Silverchair & Snow

Just a quick one to say, woohoo I've finally seen falling snow! Saturday the 24th, Nate woke me up with a call to say it's snowing outside, because all of my mates here know how much I've been hanging out for it to snow. I jumped up, threw warm clothes on grabbed the camera and went out the front. Todd sprung me trying to catch a snowflake when he opened the front door, he was looking for me to tell me it was snowing :)

So I shot a quick video and took a photo, and after about 8 mins I'd had enough and went inside for a winter breakfast of maple porridge & iced coffee. It stopped snowing after about 20 mins. The night before I was driving and it begun sleeting, which was also odd as the little balls of ice the size of ball bearings sprinkled over the car and just rolled off, leaving the car dry. I hadn't seen sleet like that before either, and driving along sounded like driving through rain, but the car & windscreen remained dry. I've been learning a lot already about winter driving conditions, such as bridges and overpasses being the most dangerous, as they have no ground warmth to prevent icing. My friend Nicole told me how a girl in her class at school was killed when she hit ice on an overpass and crashed over the wall to the ground below. Nate told me in one of the ice storms a year or so ago, all he did was open his car door, and his truck slid down the driveway and into the street. Andy said he left work here one day, and accelerating carefully out of the car park, spun almost full circle across the street, stopping when he hit the curb. Kevin's told me about driving into sleet or snow, with the white particles coming straight at you, sometimes gives you tunnel vision when you stare through your headlights, and it can make you fall asleep easily.

In other news, last night I saw Silverchair live at the Diamond Ballroom in south OKC! Aussie rock, here in Oklahoma, who'd believe it!? Daniel Johns did joke about the fact that he couldn't remember when he was here last in Oklahoma. I was waiting for him to ask 'are there any other Aussies here tonight?' but he didn't. But they rocked the house like the class act that they are, I had my doubts about the venue, it's in the middle of nowhere (search Diamond Ballroom Oklahoma on Google Maps), but the crowd filled half the place shoulder to shoulder, I'd guess close to a thousand, the atmosphere was great. The low roof was the difference, I'm used to concerts being in the Brisbane Entertainment Center, which is huge. Kevin had told me about the concert a couple weeks ago, and we both agreed to go, but lost track of time and by chance last night I told Todd about it, he looked it up, and found that it was on the same night! He wasn't feeling like a concert on a monday night, so I called my army friend Mackenzie who's always up for spontaneous stuff like that. I worried about her though, from her accident in Iraq that nearly killed her, her ears can't take much punishment, so we sat 2/3 of the way back on some chairs, and she blocked her ears for the screechy guitar solos :) When I heard a good song I went forward to the crowd, it wasn't hard to move around. I was interested to hear some of the chair songs live, coz their last couple of albums have had some interesting tracks, take Tune In The Brine for example. I like it, but there's something about it, the singing, the lyrics & the orchestra on the album, it's like metrosexual rock if that makes sense. But live with just the band, it sounded awesome! Emotion Sickness and Open Fire were also incredible variations, and I guessed right from the start that the encore song would be Freak, which was easily the most popular. Mack said her ear popped during the show, and afterwards had a kind of static noise, I'm glad her ear wasn't bleeding as I remember she's told me that's happened before. I feel kind of bad even though she said she had a good time, she's an absolute trooper. I used to think that she was crazy, even full blown eccentric, but that was coz she was bouncing off the walls from too much coffee & red bull when I met her, an addiction the Army is responsible for. She's actually pretty cool.

And so winter is definitely here, Fall lasts only a couple weeks, a blink of an eye and most of the leaves are gone, and now the temperatures are consistently close to freezing here at night, low teens or single digits in the day (celcius). And I'm the only one excited about it! Am I crazy?