It's Springtime for Stephen in Scotland!

And it's really nice here. Trees are blooming (I'm still not used to that; living 21 years in one of the biggest evergreen forests in the world puts trees that bloom and loose leaves and boom again strange creatures, in my mind), the weather is no longer grey and drizzly (still grey, just not as drizzly) and a bit warmer, but still with plenty of lovely breezes. It's awesome.

The past few days have been pretty awesome, too. Went to a club on the weekend, ran into some friends, and had a good time all around then. I was supposed to go to a barbeque on Wednesday, but it got rained out, so we just went bowling instead (for, like, 4 hours...my legs are still sore from it...I won, though). And then we went out to play pool that night (I lost...my friend Tom's a damn good pool player). To prepare for the possibility of a barbeque and the surity of bowling, I finished my National Geographic project, and I was already done with all the stuff to turn in for my boards, so I had nothing to do. I went and saw Wolverine at the second showing of the day with a couple friends, and now I'm sitting in the library updating my blog, filling in key things in my diary, and pissing the people around me who are studying hard off as I'm about to start watching a movie. I rule.

After the movie I was hanging out with one of my Scottish friends, who kept doing double takes at me when I would say things. Apparently I've started slipping into a passable Scottish accent (Glaswegian, not Edinburghan, which I knew, I can't sound like the locals here at all yet) without realizing it. So go me. Assimilation, here I come.

In other news, I think the swine flu hysteria is overblown. Not that I don't think there's risk of some bad stuff happening from a super strain of the flu, just that I don't think this qualifies, and I know for a fact that the media is not reporting basic facts that would calm people down. For example: the WHO has only confirmed seven deaths from swine flu; regular flu kills approximately 36,000 people in the US every year, and between 250,000 and 500,000 world wide, so even if this new stuff had killed 150+ people, that's nothing compared to the regular kind; WHO 'Level 5 Pandemic warning' means nothing except that the virus has passed from human to human in at least two countries (in this case, in many instances in Mexico, and in one instance in Spain); the reason swine flu has become so widespread in Mexico is that the country does not have the infrastructure or health care system to deal with something like this (the girl who died in the US was actually a Mexican child who had been brought to Texas to seek treatment), while in other countries that do have health care and infrastructure there have been no deaths...I could go on and on. I won't, though, as that gets old.

Anyway, I'm meeting with my supervisor today to discuss my draft of chapter three, and I have my review boards scheduled for 14 May at 11:15.

I'm going to go watch that movie, now. Woo!