Belated December Meme: Winter
Jan. 13th, 2015 11:59 pmI meant to answer this before Christmas, but up until this week this winter had actually been very mild, but it's snowed this last couple of days so this seems a good time to get to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
frayadjacent's question: Winter in Scotland. Love it/hate it? Any favorite "it's always dark outside" activities?
Today, I love it. It's cold and still and clear, there's a blanket of snow on the ground. It's the first time my puppy's seen snow, too, (Freya's first snow day!) and I've been cruelly amusing myself by throwing snowballs for her to chase. I also didn't have anywhere to be; so I could just come in when I was getting chilly, and I didn't have to try to get through an entire working day with cold, wet feet.
I find snow romantic, but only in very narrow circumstances, and only because it doesn't snow here every winter, and usually only for a few days.
Normally, I hate winter. Not because of the cold-- I will always take being too cold over being too hot. And I kind of like that sort of still, frosty cold, but this being Scotland we don't get that kind of cold we just cycle through the seventeen different kind of rain, and in winter the prevailing kind of rain is freezing, sideways rain.
Basically, winter in Scotland is dreich.
Dreich, by the way, is my favourite Scots word, it means a combination of dull, overcast, drizzly, cold, misty and miserable weather. At least 4 of the above adjectives must apply before the weather is truly dreich.
I copied and pasted that definition; I'm bad at explaining what words mean. When I was a student one of my best friends was Polish, and her English was better than mine, but occasionally we stumbled across a word she'd just never heard before. Like, once, I said that I thought a lad she'd been going out with was a bit gormless. What does gormless mean? she asked. Um... um, I said, it means to lack gorm...
I hate winter for difference reasons every year.
One year I was working in a windowless shop in the middle of a sprawling mall. Depending on how your shifts shook out you could go for days or weeks without seeing daylight. By mid-January you could call in and go "I can't come in to work today, I've got rickets."
This year I'm on split shifts, which is good in a lot of ways, it meant I could have a puppy, for one, but it does mean that I get to walk to and from work, in the rain, twice.
Some things I (like to) do in winter
-Puppy walking. There are mornings, when the rain is bouncing, when I think I'm not a dog person after all, I'm a cat person who's made a huge mistake.
Puppy training. Freya's been walked off her lead since she had her vaccinations, on the dubious logic that if I kept her on until she was six months or a year I'd finally let her off only for her to disappear into the middle distance never to be seen again. At first her recall was brilliant and I thought, Aha, I have a genius dog! It transpires that when puppies are tiny they just glom onto your ankles, on the dubious assumption that you're the one who knows what's going on. Freya is now big enough that she's realised that there are more interesting things in the world than me. Her recall is still really good, proving there aren't any other dogs in the area, people to pet her, anything to eat, loud noises, or birds to chase...
And how you train a puppy to come when called, at least, how I'm doing it, is that you call them then take off at a dead run in the opposite direction so they'll chase you, you jump up and down and wave your arms, and run away and hide behind trees. The idea is to make yourself interesting to something with a puppy sized attention span.
It's actually kind of fortunate that I'm doing all this halfway down muddy hiking trails in the dead of winter when there's no one around to see, because it looks like I'm having some manner of episode.
-Wearing huge, ridiculous, fuzzy jumpers, often with pictures of owls on them.
I'm a fan of the ugly Christmas jumper, anyway. But many years ago I made a terrible mistake, I was watching one of those BBC wildlife documentaries with my family, and there was a section on owls and I said, offhand, "Oh, I like owls."
Later I compounded this mistake, when my mum bought me a metal bookmark with a dangling owl on it and I said, "Oh, you remembered I liked owls." (Should have said, Oh, you remembered I like to read.) So, now whenever family giftgiving time comes around I am thought of as Owl Lady. I have owl earrings, owl stuffed animals, owl bags, owl t-shirts, and about twelve owl Christmas jumpers in varying degrees of ugliness; I rotate them throughout the winter.
-Making soup. From my dad I learned how to change a tire, wire a plug, bleed a radiator, hem some trousers, and make an omelette. I didn't grow up in a particularly gender essentialist household, I don't think, dad did everything and mum supervised; that's a bit gender essentialist, I suppose.
My mum's contribution to my life skills was vegetable soup. If you can make vegetable soup, she said, you'll never be cold or hungry. One potato, one onion, half a jug of stock (dad taught me how to make chicken stock) and your vegetable of choice. So now all through winter I just make one huge pot of soup after another and live off them for a week at a time.
This week is pea and mint; next week is broccoli and stilton.
-Drinking hot whiskey. Honey rather than sugar. Lemon but no cloves. Jameson or The Famous Grouse, please, I don't care how cold you are, that is not what 12 yr old Balvenie is for - (based on real events.)
frayadjacent's question: Winter in Scotland. Love it/hate it? Any favorite "it's always dark outside" activities?Today, I love it. It's cold and still and clear, there's a blanket of snow on the ground. It's the first time my puppy's seen snow, too, (Freya's first snow day!) and I've been cruelly amusing myself by throwing snowballs for her to chase. I also didn't have anywhere to be; so I could just come in when I was getting chilly, and I didn't have to try to get through an entire working day with cold, wet feet.
I find snow romantic, but only in very narrow circumstances, and only because it doesn't snow here every winter, and usually only for a few days.
Normally, I hate winter. Not because of the cold-- I will always take being too cold over being too hot. And I kind of like that sort of still, frosty cold, but this being Scotland we don't get that kind of cold we just cycle through the seventeen different kind of rain, and in winter the prevailing kind of rain is freezing, sideways rain.
Basically, winter in Scotland is dreich.
Dreich, by the way, is my favourite Scots word, it means a combination of dull, overcast, drizzly, cold, misty and miserable weather. At least 4 of the above adjectives must apply before the weather is truly dreich.
I copied and pasted that definition; I'm bad at explaining what words mean. When I was a student one of my best friends was Polish, and her English was better than mine, but occasionally we stumbled across a word she'd just never heard before. Like, once, I said that I thought a lad she'd been going out with was a bit gormless. What does gormless mean? she asked. Um... um, I said, it means to lack gorm...
I hate winter for difference reasons every year.
One year I was working in a windowless shop in the middle of a sprawling mall. Depending on how your shifts shook out you could go for days or weeks without seeing daylight. By mid-January you could call in and go "I can't come in to work today, I've got rickets."
This year I'm on split shifts, which is good in a lot of ways, it meant I could have a puppy, for one, but it does mean that I get to walk to and from work, in the rain, twice.
Some things I (like to) do in winter
-Puppy walking. There are mornings, when the rain is bouncing, when I think I'm not a dog person after all, I'm a cat person who's made a huge mistake.
Puppy training. Freya's been walked off her lead since she had her vaccinations, on the dubious logic that if I kept her on until she was six months or a year I'd finally let her off only for her to disappear into the middle distance never to be seen again. At first her recall was brilliant and I thought, Aha, I have a genius dog! It transpires that when puppies are tiny they just glom onto your ankles, on the dubious assumption that you're the one who knows what's going on. Freya is now big enough that she's realised that there are more interesting things in the world than me. Her recall is still really good, proving there aren't any other dogs in the area, people to pet her, anything to eat, loud noises, or birds to chase...
And how you train a puppy to come when called, at least, how I'm doing it, is that you call them then take off at a dead run in the opposite direction so they'll chase you, you jump up and down and wave your arms, and run away and hide behind trees. The idea is to make yourself interesting to something with a puppy sized attention span.
It's actually kind of fortunate that I'm doing all this halfway down muddy hiking trails in the dead of winter when there's no one around to see, because it looks like I'm having some manner of episode.
-Wearing huge, ridiculous, fuzzy jumpers, often with pictures of owls on them.
I'm a fan of the ugly Christmas jumper, anyway. But many years ago I made a terrible mistake, I was watching one of those BBC wildlife documentaries with my family, and there was a section on owls and I said, offhand, "Oh, I like owls."
Later I compounded this mistake, when my mum bought me a metal bookmark with a dangling owl on it and I said, "Oh, you remembered I liked owls." (Should have said, Oh, you remembered I like to read.) So, now whenever family giftgiving time comes around I am thought of as Owl Lady. I have owl earrings, owl stuffed animals, owl bags, owl t-shirts, and about twelve owl Christmas jumpers in varying degrees of ugliness; I rotate them throughout the winter.
-Making soup. From my dad I learned how to change a tire, wire a plug, bleed a radiator, hem some trousers, and make an omelette. I didn't grow up in a particularly gender essentialist household, I don't think, dad did everything and mum supervised; that's a bit gender essentialist, I suppose.
My mum's contribution to my life skills was vegetable soup. If you can make vegetable soup, she said, you'll never be cold or hungry. One potato, one onion, half a jug of stock (dad taught me how to make chicken stock) and your vegetable of choice. So now all through winter I just make one huge pot of soup after another and live off them for a week at a time.
This week is pea and mint; next week is broccoli and stilton.
-Drinking hot whiskey. Honey rather than sugar. Lemon but no cloves. Jameson or The Famous Grouse, please, I don't care how cold you are, that is not what 12 yr old Balvenie is for - (based on real events.)