The Cold! The Cold!

So I've caught a cold.

I hadn't slept in a few days (bar a few hours here and there) so I had to take a day off work yesterday.  I was basically carrying around the typical flu symptoms along with a severe case of zombie, and for some reason random nose bleeds, which led me to the conclusion that 'teaching,' a bunch of kids probably wasn't the best idea.

I managed to get some rest last night which led me being able to work today, which is good because money - but I'm starting to lose the energy I had at the beginning of the day.  Luckily my classes are complete and I only have to do typical busywork like making worksheets and whatnot, so the next couple of hours will pass quickly and I can get back to my sofa.

My fridge is currently a haven for unhealthy goods.  If there were a tax on owning unhealthy things I would be bankrupt with all the goodies I was sent over Christmas.  Yes, I am writing this from a place of smugness, and yes you will be jealous when you see the photograph with all the sweets I have.  But no, I am not giving you any.  They are all from england and good chocolate is rarer than wagyu beef here.

(...  Unfortunately I don't have any pictures on hand, so you will have to imagine the subtle golden halo and hymns that emanate from my open fridge.)

In other news, I tried to make a christmas dinner.

Coming into the endeavour with no experience I expected it to be a complete disaster, so I also made a backup meal of hamburgers.  In keeping with my attempts to make everything as difficult as possible, I bought ground beef and made them myself, topped and bottomed by rolls made from the home bakery.  The burgers were tasty.  Very, very tasty.

My mum sent me over some stuffing for the big occasion which ended up being some of the most delicious I've ever tasted (it's the same stuff we ate with every roast back home) and the chicken.  Well.  Only pictures will suffice in this instance.

Om nom nom.

It turns out that Japanese chickens are about half the size of english chickens, so the stuffing exploded out during cooking.  It didn't matter though, because the whole thing was unbelievably delicious.

If I'm using too many superlatives for your liking, please understand that I am a horrible cook and for a meal to end up edible, let alone tasty, is an accomplishment for the record books.

You might also notice that there aren't any vegetables.  This is because the chicken was more spread out when it was raw, and took up more of the dish, only to curl up when it was cooked.  The picture is also a little deceptive in that the dish itself is actually very small.  If I were to add potatoes and carrots, I would have to wedge them in between the chicken and the dish.  Hardly conducive to good browning I'd say!

Food nobbery(sic) aside, I'm glad I decided against adding veg because this whole endeavour took a bastard long time and was a pain in the backside.  Along with the burgers, ice cream and cake we made (those last two were group efforts) we ended up spending most of the day on the food.

Chocolate, ice cream, roast chicken, chocolate cake and burgers.  Now that's a christmas dinner.

Some Snow, A Lot of Snow

There was a relatively heavy snowfall this afternoon.  It continued for a number of hours, causing the school to shutdown halfway through operations.

Of course, as we were already there, we gained no respite; nose to the grindstone and all that.

For an idea of how much snow fell, check out this not very informative and extremely sensationalist report from the BBC.  Ignore the text, look at the picture.  We've had about two-thirds of that.

If we can't go into school tomorrow, then we would have to make up for it by working on Friday (originally planned as a half day) so I'm hoping that it will stop.

On the other hand, if it carries on this way, we might get all week off which would be cool.  Literally.

Having just ventured out (at eight O'clock) I can say with 95% certainty that there will be no school tomorrow.  It's not snowing, but I've just done a swiss cheese job on my hands from falling over on the ice.  The middle of the road is like a third-rate ice-skating rink, and the less well trodden paths are glacial standard ice.  If school does go ahead tomorrow, there will be more car crashes than I dare imagine.

Snowtastic.

There's been a reasonable amount of snow here; around five centimetres or so.  For a single snowfall that's pretty amazing, for England anyway.  Way back, when men were men, and slavery was rife, people used to ice skate on the Thames quite often.  This gradually declined in frequency, to create the balmy clime we now experience.

Interestingly, as the planet warms up, (and snow melts elsewhere) England will become colder.  The warm ocean currents that power, or more accurately, comprise the warming phenomenon are driven by the salts present in the sea.  As the concentration of salt lessens, due to increased volumes, the warming effects will lessen, because the currents will grow less strong.  Trace your finger, from London, around to the other side of the world following the same latitude.  You'll find we are pretty much level with Canada, and you know how warm it is there.

It will be interesting to see how much the sea shields us from the extreme weather they have, as it acts as something of a hot water bottle in Winter, and a cooling mist blower thing in Summer.

I waited until well into the darkness to take a couple of photos.  The snow was five (Planet Earth) centimetres deep.  I think I've already mentioned that.

Anyway...

I waited for dark so I could use the flash, and take pictures of the thousand snowflakes falling.  If the snow if heavy enough you can generally do okay without a flash, but it wasn't that heavy.  Like all things English, it was simply persistent, and despite an hour of simply muddying the ground, this snow finally found some legs and settled.

Look at all that snow.  It's like being a kid at christmas.

This kind of mid-air snowfall is worth literally (some amount of) money in Hollywood, as producers and directors strive to get this effect.  The Matrix designers took three months to get the right sized rain droplets for the final scene.  Madness.

Taken from the relative safety of the little porch out-back.

This is not to be confused with the Australian outback; which is somewhat colder than here.  What  with all the super-chilled Fosters and accompanying ice cubes and whatnot.

And herein lies the problem with snow in England.  It happens once, maybe twice a year; and for an hour it looks fantastic.  You have that one hour window to look at the snow, and take pictures of it looking pristine, before it's swamped by footprints and mud.  Only, it's usually not mud, of course.

The trees groaning under the weight of the snow made for a far more interesting journey into the town than is usual at this time of year.  The melting snow meant a lump would sometimes fall off the branches, and create the archetypal post-snowfall scene, where a little of the fallen snow hangs in the air for a second.  I would have waited in this exact spot in order to record this moment, but there would have been no point with my current camera.

This picture shows the problem with sporadic snowfall really.  This has already been trodden into an icy layer, with the snow remaining  underfoot only where no man dares tread.  The sides of any path are, obviously, out of bounds for human feet; so the snow remains untouched in these places.

The first witnessed casualty of the weather.  A tree stupid enough to still have leaves.  If the wind and the rain didn't get this thing, the wind and the rain would have.  Stupid thing.

It did create an interesting roadblock though.

This was the second casualty.  I fear the council will take this away, ostensibly for health and safety reasons.  However we all know their real motive for doing this:  The wood burning stove, into which go all the unwanted kittens and puppies of christmas.  The ash generated is then used to fertilise the soils in the gardens tended to by the council themselves.  This includes all school playing fields, and those pretty little daffodil patches you see adorning roundabouts in Spring.

It will be something of a shame to see this go.  I feel there's a romantic sentiment surrounding such things, as it slowly becoming part of the earth that sustained it is an endless theme within our own lives; and this tree mirrors us, as does all nature, eventually.

Apparently, looking at the trees in the area, half of the snow abandoned here, ended up travelling horizontally.

This created an interesting phenomenon, whereby small spheres of snow appear in open spaces of untouched snow.  This happens because an obstruction (this could be anything, from a clump of fallen snow, to a garden gnome) becomes a nuclei, onto which snow sticks.  As the wind blows, it causes more snow to stick, until the obstruction is fully coated.  I can imagine a mystical snowball fight taking place on our lawn, but science explains it away in my mind before each faction is fully realised within my own mind.

And this was the snow we had.  I love the name Yuki in Japanese, which, as I understand it, means snow.  I love that.  I love it so much that simply saying it is a pleasure.