VOTE VOTE VOTE!!

Ok dear friends and loved ones. Check out how much the rest of the world cares about the upcoming election.

And just to get you in the mood for Tuesday, can you please lend me your voice?
Last week I acquired some new/old furniture. I bought them because I love the shapes. It is all second-hand and I need to do some work on the colors. Can you please let me know what you think would look nicest by voting in the polls to the right? THANKS!!

First of all, let me introduce you to the space. This stuff will all go in the library for now. Or rather, what I like to call the library in our place. Nathan's and Seungho's doors open into this space, and ever since I have been here it has been used for hanging clothes to dry, collecting dust, and as a black hole for sh*t that nobody knows what to do with.

Gross, eh? I have spent most of my time in this place just ignoring that space. I straightened it up last week (see below), and a bunch of stuff (e.g. old clothes in bags) will get sold in a few weeks at a flea market.

The hutch
First of all, the hutch. Say it loud, say it proud. I really dig the glass on the top door. And it is very polite, nestling right back into a corner but making itself very efficient for storage (always an issue in small Helsinki flats). The color is grody though.
For now this hutch will house craft projects, as the library space (see below) will now be used for projects rather than storing crap (see above). When I move into my own place (in 2 years or so) it will go with me, and probably make nice in a kitchen. I am leaning towards painting it bright red (inside the upper cupboard will be white though, to make sure the cool yellow glass stays an interesting shade of ocher.




Table and chairs
I love round tables. And I love the shape of the chairs... so Scandinavian! They are the exact same shape as the chairs that we currently have in the dining room and I am completely infatuated with them. Therefore, I think they should most positively be red. But let me know what you think (to the right, if you please).



(I got four chairs, but not all of them fit comfortably there).

Darth Vader chairs
And last but not least, these other chairs. The photos do not do them justice (I upped the shadowing on the pic of a single chair, just to make the shape easier to see). They are the coolest shape, and SO COMFORTABLE to sit in. The arch is perfect. I only wish they were swivel chairs. I am thinking of rigging up some sort of sit 'n spin mechanism on the bottom to fulfill that wish.




Don't they look like Darth Vader?

Utensil collection, etc.

I've always had the idea that I want to use mismatched utensils. So I have been collecting them over the years. I think I am amassing a pretty nice assortment. What do you think?
Spoons

Knives

Forks


I got a few new specimens when I went treasure hunting last week. And I also found a darling table & chairs, a corner hutch (don't you think that is a fun word to say?), and two additional space age mod chairs. Tomorrow I will take pictures and post them, because I need a bit of help deciding which colors I should paint them.

Btw, here is a pic of one end of my room (it's teensy... and very clean at that moment, hence the polaroid moment):


Lastly, I got invited to go to a masked ball on the island fortress, Suomenlinna, next weekend. I want to make a mask, but have no ideas. Any suggestions? The "gown" I will wear (yeah right... like it will ever happen) has a slight Asian flair. SAY!! Maybe I will revert to my youth and be a geisha girl like I was for several Halloweens as a child. I LOVED geisha girls when I was little. I even had a geisha-girl-roller-skate themed birthday party. And my mom made a geisha girl birthday cake. And my dad teased her that it looked more like a monster. Then as a teenager I had great fun making monster cakes for all of my friends' birthdays. Man... it is all so connected.

Nesting

I spent today pretty much going ape-sh*t cleaning. Like a complete maniac.
I just woke up leisurely (no major plans for the day, ahhh.....), ate some breakfast and lollygagged.



But then it hit me. I felt like cleaning. I'm not quite sure what compelled me, but I guess I just like doing mindless labor sometimes. And cleaning in this place is somewhat like a vortex: once you slip into it, it can spiral out of control. I have no idea how long people have been moving in and out of this place (at least 5 years is my guess) and there are lots of nooks and crannies that remained unscrubbed for YEARS, no doubt... reverse tragedy of the commons. Or maybe the compulsion had something to do with my propensity to get off on tangents and decide to scrub underneath where the dishwasher once I started vacuuming... Or maybe now that I know this is really my home, I feel the need to clean the nest a bit.
I share my home here in Helsinki with three other people. Hmmm... typing that seems weird somehow. I was just reading several different blogs (speaking of vortices) by women in Provo (???) like this and this and this. The last one was my gateway into the whole loop... I had to think the other day how I even found that blog originally, but I think she ended up on my gmail contacts (along with her blog) from when I worked at the Leonardo. And the rest is history I suppose.
ANYWAYS (I told you... tangents), they write a lot about their families and homes. For some of them, that means their husbands and kids, for others it extends more outward into their community. So now I am thinking about what my notion of home is exactly. I definitely feel like this place that I am living in is my home. My roomies are not necessarily my family though... but maybe kinda. They are all super-nice and I feel somehow like we are a tribe of sorts... a motley, multicultural tribe of four: Finnish, Australian, Korean, and 'merican. But we have our own things going on, and who I consider my Finnish family consists of other people who I have known since I first came to Finland (Joensuu) in '99. I talk to at least one of those nuts almost everyday, if not multiple times a day. And I get along with some of them better at some times than others, but I know I will most likely be attached somehow to them forever (whether they like it or not).
And of course my REAL family is all back in Utah and the U.S. And of course Utah is technically my home and there are some things I miss about it (hello... why else would I be reading those blogs). It really doesn't feel that far away to me... but far enough. In another post I am going to explore why Utah really never felt like home to me.
And another why Finland does. Two separate posts, with hopefully few tangents.
So yes, for now I guess I can simply say that my own definitions of family and home have their definitions extended quite far beyond the more traditional, nuclear unit. Sometimes I regret that, but on the other had, I've had a pretty exciting go of it until now, and wouldn't change it.
But now, tweet tweet, its time to nest.

Tomorrow I will make a special effort to take some more pics of my nest. For now, this is what it looks like to gaze out our lovely kitchen window. I like to peek at people when they are out on their balconies. One one there is a cute, older couple that hangs out in their robes, no doubt after going to sauna.



And one very important aspect of days that I spend at home: Radio Helsinki.