Wednesday, July 11
Sauna house, 13:25
We had agreed that I would spend most of my time today writing in order to begin my summer project, and I do exactly that. I have two projects that I want to get done before Arcada restarts. The first involves completing all the preparatory work for a novel that I may attempt to write during NaNoMo in November. The second involves rethinking a web site from scratch and preparing all the material I will need to remake it. I may use it as a working example in the CMS course that begins in September and ends just before we leave for Kerala in December.
Before I do this I set about grading my two courses from Period 4, both of which had late submissions for the final assignments. Despite me telling the students that I would post the course assessments by the end of July, both Fred and I have received several emails asking why I have not posted the course results yet. I decided to do it today to get it out of the way, and avoid having to ignore or reply to an increasing number of students with short term memory loss.
I then set about gathering together all the material for the intended novel and placing it all in the same Scrivener project. The story will mostly take place in Marinetta, so I already have a lot of consistent background material. I generated most of it ten years ago so a lot of my time passed in trawling through old folders and consolidating different folders that contained almost, but not quite, the same material.
While I do this Sunshine makes an appearance. He hardly ever enters the sauna house but today he does. He wanders around sniffing and looking dubious, and then settles on the wooden steps where he remains for an hour or so, sleeping and occasionally waking to check if he can still see me.
Once he has gone off on his travels again I will decide to go to Tirmo to see if I can watch tonight’s World Cup semi-final there. When I get there I will discover two things. I have arrived just as the ferry prepares to have it twenty minute break. Secondly the room that houses the television no longer gets used so, to my great surprise, I realise I cannot watch it there.
I will decide to walk into the shop which I notice has very little stock compared to previous years. The chiller cabinets sit there half-empty, and the ice-cream cabinets mostly lack ice-cream. Having planned on watching the football in a bar, I will now decide to buy to lonkero and drink them while watching the match on my laptop, courtesy of YLE Areena. Having spotted that the ferry will not arrive for half an hour, I will decide to sit on the terrace with a beer waiting for it.
When I get home I will cook some more sausages, smaller and tastier than yesterday’s, which I will have with tomatoes and onions.
The football will start at 21:00, when Irma and I both expected it to begin at 17:00. I will sit in the sauna house and watch it as it goes into extra time, and then Croatia score in the last few minutes, and England fail to get to the final. Croatia will now have the honour of losing to France.
Sunshine will arrive home very late and I will find myself staying awake until he arrives, despite trying not to.