OMG teh snow!

OMG teh snow!,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

It snowed like hell for about fifteen minutes this morning, so I ran upstairs and got my camera to record it for posterity, since I knew it was going to melt as soon as the sun came out. Which it duly did, and now we have a cold but beautiful sunny day. We get so little snow up here that I tend to get disproportionally excited at the first sign of a few little flurries.

Back in the day, when I was living in the midwestern snow belt, I dreaded and feared the arrival of snow, since that meant both treacherous roads, and the necessity of digging my car out of huge snowdrifts in order to go risk my life on said treacherous roads. Now that I live in the UK which has plenty of public transport, bad though it often is, snow has become a treat I get all too infrequently. I'm sure three days of a ferocious Michigan winter would quickly cure me of my snow nostalgia, but god, that first thick snowfall is a beautiful thing, and I miss it.

I actually got to bed at a reasonable hour and got a decent night's sleep, so I was up pretty early, and I've had an efficient morning. A load of laundry done, a couple of rows knitted, six pictures hung, and after I finish this, I'm off to Liverpool to look for more picture frames. Our house is finally starting to look properly decorated and lived in, except for the mostly bare walls, which are seriously getting on my nerves. We had some stuff from the London flat that just needed to be hung, I've acquired a few things, and one of these days, we're going to have some of our own photos up as well.

I also got a start on clearing out the guest room last night. Yes, we still have packing boxes and just piles of stuff that needs throwing out or putting away. I want to redecorate the guest room, since my mum and auntie will likely be visiting this spring or summer, and anyway, the room looks like something you'd see on How Clean Is Your House?, minus the animal faeces, mouldy food, years of dust and cobwebs, and staphylococcus colony, of course. Proper hoarders and squalorees would snort in contempt at my definition of squalor, but it bugs me. It's just full of boxes and bags and cat fur tumbleweeds, and I'd like it to, you know, not be that way, so I have a safe retreat when Phil's snoring becomes unbearable.

And now I'm off to hack the dust out of my lungs, and get some more shit done.

Please, go away. Please?

This woman is bugging the shit out of me. She's the (formerly) non-famous(ish) person who won Celebrity Big Brother, which I didn't watch, and was only vaguely aware was happening at the time. I do not watch a lot of television, not because I'm all culture nazi or anything, but because I just don't. I do manage to absorb a fair amount of television-related pop culture simply by walking around and existing and stuff, though, because hardly a day goes by without me seeing the covers of many, many lurid tabloids and interchangeable gossip magazines. Those things are everywhere. Even Marks & Spencer has a magazine and newspaper rack now, for heaven's sake. So I am following this woman's fifteen minutes of fame via headlines and tacky cover photos.

Apparently, this (formerly) non-famous(ish) person was planted in the house by the producers to fool the C-listers into thinking she, too, was marginally famous. And she did. And she won. And now she's a C-lister in her own right, hooray for her. I am so goddamn sick of looking at her, though. She seems to have a beau named Preston, or something like that, and every twist and turn of their ginned-up attention whore relationship is being communicated to me through the covers of such fine publications as Heat and OK! and oh, whatever the hell the rest of them are. Who the fuck is Preston? What does he do? Why should I care that, as Chantelle assures us, "YES, we're sleeping together!" Never mind, don't tell me, I don't care. Glad you're getting some, Chantelle, now please shut up and go away.

I'm perfectly happy to hear lurid celebrity gossip, but, you know, I prefer it to be about real celebrities. I don't think Britney Spears is exactly loaded with talent, but she's legitimately famous for actually doing something, so I'm OK with reading all about her trainwreck marriage. Go, Britney. Chantelle...eh. What can she do, other than look cheap and tacky? Unless you count standing still long enough to be photographed as a talent, in which case, she is slightly more talented than my cats, she really doesn't seem to do anything. God, please, let it be 14.5 minutes and counting, because while I don't really need a new chav celebrity to despise, it would at least be a change.

Into the ether

I found a precious handful of posts from my dead journal on The Wayback Machine. Oh God, I'm actually crying, because I've lost so much. It's not that my prose is so deathless, or I'm deluding myself with the mistaken belief that I once had the Best Online Journal Ever, it's just that pieces of my life are missing, things I really cherish, and just saving the scraps of the literally hundreds of days of my life I wrote about makes it horribly clear that there are memories gone forever. Funny things my husband and I said to each other, holidays we took, meals we had at our favourite restaurants, visits from friends and relatives, our earlier married life, little vignettes about various Camden street crazies, stories and photos of one of our beloved cats who is now dead...just vanished. And I won't get more than this small fraction of them back.

I am just numb. Why did I entrust my memories to somebody else's keeping? I should've made my own back-ups, I know that, but...

At least I have my 2000-2002 Diaryland entries safely backed up, thank God. I am so angry with myself for ever moving from Diaryland to Diary-X, just because I was able to get the journal name I wanted at D-X. There's a huge mistake I'm going to regret making for a good long time. And, oh, how I remember how many people used to tell me that Diaryland sucked, and that Diary-X was so. much. better. Ah, yes. I have almost nothing left to show for that genius move on my part.

The Wayback Machine salvaged this for me, though, and I am so grateful, because it is a quote from my husband which I hope I never forget again, because it will make me laugh on my own deathbed:

"Sam Gamgee is Tolkein's revolting ideal of the faithful retainer, so cringingly obsequious and aware of his fuckin' place that he makes Hudson from Upstairs, Downstairs look like a hardcore, raving Bolshevik, and he makes me want to puke."

That is just so Phil, I can't even tell you. And there are dozens and dozens of things like that I will never see again, and probably never spontaneously recall. Gone. Disappeared. Into the ether.

how much for those kitties in the window?

how much for those kitties in the window?,
originally uploaded by tricoteuse.

Another test post, this one to see if the awesome combined power of Flickr and Blogger will triumph. Those are my cats. They are not impressed.

And that's all she wrote (at Diary-X)

Yeah, so like many thousands of other people, my journal, formerly located at Diary-X, got totally fucking hosed, as in gone for fucking ever, thank you ever so much Stephen Deken. I am feeling kind of bitter, as you might imagine, but you know, I'm also feeling kind of free. I lost the written history of the last 4 years of my life, which sucks oh so fiercely, and with great, juicy, gulping noises, and if I think too hard about that, I want to cry. But I am also in the position to make a fresh start. Tabula rasa, baby. I'm no longer tied to the old journal format, which, truthfully, I was starting to find kind of confining. Now I can feel free to work on getting bored with the old blog format.

There will be knitting. And gardening. And photos of my knitting and garden. And politics, probably. And more of life as an American expat in England. I have no way of finding the majority of my old readers, but you know, I'm OK with that.

The most painful part of this is losing my entries about my years living in London, in many ways the happiest years of my life. It may the kind of pain that makes you stronger for living through it, though, because when I'm sitting here, wishing I still lived right in the heart of the best city on earth, at least I can't go trawling through my old archives, making myself even sadder and more depressed.

Fresh start. That's the ticket. Stay tuned! (I just hit the cliche trifecta!)