Frak That

« After the ice storm; Minnesota, 1964-ish. Taken by my Grandfather. »

The upside of a 3-day weekend spent doing nothing particularly useful and instead visiting friends, eating, sleeping, walking the dog and watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD is that it is very relaxing. The downside of such a weekend is feeling badly about all the lofty goals of cleaning the house and organizing your sock drawer that your weak, lazy self avoided even thinking about for 72 hours straight. Well, maybe not that badly. :) Except for all the email that I've not yet caught back up on. I keep trying to reply to email only to have the replies to the replies come faster than I can reply. A few weeks off the grid is good for the soul and bad for the desire to hop back on.

My brother-in-law gave me his set of Battlestar Galactica: Season 1 DVDs before I left the US which I was all excited about seeing since I was a big fan of the original show back in the dark ages of polyester and disco, but after watching the first episode or two I was completely lost. I asked around and found out that there was a mini-series that aired a year before that was essential watching before moving onto the full series which is something people eagerly awaiting BSG's arrival in Finland on SubTV later this month will want to be aware of. The series is quite good, even excellent, but there is one continuing theme that runs through every episode that bothers me. Apparently the creators of the new show have taken the whole idea of the survival of the remains of the human race and decided to give it a familiar socio-political topic; the cylons are monotheistic fundamentalist robots without souls who look like humans and the humans are polytheistic victims of terrorists attempting genocide, both invoking god or the gods frequently. While it is an excellently written and filmed show, I just don't know that I appreciate the holy war/biblical aspect no matter how philosophical it tries to be though I've not yet seen a human ask a captive Cylon why they decided to nuke the colonies back to the stone age. I hope they get to that at some point as that might give this particular aspect of the story a bit of needed depth. And for the record, I really hate the frakking frak-ing all the time. Frak them and the frakking frak they frakked in on. Let's hope they don't bring back the robot dog, muffit. Frakkers.

On New Year's it rained on top of a very wet snow which then froze into treacherous ice on the sidewalks and just about everywhere else, including the dog parks. Poor Otava has been behaving rather well considering we can't take him to the dog park and we try to only walk him on streets without ice or plenty of grit to give us both traction. Three cheers for the cranky old ladies who live on Bulevardi, the only street with immaculately clear sidewalks in town. There seems little point to winter if there's no snow to go with the cold and the dark.

The dog food poisoning scare in the US has finally reached Finland and since I didn't see the story translated in the usual local English news outlets, I thought I would mention that some of the tainted food may have been shipped to Finland and that pet owners should visit the Diamond Pet Foods page for more information. The stories of dogs knowing something wasn't right with the food and the owners adding gravy and such to make it more palatable only to have the dogs die are just awful and it breaks my heart just reading them as who hasn't done that occasionally to a dog's meal? The company appears to be doing everything it can to do the right thing by being very public with the information and paying the vet bills for victims.