My dog reverse sneezes a lot. I did not know there was a term for his little breathing fits... Apparently you're supposed to pinch his nose and stroke his throat when he does that so that it'll pass quicker. I don't know how he'd like me pinching his nose... But I guess I'll try.

Also apparently reverse sneezing can be a symptom of a Pneumonyssus caninum ("nose tic" in Finnish) which is a kind of a tiny parasite that lives inside the dog's nose. Apparently it's really common for dogs to have that.

I had never even heard of nose tics or reverse sneezing before this morning at work. I feel really bad now, because my dog's had reverse sneezing for ages :/ I didn't know there was something you can do about it, let alone that it could mean he has a parasite. We've never even mentioned his little wheezing fits to the vet either. Why haven't we mentioned about his reverse sneezing to the vet? >.<

So I guess I'll give him parasite meds to see if that ends the wheezing (his eyes leak a lot too, which can be another symptom of the parasite), and if it doesn't, it's just the random thing and I'll pinch his nose when he does that :/ He'll probably bite me in the face for that :D


Oh and I got over my urge to get on that sailing boat. The timing is all wrong, this month is going to be stupidly hectic all the way to the end. Instead I am considering going to visit England from the 1st of June, to celebrate the end of hecticness and to see a private view of some friends of mine. Need to see what my English family are doing that week, they have some kind of a summer break and I'm not sure if they'd be in Cov or not...

Sneak Previews of the current project.

I just got a postcard from rural North Carolina! :D

:O The world's largest four-masted barque STS Sedov is going on a circumnavigation, leaving from St. Petersburg on 19th of May, and it stops in my town on the 21st! :O :D :O <3

So obviously I'll go see it and lure my sister and the missionaries too (since it's on Monday which their rest day), but there is something I noticed on www.sts-sedov.info and that is that the leg from Hamina to Rostock still has places and it's, well, really expensive, but I could afford it... I could take a couple days off from work and go sailing. :O I... don't know how I feel about this, except scared and awed. It's like "holy mackerel the chance of a life time" and it'd suck to think I almost did... Buuut, I don't think I will. Unless. Maybe I will >_> Meep. *needs to sit down and think and look into it a bit more*
My sister would murder me dead out of jealousy, though. >_>



*edit*
So I checked it out: I could do the ship, from Rostock take a train to Hamburg and fly back to Helsinki via Copenhagen. The whole shebang would be around 800€...

You know what? If by the 15th (when I get paid) the ship can still be booked, I'll go.
Though... I need to first do some calculations to make sure I'm not shafting my USA trip >_> But I have three months of summer working non-stop, that should be fine... but I'll do the math first :P

http://drawhappy.org/submit/

Draw happiness. Send it to this person. Take part in a cool.

So I've been watching episodes of Happy Days online because I watched a documentary on Henry Winkler on Sunday with my mum and started to miss the Fonz so much that I overcame my disliking of online tv-watching. And... I don't remember it making me this emotional when I was watching it as a kid o.O Like, I'm in tears over Fonzie going blind and stuff. But it is incredibly fascinating to see it with adult eyes now. So many things I didn't pay attention to as a kid (admittedly I've become a lot more sensitive as I've become more religious, but good grief Potsie and Ralph are desperate! :O And they're all very... fast!) But I'm glad to find that Fonzie's brand of looseness is still as gentlemanly as I remembered it. I identify with him a lot (as well as find him hot :P)

*goes back to her craziness*

I had three portions of fruit (of the daily five) for breakfast today! :D Gone are the days when I'd get 1 or none of my five-a-day.

No problems with the drunks this morning :) Next up: midsummer's -_-;

I wanted to share this http://www.thedominoproject.com/2012/04/tracts-and-books.html
I'm on the mailing list of the Domino Project and they say cool things. But I have as of yet bought anything from them. Then again, I don't have a Kindle either.

Two things that Google should do:
1. google.eu that will search all sites in Europe. Even if they only do Google Shopping search, this would be so incredibly incredible. And it would help the economic area. Because really, who bothers to go to all the different sites of google (co.uk de fr it never mind all the little country ones like se dk fi...) to find the thingie.
2. Google art search. Like a google image search engine, but searching only within the visual arts, with metadata about the different images, like "male gaze" or "impressionism" or connections to other artists (whose work influenced the work or who were influenced by the work).
3. Hire me to make these things, esp 2 (this is optional if they will make them and do them good themselves, but if they won't, they should make me do them).

Monday is the perfect day for having a day off :) I woke up early, cleaned and walked the dog and art is great and I feel happeh! And it's only 11am! Six more hours of awesome day left! I'm even a little bit panicked about what I should do with these hours to best utilise my time. Then I have one day of work, then one day off, and then rest of the week work til Sunday.

Speaking of Sunday, yesterday I was officially called as the Primary president for my ward (while previously I was the second counsellor to the primary president). So you may now call me President iippo (but only in matters that relate to persons between the ages of 3 and 11 years of age that live in the Kouvola area...)

Tomorrow is May Day (which means that the stupidest month of the year will be over) and I'll get the day after it off work. Though I'm not really looking forward to working on the night after May Day eve (all the drunks... The night belongs to paper people and truck drivers! All the rest of you should always be at home by 2am)

Listening to blues music can drive an insecure person crazy. o.O First they're all "I love you and if you leave I'd die" and the next song is "I don't want no woman like you, stay out of my life" ;_;

You guys paying attention to this political murder intrigue going on in China?
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/asia/289923/china-scandal-exposes-elite-impunity
Really interesting, it's history playing out before our eyes (well, sort of before, considering how China tries to hide stuff).

Today I made a cat card for a kid I know who's turning 12.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/04/26/literary-paint-chips-gallery-1/
Colours, as defined in literature.

Good night.

The shoe shop that I stalk all of a sudden sent an email saying "lookit, discounts!" so I looked. Earlier I had a running list of shoes that are "kinda nice, consider buying some sometime" and one pair that was "amg amg wantwantwant" (dees ones http://www.brandos.fi/iron-fist/lovelace-flat-ifloxf0002-cre-cream/a53616 ).

Now there are also dees
http://outlet.brandos.fi/bronx/herald-64833-k-1-blk/a22280
http://outlet.brandos.fi/bronx/herald-43584-j-2-whtecru/a22267
http://outlet.brandos.fi/dkode/alandys-28197-006-leath-offwlilac/a29892
http://outlet.brandos.fi/h-by-hudson/deller-5601010-multi/a13669
that have the same reaction and are on sale. Plus a couple more on discount that I would say "yes please thank you" to, and whatever I go with - if any¹ - I will throw in these http://outlet.brandos.fi/vagabond/aida-3126-001-01-white/a26013 because they are simple and white and flat and I simply can't think of any occasion where they wouldn't be the perfect back-up emergency "they go with everything" option. Plus they are really cheap. Which might indicate poor quality. But also indicates big discount so maybe not.

My name is iippo and I have a problem :S

^{1 The sheer amount of choice often leaves me incapacitated to make a choice, so I might end up buying no shoes at all.}

It seems that a worm of some sort sent all my MSN contacts a link to something or another (I found out after I got a delivery notification when one of the recipients' email bounced). Which is interesting since I don't use MSN anymore. But yeah, sorry Viking, Silvie, Pubky and three other people that I had as MSN contacts. Long live Skype, eh?


http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/21718631467/the-2012-forbes-fictional-15-richest
How could Flintheart Glomgold possibly be second-richest next to Smaug, when everyone knows he is second-richest to Scrooge MacDuck? Or maybe the picture is not in order...

Hmm, they gave a shoddy explanation on http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2012/fictional-15-12/flintheart-glomgold.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LecGuQE6t44
This is amazingness and fun and awesome!
Tags: Cthulhu and pretty much every geeky bad guy there is, and ASL sign-along-to-song awesome-ness! Srsl, this is win. :D I will go watch it again now. And if you had already seen it before, I curse you with a gypsy-curse for not having forced it upon me before.

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
HAL(Douglas Rain)


And I'd really like someone to tell me if they can see the images in them previous Tumblr links, so that I'd know if it's just me, if it's just Chrome, or if it's Tumblr that has break.

Is anyone else having problems with Tumblr lately? Really often I will see, instead of a picture, an icon indicating "here should be a picture". For example this http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/21614475184/your-mind-will-answer-most-questions-if-you-learn I can't see a picture there. Can you? This happens a lot. And even when I'm in my Tumblr dashboard I sometimes only see the icon when viewing the posts of people I'm following.
:/

This is another one http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/21598587324/move-along but I can click the icon to get to the original image in Flickr and it works just fine.

This gave me a sad


http://www.toby-ng.com/graphic-design/the-world-of-100/

Went to see Hamlet with my mum and sister, which was good. We saw a Kony 2012 poster in town! :O I would never have expected, in Finland, in a small town... But it was really cool, because I got to explain to my mum and sister who Joseph Kony is, which means that the poster/campaign thinger worked at least a little. Except that I sucked at explaining it because I don't know how to say "murdering, pillaging warlord" in Finnish (somehow that vocab has just never come up in my life before) so I stuttered and stumbled a bit.

Funny thing in Hamlet was that they had a bit of a prop malfunction in the play. In the sword fight between Laertes and Hamlet LAertes's sword broke. So Hamlet was really cool and nonchalant and said to some servant "bring a new sword". But I got really confused because you couldn't tell which sword it was (it was the poisoned one, technically), so I was like "...so how does this end..." Hamlet did touch the poisoned broken blade but I guess they just pretended that the poisoned blade had actually cut him earlier (maybe it had, it was hard to follow). We wondered about it when the play was finished and asked the director/somebody-guy at the mixing table if the breaking was intentional and he said it wasn't. And the feather in Horatio's hat was twitching really funny in the draft :D So distracting. 

Overall well done, well staged. I mainly wanted to see if they had any ideas for how to do the characters and the bits where there are no lines - the copy I have is very silent on acting directions and telling tone of voice and such. It was very confusing, some of it, the way they had interpreted the words so differently than I do. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were very... slimy, and Ophelia was really loud and obnoxious and her dress showed a lot of cleavage. Polonius did do the funny, but he talked really fast. Overall for a play where the main character himself tells actors to not shout and rage excessively, there was a lot of shouting, from Hamlet himself as well. I really liked the King, and Albert (man in a dress is always good, right?) didn't like the Queen a whole ton, and it bugged me that Horatio was a woman. So basically I'm saying, I'm a female misogynist and didn't like any of the female roles, basically. And the line "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" was omitted.

It was easier to follow in Finnish than it is in English, but it also lacked that fine quality that the English language has. Finnish is not a noble language, so all translation to Finnish automatically loses nobleness. And tends to either get a fairy tale quality (which is why Harry Potter is the best in Finnish) or a depressing/depressed/drunken/dark quality, or both. The depressed bit worked for Hamlet a little, though. But it still lacked the fine-ness. And they left quite a bit out. But so would I, it's a long play.

What the heck?! This is like... an alternative universe me! :O If I had gone to Australia instead of England.
http://inarikiuru.blogspot.com/
Another one! :O Germany this time:
http://www.saana-inari.net/?page_id=5
And the Swiss version (guys, I've taken this exact same picture!)
http://www.art-inari.com/#!__photographie/albumphotos4=1
Alternative Swiss universe interior designer version of me
http://inka-inari.blogspot.com/

Inari sushi!?!
http://japanesefood.about.com/od/sushi/r/inarizushi.htm

Inari skirt?! :D
http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/inari

There is a specific language called Inari too, spoken by the Inari saamis (Anaras). I think I should learn that.
http://www.samimuseum.fi/anaras/english/yleistietoa/yleistietoa.html
http://www.uta.fi/~km56049/same/inarinsaame.html
Getting my hands on an Inari dialect of the Little Prince might help get started :P
http://www.petit-prince.at/pp-sami-i.htm (cool links there too)
The Lord's prayer in Inari (I feel awesome now, I recognised what text it was by just reading it and before I saw the amen :3 )
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/pater/JPN-sa-inari.html

And then something strange
http://www.roccat.org/home/Organisation/Case-Inari/

Okay I'm done now. This was a weird little experiment

Nebulae cannot be drawn with colour pencils. But that can't be fixed, since I started doing it as a background and have to finish or at least try to save it some how. This will be a bloody mess. I really should get into paint again, to have more chances of fixing cock-ups like this.



The tops of the trees of the forest were alight with the rising sun.
There was a faint smell of smoke in the air.
I walked home and found that my house was on fire.

These two links go together:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/04/19/150906125/argentina-points-to-an-oil-company-and-says-this-is-now-ours

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q54lVO7elt0

http://thisisnthappiness.com/post/21330562264/extinguishing-yourself

This is surprisingly difficult to do when one seems to suffer from spontaneous human combustion. And feeling abandoned at the worst time of the year is not conducive to success either.

*cranky and bitter*