Selenay's Ramblings

Well, only another inch or snow and it was the light powdery stuff that fell. Nothing is expected tomorrow so my shopping trip to Oxford may now happen. That's good because I have to buy my Dad another present - someone at his workplace bought things from his Amazon wishlist but not at Amazon! So I've duplicated, damn. He's got no ideas (grrr) so it's time to get creative.

The roads are pretty nasty in places. Sadly, they're particularly bad up near my church and the church is too far to walk. So Mum and I aren't going to our carol concert, instead we're going to the church up the road for a "Hogroast and Carols", whatever that is. Sounds kind of weird. But we want carols, damnit, even if I seem to be getting my cold back so my throat is kinda scratchy. It'll be fine when it's limbered up a bit with a good, rousing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful".

I am so glad that I brought my snow boots with me. They're definitely needed.

I'm doing a Flickr photoset of my trip and you can see the first few pictures here.

A taster:

I'm doing that thing other people do that always make me jealous: I am posting from my gate at the airport.

It's the little things that make me happy.

But anyway. I'm at my gate! I'm going to the UK! Via Boston! And US Customs are scary! And I got selected for extra security screening!

I got here insanely early, due to my over preparation habits. My car is staying at a hotel while I'm away, partially so that I can stay there the night I get back (I hate driving the airport highway in the dark and don't want to risk the weather) and partially so that my drive can be ploughed while I'm gone. So I had to drop the car off and get hotel transport to take me to the airport. It went far smoother than expected, which is why I'm here so early. Ah, well. I know for the future :-)

Although I'm safely checked in and waiting, I don't think that I'll feel happy and relaxed until I'm on my flight to London, mid-Atlantic, and there is no chance that I'll get stuck in Boston. The Customs guy wanted to know whether I was OK financially to get stuck in the airport there. Comforting.

So, I'm going to work on editing my Yuletide and wait for my gate to be called. Eee!

So, in a little over a week I fly to England for Christmas, weather permitting. (No storms between here, Boston, and England, please)

The funniest thing about this process is everyone's impression of Christmas in England. I'm quite happy to say that I lived in the south of England and things are different up north and in Scotland. Everyone that I talk to (even people who have visited the UK) have this strange impression that Christmas where I lived is cold and snowy and pretty, rather like one of the Victorian paintings.

Er.

A hundred years ago, probably even sixty years ago, this wasn't too far from the truth. Now?

Not so much.

Christmas in my little corner of England is usually warm (5C+ - sometimes low teens) and the precipitation we get is in the form of rain. Bright, sunny Christmases aren't something that I really remember, although I'm sure we've had them. They're usually damp or raining. There's a lot of mud. Winter in my corner of England might get snow for one day in February, but that's it. Last year's snow was such a big deal purely because we don't normally get weather like that and the country isn't prepared.

I blame Hollywood.

Seriously, when is the last time you saw a festive movie set in London (it's always London or the surrounds - never Bognor or Cardiff or York or some other non-South East location) that didn't have convenient snow on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? As much as I enjoyed watching the move Holiday at the weekend, I kept cringing from all the exceedingly unlikely snow in Sussex. If it's a location that people where people can commute to London for work, there is unlikely to be snow on the ground in December.

I am not saying that Christmas isn't lovely over there. A crisp, cold, bright winter's morning can't be beaten and there are a lot of absolutely beautiful places that I'll be visiting. That Victorian Christmas that everyone is imagining me having, though, is about as probable as a Labour win in the next general election.

I'm thinking that, to counter-act all this crazy talk about beautiful snowy London, I'm going to take a photo journal while I'm away and try to upload to Flickr each evening. Sound good?

I've just jinxed it to snow from the moment I land, haven't I?

Last night Mum and I decided that we needed to watch Dirty Dancing. I still love that movie so much. The dancing is amazing. The story is great and moving, the music is just right, but it's the dancing that really captures me. Swayze was fantastic :-( The only gripe I have is that the filming of the final big dance number, while beautiful, doesn't let me see feet as much as I'd like.

Yes, I do hate going to a dance performance if I can't see the feet.

In dance, it's the feet that really do the magic work. The bodies tell the story and get you pulled in, that's where you see the chemistry between characters, but it's the feet where the real work and technicality are and that's what I always end up watching.

In other stuff, I read the re-cap of S5 Grey's Anatomy. I suspect strongly that I'll be putting S6 on the DVR. Damn. It's always been my guilty pleasure series, because it's so silly and frivolous and basically daft and yet...

Also, by big horrible Zombie Project has taken a nasty turn. Last night we thought that we'd finally cracked it and were loading good, correct data. Today we've found that there was a serious issue with the data load that nobody had noticed, wasn't on our list of issues and is going to take a huge amount of work to fix. Urf.

So glad that I'm going out for evil dinner tonight so that I can drown my sorrows in yummy food.

Mum goes home tomorrow, which I am both not enjoying (I'm going to miss her!) and looking forward to (my house will be my own again!). It's a weird feeling. The visit has been much better than I'd hoped, I'm confident that we won't kill each other when she's here next year, but I'm also quite looking forward to being on my own as well. Except that I enjoy doing things with her. Although it will be nice to do things at my own pace again :-) So, it's a conflicted thing but at least I know that I can survive winter and stuff on my own.

Oh, also, I'm coming to England for Christmas. Bought the tickets last night. Yay!

Believe me, Christmas Eve is not the day that you want a nine hour power cut! Apparently a large part of the province was out, including most of the city, but that somehow doesn't make it better...

Anyway, I'm still here and I now have lights and heat. The Christmas pud is being constructed ready to be cooked tomorrow, the veggies amongst us are getting up early to prepare their meal tomorrow (as that was one of the things we meant to do today and it had been postponed from an original day of Monday) and we are largely ready.

The one minor technical hitch is that my sister and I have hardly and presents to give. D'oh! They are all in my sister's luggage (except for my present to her) which might be at the airport now but is unlikely to be reunited with her until after Christmas. Still, she's here and my cousin is here and it's nice to have pressies well spaced :-)

Hopefully tomorrow is going to be great whatever happens because we'll all be together. I see that the Yuletide archive is due to open in two hours but I may not be awake then :-) So I'll look forward to ficcy presents when I can get a few minutes at the computer. With luck, I'll be able to get the Doctor Who special tomorrow evening and I'll be introducing a few family members to it. Heh.

I wish everyone out there a Happy Christmas. Whatever you are celebrating, have a lovely holiday and enjoy being with the people you're with. That is my Christmas wish this year.

And then we lost the power again...

ETA: And then the power came back five minutes later...

I lost power yesterday just after lunch, but thankfully just after we established that my sister's plane had indeed landed in Moncton. Phew! She spent the night safe and warm in my cousin's house being spoiled rotten and then another cousin is driving down here for Christmas and has found her a seat in his van. So hopefully she'll be here by the afternoon and her nightmare, fifty hour trip will be over.

The bad news is that her luggage didn't get on the plane :-( Apparently the airline has it, knows where it is, and will be trying to reunite her with it ASAP. For now, though, she needs to buy some necessities and we both need to purchase token gifts for the parents because the real gifts were in her suitcase. Da's comment this morning was that he slept much better last night than he has since he arrived because it feels like things are finally going our way.

The window held, although it was leaking heat like a seive which wasn't good once the power had gone. Around mid-afternoon the winds started to die down a bit, enough that my parents could get out of the house without being blown over, so they went to the hardware store to pick up some wood to secure the window better. They also went to the store to pick up some groceries including some hot chicken for supper. Yay! Miracle of miracles, just as we'd served up supper for Mum and I and were trying to work out what to do with Da's cold tofu, the power came back. Hooray! It flickered a lot over the next couple of hours and then steadied. It's amazing how much better one feels with hot food and hot tea inside and some actual lights.

The window has now been boarded on the inside so we're not worried about flying glass if the inner pane gives way. Hopefully today we'll be able to get out and secure it from the outside so that nothing can smash the inner pane. Boarding the window also insulated it better, which we decided was a good thing just in case the power went out again.

The glass that we picked up looks incredibly thin and we suspect that the window wasn't quite as well-constructed as it should have been. Damn contractor who built the house. Our roof was not the one loosing shingles - it was my neighbour. We replaced our roof in the spring when we discovered that it was very poorly constructed. His house was built by the same contractor and he obviously didn't replace the roof. Now we're feeling very grateful for spending the money on a new roof because our neighbour is going to have a nighmare getting that fixed. Plus he's trying to sell the house!

The adrenaline ran out not long after the power came back and we all kind of flumped. Once we'd got the window boarded and some of the mess cleared up, we decided that we needed a truely daft, escapist movie to unwind with. Cue Star Trek IV! Damn, that move is fun and it reminded me yet again why Bones is my favourite original Trek character :-)

I'm at work today and the good news is that the office was in fact closed all day yesterday rather than just until noon so I haven't lost a day of pay. Apparently the power was out most of the day here. There has been 'discussion' over the late announcement of the closure on the emergency line - nothing was said about my office until well after most people had started to battle their way in. The window was the only reason that I didn't come in first thing and a lot of people then had difficulty getting home again due to the storm. Methinks that the decision will be made a bit earlier next time!

To sum up, my sister is going to get here in a few hours, the window is semi-secure, my cousin will be on a flight here this afternoon, we have power and I've still got enough time to do the last bits of shopping that I need. Christmas is starting to look more hopeful than it was twenty-four hours ago :-)

Apparently, my family cannot travel in December without thousands of issues.

The good news is that my sister's flight left England and got to Newark.

The bad news is that the flight from Newark to Nova Scotia has been cancelled due to the weather. Continental's first available flight was on Christmas Day. Yup, living in the airport until Christmas Day.

Continental has managed to put her onto a flight tomorrow to Moncton. We have a cousin in Moncton and, if the flight goes, she can stay with him until someone can get her on she can get a train here. Thankfully, we managed to get her a hotel room for the night so she won't be sleeping on a floor in Newark. Now she just has to get her luggage somehow (she's a in a queue) and get the hotel shuttle to pick her up.

Who would have thought it would be this hard to get three people to Nova Scotia?

There's nothing more we can do and at least we know that she'll be OK tonight, unlike a lot of passengers who probably didn't have family sorting out alternate flights and hotel bookings. Plan is that we're all off to bed now and we'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

It's possible that I might be working from home because my parents are *not* taking their rental car to New Brunswick with its all-season tyres. If it's possible to travel (oh, god, the Cobequid Pass again) at all then they'll drive my car with its winter tyres and load them down with snacks, blankets, candles, matches, hot drinks and anything else that I can think of.

Please, lots of prayers for my sister's safe arrival here would be very much appreciated right now.

Last night we went out and bought our Christmas tree. Note to self: trees are better bought during daylight.

Anyway.

The tree has been set up in its stand in our upstairs living room. We had been anticipating two possible reactions: bored indifference or climbing it. The first was hoped for, the second seemed more likely.

We got a third, unexpected reactio: complete terror.

Annie is definitely not impressed with the prickles, but she's at least willing to be in the same room with it. Kate won't go near it. She doesn't want to see it. We've put their things in the craft room so they can be shut away at night (in case they decide to climb or destroy decorations) and she's decided that the only place she feels safe is cowering in a corner of the craft room or sitting in the sink in my bathroom. Her biggest problem is that she can see the tree (lurking threateningly?) when she makes the dash from the craft room to the bathroom.

Poor Kate.

We're hoping that when we've got decorations on it she might be a little happier. It's definitely not what we expected! Annie can't work out why her sister is being such a fraidy cat.

Of course, Annie spent the first day he was here hiding from Da while Kate was cuddly and adorable to him. We think it was the height and his deep voice that unnerved her. Now she's quite happy with him and he sealed the deal last night with a photo shoot of them while Mum and I made supper. Annie loves being photographed :-) He even managed to get some good shots of Kate while she was awake, a very rare thing. Then we brought a tree into the house and terrifed Kate witless. We're so mean.

Christmas with my girls is going to be...interesting.

The bad news is that they won't be here tomorrow.

The good news is that they will be here this week.

We managed to get them flights on Continental via Newark that get in at midnight on Tuesday. My sister is now arriving at midnight next Sunday (21st) rather than mid-afternoon the following day. They all fly home on the same day as the original plan, but six hours earlier which makes that day a lot more complicated to arrange. I'm supposed to have a rheumatology appointment that day and the cats are getting spayed so me driving them to the airport is looking doubtful.

Still, they're going to be here for Christmas and that's the important part. I'm pushing Mum to make a formal complaint about the bit where they didn't tell them about the cancellations.

We can't do anything about rearranging the rental car until tomorrow, but we're getting a cab sorted out for them because they won't let me pick them up from the airport. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they can get the rental sorted otherwise my car will be the only transport and they'll have to take me to and from work if they want to go anywhere during the day.

We'll see.

I'm just glad that we're still getting the Christmas we planned and Mum will still see her brother. It's probably going to be her last chance to see him and I couldn't bear the idea of her grief if she hadn't got to see him.