Yesterday morning I went to the bathroom, as usual, to wash my face.

I noticed an odd pile of sand on the tiles…

Duh-dun (thanks, Kory! (I couldn’t figure out how to spell the Jaws “theme”)), duh-dun, duh-dun…

I directed my gaze straight from the pile up to the ceiling.

Duh-dun, duh-dun, duh-dun…

+
1.5 hours
=

I’m thinking of making a flower for decoration.

… a little later …

Here’s the finished hat (colour is more realistic in this one — maybe because the colour correction had the black as reference point):

The flower is attached with a safety pin so I can move it around.

The scarf is 202 cm (approx. 6 ft 7 in) long now — I don’t know when to stop.

Crocheting has been such fun (much more fun than Sudoku or mobile phone games) that I ended up buying some yarn for a hat. I’ve had the same hat for probably over 10 years and I haven’t found a new one to replace it. All the hats I get or buy are to tight or itchy. Now I found the most wonderful yarn:

It feels so soft! Now I have to buy a bigger crocheting hook.

It’s soon December 24th when we get our Christmas presents (Santa travels around Finland first because he lives here). I wish you all a Merry Christmas!!!

A small leftover ball of yarn had been bugging me for a long time. Remember, I knit some socks almost two years ago. In addition to the ankle-high socks and almost-knee-high socks, I ended up making a proper knee-high socks. (They didn’t all come from the same ball of yarn.)

Knitting always leaves annoying leftovers. The socks left quite a large amount of yarn so I wanted to make something from it. I’m not very good at knitting and it hurts my hands so I decided I would crochet this time. And because I wanted the ’something’ to be something I could do while watching tv, it couldn’t be very sophisticated. Hence, I started a scarf. I tried to look for a nice pattern but I couldn’t find any (link tips warmly welcomed!) so I had to improvise. It’s not pretty but it something to kill time with.

Last night, I ran out of yarn (as you can see; I used the last bits to make a couple of tassels)

Now to the donor part. Today I went looking for more yarn to finish my unfinished scarf (this is obviously a vicious cycle). I went to two big stores — nothing! There were all kinds of nice colours, and I almost bought one nice fluffy red ball of yarn (or two), but not the mixed purple/pink I need.

Just now (as I came from the sauna and put on the knee-high socks because they match my pyjamas) I realised I could sacrifice the almost-knee-high socks which I never wear anyway because they’re overstretched.

So, now I’m going to go watch Prison Break, cut open some knots, and take the socks apart. Let’s see how far I get with their help.

On Thursday, December 6, we spent our independence day in rain which washed away the little snow we still had left.

We also had our office Christmas party this week at a casino. We ate posh: raw fish (yuck!), duck (odd and quite fatty) with a side dish of mushrooms (bleurgh) in a salad. The dessert was depressingly small but at least it tasted alright (only ‘alright’, not delicious). There was a music show by an a cappella band called Fork which was amazing! They ended with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody — sent shivers down my spine. I was quite disappointed that neither of their albums has that song (and the little snippets I heard didn’t sound as well-sung as during the show).

Because Thursday was a day off I took also Friday off (”summer” vacation). I travelled to my grandparents and on Friday Grandma and I went shopping. I bought a calendar for my godson, I found a nice red shirt which Grandma bought me for Christmas, and I also found something for my penpal Katrina (not going to say what in case she reads this ). Today (i.e. Saturday even though the post’s timestamp is Sunday) we went to Iittala where there are several design shops and a factory shop. Grandma has bought me pieces of the Teema collection and now I got 6 white dinner plates. I also found a nice lasagne pan. I was looking for a black platter (or anything black, really, because they are discontinuing the colour) but there was none! I’ll have to check out the shops in Helsinki before it’s too late. Grandma hasn’t wanted to buy me black dishes because she thinks it’s too gloomy a colour. I hope they’ll take purple into their range some day…

I also bought quite a lot of chocolate for Xmas at Kultasuklaa (sorry, no English page there) and licorice-flavoured honey at Hunaja-aitta. I don’t know how I’m going to use the honey but there’s no hurry (expiration date in the fall of 2009). They said it goes with ice cream and even porridge (I’m thinking about pancakes, too…).

Grandpa wanted to buy me a brooch at a shop that sold Aarikka products (surprisingly, I couldn’t find the brooch I eventually chose in that site’s catalogue…). I got a red “safety pin” where there are a few wooden beads and a snow flake. Quite seasonal, but I think it goes nicely with my black winter attire.

(I know, lots of product/company names but they’re Finnish and some of them are small shops, so I’m not ashamed.)

I went to see Stephen King’s 1408 on Saturday. I don’t particularly like John Cusack but he was good in this — playing a man going crazy inside a hotel room. The movie had its scary parts; there was a woman sitting next to me and my sister who screamed and jumped on her seat. Annoying. At first I was worried about the hordes of teenagers that filled the theatre but the most noisy and obnoxious people turned out to be the oldest of the bunch. The woman was accompanied by a man — a tall, wide, black-clothed, long-haired giant — who said after the movie, “That wasn’t scary at all! The scary horror movies are much better!” I thought, “scary horror movies? Which are those?”

I also did some shopping: a couple of Christmas presents (gets harder every year to think of presents for everyone) and I also found two shirts.

Quite lovely I must say. I’m saving the purple one for our office Christmas party (”festive dress”), then I can start wearing it on normal workdays.

Days are practically whooshing by. It’s already November, then comes Christmas, then birthday — and then, getting to see my apartment and moving out is going to be just around the corner.

Things I look forward to:

• New furniture! New carpets! New curtains! New colours!
  (My bedroom curtains are blue — and I don’t like blue.)
• I’m itching to test out all the recipes I’ve been collecting in my cookblog. Yum!
• I get to listen to music without headphones and sing along, too.
• Oh oh oh! I can play on the computer without headphones!
• I’ll have proper places — and enough space — to but my things (in storage or on display).
• I don’t necessarily have to close the bedroom door at night. And I don’t have to listen to CLICKety-clack from behind the door, clomp-CLOMP-clomp from upstairs, and claBONK from behind the wall when I’m trying to sleep.
• I won’t have my sister’s hair EVERYWHERE (socks, shoes, clothes, fridge, butter packet, sofa, chair…). (She’s got long hair. Think ‘long’ and multiply it by 1.5.)
• Faucet with a thermostat. (Now I’m turning it hotter - colder - hotter - colder all the time while washing my face.)
• Hassle-free toilet paper holder. (Whoever invented the holder I have in my toilet now is a nut. It’s so difficult to put the roll in that I don’t usually bother and just put it on top of the holder. And remember the orange sink…?)

Don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’ve added a Jaiku flash thingamabob in my sidebar. A guy at work asked me if I wanted an invitation (we always talk about all things mobile) and I thought “sure, doesn’t hurt to try.” (Jaiku is originally Finnish, hurraah! But now they’ve been acquired by Google.)

Jaiku describes itself: “Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds.”

I don’t see much use in posting activities all the time (especially as I’m not doing much — at least nothing interesting). So, in my Jaiku stream you may see me stuck on a packed bus for days on end. I think it’s going to be a note-taker/blog-this list for me but why would I use it instead of the memo feature on my mobile. Ah well, we’ll see.

During the installation Jaiku asked for my phone number to activate the phone feature. (I didn’t see any way around it but I guess I could’ve skipped it somehow. The activation is needed only for the SMS service and I’m definitely not going to pay for something like this.) I installed the mobile application but after it pulled up my phone book (and the names in parentheses that I’d rather have kept at the end of the list), I didn’t want to use it anymore. Who knows what it could do! Instead, I’m using the Jaiku Widset.
When I realised the phone activation was of no use, I wanted to remove my phone number from my information at Jaiku website. No way to delete it. I tried entering space, nothing, or just the country code — it wouldn’t stick. Then I entered the example number under the form field and now it’s pending for an activation code for all eternity. Ha! (Not very elegant, but I really don’t want my phone number there even though no one (?) will see it.)

Do you use Jaiku or Twitter or other similar services? To what purpose are you using them?
(Sorry Kory, I promise I’ll send you an invitation to Jaiku if I ever get those — if you want one then.)

Today at work we had a brief phone conference with a project manager in our other office. When one of the guys heard who was at the other end of the phone line, his eyes lit up, speech quickened and he leaned forward on his seat. The others chuckled that “we got his attention now.”

I wish I had that kind of an effect on someone.