Despite this month being practically longer than the last one, I actually feel as if it’s gone by at a tremendous speed.
Reflecting back on the past month, I feel like it had barely started before it was all over.
I suppose some months are just like that.
Surprise Motherfucker!
Mr. Cruise was turning 30 this month and after seeing that another very dear friend of ours was having her birthday party the same weekend, I thought, “What if we—Rebecka, Lucien and me—would hop on a plane in secrecy and pay everyone a surprise visit?”
So we did.
The idea was quite simple: Arrange a surprise birthday party for Mr. Cruise, inviting all of his friends and not tell anyone of the other guests that I would also be attending. Like two surprises in one if you will.
Obviously someone needed to liaison all the arrangements on the Finnish side of things and when my first choice, Mr. Sock was as excited about the idea as I was, it was a done deal.
Landing in Vasa at 14:05 left us with about two hours—we needed to stop for Kotipizza first—to clean up his apartment and make all the necessary preparations, including making sure all the guests arrived before Mr. Cruise did.
He almost ruined all of it by deciding to leave work an hour early but with a little semi-forceful convincing we got him to take a detour to his mom’s and from there we make could sure he didn’t arrive too early.
The Family Tree
During our weekend in Finland I had also made plans to take Lucien to meet his great-grandparents from my side because they hadn’t seen him in quite a while—I can’t remember the last time they met.
And whilst we were all hanging out I saw the opportunity to take a closer look at our family tree, a beast of a tree where I’m but a small twig on its right hand side.
Taking the names and information I had I went online, thinking—with luck—that I might find at least something from a parish register.
But a guy in southern Finland, who I imagine is possibly a distant relative of mine, has done a lot of work on geni.com and thanks to him I can now trace my family tree all the way back to 1772 on my great-great-great-grandfather’s side, though it gets a bit muddled at that point.
I sure hope I didn’t miss a “great” in that.
At some point I would like to sit down and continue the work he’s done, building it from Lucien’s point of view so that when he gets older and wants—if he does—to explore his past, he’ll have wealth of information to find.
Session #4
And as usual, as this point it wouldn’t be a monthly update if I didn’t continue on the sleeve tattoo.
After four sessions we are getting very close to finishing the sleeve and next time we’re going to start adding the smoke line fillers.
Whilst this wasn’t our longest session so far, it was definitely the one where we got most shit done in a sitting. And most of it was fine but getting the elbow tattooed stung like a bastard. He later told me that the elbow tends to be a soft spot that hurts quite a lot.
And thanks to my wonderful wife we managed to get a couple of pictures—of the now healed tattoo—before it started pissing down.
Piss down. To rain heavily. Cambridge Dictionaries Online
Solar Eclipse
And finally, towards the end of March, the entire world stood breathless as the moon took a much anticipated tour in between us and the sun.
Sadly, the weather in the UK did what it has a habit of doing and decided to be, in one word, shit.
So instead of a glorious solar eclipse like the one the picture above I got something more like the picture below.
Except I was also at work at the time, so this is more on an artist rendition of how I imagined it must have looked as I sat hunched in front of my computer screen working instead of staring into the sky like a dumbass.
The next total solar eclipse visible from the UK won’t occur until September 2090, at which point I plan on being super-dead.
And that’s it for this month.