Patience friends and family.
I was overwhelmed by the requests for Annikki's desktop calendar - which is a very limited printing. The 500 FREE copies offered on the web were snapped up within 2 days. I moved many over from the general requests to the family (about 200) and friends quota.
I then found I did not have the actual addresses of several who were either on that list or asked me for a calendar to be sent to them. So it has been a series of emails to either verify or obtain addresses. It would be stupid to post them from China to defunct addresses.
Setting up the database for sending to the printers in China has been a horrific process.
I have been working non-stop on this for the last few days. My eyesight cannot take more than a couple of hours at the computer at a time - so I move up from the cellar and watch the tele - very unusual for me to do that these days.
Tele has such rubbish on these days that I am not missing much. Annikki and I watch the news channels - Finnish, BBC, CNN - mainly on satellite in winter. In summer, the leaves on the trees obscure the vision to the satellite, so we only receive the local Finnish channels.
Annikki does watch several of the quasi-political documentary programmes, mainly from the Finnish channels. She also has a preference for nature programmes as well interior design and cooking programmes. With the Finnish Presidential elections looming, she is also watching the media and the male dominated Finnish political scene, cross party, trying to swift boat the incumbent Tarja Halonen.
Annikki can listen to radio and TV at the same time. She has a very sharp ear for words on both. Like this one she picked up from a TV broadcast about India. Someone said:
Wish I knew who said that!
On Saturday evenings I break my monotony by watching the absolutely stupid US detective rubbish - Monk. When you such gross stupidity you feel all your nerves relaxing as you realise that maybe some of us have some brains!
The only thing more stupid on TV than Monk is the Rupert Murdoch FOX News Channel which claims it is "Fair and Balanced"! When I am really depressed and want to laugh, I switch that on - and that is very very rarely - so you can guess I do not get THAT depressed very often.
Mika has been playing chess with me (usually at 04:30 am) - and that takes me off the computer for a short while at a time. Quick Chess usually takes about 15 minutes. And his chess level has been getting back to its hey day. He thrashed me two days running - something he has not done for 15 years.
While searching for a good picture of Mika I came across this one which drove me to thinking how much I am missing our grandkids and our kids who are not here. Emotional - yes!!
Then I came across this one.
Here is a lovely picture of our granddaughter with her father which I stole from Susanna's blog!!
Asha just emailed me telling me she felt she had done well in her exams. She oozes the confidence that I used to have when I was a kid, even when I knew I had done really badly.
Dear Grandpa and Grandma,
I did my exam today. I know I did really well in my exam today.
I hope Grandma is making snow-models.
What are you doing at Christmas? We are going down to Newcastle for Christmas.
I am doing my Gymnastics competition on 4 of December.
What are you doing this week?
Love,
Asha
I cannot leave out daughter, Susanna, from this emotional picture circuit, so here is another picture I stole from her blog.
Will have pictures of the boys sometime soon.
Life is worth living just for the quality time, even virtual, we have with kids.
And finally, yesterday, when we picked up Annikki's mother from her periodic stay at the Old People's Home so that Annikki and I can have some rest from our 24 hour cycle, we got some bad bad news. Due to budget cuts affecting children and old people in Finland so that they can afford more money for the corrupt bureacrats that run this country, the City Authorities have reduced her stay each month from the average 12 days a month to just 7 days a month from January 2007 onwards.
Means that life, as Hilja and we get older, is just getting tougher.
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