Giedre tyttö Ozista

Lordess of the Rings and Bikes

This Sunday we went to Desaru again. The surfer guys expected waves, but the sea was very messy and the waves were not good at all. So we just swam. However I managed to loose my wedding ring in the ocean!! Man! How stupid I am! People go for 50 years together having the same ring, and I lost mine after 7 months!.. My hands were greasy with sun screen, so it just slipped off!!! And the sea was so murky and wavy that there was no chance to find it at all! Now I just have to expect that some fish swallowed it and somehow it will travel back to me..

Of the good things that happened to us - we bought bikes on Saturday! The coolest bike that I ever had. It has everything - disk brakes, and stuff.. Kaj's colleagues are bicycle freaks (they are not only surfers..)

So we asked them to come along to the bike shop and help us choose. We got really good bikes for almost half the price that these bikes would cost in Finland.. But it is just a beginning... We already got helmets and locks.. Today Kaj got flashing lights for the back, then we need lights at the front, then eventually mud protectors, I would like to change my seat, maybe.. This is just one more way to keep spending our money.. The problem with Leijonakaupunki is that it is quite dangerous to drive bicycles on the roads. Cars cost so much that once you got one, you feel like the king of the road, especially if you drive a Mercedes ("Mers", they call them here). People take bikes somewhere nice and then they ride them, it is not a mode of transportation like in Finland. But we'll have a chance to explore the bike side of Leijonakaupunki on the weekend.

These are my cubicle neighbours, Lynette and Sharon. Both very nice and cool. So far it has been really great to hang out with people at my work. Can you believe that Lynette (the smaller of the girls) has 2 kids and is 32 years old already?!?! When I first met her, I thought she could be 15... Getting worried about these wrinkly looks of mine...

For some reason I became an athlete sports freak since I came here. First I started running 4.8km around the water reservoir after work once in a while, then i joined yoga and some kind of stretching class and look at me now - this Friday I will be running a Cross-country race!.. Weird indeed.. At TP they encourage people to take up some healthy hobbies, for example, they give some financial incentive if you run 100km in 60 days. But everything has to be measurable and quantifyable. For example, you take body fat analysis before you take up running and after. So in 3 months I have dropped one kilo of fat (I have only 13kg of fat now, imagine - a whole bucket! yoek...), but gained weight (presumably muscle.. he he..). The same goes for other areas of development. Every year you make a "Learning Needs Analysis". Meaning that you identify the areas that you feel that you need to improve on. Then you can go for training (have to collect 100h of training and human development a year!) and then you raise your ranks a little bit. So in that way you're "improving" yourself little by little. Its great that TP invests so much into human development, but for me its crazy that they require to quantify everything. It feels that they just need these numbers to fill their nice statistics tables.. The same quantifyable results are expected from the students (so tests and exams prevail).

Even when talking about the need to preserve mature trees and green areas in the city, they talk about measuring "economical benefits". So you need to prove (in numbers) that having a piece of land covered by trees and grass instead of another shopping mall is economically sensible. Hard evidence needed! No wonder that there's less and less green stuff around.. The same goes for the casino debate. The oponents claim that the "social costs" will be higher than "economical benefits".. Its all about cost, making profit, economical benefits. If you can't argue in these terms, you lost the battle already. I'm still wondering amazed and learning..