Not being upside down in a snowdrift, among other things

This week, I have finished applying to law school, put up a fake Christmas tree without lasting damage to either myself or the tree, flown four thousand miles and spent several hours in sub-zero temperatures canvassing for Hillary Clinton. In approximately that order. Oh, and I saw The Golden Compass too. I feel like I have achieved... well, something.

I'm in New Hampshire with narahttbbs and her lovely family, who remind me in strange incongruous ways of my own family, and to all intents and purposes am in another world. The part of the States I know the best is, to my sorrow, Indiana - land of cornfields and ever-more-frightening relatives - followed by New York, and NH is very unlike both. To start with, I'm in a real small town, of the type beloved of Bill Bryson, with wide streets and family businesses and impressive federal buildings, with a perfect icing-sugar coat of snow all over everything. And it is of course very cold. Funnily enough I'm on about the same latitude of Formby Point, which offers up the frightening prospect of what would happen if the Gulf Stream gave out, because there is a lot of ice here, people use words like "bracing" to describe the air, and somehow everything has a sort of cold, metallic tint to it, something I'm told is the smell of snow. It reminds me in small ways of a thousand other places - notably Himachal, for some reason; it has that same woodsmoke edge to it, and I keep expecting to stumble over someone selling cherries - but is mostly an entirely different kind of place. And that's nice.

And I picked Hillary. (It bugs me slightly that the media, and even her own campaign, refer to her as "Hillary" rather than "Senator Clinton", because surely no one really thinks it's Bill running again, but that's how people seem to be doing it, so watch me conform.) I have some reasons, but they aren't very profound; I had to pick someone, and she seems a good bet. I went canvassing today to this effect. It was really cold. I am not profound. I shall say this a lot. It was cold, it was icy, I am a natural-born introvert and I'm British (no, the British reserve is not a myth, and the cultural divide is quite the chasm in terms of politics) and thus wasn't entirely prepared to go up to doors and start talking to people about their views. But I'm glad I did it, regardless. I was doing it with narahttbbs (who is great, by the way; without her I would probably be upside down in a snowdrift somewhere) and our favourite registered Democrat was undoubtedly the guy who came running to the door in below-freezing temperatures not wearing a shirt, holding back a dog with one hand, smiling happily and telling us that he'd love to talk, sorry, no time, his daughter was in labour.

Well. There's a time and place for politics.

My other great achievement for the day was about 600 words of my yuletide story, written longhand on a legal pad but written. I think I'm pleased with it. We'll see. This is an odd sort of working holiday - campaign work, which I'm planning to do a lot more of, and copious geekery - but a good one. Because I'm jet-lagged, I'm even keeping normal-person hours. This can only be a good thing.

Oh, yes, The Golden Compass. ( spoilers )

(Obviously don't get me started on the stupid, stupid name change.)

Enough babble for one night. Back to that keeping normal-person hours thing.