Phew, what a weekend!!

On Friday, we had a memorial thing for my aunt L and put her ashes in the ground. The weather was fine, even kind of sunny when we got to the grave. But as soon as the urn touched the ground, a hell of a hailrain broke out and completely soaked all of us when it melted. So she was definitely present. Very sad and rough day anyway. It’s so incredibly empty and hard to understand.

We then spent the evening with the closest family members, except for me who had promised to visit Emil. And so I did, and we booked the tickets for the interrail, wihoo! I can’t really believe it’s actually happening. Although I can’t believe most things that are happening right now.

On Saturday, I showed Hannah around in Helsinki. We took the tram to the Olympic Stadium, and walked around Hesperia and then Töölö. From Ruoholahti to University of Helsinki by subway, and then a walk around the city center, followed by a few hours of shopping with Marie in Forum, where I ran into both Julle and Elina. Yay!

Out for dinner and back to Marie’s place for snacks and a movie. Nice Saturday (I walked a total of 10 + km, you’ll get that story later).

When we woke up on Sunday, we had planned to go have a morning swim and then Hannah would go home and do some things, Marie would go vote and help her brother with the terrace and the kids, and I was supposed to go to work. We had parliamentary elections, so I had an evening shift at HBL and an election night party at FSS to attend. Anyway, we got up around 13, went to the store looking like characters from Hangover 3, 4 & 5, bought everything we could possibly think of, and had an amazing brunch in bed, watching SATC. We probably got up again around 4, and they went to Porvoo and I cleaned up Marie’s apartment. Then I headed downtown to the office and started working. I did a 2-pager with the names and pictures of all the MP’s selected, ordered by party and, well it’s complicated. It took me  around 2 hours to finish the layout and put in the first 150 that probably would get in. Then I stayed updated and wrote down more and more, looked for new pictures and rearranged the people to have them in alphabetical order. I worked with this great team, two guys from the visual team  plus my boss who cheched in on us every 5-10 minutes to see if we’re still alive. I paid a short visit around 8.30 to the FSS office, had a piece of choclate  cake and hugged a lot of people.

Then back at the HBL office at 9 sharp, with a deadline at 12 and another at 1 am. At 10 to 12, only 96 % of the voted had been counted and the system was still messy, so the first draft was far from perfect. The later one on the other hand was perfectly set and in the right order, all names and pictures were right and it looked overall good. I just keep wondering how this was planned in the beginning, since everyone was superbusy (I heard someone say it was the mot stressful vening since the elections -94) and my job was a 5-6 hour thing. Crazy.

The feeling in the office was really good though, we had a live stream on our website from the middle of the office, and people were in a good mood. Both of the parties I root for (Green & Swedish People’s party) did good, but the True Finns-party “radical-right” was the second biggest and that’s both scary and annoying. A young candidate, Li Andersson, 27, from the Left Party smashed through and won big in her home quarters. She’s awesome. If she runs for president I’m voting.

I met a lot of cool people tonight, among them the actor Christoffer Strandberg, who has been doing a parody programme on famous politicians the last few weeks. I don’t know if he knows me (why would he?) but he said hi and it sounded like he recognised me from somewhere, so I sat down and talked to him. We talked about politics, the show, a little this and that. Really nice guy!

But anyway, I finished my day at 1 am, and got a taxicard from my boss (he’s the greatest guy seriously, not for the taxicard, but he and my supervisor are always cheering me on and caring for me and asking if I’m tired, or need anything to eat or drink or want to go home earlier for some reason) and then I took a taxi home. The driver was this awesome Somalian guy, and we talked the whole way home about politics and how we don’t like the racists in the True Finns party and so on. He was so friendly and told be about fleeing from Somalia to go to Finland, and that he+s studying to be a nurse and just works part-time as a taxi driver.

And now I’m at Marie’s place, and she’s been asleep for hours. And I’m tired too but at the same time so weirdly happy with everything that I had to blog about it. Tomorrow I’m free from work but I have a meeting in the evening. So I’m definitely going to sleep in. ZZZzz..