Friday, November 9

 

 

We had an unusual start to the day. I walked to the metro because Irma will spend the day in Tallinn with Päivi. She wanted to drive to Puotila, which meant she wanted me to drive the car home when I return from work. This seemed fine to me, so off I walked.

I had solved the final php problem for the miaaw.net site in the middle of the night. I woke up from a dream in which I had realised that I had approached the problem from entirely the wrong angle. I also realised what would constitute the right angle. I got up, made a brief note, and went straight back to sleep.

When I got to work I added the three new lines of php and all worked as it should. I then uploaded the website, which proved a lot easier than I expected. I had to go back and do all sorts of command line stuff, but it didn’t matter. I seem to have absorbed some of that so that, although it doesn’t always come easily, it does come.

Once I had done this I walked to Lidl to buy some hummus, soups and a few other things that only Lidl sells. This included their unique-in-Finland mixed vegetable juice at a reasonable price.

I spent the next few minutes recording an introductory Mission Impossible style text for the annual Egil Gala that mocks the staff. The two students suggested that I start by doing a run-through of the whole text and then did a run-through of the text sentence by sentence. I did this and then they looked at each other and said that they didn’t need anything else.

I think they thought it would require dozens of takes. Fortunately I know Mission Impossible from both the movies and the sixties tv series. The phrase “should you choose to accept it” told me everything I needed to know in terms of how to pitch and phrase it.

Having done that in no time at all I start walking around to stretch my legs and think about the MA course I need to prepare for next week. The entrance to the C3 corridor has chairs arranged artfully. In the last few months Arcada has grown furniture in nooks and crannies everywhere. It works well.

I will prepare next week’s course, or at least write down a revised outline, and then drive home from Puotila.

Irma will arrive, with bags of evidence of her day out, in the middle of the evening.