25,000 Hits!

A town called Somero reaches 25,000 hits

It is Friday evening and I am sitting at my desk watching the rain falling outside. It's been quite chilly today and we've lit the fire to warm up the house a bit.

A big thank you for all your get well messages following my spectacular accident yesterday. I am much better today - I can move my arm again and didn't even need to go for an x-ray.  I am likely to have a big bruise on my head for the next week or so but you never know, perhaps the knock did some good and has let loose a bunch of new ideas in my battered head. I can always live in hope.

This evening was a bit of a milestone in that the blog has just reached 25,000 hits, which seems amazing considering that it was originally intended for a small group of people learning English in Somero.

Thank you for reading and for all the warmth you have generated over the past few months. I have all sorts of new projects cooking at the moment and feel very positive and enthusiastic about the coming months. I hope many of you reading will be involved in them. When we reach the next milestone of 50,000 I'll send out an invitation to celebrate with me at our new home, the Oravatupa (The Squirrel Hut) which I will introduce to you in the next post.  Keep watching the figures.  I hope to see you in person for some celebratory cake at our 50,000 party very soon!

OW OW OW. I have no pride left....

If you are wondering what "Ow" means in English, it's the same as "Ai" in Finnish. It's what you say when something hurts.  I am hurting all over this evening, and this post will be very short as I can hardly type!

This evening was the last orienteering session of 2012 (the Torstairastit) and Liisa, Ella and I decided to go to celebrate the end of the season. The terrain this time was pretty rough and we had to fight our way though a lot of heavy undergrowth to get from one point to the next. Still, we made it, and eventually the final flags were in sight. Everything was going fine and I was thinking to myself how I was pleased I was that I had avoided being a) bitten by a snake, b) attacked by deer flies. If you have never heard of deer flies (hirvikäpänen in Finnish) it's a relatively innocent looking insect, rather like a small fly, but which can cause a lot of damage. If you get stung by one then it can cause a nasty infection and I had been warned that there were a lot of them around this evening in the forest where we were.

Anyway, at about eighty metres from the finnish, I suddenly fell badly, and ended up hitting my head so hard on the ground ( or maybe the root of a tree) that for a while I couldn't get up and I though I was going to lose consciousness.  When I finally realised what had happened I noticed that I had also cut both my leg and my arm in the fall. The others had not seen what happened at this point, so eventually I managed to stumble to the finish line which thankfully wasn't far away, and once I was there I pretty much collapsed! Someone arrived with a cold compress for the massive bump which was developing on my head and after a few mintues Liisa drove me to the health centre.

The doctor saw me and laughed! He said that I was "in fashion" as I was about the seventh person that day who had appeared following a head injury of some sort, although I was the only one who had been injured while orienteering. I think at the time I was still covered in bits of stick from the forest and probably had flies in my hair. Stylish.

Not Somero's greatest sportswoman....

Anyway, I was fixed up at the health centre, and now my right is arm is packaged up, which is why I can't write very well. I'll probably have it x-rayed in the morning just to make sure nothing is broken.

So - this was our eventful end to the orienteering season. I really finished the course in style! Seriously though, it was one of those moments when it felt so nice to be among friends. I am really grateful to both Liisa and Ella for looking after me so well, as well as to the staff at the health centre. Liisa took a picture of me looking my very worst. My computer will not let me post it at the moment but I will do so tomorrow so you can see what a state I was in!
 
That's it for now... I .can't type anymore!  Hope you sleep well -- until tomorrow!

I Can't Sleep

It's half past three in the morning...and I can't sleep. Having turned over and over in bed for the last two hours I decided to give up trying and just get up. It is actually very strange sitting in my own house where there is no noise at all other than the ticking of the kitchen clock and the slight buzz of the refrigerator. When you live in a large family you get used to constant background noise, and in our house it often consists of banging, crashing and screaming when either Niko or Luca decides to steal the other one's favourite car. (Which obviously changes daily according to which one the other is playing with). Now though, there is none of that. Everyone is asleep except me.

There is some nice cake on the table which I would be tempted to eat, but I am going to the health centre for blood tests in just over four hours, so I can't even do that. Bad timing. As far as I am concerned, if you can't sleep at four in the morning then at the very least you should be able to comfort yourself with cake. So, in case anyone else out there is suffering from insomnia too, below is a passage I thought that those of you in Scandinavia at least would find funny. I found it just now on another blog written by my good friend Jane Griffiths. Jane is originally a Brit but is now living in Strasbourg. We met in 2008 and shared an office when we both worked at the European Court of Human Rights.  I have to say that she was the best office friend you could ever hope to have. I still laugh now when I think of some of the moments we used to have, and I really miss those times when I am sitting in my grey Helsinki office and noone is laughing about anything much.  Anyway, amongst other things, Jane keeps a blog called "Jane Is The One", and she posted the following passage this evening. I thought I would share it with you as it's both funny and true. It's about languages in Scandanavia. See what you think!

A man from Oslo is married to a Dane. She speaks Danish to him and he replies in Norwegian and vice versa. The language spoken in the Oslo area is a sort of Danish and the language spoken elsewhere in the country is an invented form of Old Norwegian BUT each language has equal status.  So if you go for, say a job in government, you have to show that you are fluent in whichever language is not your native one. TV is subtitled in either language. Icelanders can only understand Norwegian ( a tiny bit). No-one (from the rest of the Nordic group) understands Icelandic.  Norwegians understand Danish and Swedish. Danes understand Norwegian but not Swedish. Swedes understand Norwegian but not Danish.  Finns understand Swedish and some Norwegian but not Danish.  No-one understands Finnish.  So when looking for work within Scandinavia, the Icelanders go to Norway or Finland (where they speak English). The Finns only go to Sweden. The Danes only go to Norway. The Swedes only go to Norway if they must but mostly stay at home.
Not far from the truth is it?  At least as far as the Finns are concerned. We pretty much stick to going to Sweden, only understand a bit of Norwegian and definitely not a word of Danish which sounds like they are suffering from a bad throat condition.  Thanks Jane.  You made me laugh once again, even though it is the middle of the night and you didn't even know it. That's what I call real friendship.

OK. I just yawned, and in the circumstances I take that as a positive sign.  Back to bed to see if I can sleep for just a while at least. Hope you are all sleeping soundly. Until tomorrow...Jody.