Blaaah...

Despair. That's the word to summarise the phone call I received from my grandmother today. I answered the phone despite my awareness of the strife between her and my mother, and that doing so she might assume that I'm on her side which I am not. They're two adults acting so childish! "Mum, she hit me!" "Yeah, but she hit me first!" They figure it out themselves once they decide to act like adults again, until then I'm an objective outsider talking to both or neither of them.

Anyway, after the usual weather discussion, usual "everything's fine" work update and her whining, she did what I think she could give a rest already. I mentioned I have nine days' actual summer holiday in August. She assumed that I would actually want to spend the first summer holiday I've had for the past three years by going there, back to the town in which I had to go to school (read: go through the hell on earth), in which my father killed himself, of which I have very little good memories. How can she think I would want to exchange my own very much *happy* life here, at my home, to that? So, I told her that I am very certainly not going anywhere now that I finally have a summer holiday, that I wish to use those days to do my own things, live my life. And what does she do? "Sulla on poikaystävä!" accompanied by more than thrilled voice.

She justifies this by stating that I'm in the age when "poijat ja flikat alakaa kattella toisiansa sillä lailla". The only reason I didn't correct that I'm in the age when I look at other women "in that way" is that she hasn't been, I hear, too stable emotionally since my father died. I'm sure, being a fundamentalist Christian, she wouldn't take my sexual orientation that well anyway, let alone now in the midst of this emotional turmoil.

What do you think, should I try carrying out a human version of Pavlov's dog experiments, and close the phone every time she brings up this subject? Maybe in time she would leave it altogether knowing that I'll close the phone without a single word if she does start again about my personal life.

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The Meme of the Day: Einstein's Riddle

Albert Einstein said that this riddle, which he wrote during the nineteenth century, could not be solved by 98 percent of the world’s population. Let’s see if you’re one of the remaining patient and logical two percent. I was… after two hours.

1. In a street there are five houses, painted five different colours.
2. In each house lives a person of different nationality
3. These five homeowners each drink a different kind of beverage, smoke different brand of cigar and keep a different pet.

THE QUESTION: WHO OWNS THE FISH?

Clues are as follows:
1. The Brit lives in a red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The Green house is next to, and on the left of the white house.
5. The owner of the Green house drinks coffee.
6. The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the Yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the centre house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps horses lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Blue Master drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blends has a neighbour who drinks water.