Save your "breath" :)

I keep wondering why I'm so critical against green values. I enjoy all kind of saving, not the least energy. Here's how I'm welcoming green values at the moment:

• I have bought a lot of energy-saving light bulbs. They make a lot of sense.


• I have started separating and composting bio waste. Better late than never.

That's it. The list could be longer I know. Could be shorter too. I'm thinking about getting a heat pump which should give huge saves in electricity costs.

I have following tongue-in-cheek suggestions for energy-saving. Sometimes things like these can be realized later on.

The temperature of the highway road is 5 - 20 degrees, maybe more, higher than that of air's. Somehow we could get the heat stored as energy. The dark roads are easy to find even in Finland.

People fart a lot. More vegetables the merrier, LOL! Someone could manufacture a device that would be installed in everyone's butt. It would gather the gas in a container. No more smell of shit around - instead free gas available. Containers could be taken to a factory that burns the fart gas and thus creates more free energy.

_______________________

A joke I came up with yesterday:
Who is the fastest guitar alive? Kimi Hendrix

One-way ticket to the blue

I used to be without a criminal record, as far as I'm concerned. Well, not anymore. In many TV crime series some people are regarded as "clean as a whistle - not even a parking ticket". I used to be like that, until yesterday.

To end this hot weekend, both literally and metaphorically, I got a parking ticket. Hell, my first one! Admitted, I could have gotten one several times before but my luck seemed to have run out. 30 euros for basically nothing, argh!

We were attending to a track and field sports hobby of our daughter's. I had never before noticed the sign telling everyone should put their parking disc visible in the windshield of the car. That's why I hadn't put it there (and it didn't weigh a ton).

In the middle of the event, one spokesperson of the club suddenly cried: "Attention everyone, there are meter maids in the parking area! All should have a parking disc set in a car!" A group of parents, including me, rose quickly and started to run towards their cars. There were two meter maids, although one of them was a man, hurrying in attaching those tickets now that they had been 'caught in the act'.

Too late for me though. I was one of those unlucky bastards that got the ticket. Like a woman checking her ticket in a car next to mine said: "Myöhäistä rypistää...", as I was putting my parking disc where it belonged. She referred to a famous Finnish saying "It's too late to crumple when you've got shit in your pants". That was my direct translation and it may exist in other form in other countries. She was painfully right. The ticket was there and it wasn't going anywhere.

To demonstrate how it's released in the news these days, I attached a pixelized picture of the ticket. We all have often realized how informative those pics can be, LOL!

Later I got to thinking that it was kind of wrong that only part of us got the ticket when all of us had been breaking the law. Naturally I wouldn't think like this, had I avoided getting the ticket.

Still I'm mad. I can't help it. Here comes that rainy day feeling again. The end.

Who's factory?

It was reported today that a Finnish rock group Eppu Normaali has won the rights over the usage of 'Akun Tehdas' and a company called Akun Tehdas has lost the right. The loser pays everything and the winner stays in the ring. Oh, what poetry!

I'm stupefied. Old Ramones-style punk rock band has gone pinstripe. They used to mock everything, now they are so touchy that it almost makes me laugh. Like I noted, punk's dead, and what we have left is a bunch of old men. This band is a rich institution in Finland - one they were attacking against in their twenties. Nowadays they have accepted facts and learnt how to play the game.

Well, I have always liked Eppu Normaali and I guess I always will. But this trial hassle seems quite ridiculous. Especially if you know the background behind the name. 'Akun Tehdas' means Aku's Factory - Aku being the name of their drummer. It's common knowledge that their 2nd guitarist has an eternal love affair with the CCR music. They have an LP called "Cosmo's Factory", Cosmo being a nickname of their drummer. So, it's not difficult to draw conclusions. Even the record's cover art has been copied from that CCR's album, so who really owns and what? This must have been forgotten along the way I guess. They have mocked two more CCR album names, in the name of humour or lack of own creative ideas.

In case Eppu Normaali reads this post and thinks about sueing me: I didn't write this; it was my swamp rock guitar idol John E. Horny - a secret twin brother of John C. Fogerty, LOL! Well, it wasn't...

Crowded houses

What a busy weekend we had! Saturday morning we rushed to attend to our daughter's first spring festival, or how you call the celebration of the term ending? Well, it was quite nice a happening. We were placed unfortunately close to a speaker which was turned on and off without warnings. The person responsible for audio system wasn't too professional if you ask me. Otherwise it was lovely.

From there we drove to the city of Akaa almost immediately. One of my wife's godchildren was graduating, so we really had to hurry to get there. It's only natural I guess, but the people from two families were clearly segregated, like in South-Africa years ago. They were sitting in two groups, on the both sides of the house. When I hastily visited the other group, I got remarks that could be interpreted as bitching. Only the star of the event was freely mingling among the crowd. The house was packed although most of us got to spend time outdoors. Luckily it didn't rain.

It's not for me to judge, but... Well, the graduate is a very tall man nowadays. Everyone (bar me) was joking about his height and it just didn't stop. His mother was the worst. She's proud of her son, no doubt, but this kind of one-subject conversation starts bugging me after a while. I think the graduate himself is also up to here of hearing envy remarks about his height. Well, his parents are short, maybe it's worth mentioning about two dozen times a day then..? And the guests had nothing else to talk about, clearly revealing that they really didn't know the graduate that well...

It's almost like if a woman graduate were praised after her good looks only. Nothing to do with her achievement under celebration. No compliments about her brain. Wouldn't that be rude in some unintentional way? Or, if people were praising how beautiful breasts a graduate had? Yup, it's the Smek in total action, but in spite of my overdoing isn't that so?

Well, it was a beautiful day all Saturday and everything seemed to roll nicely. +25 degrees was another topic of the day. Sunday was welcoming us with a 28-degree-in-the-shade weather. Can't get much more Summer in one day. It was time to do some house painting. I have done painting for a living when I was about 20. I developed exasperation for solvents and I haven't been a fan of painting ever since. Over-exposure for turpentine did the trick. Painting outdoors with latex paint isn't that bad, so no more murmur about it.

Then an obligatory manual lawn-mowing session. In the heat it's a bitch but it was time. A lot of yellow dandelions were blooming all over the yard. They look nice for a while, but basically they are weeds (not trying to create a tenuous link to Hairy's current post, LOL!).

I had been digging and constructing a terrace in our backyard with my wife. It's been an on/off project for some time now and we had planned on proceeding with it. We laid tiles on the ground. The result looked ok. It remains unfinished, but it's come a long way now.

My wife invited one of our neighbors for BBQ'ing sausages. It meant that it was time to go shopping for more sausages. We decided to ride a bike to the 'city' of Nokia. Yeah, it was Whit Sunday (helluntai/Pingstdagen) and most of the shops were closed. They had recently broadened the opening hours in Finland to include Sundays, except for official holidays. And this was one of them. Siwa shops are usually open on Sundays, but the nearest Siwa wasn't. Their slogan "Surprisingly close" turned into "Surprisingly closed" in my mind, as we drove to a kiosk which was open. Good for us, good for them - it was pretty crowded there.

I have advertised it before and I'm gonna advertise it again: Kabanossi is the best class A sausage you can get for barbequeing. It's well worth investing, forget the cheap flour-power sausages. LOL!

In the evening I felt nauseous. I had sunbathed without a cap part of the day, so a sunstroke was only a stroke away. I slept bad, waking up feeling not too good. I should use a cap at all times in the Sun. Another thing bothering me were the allergic reactions to hays. It's normally not until midsummer before I start getting those symptoms, but now it seems that the nature is ahead of its time. The possibility of drawbacks is evident and almost inevitable. Almost. Indeed, rain and cold has been forecast already for this week!

Punk's not dead!

Yes, the title doesn't ring a bell to anyone outside Finland, so let's give a hand. "Punk's not dead" was/is a slogan used in badges in the 70´s/80´s. If referred to punk rock of course, desperately ignoring the truth. While 'punkki', which is a Finnish translation of 'punk' means also a mite. And mites are starring in this episode of 'Alive in Finland' - dead and alive. So, watch out, Grissom, LOL!

Yup, it's the red mites (Dermanyssus gallinae/lintupunkki/ fågelfästing = my own translation in Swedish) in question this time. No more silver fishes anymore, although I have seen one in our house too. Dermanyssus gallinae is a mite that is detected close to birds' nests. According to a quick browse on wiki pages, it's difficult to get rid of, if you have a garden or even a yard.

A couple of weeks ago I was chopping wood into small pieces in our backyard. There is a birdhouse in a tree closeby with a bird nesting there, but I didn't pay any attention to it. It had probably gotten used to the noise we were making by then.

In the very same evening, I felt like something itching in my ankle. I thought that a spider or an ant had climbed in my rubber boot and bitten me. It was a long way to climb and land, for I had my huge black Nokia rubber boots on - kind of classics around here, if you will. It was a nasty bite but it was alright. These things happen.

Then in the following week I started to get more bites. This time in my knee, upper thigh... you know why I began to get worried, LOL! Luckily it stopped there. The bites itched like crazy, and I had to scratch them a lot. It took a whole week before the itching calmed down. It didn't help much putting some cream on the bites, but I was willing to try out everything. Spider and ant bites never felt like this, so I got pretty much confused.

Then I read about these red mites. Everything started making sense. Well, everything related to this anyway. I'm 95% sure that it was those mites that caused those evil bites on me. They will die in a week which explains why they/it never took a bite of my balls... No more I'm that excited about getting birds nest in our yard.

Don't get me wrong, birds are lovely. Yet it's amazing that after living more than 12 years in that house of ours, it had never happened until now. There's probably more to come, if we won't get a cat as a pet. That's even more unlikely to happen because of allergies, sadly, so I might have to get used to this possibility of another red mite incident...

Pro test?

Sometimes I get excited enough to create a silent demonstration. It's more like to give pleasure to myself than to annoy the others. Protesting without anyone really noticing it might not be sensible, but then again: how much have the 'real' demonstrations helped along the way?

This time it's the left-handed issue again. When we leave the lunch hall at our customer's, we must put the knives and forks, plates and the waste in separate holders or bags. That's ok.

What makes me a bit angry is that the plates are put in the holder with your right hand. They are so close together that it really matters how you put them there. There are 10% of people lefties in the world, remember? As I'm one of them, I can't help but notice the crying injustice.

So from this week on, I have deliberately put my plates in the holder with my left hand, creating a small chaos there. I know that my protest increases the trouble the kitchen staff has to put up with, but I don't care. Well, I have a slightly bad conscience about it, but I keep that hidden too.

Yes, it's beginning to sound like Swedish complaining. I can't say I've inherited it from there still; I have had it for decades. And you better believe it!

Grease is THE word!

Yup, it's a slow day today. It's already the third post and I'm kind of pissed off at work right now. When there is nothing to do, it's drastically boring. Web browsing isn't my stuff. Nor is Facebook.

Good news, sort of. My weight has dropped 4 kg since I moved from Sweden. I hope it won't go back up again. That's a lot of fat on the table. Some may even say that it shows, but I can't see it. Not yet at least.

The problem is that I can't pinpoint what has caused the weight-loss. I'd like to know and share it. It could be badminton I recently started, but it's only a one-hour-once-a-week happening.

Then it could be the diet. I have been eating a lot of soups and salads for lunch lately. That could explain some of it.

My notorious training programme maybe did a bit to introduce me to a slimmer life. It wasn't a success though, if you remember. I still have been training at a gym once a week, but it's been quite modest.

What about the pills I started taking this week? It's too early to tell the effects (not to mention the side effects), and clearly they can't have made a difference in such a short period of time.

The "Alli" pills should block grease to infuse in your system. Thus you can eat greasy food and still not get fat. Or fatter. I don't really get the point: why would a person having a strict diet eat greasy food and then be forced to take a 'regret' pill? Because if you eat healthy food, you mustn't take the pill, so where does the meaning of it lie? Ok, there are situations when you can't help eating unhealthily, but if you eat that way all the time, how do you expect to lose some weight? Alright, maybe it helps with hidden grease in prepared food.

I have big plans to start cykling. I even washed and oiled my bike for the first time in my life! And it's working again like a new one. Let's see what happens, I'd like to get a companion for a ride. It's not fun to ride alone. Oh yes, and I should finally buy me a helmet. Hopefully this is not one of my projects I can't finish. I hate it when my wife is right - or more like it when I'm wrong, LOL!