Thank You El Viiru!

For the Salmiakki! I got it yesterday and I have a bag with me at work today...I'm gonna enjoy every moment of it! It's too bad T doesn't like it but this way there's MORE FOR ME!!! I'm all about sharing but I gotta admit, it would be really hard to share my salmiakki with her, or with anyone else under these circumstances.I don't understand why USA can't have any? I think I could get it from the Finnish church in NYC but with my foot all fucked up I am not about to go to the city for Salmiakki shopping... and besides I have great friends and family members who are kind enough to supply the goods!

MMMM, this is SO GOOD!!!

Lots of snow!!!

In Finland I hear. We do not have any. Which I guess is a good thing with my boot and all but I would take snow over the rain! It started raining last night, rained all through the night, rained in the morning, took a little break around 9am and when it was time for me to leave for work, it started to pour. Awesome! The fashionable person that I am, I put a plastic bag around my foot, put the boot on and walked to the bus stop. Good times. You cannot pay for this type of fun! My jacket surprisingly held through all this, my backpack is little wet and my boot and sneaker are soaked. I'm drying them in front of the heater right now. I hope to be dry by 4:30.

I have my presentation about sustainability and recycling today. For once I was done wayyyy early, I did it last week. This is the class where the norm is to speak way longer than necessary so I told few of my classmates yesterday to be prepared! I will be talking for 2,5 hours.... I'm gonna do classic Marsha! They laughed. I feel good about the presentation and the paper, even though that's yet to be written. I will need to do some homework this weekend. Get on top of things. The semester is almost over, I have 3 more classes next semester and then...graduation! Kinda scary since G.W.B screwed up so badly and the economy is what it is. Will I find a job? Why would anyone hire a foreigner that needs a work visa when they could hire an American? Scary scary times...But I'll start worrying about it after x-mas.

Dis and Dat

I'm at work but not really working. I have yet to see my boss today and there was no work left in my box so I'm just chillin, surfing and doing homework. Well, the homework is also yet to be done but it is waiting for me...patiently. Like it has a choice!

I had my physical therapy yesterday. Last one that the insurance pays. My insurance covers up to $150 a year so if I really needed PT, I'd be screwed. They're doing the electric stimulation, some ultrasound and massaging it. Feels good in a weird way. Especially the electric stimulation. And the massage. The swelling is down on my foot and my ankle. The toe is still twice the side of the other one so I know not a lot of progress is being made. I have the boot I'm wearing and I'm really focusing on stepping well on my foot as to not aggravate the ankle so I think that's part of the swelling going down too. I have a Doctor's appointment the Friday after thanksgiving and I'm making a list of things I need to ask and comment about. I just really hope this will be figured out soon. The guessing game is getting kinda old.

I have another PT session next Wednesday and then I can come home afterwards. I don't have a class that day but I might work. We shall see since it's the day before thanksgiving. My professor thought no-one would show up for an 8 o'clock class that day so he put a "field trip" on the schedule. A lot of us is taking a "field trip" to see their families etc so I thought it was appropriate. My boss is not working that day but she might have stuff for me to do. I'm losing 8 hours of work on Thursday so I want to do those hours in if possible.If not then I'll just stay home. We will be going to T's moms on Thursday and stay there until at least Friday. We have the midnight madness shopping spree coming up on Friday night so it's gonna be fun. And exhausting.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about...The night of thanksgiving is the BEST time to do your x-mas shopping. The outlet mall next to T's mom's opens at midnight or at 11pm, depending on the store and people get in there around 10pm to wait in line to get into their fave stores. The stores have up to 70% off and stock up so it's filled with people, young and old, big and small. After that you go to the supermarkets which open at 2 and 4 am. Last year was obviously my first time. Me, T and JoeAnn walked to Woodbury Commons in a about -20 degrees C weather. They wanted to go to Coach which is a handbag store and get their discount in there. I waited on line with them for awhile but since it wasn't where I wanted to go I ditched them and went to shop on my own. It was SOOOO cold. This year I will bring warm clothes and bundle up like I'm going to Antarctica or something! We shopped until about 2am, then went back to T's mom's, slept for like an hour or 1,5h, got up and left for Kohl's. At this point JoeAnn's tournament endurance gave up and she stayed home. Me and T did some damage at Kohl's and then went to wait for Target to open. we waited at the parking lot for 30 min but then about 5min before the store opened we decided we were too tired to get in so we left. What a night! This year it'll be me, T, JoeAnn and Erin. Maybe other people will join us but those have committed to mad shopping! It'll be awesome! Only thing is, the Eagles are on at 8:15 and we need to go to Billy's house to watch it because T's mom doesn't have the channel.I don't know exactly how we will pull this one off but I'm sure it will be fun experience! We have decided to have a low key x-mas when it comes to our presents to each other just because we are coming to Finland in March and need to save for that. I have a feeling though that it might not work out...the low key part I mean!

the semester is almost over. I can't believe it! It's almost December already, I have few big papers to write, an exam and that's it! I have 3 courses next semester and then come May I will be graduating! It went quickly! Instead of 3 days I'll have school on 2 days and I'm hoping to work maybe 3 days a week. Do longer days than 5 hours. Soon I'll be applying for real jobs...eech! Scary in this economic environment! But at least there's gonna be a president who believes that the environment is important so hopefully there will be jobs out there...willing to hire me!

We have a big date night coming up tonight. Football and pizza! LOL! We are both too lazy to cook and our fridge is as empty as they come...I was supposed to go to the farmer's market yesterday and stock up on fruits and veggies but got caught up with my paper so I didn't go...which translates into no food. So instead of going out we will just order a pizza. I will need to check my fantasy football lineup one more time. I will have one player playing tonight. Hope he does well! PA Chiefs are going down this week!

That's it for now...I'll see how those articles I need to read for my Monday's class look like and might even do them. I could be back later or not.

Have a goof Thursday and weekend...my weekend starts in 5 hours!

I rest my case

I am, as we speak, in a classroom listening to a presentation of what essentially should be a quick overview of our class project. We are doing a sustainability plan for a city of 150000 in NJ and all the 17 people in this class have a different topic. I am now listening to one of the PhD students go through her WHOLE project...I believe we are now on slide #100 or so, I lost count 30 minutes ago. The paper that we write should be no more than 7 pages, double spaced. So when I say PhD students know no boundaries, I really mean it!

This particular person has a tendency to go over and beyond any limit set for a presentation or a project. When you should present the main points of your focus, she goes into details and expands it to other topics as well. When we are doing a summary of a chapter from a book about sustainability, she ads slides from Machu Picchu and how the Mayan culture disappeared. 10 slides turn into 100. Irrelevant. Doesn't matter. Loves her own voice.

Last year on one of the classes she spoke 30 min about a research topic when the time limit was set to 5min/person. Presentations went on for an hour when time was set to 20min...We all sigh when it's her turn to speak/present. It's a collective sigh. We all roll our eyes. We all know what's coming.

Languages

Languages are interesting. Without them it would be really difficult to communicate with others.And it always helps when you can speak more than one language. Obviously it helps that I speak English since T does not speak Finnish. But since we are going to Finland in March and since my family doesn't speak English all that much, T wants to learn some Finnish. I have thought her some random words and she is able to make random sentences out of those words, few times she has totally surprised me with what she's able to do. But Finnish language is one of the 5 most difficult languages in the world, or so I've heard. And even though there's only 5,2 million of us, there are still many dialects of Finnish. So should I teach her proper Finnish which might sound stuffy but she'd be able to maybe read some and understand it or should I teach her my dialect? It is also kind a hard because the more you are exposed to a language, the easier you'll pick up on it. Other than me and my conversations with my mom on the phone, T is not exposed to Finnish. She called Rosetta Stone and asked for a Finnish language DVD, but they said there's no demand for it which is why they don't have it. Offered her Swedish...

Right now I can list 8 different Finnish dialects but there are more than that. Different words are spelled and pronounced differently depending on where you are and which dialect you are speaking. Words might have a different meaning depending on where you come from and some words have different meanings depending on the context. Which makes a quite a good laugh sometimes when T wants to surprise me and uses one of those online dictionaries that "translate" words and sentences to English or to Finnish.One time she wanted to say something nice to me in Finnish, looked up the words in a dictionary and came up with something totally opposite! I was looking at the e-mail trying to figure out what it meant and then had to call her and ask. We got a good laugh out of it though.

We have tried to do a word of the day, maybe expand to sentence of the day but after few days I forget. I will try to do better though. It's important to her that she can say few sentences in Finnish and be polite when she talks with my family and friends so we will focus on that.

The dialects are not necessarily something that a foreigner can pick up on when they try to understand Finnish. Dialects differ in words, speed and tone. The word "I" is minä in Finnish. Where I come from we either use mä or mää. In other parts of the country it can be mie or something else. In Finnish language to, for, from etc are added to the word instead of being separate words so for me would be minulle or if you speak my dialect, mulle. From me would be minulta or multa. Multa also means the dirt you put your flowers in or grow your veggies in so you will need to be able to distinguish the difference between the meanings.

As far as verbs go, the verbs are used according to who is doing the action. When you say I run, you run, he runs, the only time the verb changes is with a third person.In Finnish that is not the case.

I minä
You sinä
he/she hän
we me
you te
they he

so if we use the verb to run or juosta, this is how it would go

I: minä juoksen
you: sinä juokset
he: hän juoksee
we: me juoksemme
you: te juoksette
they: he juoksevat.

Why all of a sudden a word that has no k's in it has k's, is one of the complexities of Finnish language that I learned when I was in maybe 7th grade but have forgot all about it. I know how to speak it so I don't need to know the rules. Lets just say that there are exceptions after exceptions and sometimes depending on the letters in the words, some will disappear and other will appear instead.

To go back to to, for, from, in etc... if we were to use my name

For Jenni: Jennille
From Jenni: Jenniltä
In Jenni: Jennissä
Jenni has...: Jennillä on
Don't look at Jenni: Jenniä.

If we used my brother's name Arttu
Artulle
Artulta
Artussa
Artulla
Arttua.

You see that in the first 4 cases there's a t missing in his name but in the 5th one there's 2. Also, instead of ending with ä it ends with a. One of the things that have rules to remember but because I speak the language I know when it goes with ä and when with a.

I now finish my Finnish lesson. Gotta do some work...or homework. Later

This weekend

what was supposed to be a relaxed and quiet and no-plans weekend turned out to be quite eventful. I am sure you all have read from T's blog that we now have a cleaner come in once a month. Friday was the first time they came in and boy was it, how should I put it? Interesting... First of all, I don't have school or work on Fridays so I was home the whole day. I caught up with my shows, did some laundry, hang out with the cats, did little homework and just took it easy. Then around 5:30-6pm T texts me that she's on a long line and probably won't make it in time for 7:30 when the cleaning lady will be coming...Oh boy, I never met the woman because when T interviewed her I was in school and didn't have a chance of meeting her and then the whole "You a lesbian?" thing...so I was little nervous. T asked me if I was OK if she told them to come early if they could since I would be home anyway...I said OK. T tells me they're on their way and so I open the garage door for them to get in...I wait and I wait and no-one shows up. Then it's 7:30 and T comes home. She calls the woman to ask where she is and turns out she's in traffic.
Then she got lost.
Then she got lost again.
T's on the phone with her trying to get her to our place. The gate has been closed for about a month now so visitors need to enter our number in the keypad and call us when they arrive so we can let them in. Since T is on the phone with them, they can't call her so she's spelling my last name to them. It took almost 15 minutes for her to trying to direct them through the phone before she finally decided to walk to the gate and open it herself. You could see the smoke coming out of her ears! We were frustrated! They were 45min late. Once they arrived they were all apologetic and nice so we couldn't stay mad for them for long. That wasn't the best first impression though. We left them at our house and went for dinner. We ate at our local fave Italian place, Johnny Carino's, cheap, good and big portions and tried to relax. Our waiter though was another blood pressure riser! Slow and didn't know her menu or desserts. How can you not know your Italian desserts if you work in an Italian restaurant?

After dinner we went back home where the cleaners had just finished with upstairs and were half way through with downstairs. Bailey was nowhere to be seen but Sox had been in the midst of things the whole time supervising that it was done properly and that everything was OK. The cleaners did a good job and we decided to have them come over once a month to do the cleaning we don't want to do ourselves.

On Saturday morning we were sitting in our living room looking at each other and not knowing what to do. We usually do the cleaning on Saturday mornings but since that had been done the day before, we didn't have to bother. T had gone to the hairdresser earlier that morning and we had thought about going to march to protest Proposition 8 in Upper Montclair but since it was raining and T had just had her hair colored and I had my foot in a boot (which is open and not a good wear in the rain) we decided to go do a little shopping instead! I had some things I needed but wasn't in the mood for a mall so we thought we'd go to Woodbury Commons and see what we can find from there. T called her mom and we made lunch plans. Her mom was also babysitting for Carly that day so we wanted to see her as well. We went to T's brothers Billy's house, passed Carly around from one lap to another and then left for lunch. After lunch we did our shopping, I did some damage at Gap and Aeropostale and then went to T's mom's house. Her other brother Johnny and his wife JoeAnn was there so we hang out for a few before they had to leave. We played with Carly but then decided to leave when Billy called and said there was a tornado warning in effect until 9pm that night. We did not wanna wait around for it to pass especially since we had plans with T's cousin Celeste so we left. The whole day had been exceptionally warm, it was about 20 degrees Celsius by her moms which explains the tornado watch. When we got home it was raining like crazy and there was a tornado watch in our neck of the woods too so T called Celeste to tell her to stay in. So we had a rain-check (hehe). We'll watch sex and the City another time.

Instead we caught up with Desperate Housewives. We had 3 episodes we hadn't seen and we watched them all. There are so many shows and sports on on Sunday nights that we don't have time to watch DH or Dexter or Brothers and Sisters...And since DH is on demand we can watch it anytime so it's the last on our list. Football usually takes over. Being a part of a fantasy football league makes it even more interesting. We sit in front of our TV, both of us have our computers on and I check the FF scores while T keeps us informed on the Eagles games. Being in the NY market area means that we get to see both the Jets and the Giants but unfortunately the Eagles are not on often. It only happens when they either play one of the prime time games or play against one of those teams. We hate the Giants and since Brett Favre came to the Jets I have not been able to cheer for them anymore so the first two games are kind of a bore in a way. And for some reason Eagles always play at the same time as the Giants so chances of them being on TV in our area are very slim. I have seen more Steelers, Chargers, Colts and Browns games that I care for! and it seems that they are always playing either on Sunday or Monday night, recently also on Thursday so they are force fed to you! ARGH! We want Eagles...Although yesterday...good lord! They tied the Bengals. TIED!!! That hasn't happened since 2002 and they give you 15 min overtime to score! What more can you ask for?!?!?!?

On Saturday night T got sick. She's now swallowing sandpaper, looks like she has a fever, has a headache, aches all over and overall is feeling lousy. It just came on out of nowhere. Saturday during the day she was fine but when we were watching DH it just hit her like a ton of bricks. We didn't really have anything for cold in our house so I was just giving her tee with honey. Poor thing was laying on the couch all day yesterday. She tried to help me with cooking and stuff but I told her to rest. now she's at work feeling like crap. I hope she gets better soon and I really hope I won't get it from her. ((((T))))

Anyway...I need to go do some work now...Later!

Narsisism

Narsisism can be a good thing in small dosages. You just have to know where the line goes. Have you ever felt like the story you are reading or the TV show/movie you're watching is speaking to you. You can relate to it. It resembles your life, your experiences but you know it's not about you. It can either be the past experiences or what you're going through right now. An example from my life would be the show "The L word". I remember few years ago when the L word came to Finnish TV and I saw the first commercials. They were selling it to us with Jenny and Marina. I was like "oh, what's this?" As I watching it something inside me started to realize that I could really relate to it. I could relate to Jenny's struggles. Not just because of the name obviously! Going through life with this weird feeling like I'm fooling myself but can't put my finger on it where and how exactly. Seeing Jenny and Marina opened the bottle for me and I realized that how I had lived my life before was really not me. I was fooling myself if I thought that prince charming was out there somewhere and our paths would cross one day. I realized my prince was actually a princess and by what you could say was a once in a lifetime chances, I found her. Her name is T but enough about that. Jenny's struggles to realize who she was spoke to me like nothing else before that. I could relate to that. But I knew it was NOT about me. The story wasn't mine even though it resembled mine. What I'm trying to say is that even though you read something that resembles your situation, it most likely is NOT about you. And being able to distinquish those 2...well, some people don't have that skill!

Kaverin ex otti nokkiinsa mun blogista ja kirjotti musta omaansa. Pari viikkoo sitten kirjotin kuinka mun tohtoritason kurssin tohtoriopiskelijat ei osaa rajata esitelmiänsä ja jaksaa puhua tunteja jos niitten antais puhua ja kuinka ne ei pärjäis normaali töissä ja tuntuu et ne on elämämtapaopiskelijoita. Tosielämän paineet olis liikaa. No tää ämmä otti nokkiinsa koska on hakemassa ylemmäntason koulutukseen ja kirjotti puolustuspuheen...ja mainitsi mun blogin ja pari virheellistä tietoo musta joten ajattelin kirjottaa näin oman vastaukseni. Ja mikä parempi tapa kun suomeks. Ei ainaka pysty lukeen tätä. Joten eilinen LOL oli mun vastaukseni hänelle. Sillä on myös todettu kaksisuuntainen mielialahäiriö sairaus ja historiaa sähköpostinlähettelyistä ja puhelinsoitoista ihmisille joista se ei tykkää ja niiden rakkaille joten yritän kovasti pysyä erossa englanninkielisestä blogista. En tiedä pystynkö siihen mut yritän kovasti. :-)

Shoutout to Elviira for you-know-what!

Yesterday T had a doctor's appointment in the morning and then the rest of the day she was working from home so she was already here when I came home from work. It was a nice change since we haven't really seen eachother too much earlier this week. We had some dinner but neither of us was feeling it and were craving for something sweet. In a household of 2 women that time of the month can be challenging. So we decided to go to our nearest A&P, a grocery store and load up on sweets. I bought cocoa and ice cream and T bought donuts and a danish. I'm not fan of those donuts so I won't be touching them but there might not be a lot left of the danish when T comes home tonight. I might have had 2 pieces yesterday and 2 this morning for breakfast...but who's counting anyway?!?! The bad thing is, when I get the sweet cravings, or cravings in general, there's nothing in the USA that can help me because I usually crave salmiakki or other candy only found in Finland...I would kill for a bag of candy from Makuuni! hint hint. Merkkarit, pantteri, salmikki pullonavaajat, aakkoset, punaset apinat, mini aakkoset, tatit...OMG, I miss Finnish candy!!! And not just salmiakki...there are way too many great candys in Finland. I will be bringing home a luggage full of candy when I visit in March.

Today I am catching up with my shows and hanging out with the cats. We have a date night tonight with T and her cousin might be coming to visit us tomorrow. We'll watch Sex and the City movie and hang out. Sunday will be spent on watching football and then next week it's back to school. It's almost thanksgiving! Great food, great company and most importantly, great SHOPPING!

Later