In important news, the snow is melting! Well, it's melting a bit on the roofs. It's hard to tell if it's melting anywhere else because there's either just lots of white stuff, or lots of grey stuff where people have walked on it. But this evening when I left work, in the dark, it was snowing a bit, but not settling, which is a start.

It's also warming up, although that's not hard. When I left for work yesterday it was -10C. A temperature which I'd never before thought I'd experience. It turns out it's cold. I mean, obviously it is because it's a big minus number, but it means it's colder than you ever thought possible. Waiting for the bus for 30 minutes was quite cold, but not too bad. But the bus itself has no heating (well, I discovered later it has one heater by one seat that can heat up one foot) and a cold draft round your feet. Since then, it's been around 0C which feels only a bit chilly. Possibly because I'm wearing a ridiculous number of clothes outside.

I don't like this sort of cold and I definitely don't like snow. I have SAD, only instead of the dark making me depressed, it's extreme (relatively speaking) temperatures that make me grumpy. Ideally I'd like to live somewhere that had seasons, but the temperature generally stayed between 10C and 20C. Maybe it could go down to 5C in the winter, just to make the point that it was winter, and go up to 25C in the summer just to remind you what hot weather was like. But never went below 5C or above 25C. And also doesn't have earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes or stupid amounts of rain. I think I might have ruled out every place on Earth...

Unlike the rest of the country, here we had our first snow of the week on Saturday morning. Driving home on Friday the road reports were all about the snow, but it was sunny here. Saturday I woke up to find the world covered in snow and it kept snowing more all morning.

What amused me yesterday was someone in my road clearing the snow off his car with a dustpan at lunchtime and then not going anywhere in it. So then it iced up, then it snowed a bit more. So whereas my car, for instance, has a blanket of snow, his is covered in ice and a bit of snow. Then today one of my neighbours spent most of the day clearing the snow off part of the car park at the back of my block of flats with a shovel and a broom. I have no idea why. He did get it pretty clear, though, so it might not ice over tonight. But since there are no cars near it, it probably doesn't matter.

I'll be getting the bus all week, which is fine because I have plenty of Big Finish audios to listen to on my mp3 player. The only question is what the roads will be like on Saturday when I want to drive home. It's so far in advance that the weather forecasts for this week change daily. It doesn't really matter if I go later - the shops are only shut for one day, I have enough food to definitely last until Boxing Day and Sainsburys is only ten minutes walk away. I hate not knowing, though. I like to have everything planned and then get all of a do when it doesn't go to plan.

I'm ready for it to be spring now. Or as warm (relatively speaking) as it was at the beginning of the week will do.

I don't like this weather. It's not the weather itself that I dislike - I quite like it when it's cold and sunny, as it is now (well, before the sun went down). But I hate living in a house where the crockery and cutlery is too cold to touch and you're only warm if you're wearing three jumpers, three pairs of a socks and a pair of gloves. It's very difficult to type in gloves. However, I do have an oil heater that I bought last January that I have switched on now it's reached that point. I am now pleasantly warm while wearing two jumpers, which is a vast improvement. It vastly improves my outlook on the world.

Except for the threat of snow. I grew up on the south coast where it only snows every three or four years. Or did while I was growing up. Although it didn't snow while I was at uni, which was further north than I am now, it has snowed every year I've lived here. Including two years when it started snowing and settling during the day (although it was dark), which I'd never previously known was possible. And two years (that would be the last two winters) where it's snowed and not melted for a week. Until then I'd never seen it last more than a day. So to me this is all a bit unnatural.

What makes it worse is not knowing if it's going to hit. If it does snow my choices on a work day are either to get up early and get the bus in (so I have to set my alarm early the night before) or work from home. Which is slow at the best of times and really frustrates me. Plus I hate having to talk to people by email. And work is really cold the fewer people are in there. Although I taped up my window with masking tape, which helped a bit. And bought a heater to put under my desk, which helped enormously. I haven't got it out of the box.

Sunday I'm going to east London to see the tennis. So I could really do with there not being any snow to disrupt anything, especially as the tube strike means that some tubes might stop early (and it's a Sunday so there are fewer trains in general anyway). According to the TfL website it should be ok at the time the tennis will finish. If it isn't, there'll be 17,500 people all wanting to get across London...

Considering that I don't like driving and given the option would far rather not, I can't quite believe I'm going to say this but... I really want to be able to drive to work.

I'd be warmer, I could leave later, so get up later, so get more sleep, I could listen to the radio (I haven't heard Chris Evans at breakfast yet and I'm missing the Five Live guys with the news on my way home). It wouldn't matter if I left a few minutes late, I would have to slide over so much snow, I would spend ages waiting for a bus and I could leave work whatever time I liked (well, after 5.30pm obviously).

I can't drive at the moment because although the main roads are fine, I'd have to park down a side road, which aren't so great. My road isn't great and to make it worse, I'd have to turn my car round 180 degrees, it's currently on a slight slope and there's a pile of snow behind it because it's been parked there ever since we had the heavy snow Tuesday night last week. And most importantly, having experienced driving on snow once I'm not desperate to try it again.

It's supposed to be a lot warmer from tomorrow (where a lot warmer means above freezing) so hopefully there'll be lots of melting going on. But I am so sick of the snow.

There is currently snow about. You'd be hard pressed not to miss it - even my parents have had snow. But it's quite amusing.

First, the background. I grew up on the south coast of England where it snowed every three years or so. Although it did, however, completely fail to snow while I was at uni - except in the Christmas of my first year where it snowed at home and nowhere else. Until last winter I'd never seen the snow stay around for more than a day. Until this winter and one a few years ago, I'd never seen it start to snow and settle during the day. So I was a bit startled before Christmas when it did just that, it was really slippery and I vowed never to drive in snow again.

Cut to this winter. There are quite a lot of people at work who, at the mention of snow, get all excited. They were rather less excited after the sudden snow we had before Christmas, mind you, but they're back to being yay about snow again.

Yesterday it started snowing about 5pm, so although I did drive home in it, it wasn't really any different from driving in rain. It was forecast to get heavier and it did. We cancelled our Rotaract cheese and wine planning meeting for the second time for the same reason. So everywhere was a bit white this morning.

But it is just ordinary snow. Walking to the station this morning to get the bus was pretty easy because people had already walked along the pavements and flattened all the snow. So I reckon, looking at the height of the bits people have walked on and comparing it to the bits people haven't, that we've got about two inches. The most snow I've ever seen was last January, which was more than that.

The main roads are fine, just slushy at the edges. The minor roads are snowy, but really slushy where enough people have driven. So understandably the bus was 35mins late. And then he didn't drive that fast because the slush isn't great to drive on. The route does go through a village and coming out of that onto the main road the bus did go sideways. I was just glad I wasn't driving.

So I got to work 45mins late to find that no one else in my office was there. One of them lives not far from me and hadn't come in because she reckoned the roads were impassable. Someone else hadn't come in because they didn't believe the bus company's website when they said they were running the buses until 7pm and she thought they'd leave her stranded. (Amusingly, the bus that runs between home and work stops at 6.53 usually...)

Given that I'm the one least used to snow, I can't believe how wet they're all being. I left early because I had loads of overtime to take and had failed to take any of it on Monday or Tuesday. The roads were much better and because there was no traffic and the bus was on time, I had the fastest bus journey home I've ever had. I'm waiting to see how many people bother to make it tomorrow now.

The best part is that I bought some really big, thick gloves from Primark at Christmas (for a whole £3) and although I can't do a thing with my hands while I'm wearing them, they do keep my hands lovely and warm. I was also wearing my fencing socks on top of my usual socks, my walking boots (waterproof and good grip), my tracksuit bottoms on top of my work trousers, three jumpers and two hoods and a hat on my head. The only part of me that was cold was my feet and part of that was because they were really stuffed into my shoes so I couldn't really feel them anyway.

I thought this last week would be quite quiet, I'd get lots of things done... I don't know why I thought that. It didn't help that I kept waking up at 6am - except on Friday when I woke up at 5am. Monday it snowed during the day, and I was sick of waiting in the freezing cold for a freezing cold bus and getting home half an hour later than I would have if I'd driven, so I drove to work on Monday. I contemplated leaving my car at work, but decided to drive home. It was the scariest thing I'd ever done - not helped by two police cars and two ambulances going past me in the opposite direction with their blue lights flashing. They couldn't go above 20mph the same as the rest of us, though, so the blue flashing lights didn't exactly do them much good.

But now I know what it's like, I won't be driving in the snow again. But I'd only ever seen it snow and settle during the day once before, so I assumed it was a freak event and it would just go back to snowing in the night again. But I also live further North than I grew up, and there it snows every year, which I find utterly ridiculous weather, but moving back South would mean I was living far from anywhere, so I supposed I'm stuck with it. If the Gulf Stream ever goes away, we're seriously buggered.

On the plus side, I have a week off work and it is now Boxing Day, which is miles better than Christmas Day. Except that for some strange reason all the good TV is on on New Years Day.

And I have a Yuletide fic! The site's really slow, so it's best visited in the mornings before the Americans get up, but it's a Quantum Leap fic: Returning Home and Meeting Memories for the First Time. Reading through the rest of the archive is taking time, not just because of the slowness, but also because I find the contrast between the text and the background gives me a headache. But fortunately, the other week I came across a site called Readability, where you can decide what you want the page to look like, then create a bookmarklet. So all I have to do, once the fic is loaded, is press on the bookmark, then hey, presto, I can read it! And to think that when I found it I never thought it would be useful...

Which I've been meaning to write for the past week...
Read more...

I am freezing. But then I am only wearing one jumper. I have stupid heating that comes in on or off and as it's so warm during the day I have it off, otherwise I wake up boiling. Because it's still really cold at night, it means it's quite cold in the mornings and evenings, plus my body clock seems to have decided it's BST a bit early.

I'm definitely still ill. I put on a New Who episode and the beginning credits are the worst thing ever. Definitely not recommended if you're dizzy. I have until Wednesday to get better, then I go back to the doctors, who are pretty much incapable of diagnosing anything I can't work out for myself, so I'm not hopeful, but I just want to get better. I want my life back again.

I am going to decide what car I want this weekend, which'll probably knock me out for the weekend with the half hour drive each way. But I definitely need a car that's less effort to drive, because part of the reason I didn't for so long while I was ill was because I didn't have the energy to turn the wheel. The trouble is that they don't make custom cars and what I really want is a Toyota Yaris at the front and a Honda Jazz at the back. And no, I don't want James May to make me one.

I have discovered the source of one of the funny noises my car makes! I currently have four: one is something rattling in the dashboard, one is a squeaking noise when I break, two are squeaking noises when I'm going along. The squeaking noises are all louder with the window open, which hasn't really been improving my drive home in a stuffy car with the sun right in my eyes. But while I was backing my car up after I'd turned it off, by the method of sticking my foot out of the door and giving it a push, as it's on a slight slope, I discovered that when I move the car, it creaks. I'm quite looking forward to owning a quieter car.

I thought I'd try out a DVD in my computer this evening. It took me ages to work out which program it had installed as the DVD playing program and then I found I hate it with a passion. It's rubbish. It takes over so much that you can hardly run any other program at the same time, and it takes the taskbar away so you can't get to any other program (alt+tab refused to work). I couldn't work out how to fast forward in any useful way and there's no right click menu to tell it that actually you want subtitles/commentary. I was looking forward to getting an upgrade from WinDVD, but it turns out WinDVD was the pinnacle of DVD playing programs (and to be fair, I loved it, it's far better than a DVD player). Am I right in thinking it's the free version and PowerDVD is the paid for one that lets you take screenshots? Can I get it somewhere? Can I go back to Windows 98? (actually, since I have it on a virtual machine on this computer, the answer to the last one is yes, technically).

It snowed overnight, and during the day, so I got to the bus to work on the basis that it was warmer and I wouldn't have to walk so far. Plus my car doesn't like the cold or the rain, so I dread to think what it would think of what's essentially cold rain. It comes from a warmer climate like me, so it's not used to all this snow business.

And I didn't get a day off either. I've never had work or school closed for snow and it never snowed the whole time I was uni. Just the year before I went and the year after I left.

According to the forecasts it's supposed to do this pretty much all week, so I'll be leaving work on time every day (the buses go once an hour, which is crap). And probably not making it back to fencing, again.

It was at 4.30pm on Friday that I thought my brain might dribble out of my ears. And there was still an hour of work to go at that point. I did quite a bit of overtime last week, which has something to do with it. The weather isn't helping. At the moment it's slightly too hot for a quilt and slightly too cold for a sheet. At least, it is in the night. Once the sun rises I wake up boiling and have to put my sheet on. And consequently wake up really early.

I also seem to be allergic to something. Last night once it got dark I blew my nose every five minutes before I shut the windows and decided I'd rather be hot.

And what's really annoying me at the moment is WP keeps logging me out, even if I don't close Firefox and even though I tick the 'Remember me' box. My fanfic blog was fine, until I decided to check it this morning and it won't let me in at all.

I left the house early for Rotaract tonight because I knew my car would be steamed up. And it was - the back windows were anyway. The rest was covered in rather a lot of ice. It took me ten minutes to get it off. The wires on the back window did that, although couldn't help with the large amount of condensation inside. Even after that time with the engine on and the five minute drive, it was only just about managing to warm up by the time I got there.

Then, of course, after less than two hours, it had iced up again. And although there was less of it, it was practically impossible to get off. Driving home I kept thinking there was fog because there was still ice at the top of the windscreen that I could see out the corner of my eye.

I also did all my driving in my proper gloves, which are thicker than my driving gloves. It took me a while to notice I was doing it, but perhaps that was because I couldn't feel my fingers either. Or my feet, but turning the heater onto them was useless because it just blew a cold draft on them.

According to Weather Underground it's -4C here (25F), and there is nowhere in the country that is colder (although some places that are equally cold). It's 10C in Belfast, I'd far rather be there!

Winter seems to have arrived. It's been cold enough the past week that I've contemplated getting my scarf out. Although that's mostly because my coat leaves a nice gap at the top for the cold to get in. I think it might be cold enough for a hat as well. The trouble is that once you give into the cold that's it, you can't go back to not wearing a hat or scarf because you get used to being warm.

Mind you, it'll all be a bit academic come Friday because I'll be dressed up warm to collect for Children in Need, although since I'm collecting from cars it does mean getting to run around, so you do get a bit warmer. And as long as it doesn't chuck it down like last year it won't be that bad.

The worst part is driving because even though I have driving gloves and I've turned the car onto winter so it takes five minutes to be merely cold rather than freezing instead of the ten minutes it takes on the summer setting, it only takes one journey for my hands to get so dry they crack.

But we have had really nice weather - blue skies and sunshine, with only a bit of wind and rain and clouds - and I like the winter when it's really cold and sunny. As long as I'm walking somewhere and not waiting for a bus. And at least I don't have to de-ice the car every morning before work.

I missed it, but half an hour ago it was 20:07 on 20-07 2007

I was woken up this morning by thunder. I then discovered it was also pouring it down with rain. My feet didn't get dry till I got home. And although it didn't seem like an unusual amount of rain, it seems to have caused loads of disruption. I'm now getting the bus to Oxford to go to the Harry Potter midnight launch as the person who offered to drive is still on a train somewhere. I don't want to drive because I'm confused about driving round Oxford, and can't drive after midnight.

There's also been a really strange creaky banging sound round here. It started up late last night and stopped after I went to bed. It had gone this morning, but was back when I got home. It's just recently stopped, about two and a half hours later, when my upstairs neighbours got home... I have no idea what it is but the two events must be connected.

Plans for tomorrow are: hoovering (did the rest of the cleaning tonight), swimming and reading Harry Potter.

It's been another frustrating day. Play started at 11am but since it didn't look like the matches were going to be that interesting, I didn't bother with the tennis till lunchtime. The minute I got myself set up to watch it, it started raining. They started playing an hour and a half later, which is not helpful. And then I spent the afternoon getting up and down a lot, so kept putting the headphones down and not putting them back on straight away. Which meant that every time I sat down to listen to the tennis it rained, and whenever I stopped for a long period, they played.

It was quite interesting to hear the thunder over the radio. It thundered here an hour after it did there, but that was all it did. As a result I saw, I think, one Nadal game before they went off again. And that was it for the day. Why they didn't play on Sunday I don't know, because they might not have been that far behind after Saturday, but they certainly are now - starting on all courts at 11am and using every single courts - including ones that don't have a number.

I finished The Myth Makers, which is Vicki's last episode and I'm all sad because I liked Vicki. And I am discovering Doctor Who is a bad influence - it's really hard to type doctor with a small d.

It's been a really frustrating day. It's the one day of Wimbledon you get to spend the whole day watching tennis, not just in the evening. But instead we got nearly an hour of one woman thrashing another. I could have watched a different match on 301 or 302 but frankly, it would have just been the same. I would have been quite happy watching tennis from 12 till 9ish, then watched Doctor Who, but it wasn't to be.

The only good thing about it was I got time to clean the house and make flapjacks and they decided just before Doctor Who started that there would be no more play today, so I was free to watch it live. Although I shouldn't have done because I had five minutes of Galaxy 4 part 2 to go, which was a bit surreal to listen to afterwards.

There were some things in the episode that I liked and other things that annoyed me, but I'll put them behind a more since they contain SPOILERS:
Read more...

I like thunderstorms when it's been really hot and you can stand outside, watch the lightning and go 'please rain'. It's a lot less good when it's rained every single day since I got back and isn't really very warm.

I just did my finances and I have paid myself back the money I owed myself to go to Romania! So I now have no money till I get paid on Friday, but this is an improvement on minus amounts. Now I need to save some so I can buy a new TV and have a very cheap long weekend away somewhere in Britain (possibly Cardiff, possibly somewhere else if I think of anywhere else reasonably close I want to go that's not in Dorset) in September.

I discovered that BT will give you a bill in pdf. I've had paperless bills for a while but I've always just downloaded my calls as a csv file. I don't know how long the pdfs have been there, but it doesn't help that they like to move everything on the site round on a monthly basis (or that's what it seems like - I can never find anything). Looking at it, I discovered that they're charging me £1.50 for the privilege of not paying by direct debit (so I actually pay the amount I owe them, not the amount they'd like me to owe them), which is a bit much. It doesn't help that they also charge £10 a month just for the line - which I use for my broadband connection, and occasionally for phone calls. My calls this month were particularly expensive at 71p.

I'm back from Romania. I'm really tired - I got used to going to bed when it got dark and getting up about 6.30am, and that's Romanian time too. And the travel sickness pills still haven't worn off yet - although they say on the packet 'may cause drowsiness' what they should actually say is 'will put you to sleep' - I feel asleep in Budapest airport.

Romania was a lovely place - very beautiful and all the people were very friendly. It was great to go with Habitat too, because you get to see the places tourists don't, meet the people, and see what a difference you make. We worked on houses for people with no running water, and they were so grateful for what we did. Coming back and watching the final of the Stella Artois I established I really need a new (bigger) telly because I can't see the ball properly from so far away, but that sort of thing seems so inconsequential when you've seen people who have very little and are grateful for it.

There are photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/paranoidangel/tags/romania/

I wish someone would turn the heat up on the weather though - it's colder now than at nighttime where I was. Last Tuesday my arms tanned (and nearly burnt) even through putting factor 50+ on every half an hour.

I am caught up on Doctor Who - I really liked Blink, which really scared me. It'll take me all week, if not longer, to catch up on the rest of my viewing and my RSS Feeds, though (even though I just marked most of them as read).

I also need to remember how to type, it seems so hard after two weeks without doing it.

Ugh, it snowed today. Well, overnight, although it was still snowing when I left for work this morning. So the office was empty because quite a few people decided to work from home anyway. I don't really like the snow, and what makes it worse was dad emailing me to tell me all they'd had was a bit of rain. I so much want to live back where the civilised weather is, except that it's so far from anywhere.

It's been bugging me for a bit that some of my RSS feeds don't seem to have updated, even though I can see that the feed has when I put the link to it in Firefox. I just realised that the link between them is that they're all Blogger. Apparently it's something that Blogger has changed and RSS Bandit can't cope with. I updated RSS Bandit and then found I needed to delete and re-add the feeds in question. Except I accidentally deleted a folder instead. And it refused to get it back from the OPML export I cunningly did before I started. *headdesk* Fortunately, I bookmark the site for every feed I have.

And some good, squeeing news that I've been putting off squeeing about. I'm going to America four weeks yesterday! I can't believe it's so soon. I have my flights and train booked and everything. All I need to do now is pack and get some more monopoly money (can't remember how much I have squirreled away from last time). I'm going to Washington DC to meet Melli, as she's a whole lot closer to me at the moment than on the other side of the world where she usually lives. Then I'm going to New York to see more of New York than I did in the previous five hours I spent there, and to see hhertzof and her bunny. No prizes for what bit I'm most excited about. Yep that would be the bunny.

The person in the flat above me has woken me up at 6am with their radio on occasion. Bearing in mind that I don't have to get up for work till 8am. And I've heard them running the bath at midnight. So I don't know if they sleep. This time it's twice in a row, though.

This morning, I had my radio on because there's only so much of other people's you can listen to and they mentioned it had snowed. And it has. Which is interesting because it's not been that cold, I didn't think. I hate living up north in winter where it snows every winter. And I work with a load of northerners who think we get less snow than we used to. Yeah, right.

I really hope it's normal snow and melted by tomorrow and that's it for the year, and not northern snow where it lasts for a week, otherwise I won't be going to Tescos on Friday and certainly won't be driving to Burns Supper on Saturday. Driving in the snow is not a skill I feel I need.

It's not that I don't like snow, I just want to live somewhere civilised where that is a every few years thing.

When I got up this morning it wasn't that light due to it being rainy outside. So instead of wearing sandals to work I thought I ought to keep my feet dry and wear shoes. Which meant wearing socks, which was just such a weird feeling, it's been weeks since I wore any socks. Mind you, it did at least help with being warm at work. The person whose desk I'm at this week is right in the path of the air conditioning and I'm sat in a cold draft all day. The office is helpfully laid out so the other end of it is still quite warm, even though I'm shivering. It's also the boys office, so they do tend to like it colder than us girls.

There was a new Armando Iannucci program on tonight - The Time Tunnel. It's set in 2031 and they're looking back at the early 2000s. So a satirical look at today by cunningly setting it in the near future. It was interesting in places, funny in others and just weird in others still. Plus they did go over the top a bit in my opinion, in pieces like Charlotte Church vomiting herself inside out. It sounds funny as a one-line thing but just gets disgusting and too unlikely once you go into it in detail. There is a real point in there but satire is best when subtle, and that's so not.

It was an entertaining way to spend half an hour, though, so I'll probably watch it next week.

I also read some Atlantis fanfic this evening and I can feel myself starting to be pulled more towards that again. I'm remembering why I like Sheppard/Weir - I must get back to the Langford U fic I do have a first draft of. And read some McShep, I'm starting to miss the banter.

I finished The Hand of Fear while my dinner was cooking, and wrote up some of the highlights at Sarah Jane Fic. I'm so feeling tempted to get her episodes on DVD, which is bad. I did the whole Ace thing last summer, I'm determined not to do the Sarah Jane thing this summer. Plus I think I prefer Jo Grant (to Sarah, not to Ace, obviously).