Snow Fairy

The heaviest snowfalls southern England has seen in the past 10 years have been when I've been here. It is currently both the first time I've been in London for Christmas and the first time it has snowed at Christmas in over 25 years. This past January I visited London for a week and, lo and behold, there was snow. Canterbury was mounded in over a foot of snow during my erasmus year there. More to the point, there has not been significant snowfall recently in this area without me.

For a while I thought this phenomenon was somehow linked to my curse from Ralph, the God of Plumbing, but I'm willing to concede that this is just global warming and good timing as I have not, to my knowledge, affected snowfall in the US. Dieties of Disasters, Drainage, and Ductwork are not beholden to mankind's political boundaries.

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I haven't updated much lately because I've been very busy and very happy. I tend to not feel moved to blog when I'm in a good mood, which I may have mentioned before probably gives an unfair impression of me to the unassuming reader.

Today I'm content but idle as I'm unwilling to brave the riot that is Christmas shopping again if I can help it. Yesterday I started at noon, when the mummies of fussy children were smiling and indulging their spawn's screeched demands for cake and entertainment. I eventually ran for home at 5, by which time the unrelenting screams had passed through the 'ignore the brat' phase and had finally caused even the sweetest of mummies to start shouting and throwing things. I hid my wallet in a high inner pocket and more than once had need to shoo little sticky probing hands away from my bags. I'm learning restraint though, I think--I merely murmured "smack your offspring unless you'd like me to do it for you" rather than grabbing the face of the breeder who's sprog I had just prised off of my purchases and shouting it at her. It wasn't easy, though.

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Kristen's News of the Asinine: I won the video game Portal recently on Ben's x-box. It was difficult because i'm awful with buttons and joysticks--my character spent most of her time slamming headlong into walls and tended to crouch when I needed her to run, so she got vaporized and drowned a lot. I like the way the game saves though--no matter how many times you get killed, you can just go back to the most recent autosave and try again, no harm done. If it weren't for this feature I'd still be on level 4. Also fun with this game is the player's ability to go into disused spaces unworried about being pursued or running out of time, most of the time, so you can pick things up and toss them around and look at the details of the graphics. The last time I played a video game before this one it was Super Mario Brothers on a black and green game boy--I lost level 1 until the batteries died--so I'd kinda missed out on developing the hand/eye coordination needed to play these things with the finesse required to win. Thanks, Valve, for making a game for me to enjoy.

And the cake isn't really a lie.

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Friday I get to be appraised and re-appraised by even more members of the Boy's extensive kinship group. Wish me luck.