all things me

As you know (or don’t), I got two boxes full of books (books books!!) from my grandparents so when I got home I faced the problem of where to put ’em all.
Well, yesterday my dad and I embarked on a mission to buy a bookshelf. Eventually we found one, at Lundia (it’s a Finnish company). A lovely, sturdy 5-shelf giant. I got all my Kings in one row (I can see them all!), all the old dictionaries and language related books in one corner, high school + university papers in neat folders (Mum and I “argued” about the difference in meaning of the words mappi and kansio, Finnish. To me they’re synonymical. To Mum not.). I also gathered a lovely collection of dictionaries etc. near the computer. *happy sigh*

Soon I’ll get the Sex and the City episode on tape where David Duchovny is visiting (episode Boy, interrupted). I was afraid I might’ve missed it (but I’ve seen all the episodes lately and haven’t spotted DD) cause I knew it as “episode 6.10” and the channel 3 (MTV3) told they were showing episodes 82-94. Anyway, it’ll be the 3rd episode when S&C starts next Tuesday. Now I have to find a tape and make sure I don’t use the VCR on that day (it’s a crappy VCR).

Word of the Day: air quotes — quotation marks represented by the movement of a speaker’s fingers in the air (Oxford Dictionary of New Words)
(I’d love that kind of a smiley gif, it’d be absolutely wonderful!)
[edit: Sep 15, 2004] I found that kind of smiley gifs. [/edit]

I left for Kuopio, where my grandparents live, on August 13 — by train. I got back home today — by car. Dad took a vacation week and drove to Kuopio so I got home with him. Just before going to Kuopio I had been at my aunt’s for a week, but now I’m done travelling for this summer.

On Monday (23rd) I finally got to swim in the lake. First time this year. But… the water was 15°C and air 17°C — and it was very windy! Grandma told me I was nuts but I wanted to swim at least once. And believe me, once was enough. Well, maybe next year I’ll be at the summer cottage a little earlier in the summer…

Today I’ve been updating a bit. First of all I read two books while I was away: Pet Sematary and Christine, both by Stephen King. After an “uncle-in-law” (an aunt’s husband) took the main TV away (he was helping with my grandparents’ move, taking some stuff to the new place) there was really nothing else to do than read because Grandpa was glued to the set (a smaller tv I used to have in “my room”) watching Olympic games (Finland only has 2 silver medals so far — bummer) AND he even dared to tease me by saying I couldn’t possibly watch anything cause there were so much important sport events!

Also, I bought Oxford dictionary of New Words because I couldn’t find any new Kings… Next week I’ll go buy Song of Susannah — I have to.

I am very excited about the 2 boxfuls of books I got from Grandpa and Grandma. There are lots of old old books, and wonderful (old old) dictionaries. I don’t even remember all that I took from their bookshelf.
Grandpa said he gave about 1000 books to different libraries and they still had a 1 meter high, 2,5 meters wide (my bad estimate) pile of books waiting to be packed. And all the books they gave away to me and my aunts (“me” includes our family), and a box of summer cottage reading… I won’t even try guessing how many books they had to begin with.
I told Grandma that I’ll probably end up with a similar collection later on.

I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 on Sunday 22nd. It was an interesting documentary, had an excellent — and apt — music selection (Roof is on Fire, etc.), and it was very funny, too.

Today I’ll get Matrix Revisited on tape. They show it on the cable channel, SubTV. I snatched Dad’s digi-box so I can tape it.

My sympathies go to the site, network, and whatever called Orkut.com (it’s some sort of a Google affiliate). They probably have no idea how bad a title they’ve chosen…

Around 10 pm Wednesday night while I was watching Cold Case, I hear commotion from outside and something that sounds like a scream. I peer out the window but see nothing. Half an hour later I hear sirens (police or ambulance, I never know which) and immediately think: Murder!

The “scream”, I’m sure, was a hysterical laugh and the sirens never got close but faded.

I’m at my grandparents’ at the moment. For an unknown period of time still. What have I done here? Well, on Wednesday I got my hair cut (– 10 cm), bought a lovely lovely book (Oxford’s dictionary of new words) and choco+mint coffee, got an umbrella (it started raining and Grandma and I didn’t have one with us — of course not). I’ve also got 2 biggish boxes full of old books (ahhh dictionaries! and all kind of wonderful language-related Grandpa put aside for me) cause my grandparents’ are moving quite a stretch and I tell you, they’ve got books. Lots and lots of wonderful books. So they’ve been giving some away to library, and of course to children and grandchildren.

I finished reading Pet Sematary on Wednesday (18.8.), luckily I can add it to my booklog from here, but the stars and things I’ll have to add when I get home. I’ll give it… *ponder* 4 stars? Yeah, it was a good one. King himself says it’s his most gruesome. After reading the foreword, I agree.

I also saw From a Buick 8 finally translated! I’ve been wondering where it’s been but, well, Grandma actually noticed it, there it was in the bookstore. Finnish title: Buick 8. Translated by Ilkka Rekiaro, who else?! This is just a note to self to add it to TGWLSK.

A little bit of QOTD:

The swamp was alive, but not with the sound of music
— Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Just makes me think of Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge. Ahh…

Well, I think that’s all. I found another 6 ft 2 in quote in Pet Sematary I need to add to the Notebook at TGWLSK.

Gosh, being on a 800 x 600 screen with only IE makes me want to go home!!! Nah, I like it here. Besides, I haven’t had a dip in the lake yet.

Today I bought two new Kings: Salem’s Lot and Needful Things. (That means updates at TGWLSK.) I was supposed to buy hard-back Song of Susannah too but I got scroogy cause I’d bought soooooo much already (nothing interesting though).

Tomorrow I’m off to my grandparents’. I’m travelling by train, Pendolino, a super quick one if only it’d work this time. Last summer the mechanism that allows the train go fast was broken so it had to travel at normal speed. When the new trains first started running, a door was sucked off by the speed. Nice going. And tomorrow’s Friday 13th… Good thing I’m not superstitious. Let’s hope the person controlling the train isn’t either.

I’ll be gone for about a week, I’d imagine.

I haven’t started packing yet, and I have to wrap some books in book plastic (I don’t read paperback books (or in my case “backpack books” ) without the plastic) before I get too tired to do that.

@ 22:45
Joined Words fanlisting

Ooooh, I found my very first Bookcrossing book here at the department. I didn’t take it though. At least not yet. It’s in Swedish, and one I’ve read (not in Swedish though). But the greatest (?) thing is, it’s Stephen King!!! Svarta Tornet: Följeslagarna — what a coincidence.

I am afraid that some over-zealous cleaning lady or our janitor (or anyone who hasn’t stumbled across this Bookcrossing “phenomenon”) will take it and throw it in the garbage bin…

I removed the slow random FL image script from the (right) menu and replaced it with a random text link (two in fact). Maybe it wasn’t too slow, but on my 56 k modem at home (56 k in theory — 42-46 k in practice) it was annoying. I think if I would’ve got an answer from Scripthost concerning the ability to set image sizes (which they “advertised” but didn’t give instructions to), it wouldn’t have disturbed the page load so much.

I’m going to publish this new blog now. Even though I haven’t customized and designed it to exactly what I want it to end up being. But I’m not going to update Greymatter anymore so I might as well change to this one. Now, I haven’t changed the intra-blog links yet. I’m going to do it some day when I get an inspiration. I also haven’t changed all the Greymatter formattings (** for bold) but I’m going to do it soon.
Oh yeah, silly me: I moved to WordPress

There is one annoyance in WordPress, from a linguist’s point of view. In the default CSS the titles in the menu were *made* lowercase (that was in the code itself “text-transform: lowercase”). AAAAAAAGH!!!
Another thing was the abbreviation of June and July to Jun and Jul respectively. That might be because I’m only an English-as-foreign-language person though…
@ 15:47 on July 16 {
Another annoyance. When I choose to see all posts in a category that happens to be a parent category, all the posts to the sub-cats are shown too. Have to look into that if I could change that; I wouldn’t want to make all the categories into “top level” categories.
}
@ 13:52 on July 26 {
I’ve never understood the practise of putting the comment’s permalink in the time… oooh! Away! I put a # sign which I’ve also seen marking the comment permalink and at least it’s logical (at least to people who’ve written HTML), it’s an anchor (or a bookmark) to that particular comment.
}

Also, as a Greymatter convert (I moved to WP mainly because my hostess Shirasade’s webspace provider frowns upon Greymatter and also because it was getting kinda slow rebuilding all the pages after each change. Maybe it was better to move this early (with only 87 entries)) I miss having a nice list of titles-only after searching, for example.

Oh well, I’ll give this one a go.

Well then. Yesterday I went to see Van Helsing with my sister. It had an… interesting… plot and the music (the theme, in a way) was amazing!!
I also bought Christine (an S. King book — do I need to say that?).
Today I went to see Secret Window (based on the Secret Window, Secret Garden novella in Four Past Midnight — by S. King; do I need to say that?) with a friend of mine.
I also bought Rose Madder (an S. King book — do I need to say that?)

I haven’t scanned them for my bookshelf at TGWLSK yet.

Oh yeah. I saw The Song of Susannah in the bookstore. *drooooool* Lovely turquoise cover and a silvery bookmark ribbon in between the pages. A bookmark! Each book should have one of those so that people wouldn’t make dog-ears. Too bad I have Wolves of the Calla as the Grant edition not the Hodder & Stoughton. Although… the Grant edition of SoS is beautiful too… maybe I should look for that? But my first 4 DTs are in that H&S box. Agh. I’m torn.

Updates: Read The Little Prince (Dad had got it from “his English teacher” ; some business English course) and finished Unreal II today. Made a card for my little cousin (literally ‘little’, 4 yrs) whom we are visiting tomorrow

Didn’t have work today (hurraah!!) and I slept for almost 13 hours.
And yesterday, I did leave at 2pm. I have my opening statement sketched in case they drag me to court…

I was reading Black House in the bus today (on the way home) and there was this short passage that somehow got to me. I don’t know why. But it’s unbelievably sweet.

Scenario: Jack Sawyer (familiar from The Talisman) is meeting the wife of Fred Marshall at a mental hospital. The elderly woman is one of the patients and a nurse had told Jack about her condition before they (Jack and Fred) went in.

   “Especial–” Before he can finish the question, an elderly woman with a lined, sweet face appears beside him and touches his shoulder.
   “Excuse me.” She tucks her chin toward her throat with the shyness of a child. “I want to ask you a question. Are you my father?”
   Jack smiles at her. “Let me ask you a question first. Is your name Estelle Packard?”
   Eyes shining, the old woman nods.
   “Then yes, I am your father.”
   Estelle Packard clasps her hands in front of her mouth, dips her head in a bow, and shuffles backward, glowing with pleasure. When she is nine or ten feet away, she gives Jack a little bye-bye wave of one hand and twirls away.
— Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub

@ 21:31
Joined Greymatter fanlisting

I just got to work and the first thing I do is go get cold water from the … water… thingy. On my way there the Libraryman came. Quite a library man: probably 2 meters tall, bearded, crazy hair (Einstein-style), a black beret, and a handbag. He said good morning to me Last week the cleaning lady was just polishing the corridor in which “my” room is and she also said good morning Very kind people I must say. Maybe they had noticed me before and realized I’m a “regular,” e.g. yesterday I left from work at the same time with the Libraryman (Libraryman, Libraryman, Libraryman, Libraryman, Libraryman — I wonder if he’ll come kill me now… Oh, sorry… that was *Candyman* ).
Oh well. I’ve also said good morning to the janitor but that’s because I had to do key business with him. Twice. (I changed rooms on the first week.)

Oh yeah, I finished reading Carrie last night. I gave it * * * *

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! DT5 finished in a horrible cliffhanger!! I can’t wait to read Song of Susannah! (it has to come out first (on Tue), and then arrive in Finland)
The series just keeps getting better and better (I didn’t think that was even possible…)

I missed my May book (A Year of Reading clique) but I’ll just have to read a few extra in June.

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! Day 12 without my TV xD
Went to watch Bachelorette on Dad’s tv but it started flickering (on/off, not just simply bad picture) so I went to the livingroom. Mum said I was just being paranoid, that the tv worked fine. I told Dad that I must have some sort of magnetic field around me that destroys TVs… But it DID flicker!

Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh! Meredith chose Ian. What happened?! Maybe Matthew will be the next Bachelor then…

Updates: Apart from updating the fact that I’ve read DT5 (booklog, King site), I went back to the tiny text. Sorry to say, I like it.

Oh yeah, I moved to a new room today, the project’s room (i.e. where all the students are crammed). Hopefully I returned the correct key…. you see, I had two while I was moving the computer from one room to another.

I have a new website project in mind… *mwahahahahaaa*