Found Luggage

American called, they found my luggage and are dropping it off soon. Now I can relax, the rest of my clothes, some tea, my housekeys (on a knife, I forgot to take them out of my pocket before I left), and a few small things I picked up will not need to be replaced.

Back Home, Lost Luggage

I got back at around 8:30 tonight and found out that the one piece of baggage that I checked got lost. I’ve been up for almost 24 hours now and am going to sleep. American’s looking for the bag and I’ll deal with it tomorrow, after I’ve slept.

Some Sightseeing in Helsinki

I had a little time to walk around Helsinki and do some sightseeing today. My first stop was L. C. Engel’s Cathedral, then on to Uspenski Cathedral. The cathedral was beautiful and they even had an icon and relic of St. Seraphim of Sarov that, according to the people there, was bought at an antique store and donated to the curch. After that I went down to the Orthodox book store and was given a book with some pretty good photos of Finnish Orthodox churches. On the way I got to take some pictures of a smaller Orthodox church, unfortunately all on film, so they haven’t been posted yet.

After getting back to the hotel I dropped off the cameras and headed back out for some dinner at Lappi Ravintola. They serve traditional Lapp cuisine and other Finnish dishes. I had some sauteed reindeer on mashed potatoes with lingonberries. For dessert some Finnish blue cheese. All delicious, and I’ll be coming back the next time I’m in Helsinki.

The digital pictures are posted here and here.

St. Alexander Church

I got a little time before sunset to visit St. Alexander Church in Turku. It’s right off the market square, and I’ve walked past it a dozen times, never realizing that it was an Orthodox church. The architecture is radically different than the typical Orthodox church. It was designed by Carl Engel and was built from 1839 – 1846. I got some good pictures of it that will be up on St. Maximus’s wall when I get back.

Back In Finland

After 13 hours on two planes and 3 more hours on a train I’m back in Turku, Finland for a week. The weather’s a little colder than Dallas/Ft. Worth, but at least this time there are some leaves on the trees!

Not much going on this week except for work, so there probably won’t be many updates until this coming weekend.

New Flooring

Operation Replace The Carpet has started. I just finished placing an order to get slate tile and laminate flooring installed in three rooms downstairs. The dining room and library are getting laminates and the wierd room (I really don’t know what to call it) is going to have the slate tiles installed. The closet under the stairs is getting some extremely cheap laminate just to finish it out.

This is the first step in a project to get rid of all of the wall-to-wall carpet in the house. With my allergies it’s just not a good idea to have something on the floors whose only job is to trap everything I’m allergic to.

Pascha Rewrite Complete

I finished it tonight, after spending an hour bumming some code, getting rid of extra variables, and generally cleaning things up. I’ve updated the record at PalmGear.com and it’s ready to be downloaded.

The new app takes up 8k on the handheld and runs just as smoothly as before. The only problem is that the database I use to store the prefs in has changed format when I switched from NSBasic to C so the old version must be uninstalled before installint this one or else it’ll crash and force you to do a soft reset.