Just received a message from the faculty office saying that forty copies of my dissertation had just landed there. I think this means that I can now go to the printing house to get my own copies as well. Things are moving fast.

The principles of open access, in societies that cherish such principles, have long demanded that academic theses, like most information, need to be available to everyone (these days, usually, on the net). I just broke these principles. To make a long story short, I decided against electronic publication (in addition to the paper version) because I'm hoping to have a chance to publish at least part of the dissertation later elsewhere (abroad), and publishers generally prefer to publish material that is not already freely available online. But I'm glad the said principles are so alive and strong here; in effect, I had to pay 320 euro to prevent the publication of "the damn thing" (a commonly used synonym for "this study I've been working on for several years") online. This is because the university only pays for the faculty copies if the candidate agrees to publish the text electronically as well.

The last time someone finished a PhD at our department was two years ago. Now it seems people are looking forward to the event "as if it were the moon rising", to translate an untranslatable Finnish phrase. The decisive moment, i.e. the public defense (another product of the principles mentioned above), is still more than three weeks away, but I already get a lot of weird smiles and questions about things like stage fever. It's almost as if others are feeling the excitement for me. And some people I haven't seen in years are getting interested. For example, I heard, via a chain of people, that a cousin of mine who has a doctorate in chemistry might want to come and see the humanist (commonly used synonym for humanoid) cousin perform in public. 16:13

I've been in Finland for two weeks now, and all that time the temperature has stayed roughly at the same figures as in Uganda. People tell me it hasn't rained here since midsummer.

I wrote the following last Sunday:

There are some people who used to stop by this blog to see if I’ve added anything. That habit should have worn out by now, just like my habit of writing something and posting it here oddly did.

Right now I’m sitting in a hotel room in Rauma, a town of about 40,000 people on the west coast of Finland, but it’ll probably take another day for this to end up online, since I decided that connecting my laptop to the net for a day is definitely not worth the fifteen euro they charge here. In Rauma, it is generally not a good idea to let people know you were born in Pori, as I was. In ice hockey, those who support Rauman Lukko loathe everything Porin Ässät represents, and vice versa. The distance between the two towns is only about 50 km, which is enough to maintain certain matters of principle. For a player to move from one club to the other is like changing nationality. As a rule, it does not happen. I just read in the paper that it took a couple of years for the managing director of the Pori Jazz festival to reveal in public that she was in fact born in Rauma. The rivalry is obviously more severe than in Tampere, where a wrong answer to the “Ilves or Tappara” question may be the most secure method of acquiring bruises late at night.

The reason I’m here is that my friend Jani, a barefoot “Raumese” – who does know I have roots in Pori – got married yesterday. The party venue was a place called Aarnkari, where you have the Baltic Sea on three sides of the building. The view to the open water is blocked by islands to the extent that it looks like a lake environment. It turned out to be one of those warm, perfectly still summer evenings when it feels one can make the colours of the sky change at will. From blue to purple, from light yellow to dark red. But that gleaming brightness is always there in the sky at least until midnight, even though it’s August already.

Inside, the band (young local guys who liked improvising and changing tempo all the time) played in the open loft because the main space has nothing like a stage of any kind. You didn’t know where the music came from until you looked up. It was like an indoor balcony facing the room from the side, and the guys had just enough room under the roof to stand with their backs straight while they played. From time to time, the lead man walked out on the support beams, as sure-footed as a monkey, and sang directly above the dance floor.

I got back to the hotel around two a.m. and now, after breakfast, am preparing for the two-hour drive back to Tampere. Well, it’s Sunday, so let’s say an hour and 40 minutes.

16:29