The Most Punctual Airline of Manchester

Troy enjoying the room service in Manchester, England.

That is what American Airlines claimed in Manchester, England and we found out why they are so punctual. Our flight from Helsinki to Manchester got delayed by an hour due to a snowstorm so when we finally arrived to Manchester, we had about 5 minutes before the flight to Chicago would take off. There were about 20 of us trying to make the connecting flight and they piled us into a van and started driving us towards the departure gate. As we pulled around the corner, we could hear "the gate is already closed" through the walkie-talkie and saw the airplane pull away from the gate. Needless to say, we did not make that flight since American Airlines did not make any effort to wait for us, which didn't make us very happy since they had sold us the ticket with very short layovers. After it was concluded that we did not make that flight, we were dropped off at the arrival gate without any directions on what to do next. After wandering around for a while, we found the right desk and started to negotiate our flights to U.S. We had missed the last flight to U.S that day so we had to stay in Manchester until the next day. Troy was supposed to be going back to work the next day so we were not too happy about this delay; however, they did put us in a nice hotel and paid for all our meals. We took a train to the downtown of Manchester and came back to the hotel with the conclusion that there really wasn't anything worth seeing in Manchester. If we would have been stuck in London or Paris, it could have been cool. We did enjoy some good meals and a good night sleep.

We are used to long travel time since we go to Europe twice a year; however, as our flights went Manchester-Chicago, Chicago-Dallas and Dallas-Tucson, I was almost in tears during the last flight because I was exhausted and sick of airplanes. We got home around 8 pm and I had to go to work at 7 am the following morning. Fortunately, our bodies were still in Finland time so we were able to get up early without any problems. 

Also, I should mention that Troy got into the graduate school program at U of A so now we have two students in the house again. School starts this week and it will be an interesting semester ahead. I will be doing pediatric nursing and medical/surgical nursing this semester and I need to apply to nurse externship programs for the summer. 

I will post some pictures later since I can't do it the way I like on Safari.

Burning Chapel

Our church chapel in Tampere (my hometown) burned this morning. They don't know if it is an arson or an accident;nevertheless, it won't be in use for a long time. The roof burned so badly that collapsed. All of the kids in my family were blessed in that chapel as well as baptized, my parents were married in there since they wasn't a temple in Northern Europe at that point and my mom's funeral/memorial was held there. It is weird how a simple building can be so much part of your family history. As I was reading about it, I guess that is only the second chapel that has burned worldwide and it will take few years to build another one. It will be interesting to see where the two wards will meet until then since the closest chapel is about an hour away.

Hyvää Uutta Vuotta! Happy New Year!

Can you believe it's already 2008? We had a fun New Year celebration. We went out for dinner and Troy tasted some snails (my dad likes them), played some board games and then went to the city to watch fireworks and a New Year program that the city of Helsinki had put together. There were tons of people in the city; most of them were very jolly due to their alcohol consumption, but we still enjoyed doing the count down and being part of the Helsinki tradition. It was interesting to notice that we heard more foreign languages than Finnish around us. I haven't come up with any new year resolutions yet, but I think it will be a good year. Last year was a reminder for us how quickly things can change and I hope to make this year a great one.






I decided that blonds don't really have more fun and dyed my hair back to brown. The one thing I love about coming home is the supply of my sisters' clothes and accessories etc that I get to share with them for few weeks. Anna got some heat rollers for Christmas and decided to test them out last night. Sadly, our hair is so fine that curls don't stick around for too long.

Love, food and family= fabulous Christmas

We have been enjoying our vacation so much that I have not even been blogging. Or maybe you can say that we have been so wonderfully lazy that I have not even blogged. However, I try to think of the blog as a substitute for a journal, I should be better about updating it. We obviously arrived to Finland safely; however, this time the traveling seemed more taxing than usual. It must have been the five hour lay-over in Chicago before a seven hour flight and the three hour lay-over in Manchester that made the travel time feel like forever.

The one disappointment about this Christmas was the lack of snow. We have not seen the sun for a week now because it has been so cloudy so it's difficult to know what time of the day it is when you look outside. Usually the snow makes it lighter and obviously more beautiful. We had a wonderful Christmas with all of the usual Christmas traditions. Even though we don't have any small children in our family right now, we were all very excited about opening our presents.
Before opening presents, we read the Christmas story from Luke and sang Christmas songs. If we had kids, Santa Claus would come and visit us on Christmas Eve and hand out the presents to us.

In Finland, the whole country shuts down for Christmas. Everything closes after 12 pm on Christmas Eve and stores and such don't open until the 27th. It is quite the contrast to the U.S and I think it really brings the Christmas spirit and gives an opportunity to spend quality time with a family. Our sleeping schedule has been messed up since we have been up until 2 am most nights playing games or watching a movie. Troy and I are usually in bed by 10 pm so it has been quite the change, but that's what a vacation is about:)

Our family picture for 2007.

We went ice-skating the weekend before Christmas. Our feet and ankles got pretty tired very quickly but it was fun to get out and do something different.


One of the Christmas traditions in Finland is taking a candle to the cemetery to a family member's grave. It might sound creepy if you have not experienced it, but it is beautiful and peaceful. This happens on the Christmas Eve and it is beautiful as you can see thousands of candles lit as it is pitch black outside. Mom's grave site is two hours away from Helsinki so we did not drive there but we took a candle to my dad's grandma's grave.


Troy and I also decided to be get out of the house and went to the Young Single Adult dance last night. Troy bought me a nice dress for Christmas so it was fun to get to wear it for more exciting occasion than church. I love dancing and there are not too many chances for that as a married couple, so I enjoyed the time on the dance floor. I will post some pictures as I get them from our friends.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and enjoyed the time with family and friends.

The Nursing Uniform

I wear this beautiful uniform three days a week. I guess I don't have to worry about my outfits for those days (like I would worry about them anways). That picture was taken on my birthday last April. I got those beautiful flowers and fun games from Troy. If I don't look overly joyful, it's because I actually found out about my mom's cancer on my birthday, which is also my dad's birthday, so that birthday was not much of a celebration.

P.S this was a response to a request from Starla to see my uniform so I'm not totally random.

Aching Feet and Happy Heart

The reason for my aching feet and happy heart is the fact that I worked two days in a row and had incredibly busy 12-hour shifts and my poor feet are so sore and tired; however, my heart is happy because I get to just hang out for almost three weeks:) I had actually had a great time at work because my patients were nice and appreciative of my efforts to provide good care, which definitely does not happen all the time. An elderly man was discharged yesterday and as he took him out to his car, his wife and he both hugged me. I took care of him on Monday and Tuesday and he was so fascinated by the fact that I was from Finland and he would ask questions about everything. Sometimes people can be creepy when they ask personal questions but he was just so sweet and it was fun to form a little friendship with him. I would tell my patients how I'm leaving to Finland on Thursday morning and they would just get so excited for me:) I think sometimes people think I'm younger than I really am and they didn't realize that I'm married so they were probably thinking "this poor little young girl is so far away from home". This is obviously true, but Troy and I are so blessed to be able to visit my family twice a year. We spent a month there last April-May and now we will be there for two and half weeks so we are getting our Finland time in.

So I have been kind of lame in the past two Christmases and I haven't done much of Christmas stuff around our home nor have I send Christmas cards to people. My mom was terrible at getting cards in the mail and I guess I'm just like her in that aspect. So I am already planning about all the fun and nice things that I will do for my friends and for us next year. If anyone has any cool traditions or ideas, I'm wanting start some new traditions with Troy.

So school is over and now I only have three more semesters to go. Somehow psychologically this makes a huge difference from having four semesters left. I will graduate eventually! At least I have some good friends in the program and my lovely Starla at BYU who will be graduating at the same time as me, so I feel like my pains and joys of nursing school are shared:)

I don't have any new pictures to post. I should have taken some as we visited Troy's parents for Christmas. Since we will be missing the actual Christmas with them; we drove up to Phoenix to see them. We had a good time and actually got to open presents already. Now we have a printer that works. We ran out of ink last summer and we were too lazy to buy some for a while. So we finally got our act together and bought the right type of ink and the printer totally stopped working. So I have been printing all my papers and lectures for school at Troy's work. Well he would print them for me since I can't enter the building because of the lack of U.S Citizenship on my part. As you can imagine, some mornings were little stressful as I would drop Troy off to work, he would run up to his floor and start printing stuff and hope that no one else was printing at the same time. I would wait in the car and watch the minutes go by as I waited for my papers. So needless to say, we are both happy to have a new printer!

For the record, I pretty much slept 11 hours last night. Poor Troy had to go to work this morning for one more day while I just turned under the covers. I think I'm going to like working part-time after I graduate; working twice a week does not seem so bad right now:)

Im off to pack, clean and do some last minute shopping. I think my next post should be in Finnish since I'll be in Finland; when in Finland, do it like the Fnnish people(however, this would mean kind of anti-social behavior and lots of beer, so maybe I'll past)

Avoiding Studying...I'm Great at It!

This week is the fabulous week of finals. I took my "labor and delivery" final yesterday and I have two more to go. Usually I'm stressed and studying like a mad woman; however, this week I'm just slacking. I'm studying one chapter at a time for my pharmacology final and after each chapter I read blogs for half an hour. Needless to say, I'm not being very productive. But I am fully entertained by people's blogs. Yes, I am one of those people who reads random people's blogs. I am addicted to blogs. Troy thinks I'm ridiculous, but if that is my one addiction, I think he should be happy.




On Friday, I took Troy to the pizza place where my nursing school friends and I go for their lunch special as a way to relax. They offer a delicious oversized slices of pizza for a good price. So since Troy is going back to school, I figured I would introduce him to one of the UA student hang out places.

Last weekend was eventful as Troy finally took his GRE test and he did great. He is my math genius and we are hoping that his verbal score will be good enough for the college. We were so relieved after the test that we ate some Chipotle and took a three hour nap. Another exciting thing was the purchase of new running shoes for me. I have worn the same shoes for 4.5 years. They are the shoes that BYU gave me as part of the Track gear when I was training with the team. So it was definitely time for me to get new running shoes. I took them out for a test run on Saturday night and they feel fabulous. So now I am ready for my marathon training:)
I'm actually really enjoying running right now. Some days I do a leisurely run with a 9-10 minute/mile and then I push myself for a 8-8:30 min/mile.

We also had a good Sunday evening with our friends Paul and Heather. We used to spend almost every weekend together last year but somehow we have not been able to get together as much this fall. It's a shame because we love hanging out with them. We played one of our favorites games "Ticket to Ride".



So here is a picture of my cute pregnant friend and I. I look pretty gross actually; however, I don't have many pictures with her and I wanted to post a picture of us. One of our fun "couple friends" moved away last year and I have only one stinking picture with them.Yes, Dani that's you guys! I need more pictures with my friends as a proof of not having a lonely life:)

Alright, another 45 minutes well spent on blogging so I guess I should go and read about rheumatoid arthritis drugs....