It's COLD.

I went to school for four winters in Cleveland. Lake effect snow and mid-American winters combined with a lot of childhood reading about Antarctic exploration makes it hard to develop any kind of healthy respect for normal New York area winters. Even when it's cold out I'll generally only admit to 'it's kinda nippy out' or 'yeah, it's on the chilly side' out of a misplaced sense of bravado. Therefore, please understand where I am coming from when I say to you:

IT IS SMEGGING COLD OUT THERE!!!

I believe it got down to -6 F last night where I live, although I don't know for sure. I'm not sure it matters. I know it was cold enough outside that my house was cold enough to overcome the Coziness Rays given off by my fuzzy PJs and comforter. I had to get out of bed, because otherwise I'd never be able to get properly warm. (Properly warm involved wearing a sweater thick enough to stop very small caliber bullets, among other things.) I have got to thank my sister; she started my car because she had to move it out of the driveway to get to work, but she was kind enough to leave it running with the heater on and didn't even ask me. The car wasn't properly warm by the time I got there, but it was a lot more bearable than it usually is.

It's supposed to get a bit warmer this week, but for now, it's damn cold. I know it gets colder in New England and other places in the continental US alone, but by my standards, this is cold.

(no subject)

Have just remembered why none of my Chinese-American characters have names that are quite right. At the time I created them, someone on an RP newsgroup or MUSH bulletin board or something similar - it may have been the WORA Forum - was complaining about how the vast majority of Asian characters online conform to certain expectations. The Lesbian Japanese Schoolgirl was a particular problem for them, but they or someone commenting on them mentioned the way Asian characters played by Anglos tended to have very, very bad names, since most people made up something that sounded right rather than using a proper naming resource. (I.e., a book on baby names, or a friend of the appropriate culture.) Someone else complained that 'not ALL Chinese have compound names, but you'd never know it from online', and so in an effort to be non-online-stereotypical I saddled my characters with two-part rather than three-part names.

In my own defense, I was drawing the majority of my character names from the sources I had at hand: Sima Qian, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe II, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the non-translated names in Barry Hughart. I cannot remember anyone in Sima Qian or the other sources having a three-character name, save for those who had the rare two-character surnames. (Xiang Yu, Xiang Po, Chang Liang, Sun Qian, Cao Cao, etc.) So the entire Xiang family got named that way, because at least I knew I was using names that had precedent. I might not have been clear on what the names meant, but I knew I was using culturally/regionally appropriate names that were correct for their gender. Unlike, say, the girl savaged a while ago on the marysues community - she created a younger sister for the Harry Potter character Cho Chang... and named her Keiko.

This doesn't mean I don't want to correct the problem. It's one thing to have a kid with a two-character name, but an entire family of 'em is probably a bit much. I'm just saying, that's why it worked out the way it did. See? I'm not that much of a goober.