Ramblings About My Life..

The Autumn Rain

I walked back from the last of my lectures for today in the wind and the rain - I couldn't possibly have done something stupider than that. I should have known better. It's cold here, even more so when the wind blows. It's even colder when it rains. But the cold is elevated to a whole new dimension when it simultaneously rains and blows. Since my umbrella was thrashed by the friendly hurricane-speed winds at the Royal Hallamshire, my umbrella-bereft situation left me with more or less no other option than to stick both my hands in my pockets and to walk in the blustery wetness that personifies typical British weather. Having been here for more than a month, I thought that I was more or less used to the weather. How horribly wrong I was.

By the time I reached the warmth and shelter of my Hall, I thought my ears had already froze to the point that they were nothing more than frosty cartiliganeous pieces. I couldn't feel them at all, and for a few heart-pounding femtoseconds I thought they had decided to abandon me somewhere along Clarkehouse Road. A quick pat to the sides of my head reassured me that the aforesaid bits were exactly where they should be, greatly alleviating my worries in the process. After the quick pat to the sides of my head, I noticed that my fingers were numb - to the point that I had no sensation in my fingertips. I looked down at my hands and - voila - my hands were deathly white. Damn the wind-chill factor. I'm no great shakes at the mathematics of the weather, but I'm pretty sure it has thingamajigs and stuff like numbers and symbols and equations. And the drop in air temperature should be something like "the speed of the wind to the power of the number of raindrops per square metre per second". Oh, wait. The temperature would be in the negative thousands, then. Whatever.

Anyway, I promptly headed to the showers after dumping my bag in my room. I forgot a cardinal rule - hot water plus cold extremities equals A Thousand Years Of Pain. At least the burning sensation meant that my extremities were still more or less functional. After the shower, desperate for a few more kilojoules of heat, I tried hugging my room's heater. Normally the heaters are nominally switched on, but for some reason or the other, it was switched on at maximum heat today. I immediately jerked back my whole right arm after trying to "hug" the heater - I could have sworn I heard a sizzle. Now there's a large red patch on my arm. Lesson learnt - always, always check the temperature of the heater before attempting to hug it. What a day. I suffered from two extremes in the space of an hour. Extreme cold and extreme heat. And dinner's fish and chips. Again. Sigh.

P.S. - Posts will be much slower as I try to get up to speed on my SSC!

posted by yong chen @ 4:42 PM