Wednesday, February 14

 

 

I woke up to Valentine’s Day and reached under the bed for the gift I had brought from work yesterday evening and hidden there. I had got a pair of Matti Klenell’s Nappula candlesticks in white, one large and one small, from iittala on Monday, and I sneaked out to leave them at Irma’s place at the breakfast table.

When I had finished washing and dressing and sat down to et my Weetabix I found a shoulder bag that I had commented on in Dubai at my place at the breakfast table. Irma got a card of a well-dressed dog/man and I got a handmade card from Kerala.

All this Valentine’s Day malarkey slowed us down so I caught the 93 to Itäkeskus where I leaped into a half-empty metro.

I spent an hour planning ways of increasing the attendance at the Buddyschool launch at Arcada next Friday afternoon. I met with Gunilla and hatched a plan with Nathalie to entice students to attend. I talked with Jutta. I also met Laura and Nathalie who will meet Irma and Sami tomorrow at Stoa.

After that I went to Pixelache to enjoy a day of server fun with Oliver. He spent most of it trying to get OnlyOffice to work with ownCloud. By the end of the day it didn’t, but he felt confident that one day soon it would. I installed another server with a LAMP stack as part of the process of finalising the Buddyschool site. I also looked at Attendize, an open source equivalent of EventBrite, the online booking platform that Arcada uses to sent out snazzy invitations.

Oliver has a small dog called Jet and today he had it with him. He tried in vain for a long time to jump on my lap so in the end I stretched my legs out and he jumped onto my feet nd climbed and wriggled his way up.

I try to photograph Jet the Dog while he sits on my lap. The result serves more as a documentary, a snapshot, than a work of art. Unless, of course, we consider out of focus as an acceptable artistic strategy for portraits.

We will realise that we have not stopped for lunch and decide to stop at Rax, the original Finnish buffet, on the way home. I have not gone there since shortly after I arrived in Finland and wait to see if it has changed. It will turn out to have changed in the way that holiday camps in Britain have changed: slightly modernised but leaving the core untouched. The meatballs have turned into vegetable balls. The salad bar has grown into a central feature. The chips have turned into cream potatoes. The chicken wings and pizzas remain the same.

I decide that I will try it again in another seventeen years.

Irma will work late and she will arrive home to find me reading The Remains of the Day again.