Right, bullet time!

Okay, so I'm sorry, I'm a shit blogger and have been remiss in my updating. SO MUCH TO TYPE! Ergo, the wonder of spot editing!

• I'm living with a wonderful, delightful woman named Danger Muffin-- D-Muff for short-- and she's fantastic. She moved here from MI and, despite a failure to communicate for 6 years, has clicked back into my life like she never left it. We originally met through the MSF and have a mutual unhealthy relationship with Shakespeare and Arts Organizations in general. As it is, we're living at approximately the same speed. Which is the speed of light and sound. Together. Amplified.
• My student loans still haven't come through. This makes me a sad panda.
• I'm working too many different jobs. I can't keep them straight. And I haven't been in my office in ages. I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something for the Ph.D., but for the life of me I don't know what. Good sign?
• I haven't heard from DS in ages. Again, sad panda.
• I've been cast in a production of Miller's Crucible at the University. And which character is little Miss Melville portray? The "death-haunted, embittered 45 year old woman" of course. Type casting? Please say no, I only look 35.
• My crossword addiction has hit record levels. The careers office is enabling me by saving all their old copies of the Herald and the Guardian. I still buy the Times on a daily basis and hit up the Washington Post online. Sick, sick puppy.
• I've rediscovered my love of white russians. They're delicious and way kinder to my tummy-lining. For a change up, I will order a vodka and cranberry, but only because I believe in the fight against UTI. I also drink gin and tonic because malaria is a bastard. Ergo, all my cocktails serve very strategic purposes.
• I think that Scotland is currently underutilizing my generous and nurturing side. I'll expound more on this at a later date if I get the time.
• Damn facebook. Yes, I use it and I love it and it's the only way people who know me in real time can reach me on a consistent basis, but it keeps telling me all sorts of disconcerting things. What things, you ask? Apparently everyone I used to know is either getting married or spawning. No joke. Entire photo albums of engagement rings, ultrasound pictures or tiny humans fresh out of their wrappers-- they're everywhere. I used to think my being perpetually between boyfriends wasn't that unusual, but apparently I'm a piraha. Still, better than being perpetually between husbands, right? Right?!?
• I really miss playing the tuba. Unfortunately, there appear to be very few of them in Scotland, and even fewer that belong to me. That number being zero.
• The roses down near the beach ballroom are still blooming.
• I still love Scotland.
• It no longer strikes me as strange that I'm here. What does seem strange is that I was never not here. Is that odd?

Enough for now. I'll finish writing and then backdate the rest of the Wedding entry, it's just too much for my less than nimble little fingers at the moment.

Forget your wild Irish roses...

... What I have for you are some hardy Scottish flowers!

All of these pictures were taken within the city of Aberdeen, Scotland. I took them within the past week on various long walks that I've been taking since the colsure of classes. Please bear in mind that we here on the coast of the North Sea have been withstanding gale-force winds that I would put up against anything I ever encountered in Sault Sainte Siberia. The sleet here is as common as snow back home, and yet these amazing doric flowers continue to bloom... I'm living in an enchanted land, that's all I can figure.


This lovely orange-yellow almost-peace rose bush is between the Queen Mother Library and a carpark on campus. The one bloom looks like it's been hit by a hard frost, but the others somehow withstood the nightly hoar-frosts.


This little pink flower is just one of a large bed on Gallowgate, heading towards the City Center.


White roses in Seaton Park, on my walk to Uni-- these have apparently magical greenskeepers who tend to them on a weekly basis, but mostly just nip dead flowers off the bushes and topiary-type trees.


A close-up of the white roses... I was impressed firstly by the flower and secondly by the thirty seconds of NO WIND that allowed me to take the picture... *gasp of shock and happiness!*


And what really gets me is that these are not old blooms that have been frozen and thus look fresh-- oh no. They're still budding and blooming!


A bed of pink roses, just to prove that these are not isolated, freak occurances!


Another cluster of white roses.


A pretty pink one on the far end of the formal gardens.


Amazingly red rose in the middle of December... you know, like you do.


One last pink rose just as you get to the top of the hill and are exiting Seaton Park.


A yellow rose on Tillydrone Avenue, I was astonished at how bright the yellow was, but the surrounding grey granite glistening under a hard frost and a bit of ice probably helped the overall impression.


In somebody's yard on Hayton Road. What you can't see are all the crushed beer cans and forgotten children's toys in the rest of the yard. These roses are definitely continuing to exist with no help from the human coinhabitants, and all this amazes me. Back home I wouldn't be able to get roses to look like this if I spent hundreds of dollars and 12 hours a day coaxing them. Here, people ignore and even trample them and they blossom all the more fully-- I love it.