The last of June is the day when inevitably, each year, the great integer counter representing my life's span ticks one numeral further, an occasion that would seem like a strange thing to celebrate, all in all, were cake not inevitably involved, which does admittedly help a lot ( Read more... )

It's been a good month now in my new apartment, and although I am arguably starting to settle in, I am increasingly starting to realise that the entirety of my life up to this point, during which just having a room of my own has not infrequently been a luxury, has left me inadequately prepared to make use of an entire apartment. What is it, exactly ( Read more... )

So, it turns out that I have a new place to live in, with some curious side effects - one being that I now have a floor that is not covered by three-foot stacks of books and research journals. The other, not coincidentally, is that a considerable portion of my time and effort this month outside of work have been spent in search of new, affordable ( Read more... )

Not much of import has happened this month, but if I were to make a note to myself about it for future reference, it probably ought to be that while coming up with indoorsy things to do is a reasonable idea in a time of the year in which you're lucky to get a couple of hours of sunlight a day if that (which go by while you're stuck in a windowless ( Read more... )

June is over, and so I am officially free, and also 28!

Freedom is, all things considered, a reasonably fearsome thing, which is why I might have cause to be thankful that said freedom is of limited scope. In theoretical terms, my legal obligations to my state is now fully completed and, that being the case, my freedom of government-instituted ( Read more... )

Well, mere weeks remain of my thraldom to the state of Finland, and after that, an uncertain future awaits ( Read more... )

I'm somewhat at a loss as to how I ought to describe the last month or so ( Read more... )

It feels very weird to spend Christmas, New Years' Eve and most of the days between them working. It occurs to me that it's the kind of thing that normal people, with real jobs, would probably consider this sort of thing distasteful, vaguely abusive and generally something to object to. On the other hand, having an actual job doing archaeology in ( Read more... )

So it's Cake Day, and I'm 27 now. Also, and perhaps more importantly, as of about two weeks ago I'm also Master of Arts (that being the natural outcome of having finished one's Dread Thesis), so there's that too ( Read more... )

Shortly after actually handing in my thesis, I caught a two-week flu, the hard drive of my laptop ceased to function more than five minutes in a row, my scanner - which is admittedly over ten years old - is taking ten minutes to start up, and the memory stick backup of most of my stuff fell apart ( Read more... )