The day doesn’t really start well when you wake up with a headache, urgent need to use the toilet and a single thought: “where the h*ll is my car key?” Next thing you discover is that it’s still/again minus-f*cking-twenty outside, in mid-March! Pardon my French. Pardon my morning-crank.

The sun is out, the birds are chirping despite the freezing weather, I’ve had my cappucino and a hot shower. The snow near blinds me when I look out through the window and it’s cold in the house too. There’s good and bad (and ugly) in this day just like in every other day. Facebook asked me what’s on my mind. A lot’s on my mind. I don’t like writing short stories for status updates, so I left the field empty and started this blog entry instead.

So, about that car key? (category: bad)

Starting with that haunting thought. Yesterday my boyfriend discovered my second car key was not where it was supposed to be. Either either one us has misplaced it or the kids have used it (not for driving, obviously) and misplaced it, but pretty much with 100% certainty it’s somewhere in this house. But the question remains: where?

Ah, that headache (category: bad)

It has been my loyal companion for quite some time now. It’s partly due to the dryness of the air and partly to the tightness of my neck/shoulder muscles.

My boyfriend thinks it quite funny when I say I’m allergic to “pakkanen” – freezing temperatures – but truly, I am. It dries mys skin so that I need to apply a bottle of lotion every day and two when I take a shower. It dries my nose so that I sneeze all the time. It dries my head so that I feel mummyfied inside – and that part causes the headache.

As for the neck and shoulder muscles, I should just start dancing again. But, there’s so many buts that everybody’s butt will hurt before I’m through so I’ll just make it short and say that yes, I have excuses more and less valid ones, and it’s me suffering the consequenses. “People want what they want”, Michael Dean from Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter (an intriguing book, by the way), concluded, so I just nuke my wheat pillow twice a day and make do with that on my shoulders, keeping the house smelling like fresh bread.

Beautiful Ruins (category: good)

A book I finished last night. Jess Walter seems to somehow remake himself in each of his books, but the trademark that remains is telling two stories (at least two) simultaneously. Entangling a contemporary story with that of an old one, a memoire of someone whose life intersects with the contemporary main character of the book. The strands are woven together quite ingeniously into a tapestry.

Another trademark is that usually there is no one person you could especially like in the book. There is something amiss with all of them. But then you come to think that that’s the way it is in real life too. You like peole and yet everyone has their quirks and traits that are annoying. And then again, in this book too, I sort of grew to like Pasquale and Dee, and Claire with her curly red hair reminding me of myself in more ways than just those red curls.

But the book was also exhausting. Exhaustingly intense and written in a language that puts you out of breath. As an introvert person I need peace and quiet, and usually I enjoy reading a book in my peace and quiet. But this book, it exhausted me many times like a crowd of people would. It’s fun for a while but then you need a break.

All in all and anyway, it was an intriguing book, beautifully woven, with the bottom line being like mine: “it’s just life, nothing more, nothing less”.

The spring “fashion” (category: ugly)

I went clothes shopping with my daughters a few weeks ago and my nearly-ten-ager got a pair of neon pink pants from a rack where the selection was neon orange, green, purple, and whatnot. The pink ones for a ten years old are kinda cool even. But I tried to look for something nice for myself too and was faced by pretty much this scene (sorry, in Finnish, but I believe the pictures speak for themselves…), so in the end my wallet was happier than I was.

I mean, even the eighties wasn’t as bad as that! Ah ok, maybe it was. My brain just fed me this image of Bogart co (no, I will NOT litter my blog with the actual picture), forever burned on my retina. Instant pain in the back of my eyes. To think that I used to have that poster on my wall back in the eighties…

My Lumia (category: bad)

The other night I discovered that the screen of my one year old Lumia is almost completely detatched from the frame. So ok, I have dropped the phone a few times, arguing otherwise would be like my dear near-teenager telling me she didn’t visit my closet, while wearing one of my teeshirts (I mean, how stupid do teenagers think their parents are?). So I need to take my Lumia to the Mobile Spa. I hope they give me a nice phone to use while waiting for my own. Our own spear ones are kinda old…

Other random stuff (categories: good; bad; ugly; *shrug*)

Oh, I guess I could ramble on about all sorts of things. Like the sun that has been coming and going today (good) before and after the snowfall (bad), all that snow still covering our world (bad), the Pope (*shrug*), North Korea (bad), all sorts of local and less local news (*shrug*), tabloid headlines (ugly), our new bathroom door (good). Such stuff. Coffee table conversation more than blog material. Sufficient to say, life is, people are and I’m happy to be sitting in my nice home, with my boyfriend (who got a new charger for his MacBook yesterday – good) feeling surprisingly good inspite of the morning and whatever else.

So that’s what’s on my mind today.

[Oldie but goldie. Seems more accurate every year…]