Stand Still and Look Stupid

Announcement

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Hello, everyone! Due to bad health and a million other things, I’m taking a break from blogging. I plan to begin a new blog of the same title and content in early March.

Friday

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Okay, guys. Remember this post, in which I moaned and groaned about my best friend no longer being my best friend? Well. In fact, she is still my best friend. But I got disturbing news about her not long ago, which caused my head to spin. V and I met this afternoon, and talked about a great many things, including the aforementioned ”disturbing news”. The news was that V has decided to move back to Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where she was born and lived almost all her life, to be closer to her son and friends she has there. I don’t blame her. Oh, God, I would give just about anything to move to Saint-Petersburg with her. I love V so much. She’s been exactly like a mother to me since I met her. She loves me. V is the first person in my life to show me what love is. I don’t want to lose her. I’m terrified of losing her. When she moves - and she doesn’t know when she’ll be moving yet - I probably won’t see her again for at least one or two years. Oh, God, I’m so sad about this. I can’t say any more about it tonight, only that it’s not enough for me to be able to communicate with V via e-mails and Skype. I want to be able to see her and hug her and tell her directly how much I love her and always miss her when we’re forced to go for almost one year sometimes without seeing one another because of our busy lives and what not.

I’m actually going to visit Saint-Petersburg in the middle of next month with another Russian friend. We’re going there on a ferry that leaves from Helsinki. I’ll only get to sight-see in Saint-Petersburg for one day, but part of me thinks that I’m perhaps meant to travel to the place V is moving back to now, so that I can take as much as I can of it in with the photographic memory I’m blessed with, so that parts of the enormous city will be less new to me the next time I’m able to go there to see V and get to know the city better. And who knows. Perhaps I’ll be able to move to Saint-Petersburg one day. Not just to be near V, but to be in a far more cultured place where my daughter will have less of a chance of growing up into a spoiled, snarky, selfish, self-centered teen who drinks and doesn’t take school or anything seriously, like about ninety-eight percent of young people in Finland. And Finnish people in general.

This is V, in one of the ways I always want to remember her. Okay, I’m going to bed now. Early as it is. I can’t help but cry myself to sleep.

Sunday

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Short post this evening. I’m really sad right now, positively heartbroken. I came to the realisation today that my best friend is no longer my best friend. Or even just a friend. I don’t have the strength to write about it now. I’m doing all I can to get my mind off of V. Today I’ve played with my daughter a lot, washed a lot of dishes, dutifully taken the strong antibiotics perscribed to me after a minor operation I had to have on my lower back last week, thought about what kind of things I might like to do this summer, and browsed through a couple of online stores.

Look at this lovely pink silk blouse from H&M.

It comes in blue, too. I like the blue blouse slightly better than the pink one. I hope to grab one of the blue blouses as soon as they go one sale.

I wouldn’t mind having this yellow silk blouse as well. All three of these blouses would look great tucked into a grey pencil skirt. I had better go now. To anyone reading this post…please send some good thoughts my way. I could use them. I look forward to tomorrow simply because it seems logical that with each day that passes, I might feel a little less downhearted. Thank you.

Saturday

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0200

Good morning. As usual, I’ve been lazy with blogging. I was shocked when I realised that I haven’t posted anything in over a month. October came and went in a flash. I was accepted into that school I wanted to go to, and studying takes up a lot of my time. I had planned to put L into a creche in October, but never did. She stays at home with her dad on the days that I go to school. L’s dad is a comics artist, and works at home with his twin brother. L seems content to spend hours playing with Duplos and Kewpie dolls in her bedroom while the twins work. Sometimes she watches cartoons on YouTube. L gets breakfast almost as soon as she wakes up in the mornings, and bottles of milk or sugar-free soda or juice between meals. She shares the twins’ lunches with them, and then eats dinner with me when I get home from school. I really miss L when I’m at school. Maybe she’ll go to a creche next year, who knows. It all depends on what, and if, I’ll be studying something; or if the twins will still be drawing comics, or writing, or even teaching.

Whatever. I don’t want to think (read: stress) about putting L into a creche right now. I would like to say that I have an outfit to show my handful of readers today; but I don’t. I haven’t had the time or inclination to so much as take one or two quick pictures since summer. Here is a picture of a piece of sky outside my kitchen window, which I took last month. It was late afternoon, and the sky was a strange shade of blue-peach.

Here is a picture of some chrysanthemums that were sitting in a pot outside the florist shop near my apartment. I like chrysanthemums. This picture was taken on a rather dark and rainy day, but you would hardly know it from the brightness of the flower heads. It looks as though the sun were shining right on them when I took the picture.

Another picture of flowers, taken on a bright and sunny day before my birthday.

This picture was taken in a graveyard near where I live. I guess I should mention that my mother-in-law suddenly passed away in mid-October. We’re all very sad that she died. She was only fifty-four; her fifty-fourth birthday would have been later that month.

I had no time at all to celebrate Halloween, my absolute favourite holiday, this year. I didn’t even get a chance to carve a jack o’ lantern, host the small Halloween party that L’s dad and I had been planning, or bake a pumpkin pie! Here is a picture of the small jack o’ lantern I hastily carved for Halloween in 2011. L was small then, and had few teeth. If you look closely, you can see that the jack o’ lantern has a couple little teeth in its mouth. Its round eyes and grin remind me of how L looked when she was a baby.

L is going to be two years old on the 27th! I don’t know how we’re going to celebrate her birthday yet. We might combine her birthday celebration with Thanksgiving. But whatever we do, I’ll be sure to post about it! I can’t write any more today, but I’ll be back to post soon. And I truly mean that. Bye for now.

More Clothes from H&M

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Today is my twenty-fourth birthday. I had a piece of cold baked salmon with tea for breakfast, which was very good; and this evening I’ll get cake and coffee at my brother-in-law’s house. I look forward to it.

I saw this rose-coloured cardigan at H&M the other day, and thought it was very pretty. I like that shade of pink; it reminds me of my paternal grandmother, the one who died when I was four. Rose-pink might have been her favourite colour. The cardigan looked nice and warm. Too bad it was so expensive. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find this same cardigan in my size when it goes on sale in a few months.

This dress is nice. I love the cut. It reminds me of the cut of some dresses from the 1980s. I wish that this dress didn’t come in only wine-red or black, though. It would be cool if the dress came in rust, brown, dark green, cream, or apricot as well. But it doesn’t matter; I like the wine-red dress better than the black one, especially if I think of the colour as ”cherry”, rather than wine-red.

Finally, there’s this dress, black with flecks of pastel colours, and perfect to wear on a chilly autumn evening with black tights (maybe even patterned) and a white trench coat or light-coloured faux fur coat. I guess this dress is meant to be worn at a party, hence the way it glitters, but I think it could easily be dressed down and worn in the daytime.

Okay, I’ll stop writing now, and have a little rest. I can’t wait until Friday. On Friday, I have to pay a visit to the school I want to attend for the rest of this year and be interviewed by one of the teachers I’ll have if I’m accepted into the langauge program. Oh, I hope I get accepted into that school! If I get accepted, it’ll make my life easier in many ways. I’ll keep you updated on what happens.

A Brown Lace Blouse, and Other Things

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Hello. It’s 09.05 on a bright, cold morning. I’ve been awake for a while, and now, while L is sitting in front of the other computer, enjoying a Christmas-themed episode of Teletubbies, I’ll try to squeeze in a short post concerning some appealing items from H&M’s autumn collection.

I noticed this blouse on H&M’s online store this week. I like it a lot. That particular shade of brown makes me think of black tea. I bet this blouse would look great with a pair of black jeans, tucked into the front just a little, and a grey blazer; or even with bright magenta or lavender pants. I like to wear brown with magenta, neon colours, and shades of purple. Those are really my favourite colours to pair with anything brown. I’ve always associated the combination of brown and purple with autumn. Think of lovely, heavy clusters of purple grapes with a good bloom on them, hanging from dry autumn vines, the leaves of which have turned rust and brown. Ready to be picked.

Yeah. I also like this dress. The colour is a bit odd (it was described as ”dark turquoise” on http://www.hm.com/fi/), but not bad. That dark turquoise (I’d describe the colour as ”lichen”) might prove difficult to pair with other colours, but it might look nice with black tights and black heels. Or even very dark green tights and brown ankle boots. What do you guys think? The dress might also look well with pale yellow, such as a pale yellow scarf, an amber necklace, or a long yellow cardigan. Speaking of yellow, I tried on a dress similar to this one when I was shopping for L in H&M yesterday. It was a bright, pale yellow that reminded me of forsythia blossoms. Or evening primroses. It was so pretty. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a picture of that dress online.

I would like a leather pencil-skirt this exact shade of brown, with undertones of red. Again, a brown reminiscent of black tea. I’d wear this skirt with a cream-coloured silk blouse, and nude pumps, or nude stockings and brown knee-high boots for colder weather. With a grey blazer or coat or long cardigan. (Again with the long cardigans, I know.) Since this skirt evidently costs ninety-nine euros at H&M, I guess that it might be made of real leather. I’d gladly settle for a faux-leather skirt that looks like this, only a faux-leather skirt might start to crack after a year or two of wearing it. I’ve hardly ever owned anything made of real leather, so I don’t know if it cracks after a while like faux-leather does. Does it?

I bought this sweater, along with a pair of matching striped leggings, for L yesterday. The colours of the sweater are brighter in real life than in the picture. Such nice, bright colours, they remind me of the lantanas my grandmother used to grow!

Grief

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0300

I’m not getting any sleep tonight, because I can’t stop thinking about my little boy. Losing a child is something you never get over. I’m definitely never going to get over this.

Unusual Breakfast to Celebrate the Last Day of Summer

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0300

I fried some bacon in a pan, poured enough pancake batter over it to make a large pancake, and served it to the husband with orange marmalade and a cup of instant coffee for breakfast. I felt like making the husband something unusual for breakfast today, since it’s the last day of summer. I’m happy to report that he really enjoyed his pancake. But L wouldn’t eat any. I later made another, smaller pancake for myself, with less bacon in it. The pancakes might have tasted even better with maple syrup instead of orange marmalade. Next month I might make the husband a similar pancake with chopped green onions and bacon or sausage and semetana.

Transparent Pumps by Marc Jacobs

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0300

I happened across this meme a while back, and thought it was funny as hell. I subsequently had a dream about a pair of glass slippers, and woke up thinking about how cool it would be if wearable glass slippers actually existed. It turns out that they do exist; Marc Jacobs designed glass slippers, made out of PVC material, that look just like the ones in that old Disney film.

What cool shoes. I read that a pair of them costs nearly six hundred dollars, and that it’s reccomended to wear them with black socks, I guess because not everyone has beautiful feet, and even the most beautiful of feet would likely appear badly distorted in transparent heels. With the way toes are pressed together even in high heels that fit well, the feet of a person wearing these lovely things would likely resemble a pickled pig’s trotter! Oh, the horror! While the prospect of wearing heels like these with black socks doesn’t exactly appeal to me, I imagine that these ”glass” slippers would look great with black tights. Or tights of other colours. Opaque tights might look best. I’d like to take a walk in heels made of PVC material, to see how comfortable they are.

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Green Floral Scarf

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Hi, everyone! July was a stressful and busy month for me, and August has been even more so. Hence no blogging. Earlier this month, I received a letter from the police station telling me that my permanent residence permit was waiting for me with the police, and that I should come and pick it up as soon as possible…So, I went to the police station, and now am in possession of the permanent residence permit I’d been waiting so many months to receive. I was surprised that the residence permit is being distributed in card form now; just last year, the permit was nothing more than a nondescript note with your face on it pasted inside your passport. Now, I’ll always have to carry that card with me when I travel anywhere in the future, along with my passport. Not that I mind carrying a card with my passport, but…Well, they told me at the police office that I’ll be eligible to apply for Finnish citizenship this time next year. And I intend to do just that. If only I could pass the citizenship exam on my first try. It costs almost five hundred euros to apply for citizenship in Finland, but I’m willing to pay the price. I want an EU passport so badly.

Now, I’m waiting for yet another letter to come. I applied to study Finnish again this autumn, and I’m waiting to hear if I’ll be able to. I have no idea of when that letter will arrive; it could come tomorrow, or at the end of September. I honestly have no idea of what I’ll do until next spring, if I’m not accepted into that school I want to study Finnish in; I guess I’ll continue to stay at home with L. There won’t be any reason for her to attend a daycare if I’m not studying.

Anyway, onto the subject of this post. I had plans to go salsa-dancing with a friend yesterday evening, but instead, I met her at her house, had a few glasses of good red wine, had dinner, and then watched one of the silliest ”horror” films that I’ve ever seen. The film was called Dead Silence. My God, it was so awful. It reminded me of some Italian horror films from the 1980s that have an odd, disjointed (if that’s the right word), nightmarish quality about them, bad acting, and unrealistic dialogue. Watching those films is like watching a train wreck. Time slows down, so that the film seems to last forever, and when the end credits start rolling, you feel traumatised not because of the scariness of the film, but because you’ve just wasted about two hours of your life by watching a crap film you never wanted to see in the first place.

This was the look I settled on for yesterday evening:

Green floral scarf: H&M / Oversized colour-block blazer: H&M / Bag: Aleksi 13 / Ethnic-print dress: Thrifted / Green heels: Skopunkten

I know it’s not such a good picture. My camera sucks, I’m not photogenic at all, I’m too shy to strike a real pose or even hardly smile, and the person who took the picture for me doesn’t have much experience with taking pictures. But that’s the new look I’d promised. More, and hopefully better, looks to come!

Craving Cool Colours by rhramstedt featuring crop tops

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 21:01:56 +0300

Craving Cool Colours by rhramstedt featuring crop tops

Summer is Ending by rhramstedt featuring short shirts

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 20:42:24 +0300

Summer is Ending by rhramstedt featuring short shirts

Craving Cool Colours

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Hi, guys. Once again, I’ve gone quite a long time without posting anything interesting, or indeed, anything at all. I had a lot going on last month, and it looks like I’m going to have a lot going on this month as well. Which is okay. I like to stay busy. But my health decided to go suddenly downhill last month, which means that I haven’t been able to get a lot of exercise for the last few weeks. I’ve also had trouble sleeping most nights. I’m sad to report that I’ve gained back the two kilograms that I’d lost on my diet; the weight gain doesn’t seem to be due to unhealthy eating on my part, but rather, the litres of water I drink every day, and on those nights when I can’t sleep. That makes me so depressed. I don’t look well, or feel well. My face has gotten all puffy again because of water weight, and it sucks.

So, I don’t have any looks to post today, though I solemnly swore in my last post that I’d throw together some kind of outfit to show you. Sorry about that. I will definitely post one or two looks later this month. Do you remember that wine-red blouse from H&M that I wrote about in my last post? Well, I bought that blouse soon after writing about it, and it instantly became my favourite blouse. Oh, it’s so lovely. Such a perfect cut, and it looks good with just about anything. I’ve been wearing the blouse with a couple of short pencil skirts (silver and dark salmon) that I found at H&M the same day I bought the wonderful blouse. Now I’m considering investing in this blouse, which is of the same cut as the wine-red blouse:

If I get this blouse, I’d love to wear it with my silver pencil skirt and nude high-heeled sandals.

I discovered last week, when the temperature climbed to nearly thirty degrees, that I’m sick of summer. Or bored with it. Spring is my least-favourite season, autumn is my favourite, and I like summer as well as I like winter. You all know how easy it is to get tired of winter. This summer feels as though it’s gone on forever, and I’m honestly not enjoying the blinding sunlight and heat any more. When I was walking in town yesterday afternoon, and drooping from the humidity, I found my eyes drawn towards some of the pastels people on the streets were wearing. Think sea green pants, pale blue tops, and the occasional lavender article. Those lovely, delicate, cool colours, which made me think of chilly rainy days, creeping fog, and cool, breezy mornings. I’ve always liked the shade of green many people refer to as ”mint” (though I prefer to call it ”sea green”), but I never wear that colour simply because there are so few other colours that complement it well. In my opinion. I like sea green with a few shades of blue, various shades of green, pink sometimes, lavender, and peach. That’s about it. It seems to me that black, and even brown, tends to overwhelm sea green. I feel that sea green is best worn by blondes for the same reason.

That said, there’s a ten-euro dress at H&M right now that’s not sea green, but another shade of green that I call ”apple green” (a pale, yet vibrant green) that I have my eye on. I imagine that the dress would look perfect belted with the finger-wide light brown belt that I wear with everything, this cool colour block blazer I just got, and my nude heels.

To be discussed in my next post: should I cut my long hair short?

Breathing a Sigh of Relief

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Today was a good day. I showed up for my doctor’s appointment this morning totally nervous and expecting nothing but bad news. But I got just the opposite. Mostly. I won’t bore you with details of what the doctor said, but basically - and this was all I was looking for - though I’m still not in very good condition because of the complicated problems I’ve dealt with since last autumn, it doesn’t look like I’ll need to undergo an additional surgery after all. For the forseeable future. I can’t tell you how relieved the doctor’s prognosis makes me feel. Now I know what it feels like to be ”giddy with relief”. I was so giddy with relief after the doctor’s appointment that I stopped to buy ice cream on the way home, to celebrate. And maybe it sounds silly, but when I got home, I was so happy that I’m probably not going to be hooked up to fluids for days on end during another long, bloated hospital stay for the forseeable future, I jumped on the computer and spent a happy hour browsing through pages of great new clothes that have just arrived in H&M stores.

I like many of the pencil skirts H&M is selling now, but the ones that catch my eye the most are a little on the expensive side. Like this skirt:

If I can go to H&M tomorrow morning, and I come across this skirt, I might as well try it on and see how well it looks anyway. Pencil skirts don’t often fit me well, especially if they come with a high waist. My waist isn’t particularly small, but it’s always hard for me to find high-waist skirts that fit me tightly enough around the waist. Pencil skirts often give me an even harder time, because if I find one that fits me well at the waist, it’ll often be slightly too tight around the hips. And if I try on the same skirt in the next bigger size, it’ll fit me perfectly around the hips, but be way too loose at the waist.

This is a nice shade of green, but unfortunately, I like very few other colours with it. If I had this skirt, I might only want to wear it with a beige blouse, or some pale peach thing. I’m not a big fan of any shade of green and black together.

Such pretty sleeves. That blouse would complement a pencil skirt greatly. In my humble opinion.

How interesting. But a shirt like this might make my shoulders appear too broad.

I admire this dress. I’ve already seen this in my local H&M, and I even tried it on. The dress is made of a material resembling heavy chiffon, and the cut and hang of it were just perfect. I’d say I’ll definitely add this dress to my wardrobe if I find it in my size again. If I can choose between the wine-red one (pictured) or the white version.

I’m still in such a good mood from today. I’m also happy because I’ve dropped two kilograms since I started my diet, by halving the amount of sugary foods I sometimes crave, and doing a minimum of three hundred jumping jacks a day. Not all at once, of course. So, my legs don’t feel too tired. Keep following for pictures of a brand-new outfit; my camera has been borrowed for the last few weeks, but it’ll be back in my hands soon, and then in someone else’s hands for a few minutes so they can photograph my newest look. Bye for now!

Sunny yellow!:) (by Alyona Gromovaya)

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 22:42:42 +0300

Sunny yellow!:) (by Alyona Gromovaya)

Friday the Thirteenth (by Maddy C)

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 22:41:40 +0300

Friday the Thirteenth (by Maddy C)

Insomnia, Nostalgia, Houses, and Interior Decorating

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0300

I woke up at about 05.30, and found it impossible to get back to sleep afterwards; so I made breakfast, and had a cup of tea while I tidied the apartment. I opened a window in the kitchen and stood in front of it for a long time, breathing the fresh morning air and listening to the seagulls screaming. I like the cool, grey light of early mornings in summer. I find the noise from the gulls comforting, because it reminds me of one or two vacations my family took in the distant past - a lifetime ago - at the lovely Outer Banks of North Carolina. There we rented a small, weathered grey house a five minutes’ walk from the beach, where there were always hordes of seagulls and sandpipers playing in the sand. How I miss the Outer Banks. I think I must have been all of five years old, the last time I visited those beaches, but the beauty of the place - the bright flowers and long grasses of the dunes, which led down to a flat expanse of pale sand littered with shells, seaweed, pieces of driftwood, and the occasional dead jellyfish or shark, with the roiling grey ocean beyond it - made such an impression on me, that I’ve never forgotten it.

This is a picture of sandpipers on a beach in North Carolina. L reminds me of a young sandpiper.

I spent yesterday evening thinking of houses. I still haven’t decided if, in the future (between five and fifteen years from now) I would rather buy a house for L and I to share, or an apartment. Somehow, the idea of us having our own house appeals to me more, if only because a house would mean that I would have a yard to do anything with that I liked. I’m good at gardening, and I’ve always wanted a place to grow all kinds of vegetablers, flowers, and herbs. Like a large kitchen garden. One thing I like about Finland, is that fruit trees and berry bushes are so abundant. Just about any person who owns their own house has a yard with at least one apple tree and perhaps a redcurrant bush. I like a great many houses from the 1960s and 1970s, like these:

I wish L and I could live in a house like this. It looks so nice. I like brown houses.

I also like brown kitchens. This is a 1970s kitchen. I’m really feeling the linoleum floor and counters. And aren’t those red blinds so much better than boring white ones? If this was my kitchen, I’d just change that weird, striped wallpaper, or whatever it is, and replace it with something pale yellow or peach.

This vintage coffee mug belongs in that kitchen. What a pretty mug. It looks vaguely familiar to me. Perhaps I saw the same mug at a flea market a long time ago in North Carolina.

Another kitchen dating from 1978. I’ve never seen a U-shaped island before. It looks extremely practical. What a lovely amount of storage room.

More on interior decorating and ”house stuff” later.

Ceramics by Arabia

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0300

I wanted to share pictures of some beautiful ceramics by a Finnish company called Arabia. (I would have liked to provide a link to Arabia’s website here, but their website hasn’t worked for the longest time.) Arabia was established in 1873. Arabia’s wares include all kinds of pottery for domestic use, as well as art pottery, and even tiles and bricks. As I understand it, the ceramics Arabia manufactures are almost always limited-edition things. Which means, when a new coffee service comes out, collectors will flock to buy it before it gets sold out and is never made again. Here is a picture of a pretty cup from a coffee service by Arabia that was probably manufactured in the 1960s or 1970s:

Pieces of this coffee service might be rare, and very expensive, nowadays.

A nice coffee cup.

Arabia made several pitchers of different sizes depicting colourful cats in the late 1950s.

I took this picture from this site, by the way.

The emerald green cat is my favourite.

Getting Back on Track, and Dorothy Perkins

Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0300

Allow me a few minutes to write about the ups and downs of my most recent diet. For the past several days, I’ve strived to eat less, eat more healthily (healthfully?) and eat less junk. I’ve still been eating some junk every once in a while, but I’ve been paying close attention to portion sizes and calories, and I plan to eat even less junk in the days, weeks, and months to come. I had already lost about two kilograms on this diet. But then, a few days ago, I started having problems with my insomnia again, and to make a long story short, I made the mistake of eating late-night meals on each of those nights that I wasn’t able to sleep, because I was hungry, and also because I thought that eating something might make it easier for me to sleep. How wrong I was! And how utterly stupid I was. My God. I gained back the two kilograms I’d said goodbye to during the short expanse of three days. Those late-night meals I’d had weren’t even of heavy fare, but it’s as though I’m still in the process of digesting things that I ate last Sunday night, when it’s Wednesday today.

The fact that I’m constantly so damn thirsty doesn’t help me in my quest to get back down to forty-three kilos. I feel the need to drink such large quantities of ice water and green and black tea (only with calorie-free sweetener or nothing at all, no sugar) each and every day, that my weight often goes up significantly between morning and evening. I hate carrying around so much water weight all the time. So, basically what I’m saying, is that it’s time to get myself back on track again with my diet. I can’t let myself eat late at night again, ever, no matter what. Even if I’m battling insomnia (like tonight) and I feel like eating. Tonight, while sitting up late at the computer or pacing the apartment because I can’t sleep, I’ve eaten a 250-gram container of light yoghurt, a large, heavy sandwich that I definitely should have skipped, and I’ve drank a whole lot of ice water and black tea. There’s no telling what I weigh at the moment, especially after having drunk so much water and tea. Well, I’ll just have to accept the fact that I’ve screwed up my diet, and make myself do better in the future. Starting now. Still, if only I wasn’t always so overwhelmingly thirsty! Perhaps I should buy some pills to help me lose water weight, and talk to a doctor about the never-ending thirst I’ve experienced since having my last operation.

Enough about that depressing stuff, now. Tonight I’ve found myself wishing, not for the first time, that there was a Dorothy Perkins boutique in Turku. Or even in Helsinki. To my knowledge, there’s not a single Dorothy Perkins boutique anywhere in Finland. What lovely clothes Dorothy Perkins has. Especially the dresses. I like the look of this purple floral maxi dress in particular:

Purple is my least favourite colour. I don’t usually care for purple things. But every once in a while I’ll come across some purple thing that makes my heart sing. Here’s another dress from Dorothy Perkins that I like:

I wonder if the quality of Dorothy Perkins clothes is any better than that of clothes from H&M and Zara?

I like this dress as well.

Does anybody know if faux fur is going to be ”in” again for the colder half of this year?

Caring for a Sick Toddler, and my New Diet

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0300

L is sick. For only the second time in her life, if I’m not mistaken. She caught the flu from her uncles a couple of months ago, and recovered in two or three days. Now, the poor kid has been coughing her head off, especially at night, for about the last three weeks. The cough comes and goes, and when it goes and stays gone for, say, forty-eight hours, I’m dumb enough to assume that the cough is gone for good, when it comes back all of a sudden with full force. I finally took L to see a doctor about the cough last Monday. And after deciding that L doesn’t have pneumonia (thank goodness!), the doctor prescribed a foul-smelling brown cough syrup laced with antibiotics that I’m only supposed to administer to L via a cute little syringe when her cough is at its worst. However, it’s surpassingly hard to get L to take her medicine. I’ve been having to catch her while she’s coughing, carry her into the bathroom, which is the easiest place for me to give her the medicine, and hold her in place while she shrieks and coughs while I shoot the syringe of medicine into her mouth one millilitre at a time (the full dose I’m supposed to give her is five millilitres) to better my chance of getting all of the medicine safely down L’s throat before she coughs it back up. It might be too early to tell if the nightly doses of cough syrup are working or not.

Sometimes L coughs so hard that she vomits. That happened three times tonight. First, L vomited in her sleep all over the bed. She woke up immediately and began to scream. I was in the kitchen when this happened, toasting bread for a pre-dawn breakfast. I haven’t slept at all yet tonight. I swear, L slept so peacefully all throughout the night after I put her to bed around 22.00, that I got the feeling that something might be wrong with her. So, it was impossible for me to sleep, and I was hungry, so I ate a little smoked salmon on toast in the kitchen and drank some Cola and tea before L had a fit of coughing and vomited. I picked the kid up, pulled the soiled sheet off the bed, flung the sheet into the washing machine, and had only gotten L cleaned up before she coughed and vomited again. At least she didn’t vomit on me or a carpet. I cleaned her up again, and offered her a bottle of water, which she drank from for a short time before vomiting a final time all over herself and the floor. Oh, L hates baths, and I can only imagine how disturbed (or should I say perturbed?) she must have felt when she was sick, coughing, and wet in her bathtub, all while she was tired and probably wanted nothing more than to be able to stop coughing and feeling sick and go back to sleep.

All that happened less than an hour ago. Since then, L has been asleep for the most part, and opening her mouth wide to expel a single wet cough every once in a while.

Today, I’m putting myself on a diet again. I need to eat less junk (like the wonderful spice cake I ate way too much of yesterday), move around more, and strive to eat three small, healthy meals every day, rather than the big, healthy breakfasts I’m used to eating every day, followed by small amounts of junk for lunch and dinner. I want to lose three kilograms and keep it off. I miss the days when I weighed forty-three kilograms, which seems to be my natural weight; at the moment, I weigh nearly forty-six kilograms, and have weighed that much for quite some time. I think the extra weight must be from the last of the water weight I gained while I was in hospital, and also because I haven’t been eating as healthily as I should lately…Oh, well. I will lose three kilograms, and keep it off. Then I’ll lose more weight if I feel like it. I say that I’m putting myself on a diet again, because I’ve played around with dieting before, and never really gotten anywhere with it because I wasn’t serious about dieting. Now I’m serious, and I’m going to make this simple diet based on eating less junk and moving more work for me. I feel so much healthier and optimistic and happier when my body is toned and I weigh less.