* Cocktails and an anomaly: a volleyball game on the TV screen in the pub, to the joy of me and a handful of hardcore fans.
* Lost my dearest neighbour,the best widow in the house, the one who first saw me in pyjamas and who could tell me what the view out of the window looked like in the Sixties.
* Endured a few months in a gym with coldhearted people, stuffy changing rooms and excellent dance classes.
* Stocktake: counting ten thousand pieces of clothing plus a few reindeer hides.
* Composed a 10-page quality plan without knowing what a quality plan is. (Brought back memories of every essay I ever wrote at university.) For a company that was went bust a couple of weeks later. (Irony not lost on anyone.)
* Weeks and weeks of compiling business statistics for lack of anything better to do. Never thought I would look at spreadsheets as a source of entertainment.
* Second-hand shopping in Suicide City with an unusual man and a GPS navigator that favoured cow paths. I learned that Toyota apparently does sewing machines too, bright orange ones.
* Lived in suburbia for three weeks during the most desperately depressing phase of winter. Cheered myself up with dog walks, good espresso and lounging in front of a real fire.
* Abrupt end to my new career in the clothing industry when I came back from my lunch break one day and was told to pack my stuff as company was bankrupt.
* Abrupt start of my new career as audiovisual translator when I was headhunted by a tattoo-heavy rock'n'roll biker dude. Visit to a strange little television company where I was crammed with new software skills.
* Return to the Little Shop of Harmony (the job I left a year earlier) for a few days of work among books and people.
* Went to a concert to hear a Nineties pop star (Jenny from Ace of Base). She can still sing.
* Debut as fanfiction writer.
* Visit to Helsinki, star-struck by the city lights. Everything was a delight - the four-hour train ride, the hostel that had birdsong in the bathrooms, the mozzarella sticks, watching football over a beer with the locals and the Japanese tourists - but most of all the urban air. Must have walked five hundred miles just to take it all in.
* Hen party with Finns and Russians - shabam-core-stretching, film discussion in a sauna, too much thai food, a club that wouldn't let us in and one that did. The dancing went on for a very long time.
* Another visit to the nation's capital, this time in a hostel with less birdsong but more exotic people. A glorious evening walk in an odd part of the city and the dubious pleasure of sleeping in a 20-person dorm - rocked to sleep by Russian whispering.
* A three-day wine picnic by the rivers of Germany with a woman who cuts dead people for a living. Highlights included a bowl of carrot soup in a twilit garden, and a bomb scare.
* A wedding. I cried, charmed a whole table of introverted bachelors, tied a ribbon into a stranger's beard and endured forced labour afterwards with the cleaning-up. Will never go to a wedding again.
* Guided tour in a garbage truck factory and a preacher museum. Just another day in the life of a translator.
* Scary and unsafe and yet the best job I've ever had: subtitling TV shows while sitting in the sun on a balcony overlooking the sea, sipping coffee.
* Day on a deserted island with a laptop, an excavator and a man.
* Watched the icehockey world championship final with friends. Someone bit me in the knee when Finland lost.
* A summer lunch in the cemetery (with the thought "Maybe I'm sitting on my future grave?") and a National Ballet show in the market square.
* Summer cider evenings with a seaview and a friend, and this year's only cigarette.
* Coldest midsummer ever with gang of friends, almost-midnight-sun and a concert with an American artist who arrived by helicopter.
* Watched the traditional old-school boat race on the Island with friends, my mother, my friends' mothers, my mother's friends...
* Summer of my dreams: five weeks on the beach far from everything with family, books, beachvolley, water games and a hot, hot sun. And no worries about returning to work. Enchanting additions to this summer included shrews, squirrel babies, and locals who let me refill water canisters free of charge.
* Camembert and cannoli at the European food market where vendors greet you with "bonjour" or "buongiorno". Melts a cold Finnish heart every time.
* Became a half-hearted fan of junior football, either roasting or freezing in the bleachers.
* Sampled the best of a summer in the city: giggling among the beautiful people on a summer's evening with crazy friends, watching beachvolley championships barefoot in the bleachers with icecream.
* The Night of Arts, this town's annual carnival day. Personal highlights included an Orthodox church crypt (not at all what you would expect), Shetland ponies, an enchanting tango show in a back room, "Whiskey In The Jar" and overdosing on tea in an artist's studio. The best thing about this annual chaos is always ending up in the weirdest parts of the city.
* An August of electrical storms - like the one that went of for an entire afternoon and almost slaughtered the city while I was trying to keep four kids and one dog calm, or the completely silent ones that brightened the midnight sky.
* The end of summer: cousins and Norwegians, bonfires, country roads in harvest time, the silence of a million stars, bittersweetness.
* Emergency-babysitting two kids, an experience not unlike that of trying to contain a bunch of wasps after giving their nest a good shake.
* Peaceful last coffee break ever in my old workplace, the Little Shop of Harmony, which now closed its doors for good. Nostalgia but a sense of grace.
* Free tickets to the theatre: Edith the crazy poet, me, my intellectual friends, silver shoes.
* A few boisterous Saturday nights in a bilingual Irish pub packed to the rafters with all kinds of humanity. In the company of the girl who reads Camus in French and drinks me under the table, and the stone-sober girl who only reads Fifty Shades of Grey. Or the scruffy guy of rough hands and a kind heart. A good time was had by all and we got through the list of selected beers.
* My first senior citizens' trip, at least 25 years too early, across the pond to Sweden: sunny landscapes, great seafood, a sing-along, hilarious elderly gentlemen.
* Autumn days wrapped in wool, warmed by the laptop on my lap or the fireplace at my side.
* Harvest feast with an abundance of melted chocolate.
* A world-class gospel concert with my teenage crush, a boy I knew in third grade, and a one-time card-game partner - all of them now professional musicians - and familiar faces all around. Suddenly it was 1992 again.
* Lunches in my ex-workplace just to confuse the boss who fired me.
* There is a first time for everything - like editing web pages, digging out ancient Finnish poems, job interviews on Skype.
* Walked like Quasimodo for a few days.
* Work that brought freedom but also hours upon hours of installing software, reading instructions, learning how to use strange databases and convert files. And wondering what would explode first, my laptop or my brain.
* A really weird party in a fancy villa, stone sober, with wasted women, bemused bachelors and a privately guided art tour.
* An international night with input from Honduras, Nigeria and the U.S.A. and the reminder that a dark, dangerous winter lies ahead. The night ended around a bottle of wine with friends as a storm howled outside and the reminder that I have survived Finnish winters before.
* Trendy Saturday brunch on raw food and liquorice balls.
* Computer courses - the same ones I've taken before and forgot all about.
* Weekend in Tampere with the girls: mad laughter, Spanish tapas, Beaujolais Noveau, cozying up in bed watching Bones and Magic Mike, spilling scented candles all over the IKEA parking lot.
* Barely made it past Christmas Eve with family before crashing down with the flu. Thank God I have friends with the good sense to give me DVD box sets for Christmas.
* Singles party on New Year's Eve. Singles party! This is SO not me. Fell head over heels in love with life.
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