Winter

Unloading the camera, I forgot I'd taken this view out the front windows - this is from a fortnight ago, but could have been as recently as last Friday:

It started snowing again on Sunday afternoon, while things were half-melted, and Cat was simply outraged: she was quite fed up with all this snow, this is the South dammit!

Standing around

Driving around Little Rock, I found - to my horror - that I had become more or less inured to one of the (many) things that shocked and disgusted me in this city when I first arrived. In this case, what I'm referring to is the poor bastards employed as living billboards - hired to stand 9 hours a day holding a sign announcing Discount Jewellery Sale Last Days! or Special Underwear Sale Now On, or just Liberty First Tax Services!!

When I first got here, they would just stand at busy corners, holding the signs, then some bright spark got the idea that if they waved their hand, or the sign, it would attract more attention, so now the poor bastards have to spend their time standing, waving and trying to draw attention, and smiling, smiling, smiling the whole time.

Just as a matter of course, I make a point of avoiding firms that use this sort of low-rent, contemptuous advertising, but when I think seriously about it, it makes my skin absolutely crawl. In the richest country in the world, this is the best use they can find for so much labour? I don't know how much these poor buggers are getting paid, but I'm sure it's not enough: they are out there, literally rain or shine, even in the freezing colds and standing ankle-deep in snow.

Hell, I used to think burger-flipping at McDonalds for minimum wages was a bottom-of-the-barrel sort of job, but this stuff has really lowered the standard.

And it also - of course - gives the lie to that ancient canard beloved of the Right, that people will just sit around and do nothing if you pay the unemployed any sort of benefit, however minimal. These people are doing an excruciating, astoundingly dull job in miserable conditions, just to earn some pittance.

I suppose there may be a few people who are suited to this, that this might represent a good job or even the peak of their abilities, but ... one, or maybe two, in a city the size of Little Rock, not the 60 or 80 people who seem to be doing it every weekend (and about half that weekdays I think).

Whiter than this page

Well, still snowed in - it snowed all Monday & didnt stop til yesterday morning. The roads look marginally passable this afternoon, provided we can make it up the slight incline of the driveway, which is still more or less solid snow. Must buy a snow shovel if we can get out (and any are left of course!).

At least it's proper snow this time, not the mostly ice with a spatter of snow on top, that we got last weekend ... much more festive looking, and oooh, soft and clean and inviting ... from inside the windows anyway. Not exactly the sort of weather Arkansas is known for, and the locals are all doom and gloom, worst winter ever seen since 1829 (*cough*cough*). Plus, of course, shows there ain't nuthin' to this global warmin' stuff, it's gettin' colder not warmer, which I've already had 3 times this week, in emails.

Let it come down

Wow, it snowed again overnight, and it's still snowing, quite hard. I can see I'll be working from home tomorrow. There's about 4 inches of snow piled up outside in the driveway already.

R was over from OKC for a weekend visit this weekend - had a game of 6th Edition wherein he massacred me: Note to self, do not charge chariots frontally into hoplites. Just because it sorta worked in DBM doesn't mean it will anywhere else ... which (a) makes sense from the real-world point of view, and (b) what on earth was DBM thinking?

Otherwise, kinda tiptoed around all the things we disagree on, like global warming, and a general hankering to revert to the 50s when middleclass white males had it so good (which inter alia I would say, actually not, but that's yet another matter).

Everything comes and goes

Everything comes and goes

pleasure leaves too early

and troubles leaves too slow

Tough month: it's been freezing cold here, biting in a way that it wasn't in London. And I do mean freezing, quite a few days it hasn't even reached 0C at the warmest point of the day. Last weekend, we didn't go out for 4 days as we were iced in - all the roads were sheets of ice, with a dusting of snow, and the temperature seesawed between 15 & 25F (-10 and -5 roughly). 

It isn't the grim grind of an English winter, even at worst there are plenty of sunny blue-sky days - viciously cold, but fine: but it's decidedly colder. Of course all the locals are shaking their heads and saying, never been a winter this cold before ... as usual. They've also been cheerfully announcing that it means this global warming stuff is just foolishness (gakk).

It, or various medical issues, seem to have left me fairly depressed: quite hard just to get up and keeping going each day.

Cat seems to be feeling a lot brighter than this though - she's just launched into a new project to build a set of compost bins behind the garage, with a raised vegetable garden as the next project after that. She's tearing into that with quite a bit of energy, happily hammering and sawing away in the garage, while wrapped up in many layers of warm clothes.