stupid weather

"+4 C - the warmest december in 178 years: january, too, will be a disaster for skiers". "the data predict plus-zero temperatures in the south for all of january: the record-mild weather from december will continue, says british data model".

to think i bought a warmer coat this year (last year i was cold straight into february!). i've been annoyed with the warm weather all winter, though, and looking forward to the snow, but it seems we won't get any. if that's the case, i wish it would stop flirting with +5 and go straight up to +12 or so, please, so i could wear my light jacket.

on christmas day the weather map of the whole country was showing it only -1 in lapland, which is just wrong. i take it there's not actually snow in santa's village, in that case.

linux adventures continued, reading, not being misanthropic

i'm going to call wax's friend V, which is what she is calling him, because (1.) "wax's second friend" is not very catchy, and (2.) "V" has some inherent non-boring value through literary reference, although V doesn't bear any resemblance that i can think of to his namesake. anyway, his new laptop is sickening¹, having been in the habit of booting to the blue screen of death and no further, so she spent hours today trying to boot it from disc, or reformat and reinstall, or at least put linux on it, and all of these things failed, because wax isn't nearly as good at computers as she would like to be, and there is only so much you can do with a possessed laptop anyway², even while connected over the telephone to Windows Brother³. 

meanwhile, the three of us watched freaky friday and discussed bodyswap fic, lindsay lohan's drug habits, and the geography of the us and finland. V's computer is still on our coffee table and still zombified, so he'll be back tomorrow for more. also she fobbed off the whole dark is rising series on him, plus some mystery novel or other, to begin her project of improving his english reading ability (she hopes to eventually introduce him to slash, and that he will subsequently realise he is gay. she's already begun gently talking about supernatural fandom to him and showing him vids).

i got books in the mail today, and took a break from heyer mysteries & pratchett to devour in one gulp the most recent chrestomanci novel, and to marvel that diana wynne jones, over 70, is still producing awesome books. (poul anderson rather beat that, or matched it at least i think. i remember when he died. and now that i've thought of it, i want to buy my own copies of the whole flandry series. ♥) (and so has fred saberhagen written that long, actually! ♥♥)

i've been lounging around in my birthday present from isilya, and for quite awhile i was also wearing part of the packaging that it came in. wax took a picture so that, as i urged her at the time, isilya can see that i'm enjoying more than one part of her present. (we're definitely enjoying the tea and decaf cappuccino parts of it too, though.)


1. in the sense of "becoming ill"

2. in this case, what she could do consisted of "name it loki".

3. i've never got good descriptive nicknames for her brothers because they're both so cool and quite similar to each other; one has a child, but i absolutely refused to use child-or-daddy-related nicknames. the younger brother converted to linux, though, and neatly solved our problems: they are now Windows Brother and Linux Brother, or perhaps i shall call them Brother Windows and Brother Linux. Brother Windows is the rich yuppie one who lives in town and has a kidlet. Brother Linux is my age and was married last summer and lives in ekenäs, as does wax's mom.