thinking about calendars

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I love getting a new wall calendar every year. Don't you just love it when you get to write down everyone's birthdays on a brand new, fresh calendar? I do. :) Jay's grandparents always get us a National Geographic kids' calendar which I love. You always learn something new about animals. Next year's calendar has pictures of the weirdest looking animals. So cool! :) I got Jay one of those "word a day" desk calendars. The idea is that we both have to use that day's word in our conversation somehow. I hope we can keep that going all year. I think it would be a lot of fun to see what we can come up with those words. Fun way to increase your vocabulary. I should make a "one Finnish word a day" calendar as well. Sienna has quite enjoyed learning Finnish words lately. I think her favorite word is "koira" as she says it the most often. If only I could easily switch to Finnish. I find it so laborsome to think/speak in Finnish. I should have put more effort into finding a Finnish friend over here so I could keep my conversation skills going. There are so many words I don't even have a clue what they are in Finnish. After all, I've lived here over 16 years now...

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Jay and I saw a very thought provoking tv show about a volcanic eruption in Indonesia in the late 1800's. It was amazing to see the power of nature. So many people died from the tsunamis back then too. Those waves crushed everything in their way. The show explained how many times more powerful the eruption was compared to a nuclear bomb, for example. The sound of the blast carried around the world five times if I remember right. There are ticking time bombs all around the world, that's for sure... Nature is such a powerful thing and has an amazing way to remind us how teeny-tiny-powerless us humans really are despite all the technology etc. We get so comfortable in our way of life and take things for granted. The show sure made me think about our family's preparedness level. I have started to fill big juice bottles with water and we do have a bit of food storage. But I sure don't feel like we'd be prepared if some natural (or other) disaster happened. History should teach us that we can't take things like food in grocery stores, electricity, sufficient health care, running water, heat (etc) for granted.

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