all things me

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 took a Goddess test just for fun and the result is: Hera. Hmm… I’m The First Lady (Hera is Zeus’s wife (and also his sister…), and Zeus is the supreme god in Greek mythology. He wasn’t really a committed type, though.) The whole of results is on the entry page.

I’m really annoyed by a restaurant’s name in the center of Helsinki: Casa Largo. Which language is that? Plutoan? In Spanish at least, which I think the name is trying to resemble, the adjective (here largo — large) has to agree with the noun it determines (here: la casa — house, home), thus the name should be Casa Larga. WHY ISN’T IT?!

@ 15:06
Mmm… Christmas Coffee. (I taste cardamom.)
I just realized a funny thing. We put kardemumma (cardamom) in our *ginger*bread (ginger being inkivääri in Finnish). And gingerbread is piparkakku in Finnish and the “prefix” pipar- can also be found in “piparjuuri” (horse-radish) or “piparminttu” (peppermint).

@ 12:04 on July 23
Mum pointed out that gingerbread in Swedish is pepparkaka in which peppar means ‘pepper’. I knew there was a pepper hidden there somewhere!! The Finnish piparkakku comes almost certainly (I’m not an etymologist) from Swedish and it has been phonetically adapted to Finnish (a common form of loan word formation).

Continues »

They act like little boys who think they’ve stumbled across a Playboy (when all they’ve really got is a big novel with hardly even a cover picture).

That’s at least the impression I’ve got. And I mean boys that don’t blog themselves and/or are new to it.

Good morning
It’s a wonderful day today. Really! It rained all morning; so loudly that I woke up to it around 6 am (I had an hour left to sleep — take a guess whether I fell asleep again or not). But when I went to the bus stop at 8, there was a slight haze in the air and a couple of tiny raindrops (“raindrops keep falling on my head”). And the temperature is around 17 celsius. It is very sticky weather though because it’s so humid.

@ 10:53
Agh, there are kids frolicking around here. They’re laughing and running up and down the corridor.

I decided to switch from pagination to summarization (condensation) — sheesh, I’m like a weathervane. The drawback is that the Condenstation strips off all the tags so the texts are purely in text format (no big deal, though).

Last week I was home alone for the first time in my life (believe me — that’s possible). I have been alone at my grandparents’ and at my aunt’s (with kids though) for a couple of nights but never at home.

Oh how it was wonderful.

When my parents + sister left for summer cottage on Tuesday I couldn’t wait to go home from work *via grocery store*. I bought milk, juice, and turkey cold cuts.

At home, I watched tv — upstairs. I made myself dinner — upstairs. Spaghetti bolognese had never tasted so good — with so little spices (I’m not exactly a chef…). I listened to the radio — upstairs — and wasn’t afraid to sing a little. Oh, and I played the piano!! Only two pieces though (Am Strande by George Posca and… some other thing Sorry, can’t remember the title. Something in G Minor by Beethoven I think).

I also double checked the locks before going to bed and listened to every creak and squeak, and car driving by. And left for work each morning dreading that’d be the day I forget my keys.

In case you didn’t get it, the title is an allusion to Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” which I haven’t read — yet?

Today at the grocery store a little boy snatched my packet of minced meat. He was so quick that I didn’t even notice. I was packing the things into the shopping bag and the packet had disappeared. The cashier noticed that the boy had something in his hand (he was a kid to the lady next in line). It turned out that they had a similar package. Hard working shop assistant I must say.

@ 21:05
Joined Dreamweaver fanlisting.
It’s called WYSIWYG but I’ve never thought of Dreamweaver as wysiwyg… Although it really is what-you-see-is-what-you-get and no extra crap. (I haven’t used it exclusively as wysiwyg so I don’t know how it handles the adding and removing and moving of code.)

Now I’m gonna go watch 2001 Space Travesty. Ta ta!

Word of the Day: Wonky — shaky, awry, crazy
(picked up from Black House (the book I’m reading…))

This is another excuse for posting a WOTD… Although, I have posted JUST WOTDs or QOTDs and nothing else. Oh well.

I forgot to watch the 2nd part of the gross parasite series but luckily (darn I’m lucky — no, really) they re-ran it on a digital channel and I just happened to check the programs for the channel in yester’s paper. And it just happened to be on later that night.
This time it wasn’t that gross (although there was one maggot) — only mosquitoes and diseases they spread. Of course it’s awful to have malaria, sleeping sickness, etc. in the world, but I’m talking about the *gross-factor*.

@ 9:58
Ok, this is weird.
The library man just called me. Yesterday I went to the library to look for a grammar book but it couldn’t be found anywhere. Now it had emerged. How did he know who I was? Very spooky. xD (I know there’s not a smiley for that, but sometimes I just can’t resist you know) I have to make one myself if there’s a blank one available.
Oh yeah: Due date 13.8. (I can’t access my menu (on the right) from work)
I didn’t desperately need the book but I couldn’t NOT go get it It might turn out to be useful cause sometimes I do need some grammar info which is difficult to find online.

@ 15:28
Uh-oooooh…

Finland gained its independence in 1919.

Says Bartleby (or The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition). That’d be 1917, thank you very much. Unless the Americans wouldn’t accept the independency until 1919…? And actually wouldn’t that be independencY (not independence)? Oh, no, sorry. Both are good.

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.

Word of the Day: curmudgeon — an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions; a churlish, irascible fellow; mocker, debunker

@ 15:31
I’m pretty sure I woke up with my mobile in my hand and the alarm clock slash radio playing music. Both indicate that I had woken (or not…) to the alarms and silenced them — and fallen asleep right afterwards. But I’m not completely sure.

I don’t understand Part III:
– why some people think they’re bicycles
lots of people walk smack in the middle of a cycle path on the street
– yesterday a woman with a pram didn’t get on the bus because there was one step! I was all ready to help her to lift the pram in but she took one look at the bus and left. It didn’t cross her mind to ask for help?

Word of the Day: guffaw; I sort of learned that today, I’ve always thought it was “guwaff” I must’ve misread it when I was little (I’ve never *heard* it). Oh yeah, it means hearty, boisterous burst of laughter — or a corresponding verb

In a way I finished the homepage I was making for my aunt. Now we’re anxiously (well, I’m anxious at least) waiting for the details to arrive so I can start uploading and setting up things. Very exiting!

I just read a wonderful article by David Campbell (hopefully that’s a permanent link, and an accessible one) on careless spelling and the mistakes the spell-checker programs may allow. (Found it through a comment on Language Log, what else)

I’ve mentioned my allergy of “their vs. they’re vs. there” and that article contained some of my other horrors: seperate, definate, relevent… I also grimace when I see “than” instead of “then” or vice versa.
I have to admit that I didn’t see anything wrong with “accomodation” but that’s because I don’t think I’ve ever used that word myself. (In case you don’t see it either, it should have 2 m’s.)

[Finnish alert] There’s a “personal” experience in this area too. Or actually it was my sister’s. The spell-checker didn’t recognise the word viisisakarainen (with five points (I don’t know what the things on a star are called)) even though it should understand compound words; one of its alternatives was viisipakarainen (with five buttocks). Clever.

What was I supposed to write about… Oh yeah, there was a gross documentary on parasites (focus on worms, it’s a 3-part series) on tv last night. I watched it (of course!) and I had goosebumps and suddenly started itching all over. It was BBC‘s “Body Snatchers”. I can’t remember (and the commentator was dubbed) the English terms of the species so I can’t talk about it much, but one man grew a tapeworm type of creature inside him — for research purposes. It grew to almost 2 meters. And one woman had been stung by a mosquito that carried the eggs of a fly and a big (about an inch) maggot started growing under her scalp. It looked like a big bump on her head and there was a biggish hole in her skin through which the maggot breathed. Ewww… I’m shivering again.
Oh and one man had caught a leech from drinking from a brook and it had attached itself in his nostril.

Brrr… is it cold in here?