Snowmen are for suckers

Well, it’s official- It’s cold, and I don’t mean “Oh I’ll grab a jacket and a beanie” kind of cold. I went for a walk yesterday and was worried about every piece of unexposed skin getting frostbite. Last night it dipped down to about 0 degrees F, and tonight it’s supposed to get a lot colder. Something to look forward to I guess.

While walking yesterday (it started out as a run, but it was impossible to run in two and a half feet of powder) I got the urge to build a snowman. Being from the south, this was the first time I had ever attempted such a feat. In hindsight, it was a bad idea because I now feel completely worthless and couldn’t even shape a snowball larger than a softball. I’m going to blame my shortcomings on the unstickiness of the snow, rather than my intelligence. I must have watched too much Charlie Brown as a kid, because I even resorted to hiking up a large hill and trying to roll the snowball down to amass a larger ball. That didn’t work, and I felt about as confused as a baby in a stripe club because this was one method that I was sure would work seeing that in every cartoon the giant snowball eats up everyone in it’s path while rolling down the mountain. I'm going to try again in a couple days, but in the meantime I'm going to do a little research on how to build snowmen. For now, it's Moldova 1, Neal 0 (I just found a store in my village that sells fireworks ALL YEAR LONG, so I've got a feeling the score will even out soon enough).

I’m trying not to turn this blog post into a rant, but I’m getting tired of the short days as well. It gets dark at 4pm! Whoever came up with Daylights Savings Time was a real genius. I would much rather sun later in the day than in the morning when I don’t need it. For some reason, I feel like I’ve heard that it was implemented for farmers, but I can tell you without a doubt there is no farming going on here. It will be nice once the Winter Solstice is here, and the days will actually start getting longer instead of shorter.

I was supposed to go visit Vince’s village and stay with him and a couple of our friends for the weekend, but I’m snowed in. Earlier today I watched as several cars attempted to make their way down the main road in my village. It reminded me a lot like ping-pong and I’m really glad I didn’t own a car that was unfortunate enough to be parked alongside the road at that time. One car literally bounced its way down the entire road hitting about 10 parked cars in the process. After seeing the cars get crunched, I’m not willing to jeopardize my life by riding in a three-hour rutiera ride on icy roads to the border of Moldova and Ukraine. Next week the temperature is supposed to warm up, and my host mother told me that all the snow will turn into mud and it’s not going to be pretty. I was a little upset about this, mainly because I don’t want to be slugging through knee-deep mud everywhere, but also because it would be nice to have a white Christmas for the first time in my life. But then I realized that if the weather keeps up like this, and I get stuck in Moldova and can’t fly to Turkey on time, I would be pissed. Capital P. Melt that snow and ice, get the runway clear, I’m ready for a little break; besides, it doesn’t even feel like Christmas. I haven’t heard one Christmas carol or seen any decorations. Not that this is such a huge disappointment to me- it is actually quite nice to get away from the commercialization of holidays. I know this is a weird place to end the blog, but it’s getting quite nippy in here and I’m going to feed the fire. Take care.