Black cats, breaking mirrors and walking under ladders

Living in a seriously temperate country can have its pitfalls. Sure, all that snow is pretty and makes for a lot of wintertime fun, but it can also get really cold, to the point where you can't feel your extremities after a quick trip outside to put out the garbage. Having to scrape a night's worth of frost off your windscreen in the mornings also cuts into precious sleep time, especially when you realize that you actually needed the extra 15 minutes you spent in bed to get your car ready to go to work. Bah.

Another thing about the weather is that it puts a tremendous amount of strain on your car battery. So much so that when someone forgot to close the door properly on their way out of my car *glares at the next door neighbour*, the cabin lamp that was left on completely drained the battery in a matter of hours. The end result was that my car didn't work the next morning when I really needed it and that I had to catch a taxi instead. In Japan, the meter jumps slowly, but in ¥80 increments, so a 15 minute journey will set you back anything up to ¥3500. Not happy Jan.

In my mad rush to contact my supervisor and school to tell them I was going to be late, I dropped my keys somewhere in the carpark and couldn't find them in the snow. In times like this, you can only laugh (albeit a little bitterly) and get on with the day. It really puts your existence into perspective when you realize you're stuck out in the snow with no transport and no way to get back into your apartment.

It was a good thing then that my sempai found my keys that evening and hung on to them for me after a harrowing day at school with a half dead phone and no battery charger. At least I wasn't going to freeze to death outside and I could warm up in the shower. At this point, I knew Murphy had it in for me that day when I turned on the hot water tap and nothing came out. Zip. No water flowing on the hot side, but a healthy gush from the bleeding cold tap. It wasn't until later that someone suggested that my water pipes might have frozen from the unusually cold weather that day. Just my luck that I was the only one in the entire apartment block to be affected, eh? :/

Being the persistent bastard I am, I decided to boil a kettle of water to wash with. It would have been better than going without and being generally stinky for the rest of the night. I swear, If I ever meet this Murphy guy, I'm going to kill him. Even though I had a minimum of lights and electrical appliances on at the time, the induction stove tripped the electricity in the apartment and left me in a cold dark apartment, wondering what kind of cosmic karma I'd incurred to have such a seriously lousy day. At least the kettle was warm enough for a quick splash without giving me third degree burns, and I was able to go to bed that night halfway clean and hoping fervently that the next day might be a little better.

A famous fictional character once said, "Must be a Thursday. Could never get the hang of Thursdays." Too roight. It's better than getting your home planet blown up to make way for a hyperspatial bypass, I suppose.