Happy Pi Day!

Today 3/14 is evidently Pi Day. I'm not sure how one celebrates exactly, but perhaps one raise a glass of one's favorite beverage to toast the last-minute demise the 1897Indiana Pi Bill, which apparently sought to specify the value of pi by force of law. (It's a little more complicated than that: the bill itself mainly concerned affirming one charlatan's claims about squaring the circle using only a straightedge and compass, a process proved impossible 15 years earlier. The "proof" of this process, I believe, had implicit assumptions about the value of pi.) Perhaps then, another appropriate activity would be to listen to some of Stevie Wonder's In Square Circle.

Six months ago today, I woke up early in the morning in Helsinki after packing and rearranging my stuff for most of the wee hours of the night and started the process of heading for the airport for my flight to Moscow. I had heard that the Russian customs officials would search and catalog my possessions down to every last coin in my pockets; so, I decided to take only a week's worth of clothes and necessities in my back pack and to leave most of my possessions behind.

So my first stop: walking in the pre-sunrise twilight down to the Helsinki Rail Station and waiting for 10-15 minutes for their left luggage office in the basement to open. This gave me enough time to wrap my wire mesh around my big suitcase and tightly lock it up for its week's sojourn without me in Finland.

Then, I rushed outside to the bus lot to catch the FinnAir shuttle to the airport.

The decision to leave most of my possessions behind turned out to be a wise one, but for a completely unsuspected reason. When I got to the airport and was checking in, I realized I never investigated the specifics of economy travel on FinnAir. In particular, FinnAir has very restrictive weight limits for carry on baggage. So, although I had only a week's worth of clothes and other necessities in my backpack -- the lightest I'd ever traveled anywhere, my backpack was over that limit and I had to check it. This raised the specter of arriving in Moscow and finding myself without clothes, but fortuntately that didn't happen. In my rush, I accidentally left a few minor things of value in my backpack completely unsecured and was happily surprised to find them still in place when I collected my bag in Moscow.