Cold Granite

The title of this blog post is a new book I just started reading by Stuart MacBride. It's actually set in Aberdeen, which is pretty interesting and slightly funny. Better yet, some of the writing of people talking is "written" in their accents, like Aberdonian or Glasgowegian, which is pretty hard to do! "The wee shite's no gettin' banged up." It's a murder mystery, so not a light read, but I'm liking it so far.

I tend to go for crime and thriller novels mostly. I can spend hours in a library reading all the book summaries on the inside flap until something jumps out at me, plus I like to read the bit about the author on the back. One of the last books was written by a guy who was a former football player then studied law and became a successful lawyer as well as an established author of crime thrillers. Talk about being motivated! The first book I borrowed from the Ferryhill library was The Midas Man and I was a couple pages in before I realized they were using words and expressions we'd heard here in Scotland. Then I realized that the library only seems to stock books by UK authors or books that have some kind of UK relation. The same goes for TV, we were watching Unleashed last night (it stars Jet Li) when we noticed that it was set in Glasgow. We'd even seen it before but never noticed. Our cable box here includes a list of free movies, and seems to follow the same rule. Mike played one of the cartoon movies, Feivel, while we were doing things around the flat over Christmas and one of the mice had a Scottish accent! It's so funny to watch something and try to figure out where the UK connection is. I think they might be a little biased when it comes to their media...

It's been a quiet day here so far. Mike went into the office for a few hours this morning and I've been catching up on writing. We're working pretty hard to get ready for our trip home, which is officially now less than a week away. I'm getting more excited every day!

The rain and cloudy skies have persisted for awhile and I can't wait until we get some serious sun. We got a couple hours a few days ago but it also snowed at the same time, so just can't seem to get a clear day. I really don't know how the folks here handle this darkness every year, I think lots of 'em--including us--get pretty down in the dumps for awhile. It's no wonder the pubs are popular, they're the only entertainment once the sun goes down!

Tonight we're looking forward to a fun time on Union Street with a group of friends, both Scots and Americans. Our American "family" has grown by one, a fellow engineer from the States moved to Aberdeen a few weeks ago. Tomorrow we'll be holding our own little Superbowl party thanks to Steve's slingbox. Apparently the game will also be aired on live TV here in Scotland as well! So we'll have a backup plan in case the slingbox doesn't pull through. The radio stations have also been talking football, American football, all day. A player from the 49ers was sharing tips about how we play the game and all the rules, it was weird to hear an American accent on the radio and I was totally caught off guard when they started saying "NFL!"

Hope everyone has a great weekend!