Man, hard to believe that yet another month has slipped by us, even thought it's not really over and, really, February is the runt of the months anyway. It's not like I went grey over the 4-week lifespan of February, 2009. It's just the rolling over of the calender.

I have no energy for much these days. Work is unbelievably frustrating, mostly because I'm good at what I do and see so much potential; yet, somehow, the quality people around me are being eclipsed by the mouth-breathing retards. It's interesting how your perception tends to settle on lower and lower things. At first you see only the good; before you know it, you see nothing but communists and sycophants all around you.

Lack of energy or no, I'll not quit for a while, I guess. In contrast to that twisted pederast, skippystalin, I started this worldwide blogolution and I'm goddamn determined to see it through.

Now, get out there and kick some ass!

It came down pretty good last night. There were the requisite Snow-N00bs stuck on the side of the road this morning. Also, new to me, there were the Snow Lost, those sad, abandoned souls lined up at the bus stop waiting for a bus that would never come; these ghost riders of the public transportation system milled about aimlessly, corralled in by the snow and A0 advertising posters.

I trudged my way through the cleared lanes in our little neighborhood street. The sidewalks were still piled high at 7:00AM, and considering the improbability that anyone around here owns a snow shovel, they will probably stay that way until the thaw next April. I passed by about a dozen disoriented little old ladies on the way into the office, and they all looked so similar that I started feeling an uncomfortable déja vu each time. The last said to me, "Are ye goin' to th' college luv? I think it's clooosed." She must have been snow-blind to think that I was a college student.

But I made it to the office, unlike 90% of my lazy bastard co-workers, who all appended "-wfh" to their nicknames in IRC, for "work from home". But with the snow do fall the IQs; the people to whom I should be providing an example of leadership stood around most of the day, staring out the window and giggling at the white drifts. One of them even went outside and built a snowman.

I guess snow is nice to look at, and makes for pleasant diversion for those of us with busy lives to lead.

Well, looks like I don't have to go to school tomorrow.

You would think that living in a new country would be great fodder for blogging. I've been living in the UK now for going on two years, and I find it almost impossible to write about. If something strange happens to you in the course of an otherwise perfectly normal day, you can sit down and pound out 500 words about it in no time, if you're so inclined. But how do you single out any one particular thing as remarkable when absolutely everything around you is new? I guess the answer is: Arbitrarily. So let me get one thing off my chest:

Plugs.

When I first moved to Europe back in '98, I thought the Germans had some kind of switch-and-handle fetish. The outlets were huge; the light switches were huge; even the lever on the toilet was a big, huge surface that you needed two hands to operate. I got used to it over the years, but was once again startled by appliance gigantism when I moved to the UK.

Here you'll see, from left to right, a European Nokia charger plug, a United Kingdom Nintendo DS Lite charger, and, for scale, my trusty Zippo™ lighter. You'll notice that the UK plug is easily three times the size of a standard Zippo, and could eat the European charger in a gulp if it had a mind to.

As you might imagine, UK outlet strips are absolutely gargantuan; versions that accommodate more than four simultaneous connections resemble a cricket bat, in both size and weight.

The UK plug size does have its advantages. Shoving it into one of the equally-monumental receptacles recalls other, more manly tasks such as heaving furniture, or wrestling bison. Also, when it's in, it's in, by God. Stumbling over a plugged-in cord will more likely rip your hip from its joint than dislodge that bastard from the wall.

If I may speculate for a moment, I believe this is a form of compensation for the deep-seated British fear of electricity. For example, in British toilets, there are no light switches. There is a rope hanging from the ceiling which you tug to turn on the light, I assume to avoid operating a light switch with wet hands. Also, there are only low-voltage outlets in the bathroom, small ones suitable for European- or American-sized shavers, and not even powerful enough to drive a hair-dryer. They do, however, have no qualms about having electric shower units instead of gas ones; which amounts to having a big, electrical appliance with heavy juice flowing through it hanging above the bathtub. The Toaster of Damocles, I like to call it.

This is probably all a leftover from the early days of electricty, when the family would gather around the one outlet in the house every evening to listen to the BBC tell them how electricity was angrying up their blood and spreading the dropsy. The plugs were made huge to remind one of their menace. Once something like that gets established, it becomes mighty hard to replace.