Counting Blessings

Helsinki in the winter is cold and snow-covered and the sidewalks are generally hazardous for the absent-minded and clumsy, especially when those absent-minded and clumsy people have weird new dimensions and can't see their feet and are rendered even more clumsy.

But! Helsinki has a suit-optional swimming pool, which means that I haven't had to purchase a maternity bathing suit but I can still enjoy swimming.  And even though the cold outside means that everyone is bundled up enough that strangers passing on the street can't tell I'm pregnant, my naked body is pretty obviously pregnant so going to the pool is my opportunity to get all kinds of advice and comments from sweet old women.

Christmas Cookies

We baked cookies!

We had some issues with these ones:

The Sun

This morning it was -20 (that's -4 in Fahrenheit, I believe). It's cold, even for Finns. But the reason it is this cold is that the blanket of clouds that normally protects Helsinki is gone, which means that we can see the sun! It's very startling to such brightness after weeks of grey. I also saw the moon this morning and it was beautiful.

Guess who's on maternity leave?

My last day of work was yesterday. Woo!

Rare Exports

We saw the Rare Exports movie last night. It was excellent! I think it's my new favorite Christmas movie:

'Watching' Basketball

It turns out that espnplayer doesn't actually show all the UNC games, and of course they don't show any that are broadcast by CBS. And cbssports.com's website doesn't seem to deal too well with non-U.S. based credit card addresses.

So...it's halftime during the UNC-Kentucky game and I've been watching it on CBS' gametracker. And I have to say that it is a really entertaining way to 'watch' a game. They have a written play-by-play and then a hilarious graphical representation. I've been seeing the game unfold as acted by a team of little light blue circles sitting atop triangles versus a team of little dark blue circles sitting atop triangles.

The fatal flaw, of course, is that each 'play' is really only each thing that counts toward statistics, so you really can't tell when they're playing, especially after a timeout.