November 22nd, 2007

Well it is Thanksgiving, and I have a lot to be thankful for. I am grateful for my wife, and my family and friends. I am very grateful for my health, as well as the opportunity to be able to do what I love and to do it well. I am very grateful to be living in the United States, especially when I get to see how so many other people in this world live. There isn´t any where else that I would want to live.
Even though today is Thanksgiving, it is very unlikely that I will be eating turkey today. I am still in Finland and I won´t be back home until the 3rd or 4th of December, so I still have a way to go on this trip. It has been nice so far, but I am still having a hard time adjusting to the time change. I was exhausted last night before bed, and I thought that surely I would have no trouble at all sleeping through the night. However, to my dismay, I woke up around two o´clock and wan´t able to fall back asleep until 9 o’clock. I have been reading all day for a class that I have at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and it has been a struggle staying awake. One of the guys on the trip said that he will share some of his ambien tonight, so hopefully I can get on schedule. Anyway getting back to turkey, I don´t think that I will be having any. There is a pretty good chinese restaurant here though so I guess that the closest that I will get to turkey and cranberry sauce will be sweet and sour chicken. I hope everyone back home eats plenty of turkey and all of the fixins for me.
There are a lot of things that are easy to take for granted while at home but later become very important when you don´t have access to those things any more. For example, being able to do laundry whenever you want to is very convenient. Usually on these trips it is rare to find a laundromat or access to a washer and a dryer. I do a lot of my own laundry in the shower. I try my best to give everything a good scrubbing, but it just ins´t the same as a machine could do. Then you have all of this wet laundry hanging up in cramped quarters and the room starts to smell. On this trip for example, there are three of us to a room and one of the guys hasn´t been washing or even rinsing his stuff out in the shower so it reeks of nasty, mildewy, sweaty, stink. Fortunately it is hanging up in the bathroom so we can close the door to try to keep the stink monster in small quarters, but when you open the door to use the bathroom the smell just hits you in the face. Luckily though he told me that he is going to do a load of laundry tonight, he found a machine, and that makes me extremely happy. There are so many little things that happen on these trips that I forget to mention that I wish that someone would make a reality show out of these trips so that everyone could see what goes on here. I am sure that it would be very entertaining. Last night after dinner, one of my roommates and I went to a store called Prima. This store is kind of like a finnish Walmart. We went there to kill some time, but then I got the idea to look for a pillow while I was there because the one that is here in the room isn´t that great. It has been like sleeping on a blanket that is folded in half, very uncomfortable. I was looking for a king size pillow, and they didn´t have one so I went with the next biggest one that I could find. When I got to the register it was more expensive than what I thought that it had said on the shelf where I got it from. I told the cashier that I wanted to exchange it for the one that was less expensive. I took the bigger pillow with me to take it back and get the cheaper, smaller one, but after I got to the aisle, I decided to just stay with the bigger one. When I got back to the front of the line at the cash register looked at me funny and laughed because I came back with the same pillow. It wasn´t that embarrassing, probably because I don´t speak finnish so I figured that if the cashier did say something about it I wouldn´t have even known what she said. Now that I just wrote that down, it actually doesn´t seem that funny so I guess I should scratch that reality show idea.
Anyway, I hope that you can all be with your families on this Thanksgiving, and I also hope that you have a lot to be thankful for. Take care everyone and have a happy Thanksgiving.