I don’t want to let too many days go by without a post, so here is a quick catch-up.

I’ve been vegetarian for nearly a month now. It’s been going pretty well. I haven’t often been wooed by the smell of fried chicken or burgers.

One of the nice things about working near Liverpool Street station is going to a fast food place called “Wrap It Up”. It’s immediately across the street from the front of the station and they specialise in wraps. They are the first place I’ve found in England where I could get a burrito. Believe me, I’ve been looking! They have a black bean burrito that is fantastic. If in the area, give it a try.

Tomorrow I start working from home. For the last three months, I have been getting up really early and putting on the suit, getting on the train, sitting at a computer, and ftp my work up to a web server. Tomorrow, I can just wake up and ftp my work to a web server.

I’ve extended my contract for a short while. One of the provisos is that I work from home two days every week. We’ll see how well that works.

This morning the people of Southern England were greeted with a couple of inches of snow upon waking up this morning. This made travelling to the Didcot from Wantage pretty difficult. The roads were gritted, but the pavements were still covered in snow and ice. The car park and pavement at the Fox Hall car park in Didcot were unmaintained. Apcoa has to be one of the most rubbish companies I’ve dealt with since being in the UK. That’s saying a lot. I’m sure I’ll moan about them on a later post.

I don’t like walking on snow. I’m from California and have never really been used to it. All it ever brings me is misery.

When I was a teenager, during my senior year of high school, my family moved from beautiful San Diego to Springfield, Massachusetts. We moved just before the snow began to fall. It was a cultural experience getting used to things on the other side of the country. In the last year of my mandatory education, I attended Springfield Central High School.

I was moving to a new high school in the last year I was supposed to attend high school. While my new fellow classmates were discussing how this year would be the ‘best in our lives’, I was trying to make new acquaintances and spending a lot of lunchtimes sitting at the table of loners and losers (the L&L table, I guess).

It was December. I had been in school for just a few weeks and, unlike my former life in California, I found that girls actually liked me. I had this rumour going around that I was the California guy. Even to me, this sounded pretty good. I had this mystique around me. I tried to open my mouth as seldom as possible?even sitting at the loner table was good for my image. Maybe it would be the best year of my life.

In Massachusetts, it snows a lot! I can remember my wet hair freezing while I waited for the school bus in the morning. But I was getting used to it. I started to like the snow covering everything. Everything was white and new.

One day, while leaving the front of the school and walking towards the school buses, I walked across an un-shovelled bit of pavement. I like to make new footprints on a fresh patch of snow. I was wearing an old Marines overcoat that I got from a thrift store and walked my mysterious-loner walk (hands in the pockets of my coat, kind of shuffling more than walking). I looked really cool. I had left my past. I wasn’t the geek people went to elementary school with. I was the new cool guy.

As I walked across the snow, my feet flew out from underneath me. I couldn’t get my hands out of my coat pockets. My chin hit the pavement first, with the rest of my body falling behind.

In a split second, there were roars of laughter from everyone. I heard them while laying flat on my face. The entire school had left the building and everyone was laughing at me. I hope they are all working in petrol stations now. I reacted how anyone would?I jumped to my feet and kept walking like nothing had happened. Just checking the pavement.

I walked for the bus a little faster than before. If I can get there before the embarrassment actually hit me, I wouldn’t risk having my eyes well up before everyone. That would look real tough?to just start crying in front of everyone.

The Florence Nightingale of the school ran up beside me as I walked. “Are you okaaaay? Are you alright?” I could tell she was always the first one to a crisis to offer her superficial sympathy. I’m just that kind of person. I’m just so compassionate.

“No. I’m fine.” Happens all the time. I tried to outwalk her. “Just forget it.”

Then she screamed (louder than I would have liked) “Oh my God! You’re bleeding!”

I looked down and saw that my sweatshirt and coat were covered in blood and reached for my still-stinging chin. I was bleeding?a lot. Nurse or bus? “Just forget it!” I ran for the bus?grabbing a tissue from my pocket (I’d already wiped my nose with it throughout the day) and covering my chin. She let me go.

My brother was on the bus and immediately asked me if I had gotten into a fight. When I told what had happened, he sympathetically laughed at me.

When I got home I found the cut was pretty deep and probably needed a stitch, but I just put a plaster on it. For the next week, I looked like I had cut myself shaving every morning. I wasn’t the cool guy at school anymore?at least I didn’t feel like it. I just waited out the last few months of high school before joining the Army.

I still have the scar and it makes me have rubbish stubble.

So this is what I think about on the rare occasions we get snow in the mornings. I’m sure it will be melted by tomorrow?maybe even for the trip home. I walk very carefully. Now, I don’t think that the people waiting for the train at Didcot will openly laugh at me if I should fall?and I don’t have any street cred to maintain?but I still walk carefully in snow with the heavy fear of public humiliation.

I don’t like snow.

Okay. The morning commute is starting to get to me. The First Great Western train is okay. The Bakerloo line is okay. But there is something strange about the Jubilee Line. . .

Yesterday morning, as a stand on a severely overcrowded train with my face in a man’s armpit, I watched a guy in a camouflage coat and mesh camouflage cap being annoyed with a fully-suited banker and they bump into each other each time the train rocks. I had never seen anyone where camouflage in London (aside from the military)?which he definitely wasn’t (blue jeans and curly blond hair). I wonder if he was going hunting at some far outskirt of the tube line.

In the corner of my eye, I can see a man standing next to me reading and . . . trying to get something out of his nose. This turns my stomach like nothing else. He uses his knuckle and tries to be sly about it, but I’m trying with all my might to focus my attention away from him. Suddenly I start thinking about the yellow bar above my head that I’m clinging to and wonder how much this guy’s hands have been on it. Then I wonder what other germs are on this train.

Soon, I can’t stop thinking about germs and the nose guy. I put my gloves on. I start thinking about the people you always see in Asia with the doctor’s masks out in public and how excessive it seems. I wish I had one of those. I also wonder how long I can keep up with the gloves on the tube without it starting to look weird.

I suppose I have a choice, leave the commuting lifestyle or join the ranks of the grey-haired, scowling, old men reading the FT and resigned to the fact that delays, crowds, and nose pickers are a fact of life.