My boss in the garment industry understands the importance of good employee care, it must be said. Amenities in the office have escalated from a fruit bowl to a Nespresso machine and now to a PUPPY.
Here with mirror image for your doubled viewing pleasure.
Perceived results in employee efficiency: Employees eagerly arrive at work, and then don't get much work done.
It's January. Enough said.
Midwinter is terror and magic. Snow, achingly cold and beautiful. Outer space and its mysteries, almost close enough to touch. Days of icy, grey rain so desperate that no human should have to endure them. Days of sparkle and cold that freezes your breath and kills in minutes. Midwinter is immediate danger and exotic adventure. Cars skidding off the road, dogs playing in the snow, sleds and skates and skis.
In midwinter, there is death and despair. In January 2021, so many people are balancing on the edge.
But I pray and hope and learn to live.
A faint whooshing sound, barely audible, caught Dak’s attention. It was a very familiar sound and it did something strange to his heart.
Neither of them had said anything for hours - Xandor wasn’t much for small talk with a slave and spent a lot of time half-asleep anyway - but Dak’s loneliness suddenly reached new heights.
He said quietly, 'They’re powering up the engines.'
Xandor didn’t react at first and Dak wondered if he was asleep again. Then he replied, just as softly, 'Yes. We’re leaving for Earth One. Royard will be doing a night shift in the pilot’s seat.'
Dak had somehow managed to forget that. His world had strangely shrunk to only include the most immediate, concrete facts and fears of his existence. The world outside these bulkheads was receding into a dream.
The whoosh was accompanied by a distant clang and other vague noises. He recognised them all - this was the airlock being secured, that was the mooring being disengaged. He closed his eyes and imagined himself in the pilot’s chair. It was suddenly so real that he expected to feel the smooth shape of the helm control in his right hand and hear the scratchy voice from the station traffic control operator in his ears.
The engine noise rose to a smooth buzz. The ship vibrated softly in response. He would now be saying his goodbyes to the operator and shifting the helm control ever so slowly to set the Sky Vixen in motion.
His right hand twitched. There was no helm control under it.
Dak pressed his sleeve against his face to stop the tears.
Xandor’s voice was so gentle that he nearly didn’t hear it. 'It will be alright, boy. Go to sleep now.'
Twenty twenty, the twenty-year anniversary of my graduation and my new life. Oh yes, and a pandemic that stopped life in the whole world.
* New Year out on the town with a clergyman, blueberry bubbly and old movies.
* New Year's resolution: to feel loved and alive and creative and see a bit more of the world (haha!).
* Helsinki trip: vintage shopping, the science museum, the most wonderful library in the world, battling crowds at the Lux festival of fiery art.
* Exiled from my home due to renovations - spent a lot of time working in cafés, libraries and my mother's sofa. Learned that I really, really need peace and quiet.
* Community theatre play - Two for One, funny - and tea with the Ski Club in my childhood hoods.
* Twenty-twenty party with a reenactment of The Divine Comedy in an old church - inferno with moral tales and a cembalo (a diabolical instrument in my opinion) in the eerie basement vaults, purgatory where I got to play the enormous church organ, paradise in the attic where we climbed the roof beams and studied the ancient clock mechanism and several hundred year old graffiti.
* Extended my laptop collection to 5 pcs.
* Asbestos in my house, and a cold colour in my hair after a lifetime of warmth.
* A winter of no winter, then a spring with a lot of winter (snow and a thunderstorm with snow).
* Badminton with the boys. I played worse and worse.
* Volleyball tournament with the funniest, if not the best, team. I was attacked by a genuine pitbull and played against a sumo wrestler with a fashion sense.
* Learned how to put a cast on a leg.
* The pandemic arrived, my trip to Italy was cancelled, Finland was put into a state of emergency and lockdown. My work continued at a little more distance than usual. Two and a half months of emergency consisted for me mostly of Star Trek and personal protection equipment.
* Volunteered in food distribution to the needy. It involved frozen princess cake, rotten bananas, canned snails and some really cool people.
* Studied personal protection equipment and became qualified in advising firefighters on which breathing apparatus they should choose.
* Birthday: a hike with friends and slightly outdated banana cake, reading in the sun, pizza and action movie with a man.
* Alternative Italy trip in the neighbourhood: a creek was Venice, a crooked fir tree was the leaning tower, a deserted camp site was Florence. Picnic in chilly sunshine with raspberry pastries and Nordic mead and a view over water and birds.
* Found out that I work for the kind of boss who gets sued for slander and is found guilty and gets his hunting rifles impounded by the police (all due to local politics and the feuding it begets. Stay out of politics).
* Funeral for my uncle in pandemic times: outdoor service in cold spring sunshine. Then highland beef stew with lots of laughs on a farm owned by family for generations. Then a picnic at the summer house, with cake, football and sunbathing in our funeral finest. My uncle would have approved.
* Scary crisis when one of my nearest and dearest had a stroke. He survived and recovered.
* Foot spa get-together with friends, online. Wine and the scent of peppermint.
* Celebrated the start of summer and (temporary) end of pandemic restrictions with a friend and a bottle of wine by the sea. We talked until the sun shone from a northern angle in among the dandelions.
* Planted lilacs and daisies.
* Moved furniture here and there over all the town, all summer.
* Beachvolley weekend with hot weather, modern cathedrals, corona concerns and brunch arguments.
* Drove a boat in scary conditions despite my general sea-unworthiness. Found a paradisical, hidden beach with dark coffee and a mystery.
* Night of the Arts, corona edition: explored the visual arts of friends and enemies, chamber music and hip hop dance. And big band jazz from my balcony, against my will.
* Road trips out of my comfort zone (scared of my car breaking down but being courageous about it). Saw ancient churches, great beaches, waffles and cupcakes, a lot of forest.
* Witnessed a house lifting operation.
* Picnics and barbecues.
* My first ever team-building day at work. A hike and fake champagne, a luxury lunch, checking out the competition.
* An August with many wilderness nights alone in the forest, with candles, Netflix, books, pizza and the most perfect peace. And melancholia.
* The year of meetings. Staff meetings just because, church team-leader meetings, virtual Friday night "meetings" with friends over wine.
* Realised that my mother has the beginning of dementia and a tendency to fall over.
* Got acquainted with Pilates balls, a really strange method of exercising.
* Visited an artists' collective.
* A rare night out on the town with a new friend, deep talk, music and dancing - on a night when the virus tore through our town (making it one of the worst places in Europe for a while) and forced it to close down. At least I got my dancing done before that happened.
* Course in altered book art journalling, loved it and scorned at the same time. I'm a conflicted artist.
* Dreamed a lot and wrote a lot.
* Had a man fall deeply in love with me. Turned him down.
* An October of living in the midst of the pandemic.
* Wolves nearly at my office door.
* Virtual reality games - it turned out I'm a natural-born talent at swinging light sabres.
* Road trip to the depressing neighbour city for a spot of shopping and new perspectives (travelling goals had to be adjusted this year).
* Bought an expensive bottle of gin. I don't even like gin.
* Fabulous work Christmas party with luxury food on a snowy Tuesday afternoon.
* Art experiments involving matchboxes and glitter.
* Christmas with family and strangers, a snarling dog and photos from the 50s.
Work-related issues: the mysterious life of eels, subtitling (for the deaf) a crash course in death metal growling, fabrics, Kalevala in beautiful Swedish, how elks sound when they are in heat (again, subtitling it for the deaf), doing a search on the zulu version of Wikipedia, sleeping bags for pro footballers, how to certify kneepads.
The year in general: Exploding head syndrome and forest walks, rediscovering childhood fairytales and favourite novels, scifi from my teens, lots of chocolate cake to celebrate that we're still alive, writing space opera.
First time events: frying asparagus, paddling a kayak, making banana pancakes, playing virtual reality games.
Quote of the year: "No-one has greater love than he who smears sauerkraut juice on his friends' cars."
We welcomed the year of hope, 2021, in a dark, snowy garden. I twirled my long skirt, waved sparklers and shouted, caught in that electric elation of watching fireworks explode and a new year being born.
The fireworks and the party were tiny, as befits a pandemic year. We spent hours playing a card game called Virus, trying to infect each other's vital organs. One of the kids screamed at me, "WE ALL HATE YOU" and I still didn't win. We amused ourselves with drinking strawberry wine, made in a local old wizard's subterranean vaults (all of us survived), and with the Finnish tradition of telling our fortunes by melting toxic tin and then trying to interpret its solidified shapes.
According to the tin, my destiny this year is to meet a tall, dark dinosaur. After a year like 2020, who is even surprised?