show where two English policemen were looking for a missing cat. The answer is of course ’The cat is in the moon.’ (Later the other policeman became a writer for several Finnish tv comedy shows and he is very much liked, his son was my client in my previous library.)

Ok so I just thought to give a sign of life. Yes, I’m still here and kicking but I’ve been kind of busy with work and everything. Last week an old Finnish blog pal emerged and gave me a spark to start writing my Finnish blog again but also this one.

I spent about all of summer at the cottage and also every second (at least) weekend has been a cottage weekend for us. Next week I’m having my fall leave as is youngest one and Hubby said he’d be working from home so we’re going to the cottage on Wednesday because it needs to be made ready for winter hibernation. We’re also going there to see if we’ve finally gotten the water meter installed. We had only lake water for washing and drinking water had to brought from home or shop since the old well wasn’t reliable and so we decided to have water line drawn to the plot. It happened in September so we now have water on the plot but the meter is still on it’s way. Luckily we’ve been able to take water from the line already but it still need to be warmed up on stove for dish washing or in the huge cauldron in sauna if we warm sauna up.

I’ve enjoyed the cottage life. My soul relaxes in the quietness and nature. I also swam in the lake every day (when in cottage) until October. In summer Sirius the Cat used to come and sit on the pier when I was swimming and she’d look at me like I had lost all of my marbles finally. She also liked the cottage life and visited all neighbours, even the one with two dogs who were a bit miffed of her.

Anyways nothing major happening here. The work is also what it’s always been, just a bit busier since after the pandemic we have now returned back to the normal scale of things. The new cabinet of ministers is worrying with its politics so we shall see if there’s going to be strikes.

Eldest son is graduating to become a programmer and they won a game-coding contest with his friends and went to Riyadh to collect the prize in August. We asked him what he’d like to have as an graduation present and he said that since him and 15 friends are going to Tokio, Japan for the month of December we could buy him the plane tickets which we did.

Middlest son is still studying in Central Finland and now his girlfriend moved in with him as she got postgraduate study place in the same city. Youngest one is on the 2nd year in high school and he loves history and social studies.

Here’s the program Hello Hello hello’s 1st ep for you. The first part is a bit slow with the vocabulary but the real thing starts around 5’20. Everybody was hooked watching this, both kiddies and adults.

Summer fun

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I was going to update anyway but since riepu made that awesome chaRActers game I thought to write a little entry now.

Here are all my darlings
Here you see Guy. He was my first boyfriend, then I lost my virginity to him and then he cheated on me and became my enemy. Quite logical outcome or what?
I quite like this compilation too. I figured that I’d probably have to sleep with someone since Claude Monet was a bit bony already when I was born.. I guess Thorin would be awesome drinking buddy especially since I do not have a good head for alcohol (I get sick pretty quickly). Ray would be nice friend and Raymond would probably kiss like there was no tomorrow.

I was watching Endeavour season 9 and when it ended I found myself tearing up a little. I love Morse and I’ve always loved Endeavour. Also Shaun Evans and John Thaw were perfect in their roles just as Roger Allam was perfect Thursday so yeah. No more Morse.

As an anecdote I once bought all 8 seasons of Morse because in S6ep5 Seraphim and Cherubim Jason Isaacs was the villain and at that time I was a Lost girl. Jason Isaacs is still one of my fave actors. He was awesome in The OA too. Actually I just love him in everything, a bit like RA.

End of May and others

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Adding a trigger warning here, this post talks about death right at the beginning.

I think last time I mentioned I was going to Stockholm with my friend M. Unfortunately they all got Covid and we debated about going as she was already healthy again before our traveling day was approaching but her mom was in really bad shape and we decided not to. M’s mom had Alzheimer’s and weighed only 36 kilos so she didn’t have the resources to pull through and after a week she just faded away. M said it’s really weird now since they have a lot of free time with her dad now as they used to home care for her mom.

Today as I was looking through the most well known Finnish newspaper which has a lot of obituaries every Sunday (M wished she’d get the latest Sunday paper because of her mom’s obituary) I noticed a familiar name among other obituaries. My old colleague whom I used to call my work brother had lost his brother in March and his obituary was on the paper also.

After work I went to meet my colleague and tell him I was sorry, his brother was just two years older than me. We chatted a while since he knows me and DH and the boys so it was nice to catch up. He said his brother had been ill for a long time but as he lived with their parents and took care of them it’s kind of hard for him now to do everything on top of his work (they were/are both bachelors).

On other news Middlest son’s girlfriend enrolled to pursue her studies in Jyväskylä so they’d move together and first it looked like it was not going to happen since the English IT-courses she’s enrolling had over 3700 people wanting to start and they only took 25 students but she made it and now in July she’ll be moving to Jyväskylä too. I’m so glad. Since Middlest son will be making a career in the Defence forces it’s important that he’ll have a girlfriend who is willing to move where the DF sends him.

What else? I spent three nights at the summer cottage with eldest son in mid May and it was very nice. The weather was very warm and I swam in the lake for the first time this year, the water was +18C degrees and so nice.

The Eurovision Song Contest was very good too this year and so exciting! Finland with Käärijä’s Cha Cha Cha came second and as someone said Finland won but Sweden holds the party next year so it’s all good. We are very proud of Käärijä 🙂

The Mayor of Vantaa (my hometown mayor and also our next door neighbour) Ritva Viljanen gets a kiss from Käärijä. She almost forgot to give the flowers to him 🙂 I just love this picture.

In about three weeks I’ll be on my summer holidays at summer cottage but before that I’ll begin an online course about Elements of AI in Open university due to my boss’ recommendation. We can do the course on our work hours which is good.

I think this is all from me now. See you later alligator 🙂

I’m waiting for the album to come out in September.

P. S. Maybe next time I’ll upload the cat video I made on the video course I took part in April.

Long time no see

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I just saw that I haven’t been updating since January, almost two months ago. Sorry for that but Finland has been chosen as the world’s happiest country sixth time in row! Let’s not let that bother us anyways.

Nothing much has happened, mostly just the normal everyday life sucks all time. I’ve also been reading more lately and have already finished 25 books this year. And now as I remember again this blog base doesn’t show my Instagram feed for some reason on the right side bar but you’ll find me under name nokisuu there if you want to see piccies. I have some troubles with adding them on these posts (no idea why) so it’ll be easier if you go there.

I’ve been on a live music concert since my favourite Finnish artist Ismo Alanko published a new album and there’s a series of gigs. I bought tickets as a birthday gift for my friend Heidi, we danced 2 and a half an hours with Ismo and other people and it was awesome.

Last weekend I had Friday off so I browsed three museums before my osteopathy appointment and it was fun. The museums were the Zoological museum, Kiasma – The contemporary national art gallery of Finland and HAM – The Helsinki city art Museum. I especially loved the Zoological museum because when I was a child we lived quite near to it and I used to spend a lot of time there and so have a lot of happy memories. My osteopath is leaving to work to Canada soon so every time I make a reservation for her it may be the last one.

On Saturday I went to theater with my old friend from library school. There’s a contemporary author Tommi Kinnunen who has written several novels about Finnish women during and after the war times and this play is based on his book ’Defiance’ and it tells the story of five women who ended up to Narvik in Norway with the German troops and how they walked home from there when the Germans left and they were supposed to be taken into a camp as war criminals but they escaped. I really liked the novel and it was very well adapted onto stage so it was quite nice except someone in the audience had a stroke and it caused a bit of excitement.

Afterwards we had nice dinner in a restaurant and talked about everything going on in both of our lives and it was nice to catch up.

The Eurovision Song Contest is coming up too and Finland’s representative is dividing audiences here and there. I myself find the song Cha Cha Cha funny and the rapper Käärijä is a very down-to-earth-kind young man, he is so sweet and level headed. Once again Finland is on the bookies lists in the top but as you might know Finland is always on the top, it just depends which side you start from. I myself hope this time we’d win, it’d be so great!

Here is an article about Käärijä winning the UMK contest if you’d like to read more. I’ll add the song at the bottom of this update. I don’t know how you all feel about the songs this year but I think Finland’s song is the perfect party anthem, it tells a story of a man who needs to drink in order to relax enough so he can go dancing and be himself. So a lot like Finns.

On other news yesterday evening was a parent-teacher meeting at youngest son’s school and it was nice. His teacher is very nice and we had a chat after the communal meeting and since I’ve been a bit concerned if he has any friends it was a relief to hear that he does. Later at home I asked him and he just said that they are pretty much all footballers which is funny as he doesn’t care for football much. But everything is quite good atm here.

I have a lot of free days from work and they must be used before May so next month I have one whole week at work. Also both me and hubby have the week before Easter off so we thought we might drive to summer cottage to have a look how it’s been there but it’ll be just a day trip. Later in April me and Mareetta are going to Stockholm for two nights as she’s having a 6-month-leave from work. I might update after that 🙂

Next week (on April Fool’s day) we are having the Parliamental elections here and it’s looking pretty grim, the far right Finns and Social Democrats (Sanna Marin’s own party) are off to a duel. It’ll be a very tight win for either one I fear. More about the elections here.

Enjoy Finland’s party anthem! There’s one with subtitles too in Youtube but the video is not as good imo.

Hello again

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I just noticed it’s the end side of January and I haven’t written anything for a long time here. I’ve been having some kind of winter escape and haven’t been much on PC when I’m at home.

Nothing much has been going on. Christmas came and went as they do (as Neil Gaiman said in a bit different words) and we had nice time at home together.

Eldest son was here for the Christmas Eve and Day but then he went to live in his Godmother’s house as a cat-sitter because they have a little Spynhx (@rufusthesfinx in Instagram) and they left for two weeks in Thailand. Middlest son came home for dinner on Christmas Day with his girlfriend which was nice. Now he has last of his studies in Jyväskylä and she quit her job here and is looking for studies there too so they’d live together. I think that’s very nice for them.

During Christmas we got glasses for youngest son and now he’s very fond of them, they are his first and he’s got just a bit of astigmatism (like me and his dad). I told him that’s his Christmas gift from me. DH had the days between Christmas and New year off so one day we went to movies to see the new Puss in Boots which was very good. I’ve also been reading a lot and I wonder if I already read the best novel of this year Sea of Tranquility by Emily St.John Mandel in the beginning of January.

At work it’s been nice to see both old and new clients. Two years were pretty glum because of the plague so it’s good to see people again.

Only thing that bothers me is the renovations going on at the underground station closest to my workplace, it’s a lot like the Hell in Good Omens tv-series so I’ve been using the next stop and then walking or taking the tram from there, it’s about two minutes more to my commute but I’m happier.

I’m watching a lot of tv it seems. During Christmas and New year I watched all of Better call Saul, White lotus (I re-watched S1 too) and All creatures great and small and then some. I also knit a pair of mitts for myself and a scarf is halfway because I need to buy more yarn for it. I’m giving it for a friend in March when we have a theater date.

My pilates lessons begun again and I’ve been going to zumba classes since November and it’s been so great. I really like it but now the teacher just told us she’s going for maternity leave in May. The group is great, all of the other women are Russian except one young lady from India and one from Philippines and I’m the only Finnish-speaking there. They are all lovely and we have great fun.

So nothing much going on, just the normal everyday living. Here’s Måneskin’s newest video for you, I quite like them (and the drummer has Finnish step-family by his father).

Quick one

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This is just a quick post because I realized that October is ending and I haven’t written anything since mid-September.

I have been busy at work but as the school’s here have a so-called Fall leave in mid-October and my workplace is a school so I took the week off.

As DH didn’t have leave I went to summer cottage with eldest and youngest son. We managed to get the cottage warm even thou I forgot to take newspapers with us. We had nice time, went to sauna on both nights and managed to do the couple of things we were meant to; turn the row boat upside down and put locks on the barn doors.

Me and DH need to drive there once more since I forgot to close the fireplace dampers… Don’t ask how.

Then I took youngest son to Stockholm by ferry and it was nice. We had good food, ate breakfast at Mr Cake and visited our fave shop Scifi bokhandeln in the Old city. We also visited the Stockholm City public library’s main building which is very pretty.

About Mr Cake, if you’re familiar with the name Josef Fares or Fares Fares, Swedish actor and director brothers, Mr Cake’s owner Roy Fares is their cousin. I must say the Fares’ brothers movies are quite funny and I think Fares Fares was in the Westworld too.

Now we’ve turned the clocks towards wintertime and darkness approaches in other ways too.

I wonder what will happen with Twitter so I made myself an account on mastodon.social. You’ll find me there by this alias too, as I’m everywhere with it.

Here’s a pic from last night. My friend and I did a short roadtrip to seaside and Tammisaari and enjoyed the views.

The bench

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My brother Kimmo’s birthday party was yesterday. He has now turned 60 and decided to invite all of us siblings for a coffee to his home here in Helsinki. It’s been years since I last visited his house and back then it was chock full of souveniers brought from their travels and paintings and I can just say that they had multiplied, severely.

Before the party I had called him and asked what he’d like to get for his birthday gift. Last time we were on the summer cottage the bench on the pier had broken because it was old and had been outdoors the last 15 years, mainly without cover for winters too so that when I sat on it some of the rungs just snapped. So now Kimmo wanted us to replace the bench as a birthday gift for him ’because we had been jumping on it and it broke’.

I was flabbergasted. Some of my friends say I shouldn’t have bought the bench and DH and the boys are also a bit miffed.

I decided to buy the bench even as I think it was not our fault it was broken but I thought I’d be the bigger person this time. DH found a bench from a garden supplier and bought it and we’ll be going to take it to Kimmo’s summer cottage in October when we collect some old furniture there for our own (new) summer cottage.

The party itself was .. well.. okay. Kimmo’s wife Anne has cats as she breeds Singapura so youngest son was happy to play with them and I talked with my middlest brother and his wife more than I have in years. Maybe I should add that Anne and I aren’t really in friendly terms due to some old stuff but we managed to be civil.

I painted the bench on Kimmo’s birthday card. DH says it’s too much but I think Kimmo liked it. I’m of course taking the piss.