Breathing hard with a big stick

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Since the Christmas musak and tchotchkes begins sometime in October it would be Christmas every 5.5 days, or thereabouts, if it was spread throughout the year. I'm not sure if a pikkupikkujoulu once a week would be preferable to the 2.5 month binge on holiday cheer the world seems to go nuts over, but it might be more relaxing. Christmas is just too damn manic in a manic time of year. It's no wonder it drives people to drink.

I might also register my disdain for the plastic tree the resident association put up in the common area this year. Granted, last year it crapped needles everywhere but that might have been due to putting it up over a month before Christmas next to the radiator and never watering it. Plastic trees just bring out the grinch in me.

I managed to survive my first game of sähly [pronounced SAH-loo with a short a and breathy h.], a.k.a. Finnish floorball. As a former Catholic school girl who was once a vicious player of field hockey, a game where 11 repressed teenage girls in skirts entertain their homicidal urges by running around with hardwood mallets while chasing a billiard ball and whacking each other in the legs, I was somewhat disappointed by how tame the game seemed. :) Not one coworker tried to shatter my kneecap with the lightweight plastic stick the game is played with. Of course, I'm about 20 years out of shape for competitive sports so it's a good thing that we weren't armed or dangerous. The guys at Nokia House in Boston had a team, but they took it seriously and never invited me to play which, judging how much like an oaf I was this evening, was likely a wise choice on their part. Regardless, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be and I'll have to go find a good stick of my own to play with sometime soon. Even being a n00b, I still didn't look quite so, uh, goofy as the Arkéomon which seems to be the, just guessing here, the sähly team for the archeology department at U of H. Well, ok, I probably did only I didn't have to wear the suit. :)