It's amazing how much I neglect the LJ when I'm busy and having fun. Some years ago I updated my LJ constantly, now I just can't be bothered, and that really doesn't trouble me at all. I'm happy I'm being busy.

Yesterday I and Carmen met one of her work mates, a British lady with, uh, extensive vocabulary and wickedly fun sense of humour. It's really good to see that my honey won't be surrounded by complete dolts and there's someone there to keep her company :) I'm still working with disabled kids, or, as the other supervisors call them, "children with special needs". The work's okay, sometimes a bit tiresome, but most of the people there are nice and funny. Here's an example of one of the kids:

"Kathy. Hey, Kathy."
"What?"
"...shut up."

Amuses the hell out of me XD

Today we went hunting for a bento box for me (outside downtown Toronto) but couldn't find any, so I guess a trip downtown would be good. Too bad there's a stupid city workers' strike going on in Toronto, which means the whole city is covered in garbage.

In about 30 minutes we're going to head off to babysit a family friend's dog, and tomorrow we're going to go to the Niagara Falls. We might even go to the US side for some time if the customs security isn't too bad. They might not like it that's I'm *gasp* European.

And gonna see Harry Potter soonish too :D

Hey hey, still alive etc. Have been rather busy, which is nice :) I finally started working about two weeks ago (social work stuff with a disabled kid in a wheelchair) and that's demanding a large share of my daily energy. But that's okay: Carmen is busy with her own job, and me having a job means that I don't have time to get bored during the day. Besides, the extra money and work experience are very nice.

Last weekend we went to see Toronto Gay Pride, which was pure awesomeness. There had been Pride events throughout the entire week, but we only had time and energy to go during the weekend. It was a beautiful, really hot day on Saturday when we went to see the Dyke March. It was rather impressive, especially the dykes on the bikes. Wouldn't want to pick up a fight with those women :P We also took a look at the booths and got a lot of free stuff. The big parade was on Sunday. Unfortunately, the weather decided to be rainy then, but that didn't dampen the mood one bit :) The parade was fabulous, with lots of different parade cars for certain political parties, different sexualities, PFLAG and so on. I saw more nakey bits than I ever wanted to see. All in all, a very good day. Pictures might follow in some later entry.

It's supposed to be somewhat rainy this week but so far, it's only been hot and humid. I hope that all the rain won't be unleashed tomorrow, because tomorrow is the Canada Day. The celebrations might prove to be a bit difficult downtown Toronto because there's a city workers' strike going on, which has resulted in firework show cancellations, amongst other things. But let's hope that tomorrow's going to be awesome nevertheless :)

I think this is the third time I decided to have my hair cur short. The hairdresser wasn't an extremely good communicator but the hair isn't that bad, eh? A bit poofy on the top but that can be fixed, and it was way cheaper than it would've been in Finland.

Heh, haven't really been posting all that much on the lj and I'm not at all ashamed to admit that I'm rather happy about that. Means I've been busy, and indeed, I've had loads to do, people to meet, and foodies to eat :D I've already met quite many of Carmen's relatives and some of her mom's friends, and I don't really think I remember all of their names. Ah well, I have time.

Yesterday, me and Carmen went downtown Toronto, and we were busay! And needless to say, I'm very lucky to have a somewhat camera-happy girlfriend. I usually just forget to take pictures, which I find rather annoying.

( Pictures behind the cut :) )

So yes, we had awesome time, and that was only a few hours. The Pride is going to be amazing this year :D

Oh! Almost forgot! It might already be the 26th in Finland, but it's still the 25th in Canada :D Score.



And a hard-boiled egg! Happy 25th May!

So! Hello from Canada!

Much to my amazement, I'm not jet lagged almost at all, and thus have been able to fully enjoy everything that the place has to offer :) Well, not quite, since I've only been here for about two days so far. Nevertheless, I've been having awesome time :D

Carmen's family is great and highly amusing, and so are the cats. Santi seems rather happy about seeing me again, although he still has the habit of walking on people's bladders at 7 AM. He also likes to tease and chase the other cats in the house, much like he chased Miska over Christmas. He's such a rascal :)

It's so good to be with Carmen again :) The poor girl is at work now, on a rather long shift, so I'm using my time now to finish all my school work. Later on, when my family's not at the summer cottage anymore, I'll test how Skype works, since I don't like phone bills much :P But that's not going to happen today, since they're probably going to stay at the cottage overnight.

Heh, so much to tell already, and I've only been here for a couple of days :) But I guess I'll have to go back to work on the essay so it's over and done with. Ta-tah~

*bounce*

*bounce*

*fidget squirm bounce*

I will be so annoying tomorrow.

Whoa. Only about 4 days until my trip to beyond the Atlantic :O Not surprisingly, it fills me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I am extremely happy that I get to see Carmen again and meet her family, but on the other hand, I am really going to miss my family and Miska. 3 months seems like a long time, but the time goes faster when you're having fun, right? :P But no matter what, I am sure that I will have the best summer ever.

I am kind of twitchy, though. This is the first time I'm traveling so far, and all on my own. The flight is on Thursday, but I will already leave on Wednesday evening because the flight leaves as early as 7.50 AM. Mom will take me to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, where we will stay overnight at a hotel. I will leave in the morning and fly to Heathrow Airport, the UK, where I will just bum around for about 3 hours. The plane to Toronto will leave at 12 o'clock the UK time and the flight will take hours upon hours :P Luckily, I can apparently use my mac on the flight, as long as I've turned its airport off, which means I can watch my movies and play the sims.

So yeah, I'm planning on spending as much time with my family as possible now. I'll go see Star Trek again with Mom today, and in the evening I'll stay home with my sister when Mom and Dad go see Laura Pausini's concert. Heh, I'll need to explain Mom what Star Trek is all about :P

And then about the Eurovision: what the crap? Finland so wasn't the worst one. As for the winner, Norway was okay but I preferred Estonia. Finland's entry did sound kind of hurried, like Hanna Pakarinen's song sounded hurried 2 years ago, but I still think we were better than, say, Denmark. Whatever, at least we won't have to worry about paying for the show.

OMG! Only a week before my trip to Canada! I'm getting rather excited :O

I'm going to miss Mom and Miska, though :( And Gran is in hospital, they say she has pneumonia. I hope she'll be all right. I went to see her yesterday and she was pretty high.

I also went to see dentist yesterday, and I seem to have quite a few cavities, which totally sucks. It's really annoying, especially as I've actually been taking care of my dental hygiene, and using floss for almost 6 months now. I'll go see the dentist again today, and will be drilled. As suggested by Carmen, I'll ask them if I could listen to the music on my mp3 player when they're drilling. It's not like I can do much there anyway, and I hate the sound of the dentist's drill.

:O

I went to see the Star Trek movie and. Well, it was fucking epic. Half of the time my mouth was hanging open, I kid you not. I can only imagine what the experience would have been like at the premier, with a room full of trekkies :P

I am not entirely familiar with Star Trek, but I do know quite a lot of the backstory, and the Internet has provided me with a lot of info (and as a future translator, I naturally need to have good researching abilities and have interest for practically everything :P). So I think I understood well enough what was going on. In any case, the movie was very well directed, making it quite easily understandable for a person with no previous information on Star Trek. Also, it helps that I'm already familiar with other sci-fi books, TV series and movies, such as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Star Wars, and Red Dwarf -> large sci-fi vocabulary :P

I think I'd like to see the movie again :D When it ended, I couldn't believe I had been sitting there, watching it for already over 2 hours.

- Congratulations to Carmen's brother for passing all his exams and graduating! :D

- I rrrreally want to go see the new Star Trek movie as soon as possible, especially as my friends list seems to be exploding about its amazing awesomeness, but right now I have sore throat which might lead to a cold :/ I'm trying to nurse myself better, lol.

- Went with mom to sell stuff at a flea market and we got over 200€ profit :) We sold amazing amounts of books, many of them quite unread because my sister has a habit of buying books and just walking around with them instead of reading them. The money will be my travel money in Canada.

- OMG! Going to Canada in 11 days! I get to see Carmen again! And her family :D I hope they'll like me.

- How come I'm more tired on the days when I get up at 8.30 instead of days like this when I woke up at 6.15 (because of the flea market)? Signed, up at 11.45 pm and still not all that sleepy.

- I will never get tired of this icon.

Ha! I almost didn't go for a run today but I went!

...at 8.15 pm :P Oh well.

I'm happy I started running again. It makes me feel so good and I don't feel so guilty about eating snacks :D (Very good logic, isn't it?)

Off topic, diet blueberry pudding is yucky. Talk about aftertaste.

Huh. For once, I've had a rather productive day: I finished two essays and emailed them to their respective professors (though the other guy probably isn't a professor yet) and went for a run. It was a pretty windy day too, one some guys were doing construction work on my route, so it was pretty tough at points. I'm still not running as much as rivermalachi, but then again, she's pretty awesome :)

And I got grade 3 (/5) in Swedish, which, to me, is pretty good. Especially as I hadn't been studying Swedish for some years so my skills were a bit rusty. I was quite amazed, though, that in class, my speech skills were pretty good. Sure, I don't know every words and my Swedish is by no means perfect, but I feel that I could communicate a little with Swedes :) Not sure if I'd understand them, though.

I went to Ideapark yesterday (it's a mall nearby Tampere) where I then spent some hours walking around and shopping. Better to spend quite a lot of time there anyway, because the buses go there only once an hour or something. I found a white bolero shirt for myself, and some skin care stuff from Body Shop, and for Carmen I bought some sauna scent and a Moomin mug. It was quite nice there because for once, there weren't that many people :)

And tomorrow I should continue working on my last essay. Should be easy enough. The outline is ready, and so is about half of the essay. I just need to write the rest of it.

Augh. Sometimes I really, really hate the "technology" at Joensuu university. It takes like 10 minutes for the computers to wake up, and right now my pet peeve is the printers. The one in the humanistics building seems to be pretty much kaput. Or maybe someone is changing the colour cassette. Who knows? It's been like that for a while now. The one at the university library does work but I noticed that on every other page, it merges some letters together and thus creates an unreadable and very unappealing black streak.

I just want to print my essay on lesbian language and drop it off at the teacher's mail box because she specifically wants it on paper? Why? Because it'd be too much trouble to print the essays or read them from the computer screen, and their email inbox would get so full and so on. Whatever. It would be so much easier for me to just send it by email. The damn essay has been ready for some days now and I just want to turn it in and be over and done with. I pretty much have two options: 1) Wait for the printers at the campus to be in working condition again (I don't have much time to wait, I'm leaving for Tampere tomorrow and today I want to get all my cleaning done), or 2) print out the essay in Tampere and send it to the teacher by snail mail. Which, you know, is so much handier and easier than to send it by email. No, wait...

I thought we were supposed to stop producing paper waste in e-time. I guess not.

---
Edit: Also, one of my uni friends promised to adopt my three plants because I won't be taking them with me to Tampere and I don't want to just abandon them, especially as they are still alive, miraculously enough. But the friend in question has an exam right now, and I don't know what classroom it is in or when it ends so now I've spent a couple of hours walking around with a bunch of plants in a bag and looking stupid. And I'm hungry and have tuna at home :(

tl;dr: Things are stupid and I'm feeling ranty.

This is rather cool:

http://www.hm.com/fi/fashion/dressingroom__dressingroom.nhtml

It's the "dressing room" of H & M where you can list your body measurements, upload a picture of your face, and "try out" some of their clothes. It's a simple simulator so not everything is exactly realistic, but I find it handy enough. Apparently, brand LOYAL jeans would look rather good on me :P

On other news, had a slight anxiety attack mostly regarding school work and such, but it seems to have passed now.

And now we have a NMES (National Meeting of English Students) here in Joensuu, which pretty much includes mostly partying for students of English language and/or translation from some universities in Finland. I did my part by attending some extra lectures today :) One of our profs talked about Australia (something we've all heard before because he's from Australia and never tires of talking about his homeland), and another prof talked about the significance of hats in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The latter was rather fun and enjoyable. A bit fractured but I think that might be because the prof had been a bit ill over Easter holiday. There's some sort of party tonight but I'm not that much of a party person, and anyway, there was a sign-up list and it would've cost around 12 euros or something.

Also, Subway is love. And so is my girlfriend <3

Augh, my brain is breaking up. I have to write three essays right now, with two of them quite interesting. One of the interesting ones has to do with Shakespeare's comedies and what's good about that is that I don't need to use sources but instead individual thinking (saves me a lot of time when I don't need to spend hours upon hours in the library). The essay I'm not too keen about is for a course on American literature in the 1960's, and is going to be about Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 which, while interesting enough, doesn't really spark all that much personal interest in me.

But the brain-wrecker this time is an essay for a linguistics course that unfortunately can only award me with 2 measly credits. Ironically enough, so far I have the most source material for that essay because, in all honesty, I've become way too interested in my subject :P I'm going to write 4-5 page essay (might very well end up being a bit more) on lesbian language and speech conventions. (Ta-tah!)

You see, the subject of the essay can be pretty much anything that 1) has to do with linguistics, 2) uses at least two external sources, and 3) isn't about translation science. At first I thought I'd write something about language and sexuality or the language between different genders, but I felt that the subject was a bit too broad. I narrowed it down to homosexual language. Still too broad a subject. Aha! There was hardly any mentions of lesbian language in my sources! Obviously, more research is needed. Hence, my subject.

The problem is, my sources are already quite numerous... I hope I'll need to use them later on on some other essay too because damn, I'm learning a lot :P

Yay, new layout!

And tomorrow I'm gonna go downtown and buy this awesome tartan-patterned shirt that looks just a little bit dykish because I've been thinking the whole day that "Damn, I want that shirt".

*vrrrrrooms away*

I'm at Tampere for the Easter holiday and was woken up this morning but a rather chubby kitty who decided to cuddle up next to me :) The said cat is now out having an adventure and yesterday he made quite a racket. I think certain Canadian cat had influence on him over the Christmas hold :P

I'll be staying at Tampere until Wednesday next week so I'll be having quite a long holiday, which is more than awesome. More time for me to work on things and not stress out so much.

In a couple of hours I'll take a but to downtown where I will have lunch with mom. I'll also probably go check out Mac store to see if they have any nice MacBook sleeves so that I wouldn't have to buy one online.

It's rather nice visiting home :) Though it's rather cold here.

And Les Miserables is awesome

Yay: Went swimming!

Not-so-yay: arms quite sore. Oh well, exercise.

Definitely-not-yay: left ear all stuffy. Have tried to yawn really wide and sprayed some warm water up the ear with the shower head. Still stuffy :(

But-more-yay: I has fish!

And I love this icon.

Nrgh. I'm supposed to do a stupid little 20-minute presentation about translating children's literature for Swedish class with some girl from the same class. She's going to cover pretty much the basics of literature translation and I'll focus more on the children's literature bit.

Now, a 20-minute presentation done in pairs should be fairly easy, right? Well, the problem is that even though we've had a couple of meetings to discuss what material we have so far, today was the first time I actually got to see what the other girl has so far. We're also supposed to send the teacher a word list of our material 3 days before the presentation and we got in a bit of a hurry with that. And now I've noticed that she has some of the same stuff I have and I still think that she has a bit too much info in general. We don't need to tell about bloody skopos theory! 20 minutes that is shared by two people is not much, especially as we have plenty of examples. I don't want to stress about something as silly as this.

Augh. Sorry for ranting but... with all the stuff going on in real life and in school, I'd rather not be completely vexed by some stupid presentation. I have essays to write, for goodness' sake!