Wednesday, October 10

It is raining hard and Naa and I have another early day. It is still dark and the streetlights are bouncing off the puddles.

I am on my way to Arcada for some speedy administrating, before meeting Juha and Kirsti at the bus station in Kamppi. We are going to the Aalto campus in Tapiola where I will be talking with an International Advisory Group about the Masters and Doctoral courses, and about my own research. It will all go smoothly, at least as far as I can tell. I will leave at about 12:30 and head back to Arcada.

I will spend the afternoon with Maija doing Virtual Worlds Research. We will make several breakthroughs, including our first foray into NPCs. I will suddenly realise that we now have almost everything that we need to make fully functional beta versions of a serious game that might be called Unmerge Me or The Unmerged. Or might instead be called Season Five or The Seasonal Wheel.

At 17:30 I will leave to race to the first day of the Stockmann Crazy Days. I have a (short) list of things to buy: shoes for me and trainers for Auo. Despite two Russian women clearly under the impression that shopping is a contact sport best played hard, I will manage to get them. As I leave Itis the sky will darken and the rain will begin. Everyone on the bus (and I mean that literally) will be carrying one or more bright yellow Hullut Päivät bags.

Two hours later, the weather still being atrocious, I will collect Naa from tennis. On the way home I will fail to turn right, with the result that we will drive through the streets of Herttaniemi past the Eho bakery until we finally find a way onto Itäväylä.

Once we get home, twenty minutes later than planned, Naa will have a shower before revising for a Swedish test while I will wrestle the cat for the second time today.

Just two more tablets for the cat to swallow and it will be game over.