Snow!

Wow! It's snowing!

I can't believe it - I woke up ths morning, looked out the window and everything was covered in snow. It looks so pretty, covering the trees and roofs and cars! It really looks like someone sieved icing sugar all over everything. And it's so funny to see cars driving down the road covered in snow, with just the windows clear :)

It almost makes up for it being so cold the past few days. I thought it was a bit warmer today, but maybe I just didn't notice, being too amazed at the snow - after standing at the station waiting 20 minutes for a train, i'm pretty damn cold. Not as cold as in Lapland, but still cold.

And this is proper snow - 1 or 2 centimetres deep, and soft and fluffy. This is the stuff you can make snowballs out of, not like the icy stuff in Lapland.

And now that I've reported in, i'm going to sit back and watch the snowy landscape out the train window until I get to work :)

Update: finally got around to putting up a couple of pictures:

Moving Back Home

So, I've decided to move back home. London's great, but it's not home, and I'm getting tired of that. I've been here almost a year, and I've gotten a lot more used to it, and learned my way around, but it's tough living in a place that just isn't quite... normal, what you're used to.

And it's tough being away from family - not only because I miss them, but because they're there and I'm here, I don't have a support circle here. Sure, I phone them a lot, but it's not the same; this really hit me when I got sick over New Year. Having no-one around to make me lunch, or go stock up on medicine, or just be around to help me feel better really sucked. I've proved (if only to myself) that I can cope on my own, I can be independent, I can handle it - but while I can do it all on my own, I'd just rather not any more :-)

And I miss biltong, and the sea, and the mountains, and the sunny weather :-) I know it won't be all sun and sand - it's not like when I went back on holiday, and it's not as though I'm going back in time to when I worked at ATC. It'll be a new life (again), and I'll have to go to interviews (aargh!) to find a job, and find a flat and organise a phone line and internet access and change all my addresses and basically re-do all the stuff I did when I moved over here, but in reverse. But it'll be worth it, because I'll be home.

It will be tough leaving London. Each place has it's own good points and bad points, as I've mentioned before, and I could add a million more things to that list. In the end, it comes down to where your heart is, and mine's in Cape Town. It might be different if I had tons of friends here - it wouldn't stop me missing familiar things, or my family, but it would help to have some support. And it's always more fun doing things if you have people to do them with - to point out all the cool sites, that kind of thing. But then again, having a bunch of friends might just have made it more difficult to leave.

There's a lot that I thought I would do that I haven't done, like travelling around Europe. But when you're working full time, weekends become about cleaning the house, and resting up for the next week of work, and shopping, and you just don't have the time or energy to go be a tourist. But I have a week or so of leave left, which I'll take at the end of February - and while I don't really feel like travelling around Europe, I do plan to do walking tours of Oxford and the Cotswolds, a day trip to Edinburgh (I know, it's pretty far to travel for a couple of hours! But there's a tour package for it which includes a sight-seeing bus trip and entry to Edinburgh castle, which should cover all the bits that I want to see), and a trip to Bath. My mom's coming over, since she hasn't been to visit me yet and won't get a chance now that I'm moving home, and we're going to spend two weeks packing up (aargh, gotta decide what to sell, what to ship home, and what to get rid of, and how to get rid of it), and doing touristy stuff that I haven't done yet, like Madame Toussauds and going out to Pooh Country. So all that should be fun.

And then, it'll finally be time to go home :-)

Magic Kingdom in the Sky

This is brilliant (although possibly not for the easily offended, religion-wise). It's "Magic Kingdom In the Sky", by an a capella group called DaVinci's Notebook. It's absolutely hilarious, and I recommend listening to it immediately!

All my life I have been searching for that fabled promised land,
With my sisters and my brothers we shall walk there hand-in-hand.
Through the trials and tribulations and the devils cruel temtations.
I know that we'll all get there one day!

After years and years of wandering, oh that kingdom we shall find
and the doors might not be open but we'll gather in the line.
And our hearts will swell with pride the day those gates swing open wide and take a walk down Main Street USA!

Ban Reclining Seats, Please!

I've mostly recovered from the tonsillitis and subsequent cold, although I'm still a bit sniffly. And I know that I promised a post on my Lapland Christmas when I got better, and it is still coming! But the other day I read a thread on banning reclining seats on planes, and then today I read this blog post which mentions the same thing. Now this is something I feel really strongly about - I hate it when the person in front of me reclines their seat. So this is the comment I posted on the blog:

the Knee Defender -- a mischievous little gadget that allows you to be a tad more comfortable at the expense of making your fellow traveler a tad less comfortable

Nope, that's the other way round: reclining makes you a tad more comfortable at the expense of your fellow traveller's much greater discomfort.

Try spending a 12 hour flight with your knees jammed up against the back of the seat in front of you, with no room to stretch or move your legs even just a tiny big.

Try reading anything larger than a small paperback - there just isn't room between my body and the seatback to hold it at a reasonable angle!

Try viewing the seatback LCD screen, with the seatback reclined - the viewing angle means that half the screen isn't visible.

Try eating your meal with your elbows bent out to the sides because your traytable is right up close - except that you have someone sitting on at least one side, so you have to try to eat one-handed.

Try getting in and out of your seat when the seat in front of you is reclined - you have to climb over the armrest to do it.

I don't mind as much if the person's actually trying to sleep, but on most of the flights I've been on lately they're just watching the movie or chatting to the person next to them, while I'm getting more and more cramped and frustrated and claustrophobic.

I really wish they would ban reclining seats!