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End of May and others

julkaissut Nokisuu

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

julkaissut Nokisuu

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.

A musical update

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As most Europeans I too follow the Eurovision Song Contest, at least half-heartedly. I used to watch them as a kid since there wasn’t so many music programmes in TV but then I had many years I didn’t watch the contest at all. After Lordi brought Finland our first and only win in the ESC I’ve had just a cursory glance at the songs we’ve sent to the contest. The main reason being that I don’t like most Finnish contemporary music nor musicians.

Finns love heavy metal, it’s said we have the most metal bands per capita in the world. I just recently read an article in which the studies said that metal music lowers the blood pressure and calms nerves. When I had more migraines I noticed that listening to heavy metal (especially Rammstein) helped the pain so I can believe the results.

This year I listened to the finalists (at least half of them) and I had some hopes for the winning song although I never thought it’d grab the most votes being hard metal. But it did! And now we are sending Blind Channel to the ESC. Here you can read more about the contest from last night.

Here underneath is the participating song, I quite liked it since I love Linkin Park. Under that it is a compilation of the songs Finland has sent to the contest over years which is quite funny imo.

Onto other news; I’m having next week off since it’s the school’s winter holiday and we have only so much work to do atm, we are trying to stretch even the most menial tasks for days. My gig at the packed lunch bags distribution is also finished now as the high schools and vocational schools are going back to studying in-situ with safety regards on place (just half of the students in class per day, others teleworking at home). We’ll see how that goes, our PM Sanna Marin wasn’t happy about the Helsinki Metropolitan area mayors’ decision.

So I’m going to study and have some free time too. My Communication Sciences studies are going well but there’s only so many hours in a day and during working week the weekends get really short really fast.

And to end in heavy metal here is a trailer to a Finnish comedy about a heavy metal band. It was hilarious.