Got to admit it's getting better, getting better all the time...

So today was a good day! I woke up around 10. I had planned to get up at 8:30, but that didn't happen. I find that I'm really woozy in the morning. It's almost as though I'm sedated, and getting out of bed seems simply impossible until 10, even thought I went to sleep around midnight last night. Anyway, I got a call from Illke, my tutor, at 11 asking if I'd like to have lunch with him and his daughter, who is 4 years old (sä olet neljä vuotta vanha). Now, usually I think that little kids are noisy, smelly, and generally not good eating companions. But Emilia was really quite nice! She answered my pathetic attempts at asking her questions in Finnish and didn't yell, scream, or demand tons of attention. Plus, somehow a blond, blue-eyed little kid seems even more über-Nordic than a blond, blue-eyed grown-up, which is kind of interesting. I imagine her growing up to be some sort of Norse God :)

After that, I had some really productive conversations with Kai and Pekka. It's amazing how much better of a mood I'm in when math is going well. When I was playing a ton of trumpet, I had a similar phenomenon occuring: good trumpet day = happy kevin, bad trumpet day = sad kevin.

Here are some wonderful things about Finland
- grocery carts *actually work*. You can even turn them sideways on a dime, and there are never any weird unbalanced, off-kilter carts. And they are well-designed too, with a tall skinny compartment at one end for items that would otherwise fall over, like milk or cereal.
- one can purchase bicycle parts in the grocery store for cheap (a set of replacement brake pads = 1.50 €).
- cars stop at intersections for bikes and pedestrians, even when they don't have to.

I'm feeling much better health-wise today also. Hopefully the insurgency has been defeated...