Winter is here

Though I doubt you needed me to point that out to you.

Let's face it, we're all intelligent people here...you could probably figure out that it's winter. Unless you're in the southern hemisphere...in which case, it's summer. Sweet! Go the beach, enjoy the nice weather and laugh where appropriate.

In the last few days, it has felt as though everywhere else in Germany besides Hamburg was seeing snow. The weather forecast has had lovely snowflakes scattered across the map and for a fair few days, people have been talking about snow. Some people have had lots of it, some just a dusting. According to Sam, there was snow on the other side of Hamburg on Sunday morning but I saw nothing. I was awake thanks to my neighbour having seemingly turned nocturnal and having their TV on throughout most of the night with the volume up pretty loud. There's a plus side to this though where since I'm waking up early enough, I've found myself watching cartoons during the early morning. Most of them are the standard cartoons that you'd find pretty much anywhere in the world so they're not the most difficult thing to follow, but it's something stupid and keeps me amused for a bit.

I was stopped on my way to lunch today by someone I didn't know. She looked at me and said (I'm translating here), "Short sleeves? But it's cold outside!" I looked at her, smiled and said that it wasn't REALLY that cold, but she was pretty insistent that I was mad to want to venture across the car park to lunch without at least a jacket. Fair enough...or so I thought. Then when I decided to walk home from work, I had three or four people look at me while we were waiting to cross roads and question my sanity for not wearing a hat, scarf, gloves and have my coat zipped up tight. Instead, I was still wearing the short sleeved shirt, had my coat open and was nodding my head along quite happily to Fozzy's latest album which, if you haven't heard it, is totally froot and well worth checking out. In the highly unlikely event that Jericho or any other member of Fozzy reads this, I'm trying to get 'froot' back into circulation. You're welcome.

Maybe when it actually gets cold I'll think about zipping my coat up. Or when I get ill...which ever comes first.

Of course, just as I got back into the flat after the walk home, it started to snow. By no means is it a blizzard or heavy snow, but it looks as though it's settled after being dry for most of the day so hopefully that dusting will still be there by tomorrow. It's just nice to look at really and just points out that winter is here. I'm expecting there to be more snow before I fly home for Christmas in a couple of weeks...

That's a slightly scary thought. I'm home in about two weeks and I do only have 10 working days left (you can probably work out when I'm home based on that). Then Christmas is less than three weeks away. Where has the year gone?

I should probably get cracking on the Christmas shopping...if I have to go out into Liverpool a few days before Christmas, I might find myself killing some poor fool who, like me, has left it far too late to buy presents. That's what Amazon is for these days, right?