"I'm Still Alive"

Recent times have been dominated by late mornings due to laziness, late nights due to work, general lazing around, productive working on my thesis (seriously !) and, as time has gone on, spending more time buried in the Lonely Planet guide to Iran which M and I got from the library a few weeks back. Looks like a great place, full of interesting stuff, suitable for our budget (which is a diplomatic way of saying "dirt cheap" and we can fly into Turkey and out of Armenia in September for next to nothing. I called the consul in Helsinki yesterday who seemed to suggest that getting a visa would be an absolute breeze. I'd like to think I believe him. In any case, the trip seems to be getting off the ground although, without any flights booked, it's tempting fate to write that. I'll do it anyway though, 'cos that's just the kind of guy I am.

Last weekend I played golf. It's the first time I've ever done it and before I never really saw the point, thinking of it as a lazy man's sport. Having spent an afternoon on the greens (or, more usually, in the trees trying to dig my ball out of a rut of tree roots) I still think it's a lazy man's sport. However, I've realised that, as a lazy man myself, I quite like it. The fact that it was 27 degrees and sunny did no harm at all to this pseudo-sport's impression on me, nor did the fact that I came joint first out of a group of myself, M and her parents, both of whom play it regularly. The stiff arms I had to put up with for three days afterwards was a small price to pay and I'm tempted to do it again.

I'm also quite a fan of golf of the crazy variety - M and I have a bet going. We play a game every couple of weekends and whoever has the most wins by the end of the summer gets a steak dinner courtesy of the other. After 2 games, I'm 2 games up. Golf doesn't get any better than that.

Other than Iran and golf, there's nothing much really going on. The foreigners in Finland are sitting around waiting for the summer to arrive, and the Finns are happy that the summer has already arrived. The Africans living here, I'd imagine, are probably waiting for the end of the winter. Tomorrow I'm going to write some more thesis and then go to work. I'm sure this is not what life is supposed to be like but, given that it's not -25 and that I don't have to plough my way through 2 metres of snow to go anywhere (like my extremely exciting visit to Pasila library to get some books today) I'm happy to put up with it until something more interesting comes along....

So for now, as the Iranians would say (and will say to me in September, inch'allah) Kheyli mamnum and khoda hafez....