Birthday

This is the first birthday of my blog. It is unbelievable that a year has passed so quickly. The year has been wonderful! I have learned so much about using the internet and how to find content which is useful. I have met online so many wonderful people all over the world and through them about different cultures and also history. I have learned that the people behind those avatars and icons are real and that connecting through the net is nothing to be afraid of but brings many delightful moments to your life.

Now I am in front of great challenge. I will try to use a blog in teaching in a much larger scale and I will also try to convince more people to get connected by other means than e-mails only. All the experiences I have got are something that is not taught in the universities or schools but I will try to make my effort to change that.

Since I have such a big list of friends I would like to thank for help and support, I will only mention the one who got me into this and has been helping me all the way both technically and mentally.

Thank you Gil :) One year ago I still thought that this is not going to work!

Beauty Queen

As I have written before, Piitu has been attending dog shows. In match shows she has not been very successful before. In match shows the dogs go to the ring as pairs and the pairs are random; they are basically generated by the order the dogs are registered to the show. The two dogs can be totally different breed and even size. The other one gets a red ribbon and is the better one of that pair and the other one gets a blue ribbon. After the dogs have been divided in two, both groups are competing in their own group.

Piitu has got the blue ribbon in all match shows. While I was still in Israel, Piitu got the 4th place in the blue group! She got a bag full of dog food as a prize.
She also attended a real dog show in Raisio Turun elonäyttely. Now she finally got graded as excellent and was 4th in the Junior class.

Since my daughter is very keen on taking Piitu to these shows, we left again yesterday, this time for Helsinki. I think I have been sitting in cars a lot lately taking Piitu everywhere… On the way Piitu once again showed her spirit. She has a harness attached to the safety belt holder, but she decided to travel on the back. The picture is not very good because I was sitting on the front seat, the worst possible place to see her.

Piitu has finally started to understand what dog shows are about. Nowadays she can even stand still for a moment without sitting down and she is also walking in a more dignified manner. When we started, she wanted to run or to go to a totally different direction or she started to jump against Katri. The result was excellent also this time and 4th place in junior bitches.

After the show Piitu met another Corgi Pembroke which looked just like Piitu. At one point we were looking at the other dog and thought that Piitu had once again found a way to escape from the cage. There are small differences in colouring, but from many angles they are so alike!

Here is the "official" picture we took at home

After the show Piitu was very tired and slept and here is a picture which again shows how much cat-like Piitu is. I have never seen a Corgi who sleeps like this. One day she looked like the fox in Firefox logo when sleeping :)

Free Sudoku Puzzles to Your Mobile Phone

As if Sudoku wasn't addictive enough now it can be played right on a mobile phone for free. Until now I have had puzzles and pens in my bag to feed my addiction. Now I can leave them at home and use my mobile. Amazing experience!Even though I am not very keen on writing text messages I found out that I can play sudoku with just one hand. Check the details on the website and download your own puzzles

read more | digg story

Finnish vs. Hebrew

Sometimes when you read something and you have no idea what the book or article is talking about because it is either needlessly obscure or overly technical language, in English you use the expression that the text is like Greek to you (at least it is used in British – English). in Israel I learned that the Hebrew version of a similar language is Chinese.

The most amusing thing is that when we Finns don’t understand anything, we use the expression “That was totally Hebrew to me”. I even found the two meanings of the Finnish word Heprea in Wiktionary. There the other meaning is given by the word gibberish.

Our relationship with Hebrew caused some amusement in Israel also. I think that mainly these expressions refer to languages which use exceptional letters. If Finnish is used in this sense in some language, I would really like to know :)

The other funny thing happened when we were landing in Tel Aviv. There were many young people in the plane and when we were on the ground they started singing Shalom Aleichem, which literally means "Peace be upon you".

The song and the verse were familiar to us from the radio and it is a good example of misheard lyrics. Here is the song sung by a little girl and it includes only the necessary part. I found lots of songs in YouTube, but this was the best to demonstrate my point.

What we Finns hear is a Finnish sentence: “Ne vei mun sanomalehden.” The translation to the sentence is “They took my newspaper away” or “They stole my newspaper”. The Finnish version is not exactly written Finnish but it is totally exact when we use spoken Finnish.

I just wonder if this describes the difference between Israeli’s and Finns. They bring the peace to us and we are complaining that they took our newspaper!