Dreamworld

I got the idea to this post while I was doing my nightshift last night. I chose not to write it down then and you will understand why as you read further on.

As I have written before the world of the nightshift is a world of it's own in many ways. One of the more interesting aspects is the state of mind you are in while working at night. You are of course tired most of the time but there's a difference between being tired at night and being tired during the day. The difference is your state of mind.

Around 1-2 AM you get tired, sleepy tired but it usually blows over within an hour. At that point your social behavior constraints sort of a fade out. The person you have spent a lifetime at daytime pretending to be is gone and what is left is you, who is truly you. Writing a blog post or chatting on the Internet at this time could mean that you write too honestly, often bluntly honestly. It could be a good thing but it can also be bad.

The next phase happens around 4-5 AM. Your are still being honest but you start feeling exhaustedly tired and this is the point where you enter the dreamworld. You know when you had a strange dream and are waking up and the thought pattern that was created in your mind as a response to your strange dream is still fresh in your memory as you become awake. This is similar, but you are awake and you are not dreaming. You function normally, you do normal things and you can handle your job very well. But the mind goes off in a different direction.

You have strange thought patterns and emotions. Things you wouldn't think about or think in that way about at daytime. Your mind has gone weird. Your body is present and awake but your mind is living a life of it's own. I work alone at my nightshift which is probably a good thing because if you had someone to talk to during this time of night, you might have some really strange conversations.

If you have read some strange or even offensive blog post written by me, it was likely produced at around 5 AM by me at my night shift. It was me but it came from my dreamworld, a place not like the real world in daylight.

People have always performed their job well, the trouble with interacting with the real world usually doesn't happen before going of the nightshift in the parking lot. I call those troubles car problems. People haven't found their car among the 4-5 cars that are parked there the time people go of the nightshift or if they find it fail to understand how to start it. But once we get home and get some sleep we are back to normal when we wake up in the afternoon...

It's summer

I guess I've been sort of lazy lately with my blog. But here I am again and it's summer. I have mowed the lawn twice, well almost, actually it's more like 1.5 times, tomorrow it will be done twice, if it doesn't rain. I'm doing my second evening shift out of four so that means I don't get much done at home.

Mirelle has started taken interest in our media center so my Xbox has no longer any gamepads attached to it. No she doesn't crawl yet. She rolls (and she's good at it) to where she want to go. That's not a good thing according to the current charts and flows the people at the child welfare center have. Notice I used the word current, I know of parents who have had their child referred to a child specialist at university hospital the same day because his/her growth/development didn't follow the new chart but was perfectly fine according to the old chart which was still in use the week before. And here's come the big surprise, the child specialist told the parents their child was perfectly fine.

I do realize that these people are professionals. I appreciate that they look out for medical problems in our kids since we aren't trained to see those problems but sometimes they bury themselves in their flows and charts and forget about reality. We parents actually meet and our kids meet, we see that they develop independently at their own pace in their own way. So if you have a kid that has actually followed the chart, all charts please make a comment, your child is the eighth wonder of the world and we will worship him/her. I'm not trying to be sacrilegious, I'm just convinced that such a child do not exist. Or about as plausible as when the first men land on Mars they will be met by a flock of sheep with bells around their necks and goes "Bah! Bah!! Bah!!!".

Stop the mass physocosis

Make no mistake, having the flu can be the last thing you have, especially if your immune system is not what it's supposed to be. Annually around 250 000 to 500 000 people die from having the flu. 36 000 of those deaths happen in the USA. To put it in perspective, each day 700 to 1400 people around the world and 100 of those die in the USA die from having the flu and each day means every day, even on Sundays. So can someone please explain to me why 17 deaths caused by the swine flu during the course of 9 days make it such a dangerous pandemic? There are two flu seasons each year so most deaths caused by the regular flu occur during those, but statically seen around 10 000 people should have died from the regular flu during those 9 days.

The swine flu is real and it is deadly as every flu that comes twice a year, every year. But it's no more or less lethal than last years flu, actually less so far. But the tabloid press have owners who actually want to earn money and what better way to sell newspapers than exploit our fears?

The second evening

Here I am again, spending my second evening shift at work. It's Easter and everyone seem to be celebrating Easter. Yesterday was warm and sunny while today has gone towards the cold and rainy type of weather. but it could be worse, it could still be snowing. This is the spring and the winter is raining away =)

Blogging isn't what it used to be

I must admit that blogging isn't what it used to be. I like blogging, unfortunately more and more people seems to have stopped blogging and moved over to Facebook. Nothing wrong with that, most of my irl friends and other people I know are there and it's nice to see the these little status updates about what they are doing in their life.

BUT and it's a big but, the things you write in your blog you can NEVER put out on Facebook. I'm really not that weird but in company of friends you play a role, you are the person you always been in their eyes. You may have evolved light years during the last 10-15 years but to them you will always be the person they grew up with. And in a sense I still am but there are other sides of me that they know very little about and that I can express freely trough a blog.

When I write and mean truly write from the hearth I'm good at this. I can write without my hearth present and my long time readers can easily tell the difference. I think that in the beginning most of my blog posts where from the hearth but as each post got written my matters of my hearth got told and there where no point in rewriting them again.

So in order to be a productive blogger I wrote about mundane things, again, nothing wrong with that, it's just boring and without emotion. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't good neither. Stephen King once said that productive writers doesn't wait for inspiration, they get up every morning and start writing. He knows how to write without inspiration or maybe he never lost it although he claims he doesn't need it. I read most of his books and he's good, really good.

But I don't compare myself to a literally giant like Mr King. I need inspiration from the hearth in order to write to you, for you. I can write without it but it lacks that thing that separates the bad posts from the good posts, inspiration.

I'm back

Well my month vacation is over and I'm back at work doing my first evening shift. Back in virtual reality =). Anyway I got some work done around the house, mainly making the stairs child safe, well almost, but it actually looks nice from downstairs.

My mother has moved from her apartment at a retirement home to a nursing home. We tried to get her to a nursing home closer to where we live but since Närpes municipality, her home of residence, had free beds and Korsholm municipality, where we tried to move her, didn't have free beds and Närpes had to pay for her first 6 months in Korsholm (I was told it costs 200-300 € per day) and the district taxation registrar who both municipalities tried to refer didn't have any decisive power in the matter and it was finally up to the two municipalities to agree over the matter, which they didn't, it means it's a one hour trip to to go and visit mom. To top all that off the social worker responsible for the elderly care in Korsholm had a week vacation when I tried to contact her and the same goes for the district taxation registrar and us spending a week in Stockholm, Sweden somewhere in between. It meant a lot of phone calls back and forth for the sake of finding out that it didn't work.

But on the goos side is that her nursing home felt nice and warm and the staff seems caring. Because in the end it's how my mom likes it that is the most important thing and she seems to like it, not how far we have to drive to visit her.

My blog on Facebook

I'm publishing my blog on Facebook and no it's not this one. I'm publishing my Blogspot blog in Swedish trough Notes (I think it's called Notes, I'm not entirely sure since I got my Fb in Swedish and I'm too lazy to switch languages back and fort just to get that 100 % correct).

Around 95 % of my Facebook friend's mother tongue is Swedish and the rest should be able to read Swedish. And any future friends that does not understand Swedish should be able to find this blog trough my Blogspot profile. You can even find a blog in Finnish trough my profile but that's not being updated regularly. That's why I'm publishing my Swedish blog on Facebook and not any other one.

The smell of old clothes

I need to use all of my t-shirts, not just my favorite t-shirts or the ones in the front of my t-shirt shelf. Today however I managed to find a t-shirt that has been in the back of the shelf for a while. It's clean, all my clothes in my wardrobe are clean. But no matter how clean they are, if they've been at the back and on the bottom of a shelf for a while they smell old clothes.

As a result I smell old clothes today.

Good Morning

It's my first morning shift out of four, on a Sunday morning. I like working Sundays, for a different number of reasons so I actually like being here. Although going home is even greater =).

Yesterday was spent in Reisjärvi, or actually going to and from Reisjärvi. And in Reisjärvi we did some dog mating. If all goes well, it's a puppy summer. You wonder where Reisjärvi is. Well according to the GPS you drive north along the E8 to Jakobstad and then turn right and drive eastwards about a 100 miles into to middle of nowhere and the middle of nowhere starts emidietly after you leave E8 .

Fortunately we didn't follow the GPS or looked on the map and drew a straight line when we went home. We headed to the nearest "big" road, which meant going north 30 miles, then going westwards until we got back on E8 north of Kokkola. Now on the map this is a bad choice but roads east of Kokkola and north of Reisjärvi are so good that we actually saved time going the longer route. The GPS choice might work in the summer but it's still winter and the roads you could legally drive 80 km/h on you where sometimes forced to to drive 50-60 km/h on do to the snow/ice condition on the road.

Blogging again

Well, this is a post about blogging. Yes I'm blogging again. With two other posts this day already, one very serious and one less serious it's time for a post about...nothing. It's just that sometimes you feel like writing about everything and nothing and sometimes you just don't feel like writing anything at al. I'm right now in the write mood...

Dementia

My mom is spending a few days or maybe a week or two in hospital in order to determinate if she got dementia (we're pretty sure she has, that's how she ended up there in the first place), how severe it is, what type of dementia it is and what can be done about it and if something can be done about it.

Best case scenario is that it's false dementia caused by her medication, they change her medication and she'll be back in her apartment in a couple of weeks and her new medication will work a couple of years again. She had an episode like that three years ago and it has worked fairly well up until now.

Worst case scenario is that she got dementia and this is how far it has gone. Dementia is not an illness that gets better. So then we'll have to see if she can live in her apartment again and for how long. After that or by the end of this month we might start considering a nursing home.

But we'll have to see first how her condition progresses during the next few weeks...

I thought about writing individual e-mails about this for whom this concerns but then I realized that no none that I'm not related to or don't have family ties with reads this blog.

Can I have more flamebaits please

I've got a small confession to make. I'm easily provoked by trolls. Throw me a flamebait and I'll be all over it. A few years back it was one of my favorite things to do on the Internet. But as I grew into a seasoned and experienced flamer I got bored. Roasting a few trolls is fun when you get the hang of it but it never ends. There's always a new troll in the next forum thread and there's always a new thread.

It's fun every now and then to read a few threads in the forums I used to hang out in but the trolling and flaming I leave to others. The occasional blog comment troll I get occasionally I can leave alone. Well almost, I usually writes a flaming reply and when I have written all that needs to be said about the troll and his opinion I delete it and then I write something like " I don't feed trolls". A flamer turned diplomat, but there's a huge difference with debating some issue on an anonymous forum and having a blog with your own name on it.

And for the sake of old times: Bring it on!!! ;-)