Greedy Bastards

I live in a mythical country. We have ancient forests and beautiful maidens. We have medieval city walls and castles. And most importantly, sometimes our country exists and sometimes it doesn't.  The ignorant people involved with entertainment industry usually can't see us but the modern all-knowing oracle, the Internet, knows we're here in need of entertainment. Thus our fairy tale features a lot of pirates.

I read Cracked.com very often. It has humorous articles about everything from women clothing to zombie apocalypse. One of the writers there (can't remember which one) condemned Internet piracy, saying it only made sense when he was young and entertainment cost too much and wasn't even always available for all people. I was confused - how is that different from our current situation? Music records are ridiculously expensive and a nuisance to buy. I would literally have to WALK TO THE STORE  to buy an expensive music record with only a couple of songs that I actually like and if the CD gets scratched, I get to throw it away. That is so ridiculous. I would really have to hate money and have no respect for my time to do that. Buying CDs is so damn ridiculous that downloading a few songs or even playlists full of thousands of songs with a few easy clicks doesn't even count as piracy in our society anymore. So when I talk about piracy, why even mention music at all, right? Besides, I could just legally listen to free random music on Pandora.

Or not. Pandora website:

Dear Pandora Visitor,

We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of a truly global Pandora, but for the time being we are required to restrict its use. We are very sad to have to do this, but there is no other alternative.

We believe that you are in Estonia (your IP address appears to be 80.235.58.120). If you believe we have made a mistake, we apologize and ask that you please email us.

Oh go to hell. Licencing is like the evil spell that makes us not exist.  Come on! Estonia has real people who might want to listen to music too. Ah, to hell with it. I'll just download something later.* (*added later: Just kidding! I'm too lazy to even download music because I'd have to actually know the artists that are worth downloading. I might find them on Pandora, except... Never mind. Music is overrated anyway)

The situation is worse with movies. It's not really possible to stay up to date with the movie industry by only watching movies after buying them. Movies are really expensive and it takes so long for movies to be released in mythical countries. Me and Erkki are really fond of watching movies and for a while we had a weird delusion that we want to support the movie industry by actually buying movies every once in a while. About 10% of movies (that we watched) we saw in the cinema, 30-40% we bought and the rest of them we saw by other means. After a few of years we had possibly over a hundred movie DVDs. We had nothing to do with them because it's tedious to watch something old when we barely have the time to watch all the cool new things. We eventually gave most of the movies away and the rest of them are collecting dust and taking up space. It's stupid really - we have all those movies what could fit on a regular hard drive. And we can't even use a "search button" to find the right movie. We have to BROWSE AND FIND the right DVD and actually OPEN THE BOX and INSERT THE DISC.  Are you kidding me? What year is it - 1992?! 

Besides, the price. Oh my god, what price they ask for it. Most people have really crappy TV-sets and even worse sound systems (if any at all). And even with good quality technology, most people live in apartment buildings so they can't turn up the sound. Now can you imagine that the DVD version of Inception costs 13 euros? For such a price you can buy one movie that everyone has already seen, and are already forgetting. For a standard family of 4, that would be a good deal because going to the cinema once would cost about as much money and then you couldn't watch it over and over again. Except it would be on your crappy TV set with that crappy sound system in that thin-walled apartment. Another aspect of entertainment prices: what's your entertainment budget for a month? For most people 35 euros for a month of gym membership is too much. How would they ever manage to watch more than 2 movies in a month if they also want to listen to legal music of their own choice.

And the stupidest thing of all - the reason why the movie industry should just do a huge face palm at their own horrible idea - DVD regions!  Some of the movies sold in Estonia aren't even meant for our region. One Estonian guy told a story how he used to be completely legal in terms of Internet piracy (sucker!). One day he bought a cartoon DVD for his kid but when he got home and tried to play it, he found out it was meant for Australian region instead or somewhere similarly far away. He hadn't cracked open his DVD player regions, and I think that would have been illegal anyway, even though everyone does that. He was furious and called some official line to complain and ask for advice. As it turns out, the store did nothing wrong, there are no grounds for getting a refund, it would still be illegal for him to download the same movie and he should have bought an Australian disc only if he had a plan on traveling to Australia to watch it. That was the day he turned to piracy for justice. 

Movie industry just doesn't get it. The entire world is paying for those blockbusters so it's just horribly unfair to treat some countries worse and give us the movies much later. Also, if there is any statistics out there saying that movies make more money in US than in the rest of the worlds then DUH! That's because the rest of the world decided they won't take that crap and just went and saw the movie for free. The movie Inception premiered in UK, was released in USA on 13 July 2010, already on 23 of July in Estonia and then finally on 1st of September in China and 24th September in Italy. So, they they expect Italians to just wait around for all that time to actually see the movie? And people who enjoy watching films in their own home had to wait until 7th of September for the DVD to be released. In the modern age, that translates to AN ETERNITY! Enjoy your regional favoritism, movie industry and don't worry about the common people - the Internet offers an alternative.

The movie industry bitches and moans about lost profit while they still think its possible to screw people over with regions and delayed release of movies. If you're assholes enough to say: "you have to wait three weeks to see the movie just because you live in Estonia and you have to wait even longer if you want to watch it in your living room" then people in the world will simply find an alternative. People can't wait. The proof is the existence of screener copies of movies. There are plenty of people out there who would watch a low quality version that has been filmed with a hand camera by someone with shaky hands in stead of waiting a couple of months for a good copy of the film. The world is too fast paced and global for the current system of movie release dates.

Don't even get me started on programs that cost more for the European market than they do for the USA market and come with a price tag close to minimum wage or much more. Between the choices of not using the ridiculously expensive programs at all or using freeware crap, the market found a third option, which unfortunately isn't legal. I once tried to find out how much I would have to pay to use Photoshop at home.

From Adobe forums:

Hi,

could someone from Adobe give me a real answer to this question?

Photoshop CS5 is 999$ in the US but....1434Euros in France!

If I use the current change rate, it should be something like 735 euros!!!

So, why do you simply multiply the price by 2?

(And please, don't tell me that the shipping in France and the translation of the manual cost 700 euros)

Thanks

JM

Good going Adobe.  Nice of you to make sure no one actually buys your program for their home computer and to guarantee that there will always be pirated copies available online. I don't use photoshop very often so I would pay 10 euros for Adobe Photoshop if I could download it in from a fast server and get some extra benefits (like removing ads that could be included on the FREE version that you yourself upload - so, what do you think?  ). I would not pay the ridiculous money it costs now. It costs so much that piracy seems to be the assumed way of using the program at home. Besides, it's truly inconvenient to actually download and install the official Adobe program, as I know from workplace experience. As long as the legal option is infinitely more tedious, piracy isn't going anywhere.

E-books.  That's possibly the issue that justifies piracy more than anything else. The translated, hardcover copy of Dan Brown's "Digital Fortress" costs 14.19 €. That makes sense. The original language hardcover copy is 12.11 € (calculated with Google currency conversion). Translating and transporting books is very expensive. Paying only 2 extra euros for translation and transportation is a bargain. Printing a hardcover book is also expensive, especially a book with 408 pages. One online printing company says that the price of printing hardcover books is $8.50 per unit + $0.02 per page, which is 16.66 € for a 408 page book. I guess Chinese sweatshops do it for much less, but nothing can explain why the e-book of translated Digital fortress costs 12.14€!!! Absolutely nothing except for evil greedy manages who are laughing their evil greedy laughter in their Bad Guy castles that are surrounded by moats full of hungry piranhas. 

So basically what I'm saying is that piracy is so mainstream only because the entertainment industry (and some greedy companies) have made so many bad choices and now there is no turning back. There would have been some piracy no matter what they did, but in their attempt to squeeze more and more money out of regular people, they have made piracy the widespread norm that it is today. Those regular people actually like to eat and pay electricity pills and can't seem to find leprechauns  to give them pots full of gold. There is one way to stop piracy - no it's not ACTA or PIPA or SOPA. The solution is for the entertainment industry to stop living in fairy tales and realize that they live in the real world where all countries have access to the Internet and people do not have unlimited money and time that they are dying to give away to support greedy bastards. 

PS! I have officially lost 18 kg (4 months and 1 week) and I'm now back in the pre-pregnancy weight. For a long time it was 18ish kg (0,3-0,6 over the goal) but today the scale was my friend. I am very happy about it!  

Confusional Arousal

I know what inspired the movie Exorcist. Just imagine a kid waking up at night and screaming. Mother enters the room, "Mommy's right here. Everything's okay!" and the mother touches the child's arm. The child starts screaming twice as loudly as if touched with burning iron. The father joins the scene and also tries to calm the child who still hasn't opened her eyes. The child cries and cries and screams and then cries some more for 10 minutes while both parents are confused. Then she walkes around the room being angry at everything  and suddenly calms and goes back to sleep. In the morning the child is happy and playful as if it had all been a dream. 

The contrast between nighttime Siiri  and daytime Siiri and is like the difference between night and day, or the difference between being possessed by a demon or not being possessed.  (A lot of good that baptism did.  ). I've done a lot of Google research and it's actually a sort of sleep disorder ( a parasomnia) called confusional arousal. It mostly affects infants and toddlers. It's almost like a form of sleepwalking, because the child is still asleep during the episode. Siiri is very difficult to wake up when it happens. At first we tried to wake her up every time. What else are you going to do if the child is screaming at 3 a.m. for no particular reason. It sometimes worked but usually it just made her mad. And I really mean MAD! She was still not very responsive, except she started making demands. "Bunny doesn't want to be tucked in! BUNNY DOESN'T WANT TO BE TUCKED IN! BUNNY...  "

A few days ago she made up a new demand "Put Siiri back!". Neither me nor Erkki knew what she meant by it until Siiri started demanding it in the middle of the night, screaming it as loud as she can. Finally Erkki picked her up and placed her in the last place she had been standing and that solved it. Erkki must have casually nudged Siiri, thus "helping" her move further and now had to restore Siiri's location in the room. You see, any kind of help is completely forbidden at night. For Siiri it's all about "myself!". I do like to encourage Siiri to try to open buttons herself, open the door herself, put on clothing herself, but it's not quite the same when a sleep deprived (or still askeep fidgety toddler picks up a class full of water, says, "I will do it myself." and then attempts to climb and sit on the bed while still holding the glass. If I take away the glass, she will say (I mean, scream as loud as possible), "do not help me!". 

Some of the demands are perfectly reasonable. If a stuffed toy falls off the bed and she wants to climb down and get it, it's a perfectly reasonable request. However, if she holds on to her thumb with the other hand and cries, "Remove finger!", that's not quite as reasonable. I thought she was simply confused but then she told me to get the scissors from the kitchen to cut the finger off.  There's also a thing with hating her left hand. At night, Siiri's left hand isn't allowed to do anything. It can't help adjust the blanket or pick up a stuffed toy. Sometimes it isn't even allowed to help hold that glass of water. Sometimes Siiri lets me help her hold the glass with my right hand, but not with the left hand.

The nighttime tantrums are really annoying and cause sleep deprivation to all of us. It's been going on for months, with some nights worse than others. Sometimes all is quiet for weeks and then sometimes there isn't a single quiet night for a week. Lately it happens several times a week.  After I read up on confusional arousal (or sleep terrors, whatever the difference really is), I found out we're not supposed to wake her up at all. Actually we had tried just waiting out the crying but only for a few minutes at a time and then we interfered. When we finally tried to not interact with her in any way during the episode, she cried for 6 minutes and then simply went back to sleep, not saying anything or doing anything. It won't always work though. Even touching the blanket in the wrong way can end with 30 minutes of confused tantrum. I call it confused because even if she gets exactly what she wants, she decides she wanted something completely different in stead. 

Confusional arousal is really interfering with potty training.  During the day she doesn't use diapers and doesn't have any accidents. She often wakes up in the morning completely dry, except when she has one of those nighttime confusional arousal episodes and can't make it to the bathroom in time. She tries, but it's just doomed effort. She tries to do everything with only her right hand, including taking off her pants and climbing on the toilet seat.  When something fails, she has to do it again from start, all while crying and screaming. By the time she's sitting, it's 20 minutes later and too late.

Some mothers think that the episodes are caused by discomforts such as wanting to pee or being too hot or too cold. Doctors are mostly just confused themselves. The description of the episodes varies a lot but tantrums are rarely mentioned. They often say that interacting with the child will make the situation worse but they don't say that the child might want to cut her finger off. One thing that all the medical descriptions say is that lack of sleep causes such parasomnias as night terrors and confusional arousals. And since parasomnias  cause lack of sleep, the condition starts to feed itself. For Siiri, lack of sleep is most definitely an issue. It takes HOURS to get her to fall asleep. Lately we start putting her to bed at 8 or 8.30 but she falls asleep near midnight. Nap time isn't much better: I read her the stories at 1.30 and she falls asleep around 3 p.m. or later. The smartest solution suggestion to a similar problem was to put the child to sleep even earlier, at 7 p.m. because of the child's circadian rhythm. If we do that, Siiri can only see Erkki in her dreams. I don't like that solution one bit but we might not have a choice. 

...or perhaps a priest with holy water would be more convenient. 

Gingerbread Cookies

I really do have too much energy for spending my time being idle and doing really boring repetitive tasks. Thus I find stuff to really care about. Yeah, okay, I really care about my kids but it would be really unhealthy to obsess about their development too much. I can just imagine it, "Siiri, I see you drew a sun, again! But you already knew how to draw it! Now try to draw a cat. Practice!" . If I really want to push someone to change and improve themselves for my entertainment, I'd rather it would be me. So I try to learn new things.

I have horrible memory, so at first I tried to do some memory exercises. Pretty soon I realized that it's frustrating to spend my time doing something I'm terrible at. Then I thought I would learn to dance better. I'm not good at it, but it's not nearly as bad as with memory. I took on the challenge to master all the dances on Kinect's "Dance Central 2". That was also going badly enough that I kind of gave up. It's wonderful physical exercise but I'm pretty sure that's one challenge that is not really worth the effort. At least not with my grasp of choreography and my lacking physical memory. Then I thought - I haven't made the perfect gingerbread cookies! 

Gingerbread cookies are not just a sugary treat. They symbolize my favorite holiday!  There's so much tasty food that is only eaten during Christmas. I'm not religious at all anymore and the entire baby Jesus theme is just a nice childhood memory, especially because I barely hear anything about Jesus anymore now that I'm surrounded by spiritualists, pagans, atheists and agnostics. I love Christmas for all the candles and spices, the smell of a spruce tree and the activity of baking and eating fresh gingerbread cookies.  As long as I remember, Christmas has always had those things. Most people don't really think about it but when you have kids, the things you do become their childhood memories. How could Siiri have a childhood memory of family Christmas if we're too lazy to celebrate Christmas. That just won't do! We should make the most of it! I want my kids to have childhood memories of Christmas that are worth remembering. One thing that I always remember about Christmas, is when we were kids, we took a bunch of gingerbread dough and made all kinds of shapes and a lot of cookies. Everything was covered in flour and the entire home smelled like gingerbread spices. We always bought the dough and the quality was different every time. How about if I learn to make our own gingerbread dough, so that it will be good every time. My kids could some day eat store-bought cookies and say, "yeah, it's good, but not as good as the ones mom makes.". It's a silly thing to take pride in but I really want to be able to make something better than can be bought in a store, something uniquely excellent.

I started by researching recipes on Internet. The basic idea is that you melt and caramelize sugar, add water, butter and more sugar, then let cool a bit, add spices, let cool a bit more and then add egg and flour. Easy enough. Except it's such a classic treat that everyone has their own recipe. Another problem is that the recipes have been modernized to contain margarine, "gingerbread spice" and special caramelized sugar syrup. I really wanted an ancient-sounding recipe, like something that grannies might have used decades ago. I picked two recipes that were as different as possible. One of them was a really basic gingerbread dough recipe from an old soviet era cooking book. Those cookies were good but nothing special. The other recipe was interesting, though. I found it in some forum post (that I haven't been able to find again). It said, "This is my great-great-aunt's recipe...". WOW, cool!   A recipe with genuine ancient family background. That's exactly what I'm looking for! Also, the recipe said, "and then add hot coffee". Plus it had twice as many spices and herbs as any other recipe!

Both recipes contained orange zest (orange part of the orange peel) but I know from experience that adding orange zest sometimes it leaves visible small pieces of orange peel in the pastry. My goal was to make perfect cookies so I wanted to avoid that. Then I had an idea - I will dry the peels and then quickly grind them to dust with a mortar and pestle. So I took the orange and peeled it with a potato peeler. Superb thickness, without any of the bitter white part. Then I let it dry overnight. The next morning I got up and inspected it - the long orange peels had turned into long pieces of orange rubber.  I tried to grind one piece. After two minutes of grinding it was still the same piece of rubber. Sugar will surely help! A added some sugar and used the mortar and pestle for another couple of minutes and inspected it - now it looked like an orange piece of rubber half-hidden in powdered sugar.  "No, that doesn't look right!". I searched it on the Internet and found out I was supposed to dry the peels  for 3-4 days. I didn't have 3-4 days!  Okay, but I could just apply a bit of heat. So I put it in the oven at 120 C and the oven fan turned on. About 30 minutes later I was walking around the kitchen being happy with my idea to try the oven until I smelled something strange - cooked orange peels! Gaaah! I rushed to the oven and took them out. They were completely dry and crispy but half of it now looked slightly brown. Well, at least it was dry. So I tried to grind it: in stead of orange dust, it turned into orange sand, leaving visible small pieces of orange peel in the cookies.  Epilogue: The next time I just used a fine grater on fresh oranges and ended up with fine wet powder perfect for the cookies!

Okay, so I'll give you the recipe as well. I'll add the spice names in Estonian because even I don't know the translation of some of them. 1 dl is 100 ml. 100 ml liquid weighs roughly 100g. The first time there wasn't enough water or I added too much flour. The result was a very crumbly dough which couldn't be used until I added water and flour just before we made the cookies. The second time I made it, I added water to the dough before I let it sit in the refrigerator. The second time I also used twice the amount allspice and caramelized the sugar even darker. It looks and smells even better than the first time. 

PS! We actually baked the gingerbread cookies with several friends  and we had four different kinds of dough, including two (Eesti Pagar and Vertigo) that had got the best rating in two separate articles comparing gingerbread doughs sold in Estonia. This dough was most people's favorite that night.
PPS! Vertigo's dough was very good. Eesti Pagar's dough was bland and the cookies turned into wood the next day.

Gingerbread Cookies

2 dl sugar (for caramelizing)

1.5 dl hot coffee

3 dl sugar (originally 2.5-3 dl)

250 g butter

Spices:

---0.5 tsp clove (nelk)

---1 tsp cinnamon (kaneel)

---1 orange zest or 1 lemon zest (riivitud koor)

---0.5 tsp cardamom (kardemon)

---0.5 tsp powdered ginger (jahvatatud ingver)

---a bit of nutmeg  (muskaatpähkel)

---5-6 allspice berries, ground (jahvatatud vürtspipra tera)

1 egg

800-900 g flour (I used pastry flour 405)

3-4 tsp baking powder

Pour 2 dl sugar into a thick-bottomed pot and caramelize. This is the tricky part. I had best result when I used two spoons and when the sugar started to melt, I kept the sides of the pot and the spoons clean of the melted sugar, otherwise it will turn hard in only a moment. When sugar is sufficiently brown, remove the pot from heat and then add hot coffee. Be careful. Mix constantly and beware the steam. Then mix (on very low heat) until sugar is dissolved. Sounds easier than it is. I kept adding small amounts of water because it took so long. Remove from heat and add butter. Add sugar and butter and mix and melt it all together. Let the mixture cool. When it's half-way cooled, add spices. When it's completely cooled, mix in the egg and flour, with baking powder mixed into the flour. Add water if the dough is too crumbly. Refrigerate for a couple of days before using the dough. 

Glass of Water

If I ask you, "is the glass half full or half empty, you will probably say "it's half full" because that's the learned answer. Everyone knows that it's wrong to point out the negative. How about we give it another try. Quick, think of the answer before you continue reading, "Describe winter!". Remember the first words that popped into your head. Did you think of soft beautiful snow or the cold moist wind? Do you see winter as a wonderful season with lots of holidays or a wonderful opportunity to slip on ice and get hurt. For me, the first word I thought of, was "cold, blizzard, being indoors cuddled up in a warm blanket". This includes the problem with winter and a solution to the problem.

I'm a very negative person and I can't change it. I didn't really notice it until I was already in the university. I met so many new people and I talked about old and new topics and I realized that people actually have such different personalities. It seems like an obvious thing, but during school years I was too busy trying to conform to the majority mindset to really understand my own personality. Some people are always positive, no matter what the topic is. It's almost like they live in a different world where the reality is fundamentally different.

I like to think of myself as an energetic and ambitious person but when I have a discussion with someone, I tend to energetically say the most negative things possible. It's horrible! Even when I say something positive, it is often really something negative in disguise. "I love this cereal, it doesn't get as soggy as most of them!", "It's so warm outside ... that all the snow has turned into mud", "This is one of my favorite shirts, too bad I don't have anything to wear it with.". I've tried to stop myself but I can't. Even when I'm in a really positive mood, I'll just have better control over what I say out loud.

It's a weakness and a strength but mostly it's just really annoying. I even annoy myself with it. Can't imagine how others put up with it. It actually makes me less able to go along with new ideas. I notice the potential problems way sooner than the potential gains. Initially I'm usually very pessimistic and trying really hard to hide it and keep an open mind. After a while I have finished thinking about the problems and the possible solutions and I'll realize that it actually is a good idea. Or I'll be stuck on a small problem and I need someone else to point out that the potential gains are still worth it. This sort of negativity doesn't even make me unique or special in any way either, as about 50% of people are really like that.

In the first year of university when I realized that all people are different, I became obsessed with personality theories. And yes, it seems I am always obsessed about something - food, nutrition, extreme embroidery, personalities, reading, drawing, hair, kids, etc. Most of my obsessions pass after a while and leave something behind. Being obsessed with personality theories was one of the biggest obsessions in my life, perhaps even worse than nutrition. Actually I was planning to be a psychologist when I graduated high school but the competition was too tough. Among other things I learned from my obsession that one of the personality dichotomies of Grigoriy Reinin divides people into two groups:  positivists and negativists (that's how they were translated to English).  Roughly half of all people are the "glass is half empty" kind of people whether they like it or not. Well, I don't like it. I think it would be better to think about all the positive stuff first but the best that I can do is to try and hide it better.

I should also mention that being a negativist is not the same as being a pessimist. I notice the negative stuff so I can ensure that I avoid them on my journey to a positive future. Like when I bake a cake, I'm convinced that it will turn out delicious (otherwise I wouldn't waste my time) but while I'm baking it, I'm constantly thinking about the possible ways I could ruin it so that I can avoid them. It's a kind of skepticism which can be very useful but unfortunately can't be turned off.

If half of all people are really skeptical like that then perhaps some of you recognized yourself in this post. Perhaps this personality trait isn't so obvious in my general writing style but that's because I usually write about things after I have already formed an opinion about. My first thought might be negative but when I finish my contemplation, my opinion is rather balanced between positive and negative.

Also, being a negativist doesn't make me any less self-absorbed as we can see from this totally egocentric blog post.

PS! Kids are doing great. Liisa holds her head really well and already tries to crawl. I haven't told her that she won't be able to do that until she's 5-6 months old. Siiri has reached her terrible twos and she gets really demanding in the middle of the night. I'm still planning on writing a longer post about that in the near future so I'll leave it at that.

Daily Torture

Pain tolerance is difficult to quantify. I usually see myself as having rather high pain tolerance, but it really depends on what kind of pain we're talking about. I've experienced several kinds of pain in my life and childbirth wasn't even the worst of it. I think I handled those very well, so perhaps my pain tolerance is quite high, except when it comes to using mouth wash, I am really truly sensitive. I'm like a little baby. Or perhaps I'm making some bold assumptions. I'm assuming people don't usually get tears when they use a mouth wash. Is that normal? Mouth wash stings like crazy. Maybe it's just one of my traits - I'm also VERY sensitive to spicy food. Often when eating spicy food, I feel like my mouth is on fire, tears are running down my cheeks, I'm desperately holding ice water in my mouth and reaching for a handkerchief, someone else eating the same food just shrugs and says, "it's a bit spicey, but not THAT hot" .

Speaking of tooth-related torture, I think dental floss is just brutal. I get shivers down my spine when I think of cutting my gum with a piece of string. Like really! That's horror movie level of horrible. That could be a scene in the Saw movie series and it wouldn't be out of place. Still, I can't argue, it is effective in dental hygiene. I just wish it wasn't so horrible. I started flossing a month ago so I'm still getting used to it and I hurt myself really often. Some of you might think, "you didn't floss before?! OH MY GOD!!! Nasty.". And the rest of, I guess majority, would think, "people actually floss? ". In Estonia people don't normally floss. Perhaps dental floss wasn't available during soviet times. I know some women who started flossing in their twenties but it certainly isn't widespread in Estonia. Even in USA, where people have been taught to floss since they were children, only 10-40%* of people floss daily (*as I read from Wikipedia). 

Oh god, why am I thinking of teeth so much?! Oh yeah, I have a dental appointment tomorrow.

About a month ago I went to a dentist's just to get my teeth checked. The dentist wasn't happy at all. She described how I need about €2000 worth of tooth care. No, my teeth aren't horrible and she didn't even find any cavities. That's the cost of having crowns fitted on the teeth on my favored side. Maybe that's a good idea, maybe not, maybe it's just a sales tactic. I'm going to a different dentist tomorrow to get a second opinion. Actually I'm not going to a different doctor because the number scared me. I'm going to a different doctor because that place looked creepy. I'm not too fond of going to a dentist but the modern dentists offices, full of sterile gadgets and expensive high-tech equipment, are kind of soothing. That place wasn't. Imagine an old soviet apartment building. On the first floor, one of the apartments has been built into a dentist's office. The chair looks like it might squeak but it doesn't. The soviet era reception desk is equipped with a simple laptop. The laptop isn't connected to the Internet (!!!). The drill looks about 10 years old. The dentist ensured me that only the drill tips really matter but the drill did look questionable. The cupboard full of cotton and other such things didn't even have a door. It would have been okay if it was meant that way, but it looked like the door fell off at some point and they didn't have money to fix it. But the prices were somewhat cheaper and the doctor seemed very skilled so initially I thought I would ignore the problems. But then I started paying for the check-up and found out they only take cash! "You don't take card? Uhm, really? No card?". I barely had any cash with me but fortunately spare change at the bottom of the bag made up for what I was lacking in my wallet. I even considered it before I left home and we agreed with Erkki that there is no way they won't accept card. Even some second-hand stores can afford to enable card payments. Even the small corner stores that only sell stale bread and booze accept card. I am not going to carry hundreds of euros in my wallet for each of those dentist's appointments just because the dentist's office is stuck in the soviet time. If I fix my teeth in a place like that and something, anything, goes wrong, I would just ask myself, "Well, what did you expect?". So tomorrow I'm going to Maxilla, which is the most modern, but also the most expensive dentist in Tartu. For a while I felt really guilty about it - I'm going to pay a lot more to have the exact same procedures just so I can pay with a card. But then I realized that I wouldn't even buy a cell phone in a place that looked that iffy.

I still wonder how important it really is to floss daily. Is it like a "must" rule or more like a suggestion. As a mother, I try to take this sort of universal advice seriously. At first I tried to treat all of them very seriously because some of them really do make sense but when you start paying attention, you'll realize how surrounded we are by rules.  Never leave a baby alone in the tub. Always wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. Always wear your seat belt. Bathe children every day. Wash your teeth after every meal, or at least twice a day, 3 minutes. Floss every day. Test your smoke detector every week. Dust every week. Change bed sheets every week, or every two weeks. Eat fish twice a week. Do not eat more than half an egg on average per day. I could fill a page or two with rules that everyone "must" follow, or else! While some of them really are important, no exceptions allowed, this flossing thing seems like more of a suggestion. But I guess it's good for the gums so I keep on torturing myself. And after flossing mouth wash actually is a good idea, so torture is followed by more torture. ...And people think masochism is most widely spread among emo self-cutters. 

Tall Like Us

"Oh they grow up so fast" is something that people in movies and forums say all the time. I'm not sure if that's true. The first two months with Siiri lasted FOREVER. Like really: sleepless nights, getting used to feeding all the time, still trying to maintain some level of activity at home and also social activity. Siiri was a very calm kid but it was tough with the night-time feedings and I sometimes lived for my daily cup of coffee. It was the best moment of each day. Well of course it was great to observe the early development of a baby and the first smiles and her cute struggles to lift her head, but it was always better after I had had my coffee. I remember being very sleepy. Now with Liisa I don't even notice the night-time feedings most of the time. I fall asleep while feeding and put her in bed when I wake up.

The perception of time has been very different with the second child. Weeks just whooosh past me in a blur of multitasking. I sometimes see social events being announced in Facebook and it feels too inconvenient to actually try to attend them. I did go to the events that I really wanted to go to and I don't have much regrets about other events. I do miss movie nights but there really haven't been many good movies lately so it's not a huge loss. What's important is that I don't feel left out. I kinda miss playing role-playing-games (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons) but I really can't imagine how I could do that at the moment. Maybe in a couple of years. Or maybe just short one-session games that don't demand any weekly commitment.

The perception of child's growth had definitely been different with Liisa. With Siiri, as was expected with a firstborn,  I was constantly observing everything. I mentioned to Erkki when I thought Siiri had grown another centimeter, I observed how Siiri played with toys , I counted how many seconds she can hold her head, I fussed about every time Siiri cried loudly and tried to figure out the cause. With Liisa, I just take it easy and just make sure she looks healthy and seems to enjoy her life. She seemed to be growing quite a lot but we had no idea how much because me or Erkki never bothered to measure or weigh her before her first doctor's visit. The nurse finally weighed her and she had grown 5 cm and 1 kg in her first month. That's a lot. The two-month measurements we had to do ourselves because there are no vaccine shots at that age and there was no reason to take her to the doctor's. During her second month she grow another 5 cm and gained another 1,4-1,5 kg. No wonder Liisa keeps growing out of her clothes. She's as tall as Siiri was at three months. Liisa feels very strong.

While Liisa is getting bigger, I am getting smaller. I lost 8 kg in the first month and another 3 in the second month. Out of the 18 kilos, it's 11 down and 7 to go. I'm currently still on the weight loss trend so I expect to reach my normal weight soon enough. I'm also using some of my free moments to do achievements in the physical games of Xbox Kinect which is quite a workout.

One thing that hasn't changed is my dislike for walking the baby like it's a dog or something. Daily walks shouldn't be a social obligation in a place as cold as Estonia. It easily takes over an hour to coordinate the clothing and feedings and diaper-changing to get two kids outside... so I could carefully walk around with them, making sure no one gets hit by a car or falls in the water or steps on dog poop. I only do it for Siiri's entertainment. I was going to take them outside again today and I was guilt tripping about not having the energy to start getting us ready for the ugly cold and wet outdoors but then I realized it was already close to noon, I had been awake for 4 hours and I still hadn't made it to eating my breakfast (a truly rare occurrance) and according to schedule I was already supposed to start preparing lunch. Soon after lunch it would be Siiri's bedtime. I was relieved I didn't have time to go outside.

Schedule is one thing I didn't have when I was at home with Siiri. I ate whatever I could whenever I wanted. Mostly fruit and fairly healthy snacks and then dinner with Erkki. With Siiri that's not enough. She really does get three warm meals per day: porridge in the morning, last night's leftovers for lunch and a proper dinner all together in the evening. It would be stupid of me not to eat with her so I do get to eat regular healthy meals and it makes a world of difference in how I feel emotionally and physically.

Despite all the hassle of sticking to Siiri's schedule and making sure she's enjoying her life, I really enjoy having her around. I know conversations with a 2.5-year old aren't very complicated but it's still much more fulfilling than checking the messenger every two hours to see if any of my friends has time to chat a little bit and going to an internet forum when all my friends are doing something useful. Besides, it's actually very nice to explain the world to Siiri. I especially enjoy describing which casual-looking household items could kill her and how.

By the way, my paranoia about online Xbox is very much justified. I finished all the missions and all the achievements in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, except for the multiplayer part. I couldn't leave it at that so I made a 3-month purchase to get online access for my Xbox account with Xbox Gold Membership. I got right at it. When the kids were asleep, I logged in to multiplayer and spent 40 minutes getting used to the gameplay. Then Erkki came into the room and I we started preparing dinner so I logged out. The next day Liisa was asleep and Siiri was playing on her own so I logged in. I played a 10-minute match and I was about to start another one but noticed that whenever Siiri says something (and she talks quite a lot), my player's name has a sound icon. I wasn't using any headphones and no one else was using them either! I replied to Siiri, and again there was the sound icon. I frantically started looking for options but then panicked and just turned off the console. As it turns out, Kinect has a built-in microphone and as soon as I logged into multiplayer, it started broadcasting my living room sounds to seven strangers! Oh my God I feel my privacy was so violated. And I feel embarrassed because in AC Brotherhood it's not possible to turn off the sounds of someone else's microphone. Someone had to put up with some casual Estonian conversation between me and Erkki and some Siiri's ranting, but that's about it.

Despite the privacy issue, I still have achievements to get, so I turned off Kinect and joined the multiplayer of the new Assassin's Creed Revelations. Other players there are just as new at the game as I am and it's much more fun this way. Surprisingly, it's so easy to get addicted to the unpredictable nature of online gaming and I have made very little progress with the single player part of the game. Soon I'll have all the achievements of AC Revelations multiplayer and I can get back to the story part of the game.

Porcelain Pony

I've been playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and trying to get more achievement points and right now I totally hate the game. There are still many frustrating parts in the game that I can't complete with high score and I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get maximum achievement score anyway. I could handle the nasty difficult missions but I just can't handle the pressure of joining multiplayer. I don't like multiplayer games. I've tried at least one and I constantly felt awkward knowing that there is a real person behind every human (and other) that are running around on my computer screen. My computer is almost like my safe haven. I don't want anyone running around in it! The same with the TV. It's a part of my home, my own safe zone. But whenever I turn on Xbox, I start to feel a bit awkward. My subconscious keeps reminding me that Xbox Kinect has a camera and it's connected to the internet. And it's filming ALL THE TIME. I don't even know if that's true but it could be. And there could easily be Xbox viruses out there for the sole purpose of broadcasting the video feed to some pervert's computer. I make sure not to get caught walking around in underwear while Kinect is broadcasting... *khm* I mean turned on ...I mean switched on.

I do understand that my paranoia is unnecessary. Still I'm sure most people who own a a webcam understand it. I actually don't know about other people but when I bought a webcam to talk with forum buddies from across the world, I also developed a habit of always checking if it's switched on. I even got a webcam with a plastic slider that physically covers the camera, so that I can safely keep it closed most of the time. Kinect doesn't have such a slider. I guess Microsoft itself is to blame for the paranoia. Xbox Kinect came with a "free game" that had a habit of making surprise photos of the player. I was really surprised the first time it showed me a picture of my living room and in the middle of living room I was jumping. I was wearing very casual clothes and it was a really bad picture. Ever since then I try to look nice in front of Kinect because I never know when it might start making pictures. Basically it makes me really self-concious whenever I notice that Siiri has accidentally switched on Xbox and the room or myself look messy.

This absurd paranoia wouldn't be helped one bit if the people on the TV screen in our living room were actual people who could really see my character walking around. And I really would feel uneasy about XBox Live Gold membership which would allow video conversations with my Windows Live Messenger contacts. Even if I would never use it, Siiri accidentally might.  So I don't want anything to do with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood multiplayer but then I can't get all the achievements and then the game feels incomplete. And if I can't REALLY complete it, then it feels weird to start playing the next Assassin's Creed game which should be released at the end of the month. So now I'm at a standstill. Assassin's Creed used to be my favorite game but now I really truly don't want to do the multiplayer part of the game and that's alienating me from the entire series.

Actually that's not what I planned to write about. There's another issue that has been on my mind. Many issues really. I have too much time to ponder dumb thoughts. Anyway... There's a fairy tale that's bugging me. Me and Erkki bought a fairy tale book titled, "Fairy Tales for Girls". The entire idea of such a book is annoyingly sexist, but it was the only fairy tale book with so many pictures and so many good classic fairy tales that we still didn't have. Apparently Three Bears is well suited for girls, as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Three Pigs and many other Siiri's favorites. There are a couple of novel fairy tales that I certainly didn't hear when I was a little girl, and a good thing that is. The novel fairy tales lack any logic, thus making them perfect for those young future women (makes sense in the twisted mind of a sexist publisher who would publish such a book in the first place). My favorite is a fairy tale called the Porcelain Pony.

Once upon a time there was a little girl living with her father. A strange lady showed up and introduced herself as her aunt who has come to take care of her. The aunt moved in but she was very mean to the girl. One night the father disappeared. The aunt made the girl work a lot and treated her badly and one day when the girl was out grocery shopping for the woman, she found a porcelain pony on a shelf in the store. The shopkeeper had never seen it before and told the girl to keep it. She took it home and hid it under her pillow. The porcelain pony turned into a real live pony at night. They suddenly found themselves outside together and the pony told the girl that he's there to help her father who is locked up in a tower several-day journey away on top of an unclimbable mountain. A cannibalistic monster is planning to eat her father in the morning. The only way to save the father would be with the help of a golden flower that grows nearby and gives the ability to fly, unfortunately no one has ever seen the flower. The girl and the pony set out to find the flower. They search the entire night with no success, but as the first rays of the sun become visible, the girl sees a golden glimmer in the snow. In the snow they find the golden flower. The pony eats it and the girl sits on the pony and together they fly to save the girl's father, so that the monster can't eat him once the sun is up. They reach the tower that has three floors. Each floor has a chest full of treasure that the girl is warned not to touch. She finds the father, gets the key off the sleeping monster, releases the father, then accidentally touches a piece of treasure and they escape the tower with the monster chasing them. Girl and the father get back on the pony and fly back home. The aunt, who is really an evil sorceress, is waiting for them and sends a big storm to bring them down. The pony kicks thunder with his hoofs, sending it toward the sorceress. The sorceress gets hit with the lightning and disappears in a flash of light. They safely land in front of their home and suddenly the pony turns into a handsome prince. He tells them that he's a prince whom the sorceress enchanted to be a white pony at night and a porcelain pony during the day. Now the sorceress is dead and the enchantment is broken. He then asks the girl to marry him. The girl says yes and they live happily ever after.

As you can see, the fairy tale has everything - a white pony that flies, golden flower, treasure, a girl saving the day, and a prince who wants to marry. Everything except logic. Where to begin. Perhaps at the point where they all plummet to their early death at the exact moment when the sorceress gets hit with that lightning and disappears, thus being effectively dead and breaking the enchantment that made the prince a pony. Or maybe there would have been the awkward moment when a girl and her father sit on the back of a prince who has the ability to fly. Actually that shouldn't have been a pony at all because it was no longer nighttime. The fairy tale should have ended with a scene where the girl notices the golden glimmer in the show and starts cheering with joy and hope, but as she turns around toward the pony, she sees a porcelain toy standing on snow, shining in the early morning sun with sad eyes. 


Okay, but imagining that it was a 12-hours-porcelain and 12-hours-alive kind of an enchantment. Kind of rare, but lets imagine that the fairy tale didn't have a gloomy ending. The monster is supposed to eat the father in the morning. Usually in fairy tales that means dawn, but okay, that monster indeed was a heavy sleeper. The pony later said that  the monster will eat the father when the sun is up. So lets say noon. So they  fly several-day's journey in a few hours. If the sun comes up at 8 a.m. and they have four hours until noon, and lets say the "several" is three days journey to that tower (although it might as well be five or six or more). That means they travel 72 hours worth of distance in only 4 hours. I found in a forum that wild west mail courier Pony Express riders averaged about 120 km per day. That's 360 km in 4 hours, or 90 km per hour. WHOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH!! That is quite some speed. Especially if the girl is in her night gown. (The pony woke her up at night and they "suddenly found themselves outside" so I see no reason for her to be in a winter coat.) Spending the entire night outside in the winter with only a night gown would have left her with frostbites but those 4 hours flying through the air at 90 km per hour is totally icing on the cake. They fly towards the father as the girl gets more and more stiff. When they reach the tower, the pony realizes she is long dead.

That's just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). Why could the pony teleport outside and away from under the pillow? The sorceress would have never given him that ability. And if she did, why didn't they just teleport to the tower? How did the pony even know about the father and how did he manage to get to that shelf in the store just in time for the girl to find him? How did he "kick" lightning? What happened to the sorceress's smoking burnt body?

Erkki often warns me not to look for logic where there is none. Perhaps some day I will be wise enough to listen.