Okay, snow and the new year. Let’s take this one at a time.

Snow is different than dry or wet. It is colder, for one. Wear a jacket appropriate for your body heat - dress until you are warm, then stop. A hat and gloves would be a good idea, particularly since if it’s snowing, you can get frostbite. Frostbite is bad. Also, walking in snow is different. Expect there to be no friction when you put your foot down; don’t walk with your feet in front of you, walk with them under you. Put your weight down flat on the entire foot, not heel-to-toe. Always keep your center of gravity over the most stable foot. You see, where there is snow, there is ice and slush. Snow may make a pleasant crunch, but slush and ice make you fall because you can’t walk appropriately. Now the big test: driving in snow. You are going to relearn how to drive every winter. Now, it may have been a while since you learned, and most drivers on the road arguably never learned at all, so here we go: be aware of your car. What feedback is it giving you? Are the wheels slipping? Are the brakes locking? When you gas it, does it move? The answers are a lot, yes, yes, and no. Assume that at any moment, your car will cease responding. If that happens, are you going to skid into the car in front of you? Will you go into that intersection? Will you slide sideways into that house? It takes some time to process all this information, and it will take some time for your car to respond the way you want it to, AND the slower you’re going the less severe your inevitable accident will be. Oh, I don’t care how good a driver you are, how clean your record is. When there is snow on the ground, assume you will be in an accident. Drive that slowly, that defensively. Some asshole wants you to go faster and honks at you? No way. Go even slower, because he’s going to try to whip around you and he’s going to slide right into you. The slower you’re going, the safer you are.

I’m not saying go two miles an hour on the freeway. But I am saying go two miles an hour in an unplowed residential area. Be aware of the weather. Oh, and when you get in your car? Brush off the entire thing. No snow. At all. I don’t care if it’s on the top - that shit is going to come off your car as you drive, and it’s going to hit the car behind you, and when they get into an accident because of it, guess who’s at fault? You. You caused an accident by not brushing off your goddamn roof. And brushing off your hood is just common sense - that’s going to blow up onto your windshield, blinding you. Brush off your lights and liscence plate. Knock the sludge off your tire wells. These things are not optional, no matter how late you are. These things are just as necessary as seat belts and air bags. Guess what? Winter is different from summer. WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED.

Now, the new year. My resolution is to stare yearningly at fighter planes all the time, and to learn to identify most military aircraft, or at least all the ones around here. A cargo plane was doing touch-and-gos in skid plates the other day. SO COOL. I have never seen a plane that big bank that hard. You could tell exactly when he decided to turn, because all of a sudden the wings were perpendicular to the ground. Awesome.

I’m scared. I don’t know why. I think I’ve been away from work too long - when I’m away more than a day or two, I get weird about work, start thinking about all the negatives and forgetting the positives. And I get scared, and don’t want to go back, but as soon as I do I settle back into the routine again. Routine. Nothing changes, really. Nothing special happens. Nothing goes anywhere.

I think it’s just been a weird weekend, too short and too long all at once. I wish I could take a vacation. I wish I could quit work and just go to school. I wish I could win the lottery and have an island and a kit helicopter waiting for me when I’m thirty-five. I wish I could live inside my own head, in all the stories and places and wonderful, wild things that are nothing like reality.

I think it’s the rain.

Christmas Christmas Christmas! It’s so brown and ugly out, it’s hard to get into the spirit, but this evening we went to Shan’s parents’ place and they had a tree and a big meal and PILES of presents AND LIKE HALF OF THEM WERE FOR ME and it was AWESOME and I am totally a lying materialistic loser. Then Shan and I had a somewhat quiet present-opening at home, and the obligatory picture-taking of our loot for the forum to ooh over. I feel quite content, and a little off, like Christmas hasn’t really come yet. I mean, technically it hasn’t, but waiting wasn’t going to help. Now I can have two days of lazing about watching House and Batman and reading books and NOT THINKING ABOUT WORK. No matter how annoyed or nervous I am.

I should ask Ally to grab me some miso and nori and maybe umeboshi, but definitely miso and nori. And dried wakame? Whatever that is. It goes in miso soup. I think it’s the big pieces of seaweed.

Okay, whoa. When I blow my nose, my teeth hurt. And I mean like, eye-watering pain. I think my sinuses drained during the night and now everything is like OKAY WHOA WHERE DID THAT BIG CUSHION GO. Popping my ears helps. Heads are so peculiarly made, you know? I have no idea how all these delicate little systems work. I mean, eardrums! What The Fuck.

I should put batteries in the camera and take pictures of all the lovely lights tonight. And our presents under out teensy tree! I might move it over by the window and plug it in tonight. It can’t raise the electric bill that much, right? >_> I doubt I can sleep with it on, so it’ll get turned off anyway when it gets late.

I can’t believe I slept so much. And now I’m back to a normal sleep schedule, without being kept awake by having slept too much. I must have been sooooo sick. At least it wasn’t the superflu!

So I’ve slept almost exactly 24 hours out of the last 48, and I’ve spent about six hours neither at work nor asleep. GOLLY MAYBE I’M SICK. I’m down to runny-nose phase, though, and although my sinuses are still trying to crawl out of my face, they are not doing so quite as enthusiastically. I think I can eat real food now, maybe, and try to stay awake all day. Or perhaps I am being a little optimistic. I am still fairly miserable, after all.

Okay, no, eating food is a go. And mm, is it good. Still getting some fever-symptoms, but no actual fever, so I think I am doing alright. I have a few days to recover, after all, and then a semi-vacation without my coworkers. I need to talk to Boss about Sempai, though. We have some communication issues that are going to be a serious problem.

In fun news, Ally and I have decided to run away to Mexico and reenact someone’s fanfic. There will be tortillas and weaponry and Montezuma’s Revenge when she doesn’t believe me about the water. We can skip the sad ending and the vague hints of a really awesome sequel, though, because SOMEONE HASN’T WRITTEN THE SEQUEL YET AHHHH. One of my favorite stories of all time, and no sequel. Sorrow. Sorrow and despair.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

There is very little more amusing than seeing all your coworkers drunk off their asses by noon. YAY COMPANY PARTIES. They’ll never admit it, but the bosses bought a whole load of beer for everyone, on top of what got brought in by employees. My former department lead was so, so drunk - she went to answer the phone around ten and she was swaying and rubber-legged. It was hilarious. Also, catered dinner - there was a dude carving roast beef as you walked down the line to him, and I got stuck between two of the owners of the company. >_> Kinda weird.

Still madly sick, still sleeping all day to escape the agony that is my face. Goddamn sinuses.
I’m so nervous about being on my own next week at work - there’s an order of 18 scales I’ll need to do up as much as I can, and I hope Mike knows how to finish them because I sure don’t. Other than that… 210 scales I can do up but not finish, I got asked to do a day’s worth of pinion plates, and we finished those other jobs I had lined up… I’ll ask Jack when I run out of stuff, or I’ll just do more pinions. We really need those. I might need to do pivots, if my department lead didn’t make up enough… Just trying to get things straight in my own head. It’ll be a weird week.

There is very little worse than being really, truly sick. Except for being really, truly sick on Christmas. I cannot express how much pain I am in - that fever-ache that hits your joints and muscles, except worse, and I worked hard all day on my feet and now my knee, oh man, that is some awesome pain right there. My head is going to explode. I don’t dare take painkillers because my stomach is trying to reject everything that isn’t a starch, and I don’t have any other meds. Medicine is expensive. I am not even going to think about work tomorrow. At least it’s a half-day, and it starts late. Ugh. I just - bed. I want more bed. I got home at 2 and slept until 6, and I want to go back. Been drinking cranberry juice, as it is the least sugary drink we have other than plain water, which for some reason does not appeal to me. Water in this state tastes funny.

So. Miserable ball of me will be on the bed, watching recorded episodes of Good Eats, after I do some dishes. I will get a cold, damp cloth to soothe my sinuses and some cough drops for my lovely hoarse voice, and I will wrap presents some other day.

Things I Have Meant To Blog About:

Fighter jets. We have a bunch here in town, and the runway is just short enough that they need their afterburners on. They practice touch-and-gos in the evening, when it’s pitch black. They are SO COOL. You hear this roar, I have seriously never heard afterburners before, and you look at the horizon ahead of where the sound seems to come from and there they are, a pretty pair zooming along. So awesome.

Taco Bell. Can anyone tell me how many actual places had e. coli? Was it less than 50? Because see, there’s this certification called NSF. It says that this item has no places on it where food can readily collect. I can attest that Taco Bell does not much care about this certification, or at least does not care about it on a certain thing that is being tested in their restaurants. I have a suspicion that their e. coli was not so much brought in as it was grown. This is not a particular surprise if you have ever seen inside a commercial kitchen, most fast food aside. My god, the things we get back from certain restaurant chains. I am not leery of eating at such places, because I have yet to die of it, but my god. Ew. It’s bad enough that I don’t want to name them.

I was gonna whine, but instead, I will tell you, my faithful and mostly uninterested reader, this:

I got over 100% on my Algebra midterm.

So, there we go. I aced my classes for the first time since, uh, elementary school. I don’t know my final class grades yet, and I’m not sure they’re posted yet - but damn. I am so proud of myself. I had my teacher mail my test back to me, and I adore her for that because it cost her a buck, and I flipped to the second page and Saw A+ “Hey-hey!” I thought. “That’s sweet!” And then I saw that I actually had two wrong and wondered what was up with the + sign there, and then I saw I got the bonus right and thus my score was 108.

OH GOD SO BORED.

EDIT: Today/yesterday on my flist, someone’s twin sister almost had brain surgery for her epilepsy, someone else’s rabbits all spontaneously died, CFUD disappeared from the Internet, a bunch of people posted memes, someone posted Harry Potter fic, someone else posted Supernatural fic, someone posted a recipe, someone broke a camera in Japan, someone recced a story written by a newcomer to Atlantis, someone was propisitioned on a Seattle street corner, someone invented National Coming Out Day, and someone has an imbedded YouTube video of Atlantis done to Evanescence.

SO. BORED. Also, need wrapping paper.