May Day

It’s May!

For most of Earth, that means colorful trees and flowers and sun and great weather.  In Vaasa it only means sun.  It is freaking freezing in this city and according to my phone weather app it’s only gonna stay cold!

It’s been a few weeks since my last post, and last I posted we were in the midst of an injury crisis.  I obviously can’t talk about our injury situation currently as we don’t want to give anything away ahead of the HJK match.  It’s evolving everyday anyway, so even if I wanted to give an update it probably would be wrong.  I actually got injured myself against MYPA and had to come off.  Luckily for me (and for the team) we had a full ten days between MYPA and our upcoming game against HJK.  So now I’m ready to go, as I always am.  Fun fact for all of you: In official matches, I have the longest current streak of games played for VPS.  Assuming I play against HJK, it will be the 43rd consecutive game that I’ve appeared in for the club.  That streak goes all the way back to my debut against IFK Vaasa 14 months ago.  If you don’t like watching me play, well then tough titties because I’m always fit! (Famous last words…)

We had a free weekend and I took that opportunity to do absolutely nothing.  I’ve made a decision to leave the house on every off day, so I did that, but mostly I just sat at home and watched Netflix and played Playstation.  I’ve been playing a lot of Battlefield 4 online recently, and somehow I continue to be terrible at it.  For those who don’t know, Battlefield is a series of war video games and they have teams online.  I play and just get killed repeatedly.  In my last round I played, and this is 100% honestly true, I got killed 4 times in 10 minutes by a player whose username included “Samantha1999”, suggesting that I’m worse at Battlefield 4 than a high school girl.  If you’re worse than a high school girl at anything, then it’s a surefire sign that maybe you should be doing something else with your time.

The past week of training was pretty good, though it was a bit surreal since so many guys are in various stages of recovery from injury.  We’ve had our fair share of injuries, but it’s evened out by the fact that HJK had to play the Finnish Cup midweek, so they’re be a bit stretched as well.  I don’t have much to say about the game really; we know how good HJK can be, but the group we’ve got have played HJK well for a few years now.  We don’t have a fear of HJK that I think hinders a few teams that play them.  It should be a good one!

A bouncyhouse!  Half of my childhood was spent in those things.

I went to the center of May 1 to enjoy the city.  I think that May 1 is Finland’s Independence Day, though I don’t know who they got independence from.  I assume Sweden or Russia.  Anyway, I made a point of actually going to the center for the festivities this year since last year I got super drunk the night before and didn’t leave my house until 5pm.  It was a good time in the center; I’ve never seen so many people in one place in Vaasa.  I wish the center was like that more often.  It would be fun just to go down and hangout.  One of the great things about the biggest cities in Europe is that they have big markets or squares that dependably host a ton of activities.  For a foreigner like me, having a place like that would be great.  Anytime I got bored I would just head to the square.  That makes such a difference.

The games come thick and fast now so I’ll try to post a bit more often than I have been.  Life in general seems to pick up when we’re playing more games so that should lead to more to talk about.  Come support us against HJK!

The meme, for the brainiacs out there: