Thursday, January 15

Today I left first, and Naa and Irma followed ten minutes later.

Most of the day at Arcada was spent with Tomas and the Innovations & Concepts course. Ten groups of students made presentations of their research, their concepts and their initial attempts to turn these into practical projects. Each presentation took between thirty and forty minutes. They were all good.

Jutta and I tested Zoom, a video-conferencing app that may be more useful in projects than Skype. Jutta ran into Macintosh difficulties.

One of my current peeves is people who use literally when they more nearly mean figuratively. Having said that I literally bumped into Sofi Oksanen at Sörnäinen metro station. She jumped out of a carriage and strode into me while reading her phone. Or perhaps she was pretending to read while engaged in a strategy to avoid receiving attention from book-lovers.

Either way we made eye contact.

Now I am walking from the bus to home. Where our garden joins the road I can see the candle in a block of ice that Minna placed there on Monday to remember Auo. It is still burning. She made one after Auo died and that lasted for a week or so. They are beautiful and I very much appraciate her making them.

Naa is spending the night at Kamppi and I am going to have some biscuits and a shower as soon as possible. Irma and I will agree that this week feels like the end of a cycle. We can’t imagine wanting to hold memorial parties every year. We will start to find other things to do instead.