What a day!

Let's just start by saying that I got my hair cut the other day, and the girl doing the cutting, after commenting on how beautiful my hair color is (back to natural, more or less), commented on how jealous she was that I got live somewhere with real seasons. Well, real enough, despite having falls and springs that are about 2 days long. At least summer and winter differ by more than a few degrees. Here, as she so nicely pointed out, all it does was rain.

Which was why, on a day like today, I'm pretty sure everybody just skipped out on work (I'd say school, too, but it's reading week soooo there is no school!) and went to the park. The sun was out, and the sky was virtually cloudless (though, amazingly enough and as the Weather Channel pointed out, visibility was incredibly low, which I'm sure is something that can only occur in Scotland), and temperatures soared to about 60. Wind was negligible (for ONCE). The world's most perfect day (well, this part of the world, anyway; my perfect day would include about 20 more degrees, a beach and some kind of girly cocktail with an umbrella in it). You guys in the States are having snow days; we have sun days.

We discovered Springtime as we walked to pay all of our bills. I want to reiterate how difficult it is to pay people in this country. They don't take credit cards, or they don't take YOUR credit card, or you can't pay in cash even though you don't have a credit card, or you can have it taken right out of your account by not all at once and it has to be monthly, or they can't take it out of your account at all and you have to use a debit card or a check even though you're not eligible to get a checking account in this country... or some absurd combination of any of the above. Council Tax has been a supreme pain in the ass (ask me about it if you dare), and tuition payments took about 4 months before the university figured out how to deal with my loans, which is odd considering there are an awful lot of us Yanks mulling around.

So we got everything paid up, just in time for our Valentine's Day trip to Amsterdam (love a man who plans for BOTH my birthday and Valentine's Day despite the fact that they land on the same day; haven't had one of those in a while). On our way back home, aside from noticing the serious lack of work going on in the city today, we stopped to toss the baseball around. It felt good to get some sun. I think I'm suffering irritability and anxiety due to a severe lack of Vitamin D, hopefully taken care of by a nice trip to the Arabian desert in a couple of weeks. But getting some exercise out in the park, watching people just stroll around, enjoying the sun and warm air and birds and dogs and... the lack of people picking up after their dogs. Yeah, it was rather pleasant.

On a different note, I'm reading a book by Steven Brust called Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille. It's by and large a very odd book, but it reminds me a lot of how my mind works: deep and intense at times, those times followed very quickly and inexplicably by hours upon hours of clear, unadulterated schizo visions of Disney Princesses, Van Gogh and Star Trek, often all in one. I'm fully enjoying the erratic quality of the book, though I hear the ending is a little off putting. You know, nuclear war, a bar that can jump in time and space whenever a nuke goes off in its vicinity, an Irish band caught in it all... the usual.