Update on some stuff because I'd rather whine and be self-centered than work.

So I bought a car. It should be good news, but right now it feels like a curse.

Some of you might remember one of my way earlier blogs in which I said that I work for a car leasing company that sells us one used car per year for very cheap as some kind of bonus. I have been buying cars every year since 2010, but only to sell them back for a profit, to help my parents financially and to add a little something to my travel fund. Well, this year I have decided that I'm going to keep the goddamned thing and learn to drive it!

I got my driving license in January 2003. It expired in January 2013. In the meantime, I never used it once. To this day I have no idea how or why I even got it, I was terrible at driving. And today I'm proud to say I don't even know how to start a car. Whatever I learned back in the day vanished completely. But my sisters are very eager to learn (one of them is kinda OK at it already) and don't mind being my chauffeurs, so at least it'll give us all some kind of independence. And frankly I can't stand being in a car with my father anymore. Every drive to or from work has become a session of mental torture for me. As a driver, my father is total dick. He doesn't always respect road code (signalling when changing lanes is for pussies!) and yet berates people who do the same things (and also people who do follow the rules but somehow inconvenience him), he is getting old and his reflexes aren't so good, so we barely escape crashing the car just about everyday, he loves nothing more than insulting whoever drives by him and annoys him (sometimes out loud, which is very embarrassing, but mostly I'm the only one to hear and it adds to my stress), he takes the longest possible routes supposedly to avoid heavy traffic, when the traffic is just as dense on those routes, so as a result we just spend more time in the car, but don't you try to tell him otherwise or you'll get your head bitten off, he hates women drivers, and drivers with very nice cars (so it's the worst when it's a woman with a very expensive car) and he loves nothing more than blaming us for leaving home too late (when it's him who takes forever to leave the house) which results in being stuck in traffic. So basically, it's either I no longer have to sit in his car anymore, or I quit my job and stay home forever (my parents would never consent to letting me live on my own.)

So anyway, as I said, I got this great opportunity to finally buy my own car, and I got one for very cheap, which only cost me about half my life savings () but of course it wasn't in in ideal condition. It's got 110k kilometers in the counter, the battery had to be changed, the alarm doesn't work anymore, some front lights are kaput, the spare tire is flat and needs to be fixed, and who knows what else. It's at the garage right now, hopefully I can get it back before the end of the week. And hopefully the final bill won't give me a heart attack. I'm sure it'll be worth it in the long run. And if I need to sell it back, I'll make a decent profit from it (double what I paid for it) though I doubt I will anytime soon.

So that's basically what's been happening for the last three weeks: lots of car-related expenses, lots of running around between city hall and the DMV to get papers in order (you can't imagine the bureaucracy) and a lot of annoyance and frustration.

But, I'm going to Finland in three weeks That makes it all worth it. Also I have kind of taken care of a problem that's been nagging me for a while. My parents always insist on driving me to the airport and staying with me until I pass through security, every time I travel. Usually they keep their distance during check-in, but every time I'm scared to death that my mom will decide to stand with me the whole time, and hears the clerk asking me if I'd like my suitcase checked in all the way to Helsinki, and sees him giving me two boarding passes. It almost happened the last time when I was going to Vienna, but I distracted her (she's not particularly suspicious, she just likes being with me, I guess) so of course I've been thinking about that constantly. Well, turns out I have a few coworkers who are indeed going to France on business the very same day I'm traveling. Their plane leaves at 8 am (mine does at 7:30) so one of them agreed that I'd have my father drive me to her place early in the morning and from there we'll take a cab to the airport. I feel extremely relieved by this. Also I have been wanting to take a couple of bottles of local wine for my Finnish friends but I can't do that because it's very tricky to smuggle wine into our apartment so I can pack it in my suitcase (if not entirely impossible) and if I buy the bottles at the airport here, I couldn't take them with me from Paris to Helsinki because of the no-liquid-on-board policy. So I could just give the wine to my coworker and get it back from her when we leave for the airport. Hooray

What else has been happening? Oh yeah, my youngest sister is working with me this week. The company has a deadline to deliver car tax disks to our clients, and no one seemed to want to deal with the work load of sorting them out and scanning them etc. So they decided they'd hire two extra people to do it, for a week, and pay them a rather nice sum for the effort, and I volunteered her. It's nice having her around and everyone likes her and says she's such a good worker She's making me proud. Plus the extra money certainly won't hurt, while she's looking for a real job.

I think that about covers it for the last few weeks!