(no subject)
Well then, update time!
I'm done with my first Uni degree. If all goes to plan, in month at most (hopefully sooner!) I'll be a Bachelor of Arts (Humanististen tieteiden kandidaatti). Then onwards to the Master's degree... I am a bit stressed out though, worried that something will pop up that I should have done but haven't and therefore the Uni'll tell me to piss off. Like not having a good enough grade from the courses is Swedish, as a study mate of mine claimed it's not enough that you pass but you must have a good enough grade. We'll see...
Things with stress haven't been improved by the fact that Ville the cat has been sick. He had some kind of a skin and/or ear infection, which we treated with antibiotics. Everything went fine at first, until we switched to a different antibiotic, after which the cat started throwing up essentially everything he ate. So yesterday we packed him to his carrybox (an operation which resulted in Maria being bitten and clawed quite badly) and headed off to Maria's work. Ville's bloodwork indicated he might have Addison's crisis (Addison's being extremely rare in cats). We gave him some liquids and ran more tests, and he did recover somewhat. We're hoping the lab tests were faulty, as the results were generally a bit weird. We ran a test to see if he has Addison's, but won't have the results until the Wednesday a week from now. A likelier diagnostic is simply that his stomach couldn't stand the antibiotics and the resulting vomitting left him dehydrated.
Unsurprisingly it turned out Ville is extremely resistant to sedatives. He should have been knocked out for 1½ to four hours... we had to sedate him four times during the three hours we treated him. Yesterday evening he ate quite well after we got home (though he's extremely suspicious of everything now), but he hasn't pooped and today he hasn't been eating that much. But that might simply be an after-effect to all the sedatives.
In somewhat less stressful news, to celebrate not having anything new to study for a while, I went and bought the book Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It promised to be an absolutely brilliant book, set in the Moscow Metro (the world's largest nuclear shelter), where the remnants of the human race are living after a nuclear war. What it essentially was was a basic fantasy plot, a guy going on a quest to save the world from forces of darkness. Nothing against that, especially in such an interesting setting. The problem is that Glukhovsky isn't actually that good of a writer. His characters are really thinly written, you feel almost no connection to them and because of their thinness, their actions appear random. This is accentuated by the author's habit of hurrying over supporting characters and situations. The main character, Artyom, visits every notable place in the Metro during the book. He had about 20 different travelling companions, most of whom he meets randomly, they have no real reason to be travelling with him and eventually most kick the bucket to allow artyom to randomly meet another person. Plus Glukhovsky's grasp of the "science" side of science fiction is thin at best, which can be annoying at times when he's trying to give a scientific explanation to something... and fails terribly.
Staying with books, after getting finished with Metro 2033 I happened to drop by at the Academic Bookstore and bought something more to read: namely, Tad William's Shadowrise (the third book in the Shadowmarch series) and a Spirou et Fantasio omnibus edition in Swedish, containing La corne de rhinocéros, Le dictateur et le champignon and La mauvaise tête plus foreword to each of them containing excerpts from an interview with Franquin. Haven't had a chance to begin Shadowrise yet, but the Spirou & Fantasio omnibus is excellent. To start with, for some reason I've never read La corne de rhinocéros or La mauvaise tête. Additionally the forewords are truly excellently written, giving a good analysis of and insight to Franquin's work. And I can understand the Swedish text surprisingly well. Den ena svarighet är att Fantasio heter Nicke på svenska. ^_~ Funnily enough, even though the omnibus editions are published by a Swedish firm they've been printed in Finland. If only we'd get something similar in Finnish as well. Especially as the series starts from the very first Spirou strips by Rob-Vel, something that has never been published in Finland as far as I know.
Yeah... plenty to say when I bother updating.
I'm done with my first Uni degree. If all goes to plan, in month at most (hopefully sooner!) I'll be a Bachelor of Arts (Humanististen tieteiden kandidaatti). Then onwards to the Master's degree... I am a bit stressed out though, worried that something will pop up that I should have done but haven't and therefore the Uni'll tell me to piss off. Like not having a good enough grade from the courses is Swedish, as a study mate of mine claimed it's not enough that you pass but you must have a good enough grade. We'll see...
Things with stress haven't been improved by the fact that Ville the cat has been sick. He had some kind of a skin and/or ear infection, which we treated with antibiotics. Everything went fine at first, until we switched to a different antibiotic, after which the cat started throwing up essentially everything he ate. So yesterday we packed him to his carrybox (an operation which resulted in Maria being bitten and clawed quite badly) and headed off to Maria's work. Ville's bloodwork indicated he might have Addison's crisis (Addison's being extremely rare in cats). We gave him some liquids and ran more tests, and he did recover somewhat. We're hoping the lab tests were faulty, as the results were generally a bit weird. We ran a test to see if he has Addison's, but won't have the results until the Wednesday a week from now. A likelier diagnostic is simply that his stomach couldn't stand the antibiotics and the resulting vomitting left him dehydrated.
Unsurprisingly it turned out Ville is extremely resistant to sedatives. He should have been knocked out for 1½ to four hours... we had to sedate him four times during the three hours we treated him. Yesterday evening he ate quite well after we got home (though he's extremely suspicious of everything now), but he hasn't pooped and today he hasn't been eating that much. But that might simply be an after-effect to all the sedatives.
In somewhat less stressful news, to celebrate not having anything new to study for a while, I went and bought the book Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky. It promised to be an absolutely brilliant book, set in the Moscow Metro (the world's largest nuclear shelter), where the remnants of the human race are living after a nuclear war. What it essentially was was a basic fantasy plot, a guy going on a quest to save the world from forces of darkness. Nothing against that, especially in such an interesting setting. The problem is that Glukhovsky isn't actually that good of a writer. His characters are really thinly written, you feel almost no connection to them and because of their thinness, their actions appear random. This is accentuated by the author's habit of hurrying over supporting characters and situations. The main character, Artyom, visits every notable place in the Metro during the book. He had about 20 different travelling companions, most of whom he meets randomly, they have no real reason to be travelling with him and eventually most kick the bucket to allow artyom to randomly meet another person. Plus Glukhovsky's grasp of the "science" side of science fiction is thin at best, which can be annoying at times when he's trying to give a scientific explanation to something... and fails terribly.
Staying with books, after getting finished with Metro 2033 I happened to drop by at the Academic Bookstore and bought something more to read: namely, Tad William's Shadowrise (the third book in the Shadowmarch series) and a Spirou et Fantasio omnibus edition in Swedish, containing La corne de rhinocéros, Le dictateur et le champignon and La mauvaise tête plus foreword to each of them containing excerpts from an interview with Franquin. Haven't had a chance to begin Shadowrise yet, but the Spirou & Fantasio omnibus is excellent. To start with, for some reason I've never read La corne de rhinocéros or La mauvaise tête. Additionally the forewords are truly excellently written, giving a good analysis of and insight to Franquin's work. And I can understand the Swedish text surprisingly well. Den ena svarighet är att Fantasio heter Nicke på svenska. ^_~ Funnily enough, even though the omnibus editions are published by a Swedish firm they've been printed in Finland. If only we'd get something similar in Finnish as well. Especially as the series starts from the very first Spirou strips by Rob-Vel, something that has never been published in Finland as far as I know.
Yeah... plenty to say when I bother updating.