Bizarro Christmas

I just got back from my Christmas travels. Despite losing my voice for several days due to a nasty chest cold, it was a wonderful time. The weather, however, was rather unusual.

First, we visited Bryan's family in New York state. Everyone lamented that there was no snow this year.


Then, we went to Arizona to visit my family... where it dumped copious amounts of snow in the foothills while we were out hiking.


So, to reiterate...

New York in December


Arizona in December


Good thing we brought warm clothes!

Cold-Blooded

I left Minnesota because it was too damned cold. After more than two years of living in the tropics, returning to Minnesota was a shock to my system, even in June. The temperature in Minnesota in June averages about 80 degrees. I was used to 105. My blood was thin, and after scraping my car windshield for several weeks in a row in November, I was ready to move on to a warmer locale.

Several months later, in January, I moved to my current Bay Area home in California. I threw away my turtlenecks and long underwear and expected to see palm trees lining every street. Hmm... that is a different California.

But, my blood adjusted to the point where I'm only mildly chilly on a constant basis, and I'm happy with the eucalyptus trees. Who needs palms with their pesky dropping of lethal coconuts, anyway? In short, I've grown to love it here.

And then, this morning as I left for work, I merrily tromped over to my car and realized that the entire thing was covered in a thin sheet of bumpy ice. I did a quick mental inventory of things I was carrying to see if anything would double as an ice scraper. Banana, clearly not. Tennis shoes, nope. Textbook, softcover so no. In my trunk I found a pair of gloves (hooray!) and an empty plastic bag from Target. I used my now-gloved hands to scratch a hole in the ice large enough to see, but once I started driving, it iced right back over. I pulled over two blocks up from where I had been. In the end, I had to let my car warm up for a full 10 minutes to thaw the windshield out enough so that I could see.

In Minnesota, at least I owned an ice scraper. The funny thing is, I carried my old one around until I got rid of my old car. I remember thinking how silly it was to have an ice scraper in California!

Inter-not

We are getting new internet service in my apartment. It's really the same service, but it's being transferred out of my former roommate's name. It seems like a simple task that would take merely minutes, perhaps, at the very most, several hours, to complete. After some initial haggling over timeframes, AT&T seems to think it takes them two days to stop service and reinstate the same service under a different name. Unfortunately, they overestimate themselves. Evidentially, it actually takes about a week. This is down though, from their original estimate of two weeks. (Hence the aforementioned haggling.)

In this time of Zero Internet, I'm discovering just how dependent I've become upon to convenience of being connected to virtually any information I could ever want to access, at any time of day or night. Going to party? Let me map the directions on Yahoo. Want to know which restaurant is good in the area? It's easy to hop on to Citysearch and check it out. I need to pay my cell phone bill. I'll just get online and do it electronically. I want to make a cool new recipe. My favorite recipe site, Epicurious, will have something fabulous. I need my brother's address. I've got it stored in my online address book. (I did away with my paper one, with people scratched out and new ones in the margins, long ago.)

I am so completely impotent with out the internet.

Normally, I would just do all of this virtual errand running and cybersearching at work. However, I just started a new job. And even if I were inclined to make web surfing my first impression (which I am not), I still don't have a password to get onto my new employer's computer system.

All this whining about no internet, and yet, I'm blogging something right now! Where am I, you wonder? Thank goodness for cafes with free wireless. The only issue is, finding that elusive and sought-after electrical plug.