"the sky has declared war on the earth, and its icy white soldiers outnumber us by millions to one"
Living as I do in such close and intimate proximity with the British countryside I tend to receive a slightly more distilled and purified version of whatever weather is currently afflicting the UK. On a sunny morning bright light pours in through all of the east-facing lounge's biggest windows and my routine walk to work is gorgeous - although we haven't had any proper warmth since I moved here in December. On a foggy day the landscape is ripe for photography and the Sun looks, more than at any other time, like a true nuclear fusion explosion in the sky. On cold mornings the relative lack of vehicular and foot traffic around my lodgings means the consistent white tinge on the local buildings and vegetation stays almost completely undisturbed, sometimes for the entire day. And when the frost giants descend and the entirety of England receives the most snow it has for eighteen years, and I'm the first guy out of bed in the morning, well, the weather outside is frightfully beautiful.
The people of the United Kingdom are well known for carrying on regardless, persevering through adversity, but the problem with snow is that snow is inanimate; it does not go away if you ignore it. Were aliens to invade our country, as they do every week on certain television shows, they could bomb us to pieces and we would not surrender, but if they used advanced weather-controlling machinery to inflict blizzards upon us, we would bow down and surrender by the end of the weekend.
I actually made it into work on the first day of the snow, being offered a lift by a passing co-worker on the way in, and only discovering that all local buses were cancelled by the time I got there. I got another lift home and worked from home the next day, something I'm no longer able to do on account of the lack of an internet connection. I'm a long way from any decently fast local interchange so it looks like 512kb/s is the best I'm going to be able to buy. Working from home isn't ideal at this particular home thanks to the lack of a usable desk-like object (my actual table is unusable due to the amount of stuff semi-permanently stored underneath it and on top of it) or anything approaching an office chair.
I'm a long walk from Sainsbury's and still without a car but I've got used to the trek and I pass it off as legimitate exercise and bring a fair weight of stuff home. I ditched the canvas bag idea when I realised that the plastic ones packed much flatter, so apologies to my sister and brother-in-law for that mildly environmentally unfriendly move. I'm in the process of watching a huge quantity of old anime which has sat on my hard drive unwatched since college, to see what's worth buying legitimately and what's worth deleting. At the same time I'm scanning my mountains of old financial paperwork to JPEG, in order to save space. It's uncommonly time-consuming, but I'm hoping to arrive at a point where everything of significant value to me is stored electronically where it can be rescued from a burning building in one trip.
