Need to feel better?

That will depend on just where you might be at this particular moment I suppose.  If you’re already somewhere warm,  you may not need to feel any better.

Unless you had to put on a sweater or something equally as daft.

This is what we woke up to this morning.  

 

And now that it’s mid afternoon,  we have considerably more.

And that’s all I have,  really.   No complaints,  just an observation.  Which reminds me,  I have to go down to the storage locker and bring up my *shudder* snow shovel.  I like to keep it tidy out there.

The other slight “issue” that arises when there’s a given amount of snowfall,  is that Travelling Companion gets ever so slightly stressed at even the thought of driving in it.   Much to her credit,  and this coincides with the switch we made from “all season radials” to actual winter tires about 8 years ago,  she has been much more courageous when faced with driving in the snow.  She’s had a few experiences in the Czech Republic,  among others.   But she does get stressed,  which meant that I drove her this morning.  

I’m not even sure what it is exactly,  with the possible exception of spending the first ten years of my life in Nova Scotia,  but it doesn’t bother me in the least.  Maybe I’m too dumb to let it bother me?   I don’t know.  Admittedly driving in a snow storm in the dead of night is another story,  and that has more to do with visual acuity than anything else.   Just like my memory,  my eyesight is also getting dim.

 

 

Coming back up Mariahilfer Straße this morning:

Bleah!

 

One of the other “joys” of a snow fall:

I thought it was a little cooler than usual when I went out for my morning jaunt,  so it wasn’t much of a surprise to see one of the windows in the stairwell had either not been closed properly,  or simply left open.   Who does this?   I’ve opened the one on the floor just below us in the summer time,  but would never consider it when the temperature drops.

It will shortly be time to head out again to fetch T.C.   I can well imagine that the traffic will not be in top form,  so I’ll probably give myself a good hour.   Yes,  an hour.
“Gee,  what do you do all day,  Bob?”

 

This next photo will be a test.  Study hard.

Travelling Companion is heading out tomorrow,  so I did a quick check to see if she had enough local currency for her destination.  She’ll have plenty enough for cab rides,  although some times she comes back with all the money she left with,  depending on the circumstances. 

She mentioned that, the last time that she was there,  she took a cab to her hotel,  and it turned out it was probably 400 meters.  She could have walked.  Not a huge deal in terms of our personal resources,  since the Company That Cannot be Named reimburses her for these things,  but nobody is particularly fond of getting hosed.   I suspect this time around she might just walk.   I’ll find out tomorrow night.

There has only been one time where I’ve knowingly taken a cab for a distance where we most likely could have simply walked,  and that was in June of 08,  when T.C. and I were spending a week in the Netherlands in order to look for a place to live.  (I know!  A week?)  They were having one of the hottest days of the year there,  the temperature was something like 32°C,  we had just stepped off the non air conditioned two hour train ride from Amsterdam airport to Enschede,  and had to get to Europcar to pick up our rental.  That was after the usual overnight flight too,  so I had no desire to walk.    By the way,  Enschede is pronounced,  “Enskeday”,  with the accent on the last syllable.   I had to have someone tell me how to pronounce that one,  since I would have never figured it out on my own.   Actually,  the “sch”  part is more like the “ch” in the Scottish word “Loch”,  but that’s only a minor technicality. 

They say one of the ways to determine if a person is a native speaker (this seems to have started during the second world war)  is to ask them to pronounce Scheveningen.   Many a foreign spy was ousted after that failed attempt.   I can’t vouch for the accuracy of that one,  but it could be true.

I think that will be it for today’s geography, meteorology, linguistics and history ‘lesson’.  

 

Thanks for stopping by.

 

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