It's Freezing Here!

Well, the water in the gutters and on the pavement is mostly all frozen so it's officially gone from "cold" to "freezing" here.

Last night the Flat of Rats (Molly & Johanna; though Johanna was off at French class) hosted a mulled wine and poker (well, poker and whist) night that was good fun. The grand prize was a bar of chocolate but due to a failure to work out exactly how to determine who the ultimate winner was, we ended up sharing the chocolate. I lost abysmally in the practice round while the two who knew what they were doing taught us all, while Doc apparently used up all his beginner's luck that round. During the "real" round I did well enough though. I still feel absolutely no urge to risk more than chocolate, however. I was tense enough just playing with little plastic chips that weren't worth anything. The best hand I won they reckoned I could have driven them all up way higher, but I'd been keeping my bets so low till then I figured they would know something was up.

Ron declined to play, thus earning no chocolate, but he enjoyed mulled wine and sitting nearby working on his newest role-playing background (since the internet was down, he claimed there was no way to job hunt anyway, and I suppose it would be unfair to expect him to work on cover letters while the rest of us played cards. Particularly as one of the card players is also job hunting in the same field).

Between travel prices being higher than expected, and the fact that, if we left, Johanna (whose family is in Sweden) would be all alone for Christmas, I think we've finally decided to stay in Glasgow for Christmas. It was Ron's mother who suggested it, being a practical sort, and we did see her just recently. I still feel a little guilty though, since who knows when we'll next be so close to her for Christmas. At least Jacky is going down. And hopefully once we both have "real" jobs, hopping a flight to the London area, even from the US, won't be such a problem. Of course, then there's all the question of fuel use and damage to the environment...

As a tangent, since I was teaching on this topic just last year, the UK general populous (ok, as judged from BBC radio and my over-educated friends) seem far more inclined to take anthropogenic global climate change as a fact. Annoyingly (from a selfish standpoint) the British law makers (though not my friends) seem inclined to target air travel first and foremost. I, however, think that cheap airtravel tends to make people more aware of how small a world it really is, which can only be useful in trying to get people to care about environmental changes in other places as well as overall. By that token, global travel should be one of the last things hit, not the first. Of course, I am quite biased.