It's been too long, I know. It's not that I haven't had the time or been too stressed out to write; it's more that when I dip into the well for the words, the bucket comes up dry. Failing inspiration, I'll pump the well full with grim determination.

A dry anything is surprising, since it's all rain, all the time this summer. More water fell in Wednesday than is normal in a month. And showers still dominate the forecast. The newspapers are chock-full of images of flooded out river banks, footbridges even with the current, sidewalk underpasses as small ponds. Not too exciting, but when natural disasters are few and far between these picture resonate more deeply with the locals than all the waterlogged Bangladeshis or flash-flooded Romanians that preceded them.

With that in mind, we spent the last two days at Linnanmäki, rain wet and motion sick. (Or Melina and I were motion sick, the kids chugged along nicely.) Linnanmäki reminds me that I'm getting old. Each year the rides affect me more, my stomach complains a little louder. In the not too distant future I'll be the lame dad escorting his children around the park, unable to ride with them. Yuck. Owen loved it. Not even three, he screamed delightedly through roller coasters and jolting machines alike. I guess that's why you shell out the cash for amusement parks.

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Lately I've spent an enormous amount of energy dreaming/planning about what car I will buy once I return to Maryland. Traditionally, I'm not a "car guy", but maybe that label is outdated. These last three car-less years have provided me with new insights into automobiles.

Helsinki by bus is possible and only mildly irritating. (It's sure provided me with plenty of reading time.) But anything outside the city limits is off limits. I live about one kilometer from Espoo and never go there because 6.80€ round trip is too much to pay and my monthly bus pass is for Helsinki only. So if Espoo is too far, the rest of Finland might as well be China. (We do go to Sipoo, but that merely siphons money from other travels.) Consequently, we rarely leave this city, which though nice, is stifling when the sentence is life. So I'm ready for the liberty of four wheels and a gas tank.

A car in Finland, with our Finnish budget, doesn't mean freedom, it means burden. So I haven't dreamed about it until now. In five weeks I'll be in the land of wheels and deals, and I'll be helpless as a babe without my own. Dreams, dreams, dreams...

Choosing a car is one part practical need, one part personal taste, and one part politics. It's what you need, against what you want, against what you can afford. People read a lot into your character from the car you drive, we'll see what I say about myself.

Two fourteen year old nihilists came cruising out of the woods, recklessly pulling up to the Siwa door. I stood outside the shop waiting for Melina and Owen. Before too long the boys came out with suckers. They pulled the wrappers off and dropped them on the ground. The old curmudgeon I am becoming stirred into action. "Is that a trash can?", I asked the boys. Surprised, defiant looks accompanied their bold, "Yes." I continued, "You live around here. Why throw trash on the ground?" After some intense eye contact I looked away, tired of being a moralizing old fart. One boy reached down, picked up his wrapper and attempted to throw it into the trash can a couple of feet away. It fell to the ground. He then picked it up and put it in. "Are you happy now?", he asked. Still defiant, it seemed he knew littering was a punishible offense, and a little guilt made him listen to me. "Yes," I answered. "I am happy. Thank you very much." They rode away shaking their heads, one wrapper still on the ground. (The other boy seemed to think I was not talking to him, too.) I waited for Melina and Owen, bothered by the whole thing. Should I have kept my mouth shut? Did it matter? Could I have done it better? Probably.

Today is my last work day for three weeks. Though the weather is still pretty awful, I'm looking forward to resting, relaxing, and generally pissing away my time in pleasantly unproductive ways. Here's to time away.

I finished Kingsley Amis' book The Old Devils yesterday. It was a bleakly funny, surprisingly deep look into aging and living in general. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it was a nearly complete lack of positive adjectives. Anything remotely positive was denoted along the lines of "not entirely awful" or something like that. I naturally tend towards thoughts and expressions of that sort, ignoring beauty abundant seeing instead the awful and not quite awful. In stark contrast to this, I watched John Waters' movie Pecker last night. I laughed and laughed. Not only was it fun to see Baltimore in my Helsinki living room, it was fun to see someone poking fun of Art. Pecker was right, though. Beauty is all around us.

Months after I replaced my work phone (keeping the old one), we openned an account for Matilda. Month after month she eagerly demanded, wished, and whined for a SIM card. Finally, her dreams have come true. Her face radiated achievement as she handled the phone yesterday evening. There was a strut in her step, and glow in her eyes. This morning she called me without more to say than "How are you doing?" Her childish voice sounds cute on the other end of the line. (Or wave?) I automatically launched into my parental role, "Remember, Matilda, you should only make calls that are necessary." But I was the first call she'd ever made on her first mobile phone.

My mother thinks giving phones to seven year olds is silly. She maybe right, but I think had phones been cheap and available when I was young, they would have been standard issue. After all, when we can't find Matilda, we can call her now. When I was young I roved far and wide; my mother never realized the range of my wanderings. A phone could have always reeled my in.