Spybot, defrag and a sauna

23rd March 2012
Before Midnight

The computer has been frustratingly slow recently. It's taking me as long to save and publish my blogs on Twitter as it is to write them. My impatience is growing because as I wait for the computer to do what it is supposed to do, my creative muse is pouring ideas into my head. I reach for scraps of paper to write down the themes for future chapters in my blog.

The operating system on the computer is in Finnish and I'm not confident enough to navigate my way around so I limit my maintenance to installing Spybot.

Spybot picks up a load of malware but takes hours to scan for the more than 800,000 known culprits. The scan ends and Spybot suggests restarting and running again to get rid of the 21 items it was unable to clear the first time round. I do so and find it starts to go through all 800 and odd thousand items again. I give up writing any more for tonight.

...
24th March 2012
6.00pm

The computer hasn't been any better today, so I manage to track down Defrag and start running it while I go upstairs for a sauna.

I check the temperature in the sauna. It's close to 100 degrees so I leave the door open for a while and mix some birch tree tar with water in my sauna bucket. I sit down in my customary pose with my elbows on my knees and scoop some of the water mixture onto the stove. The Fins call both the water and the resultant steam löyly ('y' is pronounced like a u). I brace myself as the löyly almost immediately lashes my back and my nostrils are filled with the smell of birch tree.

The room does not steam up. There is no condensation on the door windows nor on any of the surfaces inside the sauna. It's too hot. The air is at a temperature that would boil water. How do we manage to be able to sit in these conditions? The wooden bench is so hot that when you sit, you can't slide. You just have to plonk yourself down and not move. You can't lean back against the wall when it's this hot.

I'm looking forward to experiencing my first wood burning sauna soon. Apparently, they are not so dry.

Sauna competitions are held in Finland where cases of severe burning and even death are common. There is a lot I find similar between the two cultures of Finland and Japan. Strangely enough, even between the languages which I shall explore at some later date.

In Japan, I used to set my bath temperature at 42 degrees centigrade. In hotspring or Onsen resorts, at just one degree hotter, it becomes almost unbearably hot; I have to lower myself in very slowly.

The pleasure of these two forms of heat is further heightened by suddenly subjecting your body to the other extreme, usually by plunging into a cold pool. In Finland, this can be a hole in the frozen surface of a lake. After just a short time, you are rewarded for your bravery by a beautiful tingling all over your body and an almost hallucinatory head spinning feeling that momentarily warps your vision as if in some sort of Daliesque landscape. I remember feeling this particularly strongly in Japan when staring at a clock.

For the time being, I make do with a cold shower although when there was still snow outside my front door, I was standing barefoot in it with just a towel wrapped around me. Beautiful.

I come back down to catch the end of the defrag. It's recovered a lot, so fingers crossed, things will have sped up now.