bunn

We had a red weather warning this time, and a government alert sent to our phones to warn of danger to life!

But in fact this time it was just very windy. It was a bit stressful, remembering Storm Eunice when we took a lot of damage, but nothing major got damaged. A tree came down on the one road that connects us to the town, but it was quickly chopped and shoved to one side by local residents.

I actually went out to join a Christmas quiz with some friends on Saturday night. Felt slightly guilty, given the dire warnings, but we went only a very short distance on main roads and encountered no trouble.

My house has one loose roof tile and some soffits that are loose and will need sorting when the wind drops. That will be a minor nuisance to sort out, but I think we can probably leave it till the roofers have finished their emergency work.

Apparently the waves at the headland facing out to sea were seven meters. The Irish Ferry wisely decided to stay in port for a couple of days, we finally saw it heading off this afternoon.

It rained like mad today, then cleared to an amazing pink before the sun set.

I have been doing a bit of coding, for the first time in a long while: various bits of functionality for the Shop: reporting, mostly. It's remarkable how you forget, and then pick it up again: I've gone from clumsily googling for basic functions to cheerfully writing quite long sections before I test the code actually works. I am still slowly running down most of my website work to other providers, with the aim of focussing more on the Shop.

I keep meaning to photograph some of the things I've drawn recently, then not getting around to it till the light has gone: autumn is fading in properly now, though last weekend was very warm. The temperature when I went swimming at Hazelbeach on Sunday was 17 degrees. The pontoon is still out there, though the one at Dale has already been taken in for the winter.

It feels like there's been brilliant sunshine for months. I think surely, it must have rained a couple of times in May? But certainly, most of the time it has been sunny, and increasingly, hot and dry.

All the doors and windows have been open to let the breezes through, and these last two weeks or so, we have been using that most un-British item, a portable airconditioning unit, and I have been whizzing around watering the plants. I hope there was enough rain to replenish the waterbutts.

The oxeye daisies are in full bloom, as are the red and pink valerians. The aquilegia is nearly over. I didn't plant the valerian, it volunteered, but it makes such a colourful display that I'm not inclined to consider it a weed, and the same applies to the aquilegia, which appeared this year in a wide range of purple-blues.

Nenya the white cat has found a comfortable spot that catches the last of the sun, though really the last week it's been more a matter of hiding from the sun than basking.

She's still not talking to Fankil, and Fankil is not talking to her. Starting to think they are going to have to live separate lives forever.

But still, today it rained, and this evening is cooler though we still have the doors open to let the warm out.

A mighty storm is raging outside, but thankfully so far nothing has blown off the house this time. White horses are racing across the Cleddau, and it's hard to open any doors that aren't on the south side of the house because of the force of the wind.

I bought a sash block for a window that is insufficiently secured against the wild winds, on Ebay. I'd already added two extra sash blocks to the most vulnerably northern window, before realising that a window on the relatively protected south side kept coming open. Pp has forced it closed for now but the sash block will hold it more reliably.

I was too lazy to go downstairs and check my password so I bought it as a guest, triggering yet another 'how exciting! your first purchase is confirmed' message. I'm sorry Ebay, but my first purchase from you was in the last century, not this one.

I must admit I thought I had left the frost behind us, now that we live right at sea level with lots of sun, but no, the frost has come and made things very slippy though there's no snow here yet it's cold enough that snow would settle. We walked up over the golf course to the fort today, and stuck to the grass because the tarmac paths were lethal! Theo is a nudist, but Rosie was togged up in coats and jumper. I had thought of leaving her behind today, since I am worried she might slip. But she was having none of it. The road was gritted, so I decided the risk was not too great, and in fact she didn't slip at all. She did decide she was going to mooch off about her own affairs and split the party though so I had to stick her hastily back on the lead because I needed to keep my eyes open for incoming dogs in that area, since it's a fairly busy walking spot.

Hmm. I need to work out where I'm going to put photos now. I did try sharing them across from my Google account, since that's where my phone puts photos anyway, but I kept finding things were unexpectedly locked. I really hate the way that Google likes to hide options in the most unlikely places, presumably in case people should actually find and use them. Maybe I should go find my old Flickr account.

Anyway, this post is not about that. It is about the Great Storm that came rolling in from the west on 18th Feb, which the Met Office christened Eunice, which sounds genteel. It was NOT GENTEEL.

Proceeding up the estuary at about 80mph, Eunice blew the window at one end of our sun room in, then it came INTO the sun room and lifted the roof off, jamming it vertically against the wall of the house. Poor Gothmog kitty was in the room at the time, but fortunately she ran to the door, and Pp managed to whiz in and grab her.

For several hours the sunroom roof was wedged upright against the main house roof, while my various sketches and bits and pieces that were in that room got whirled away into the Cleddau, and we wondered if it would break all the windows as it bounced against the wall. Fortunately, it then exploded, raining bits of itself all over the surrounding area and nearly slaying an incautious neighbour who had ventured outside wondering if the worst of the wind was dying down. Luckily, it just missed him.

The insurance company was overwhelmed with people trying to claim, I think, and was very little help. They told us to ring round to try to find someone to fix the broken rooves locally that they could pay, but of course everyone was doing that. Fortunately, our neighbour Yvonne, who seems to have 99999 useful cousins, has a cousin who is an architect, and was in touch with a small roofing contractor who seems to have absolutely zero 21st century presence. He does hand-written quotes, has no email, and barely even answers his phone. BUT that was fine, because it meant he actually had time to arrange to come fix the missing tiles on the main roof, which finally happened today, and to quote to replace the blown-off roof, which is planned to happen over the next two weeks.

Unfortunately, in the meantime rather a lot of water has run through the sun room into the rooms underneath, which we were getting converted into additional shop storage and a place to keep the canoe, and were SO CLOSE to being finished.

The Canoe itself flew over a 4foot fence to visit the nearly-slain neighbour. We haven't been over to get it back yet. It seems like tempting fate to move it back outdoors to the place it took off from.

Gothmog is now in residence in our bedroom. Thankfully, her litter box issue seems to have resolved, so I think maybe that was a medical thing that the antibiotics have helped with. She seems quite happy now.

Fankil the no-longer-missing grey kitty is living in the living-room. A lot of his fur has fallen out and having been super sweet and cuddly and delighted to be home, he's now going through a bitey phase. I think the steroid injection & the lotion the vet gave us is helping him, but I am really not sure how much longer we can keep him in one room, he really wants more space.

Nenya and the dogs continue to be fine, though Nenya is annoyed that she has been excluded from rooms she considered her own, and would also like the sun room back and is a bit shouty about it.

Still, things are moving forward. As interesting times go, the war in Ukraine makes anything in the UK feel very small.

Storm Arwen was pretty wild here, particularly since builders are hard at work in the garage making more Shop storage, and have busily removed all defences between us and the ocean winds, replacing them with a temporary and not very wind-proof door.  But they are motoring on with enormous speed, so with luck this will not be the case for too long. 

At one point they were playing Eye of the Tiger  and SINGING ALONG.  Given how fast they are going, the possibility that there was some sort of Montage going on down there seems good. 
( Read more... )

I love these two tugs. They look tiny here but when we've kayaked past them they somehow transform from bathtub toys to Monstrous Vehicles of Industry.

I took a photo of them from the north side of the river when the wind lulled and I took the hounds out for a walk .

The coast path goes all along the northern side of the estuary, past the oil refinery, where we found a rather terrifying wire tunnel over a lot of pipes.

A LOT of pipes. Going down to the place where the tankers dock (with the aid of the surprisingly large tugs).

It's a hot one. I went swimming today from the little beach by the house for the first time. I had previously been deterred by ... I don't know. Potential swans (they can break your arm, you know). Green weed. Winkles. Fish. Etc. But today it was too hot to worry about any of that. I plunged in. It was great.

I wore the wetsuit shorts I bought for kayaking. They are a tiny bit too loose for ideal swimming shorts, but then I wasn't swimming very enthusiastically so it didn't matter that I had to haul them up occasionally.

Here is the sunset yesterday. Looks almost tropical. Most unlike Wales.

This morning, Pp noticed somethings swimming up the estuary, mostly under the water but occasionally just surfacing visibly. I think they may have been harbour porpoises. Sadly I wasn't able to get a good enough photo of them to confirm.

It was a stressful weekend because the Shop was down and the support guys were frankly not in any way supportive so I spent ages fiddling around with it myself. But I decided not to get stressed about it and after a horrible horrible headache on Sat, managed to not fret and tried a few things, and now it's fine. Hurray.

Well, I hope he will, anyway. We have an F75 error and the boiler will not boot up, which means no central heating! It did the same thing yesterday, but that was too high pressure, and I was able to get it to start by bleeding the radiators. But now although the pressure is only at 2.1, no heat :-(

It's moderately cold, by Cornish standards (around 2 degrees C in the day time and maybe 2 below at night) so hurray for the gas fire and electric shower to keep us moderately warm until the boilerman come. I remembered the existence of the immersion heater, having checked my previous boiler posts (I knew this journal had a practical value) and have just turned it on. With luck this is a minimal level of competence which will avert the Sarcasm of the Boilerman.

We'd probably be comfortably warm if we had got round to getting the back doors properly sealed (draughty!) and if it wasn't windy enough that the catflap keeps flapping, bringing an added chill to the utility room. I like the new curtains that I bought for the back doors, but I bought them in the summer, forgetting that winter-weight curtains with draught-excluding properties are a boon. Hey ho.

In theory, we get to buy the new house on Monday. However, the seller of the house that our sellers are moving to has apparently had a tantrum and cancelled her removal company, so who knows. *holds up hands in bafflement as a statement of surrender to the elements*

I don't think I remember a spring quite so consistently warm and sunny. It won't be a good year for bluebells at this rate.

Seed-buying websites are overrun with eager shoppers, stuck at home with nothing to do but grow things.

I had the same thought, but instead have rummaged through the utility room shelf and found a number of dusty seed packets full of all kinds of things, from pansies to parsnips to butternut squash and Morning Glories. I have put them all in plastic boxes on damp kitchen paper, and we'll see what germinates! The oldest packet was from 2002, so I'm not holding my breath, nor wasting compost on them. But they can have a couple of weeks of water and time. At the very least, I've cleared out some junk.

There was a time when I was a very enthusiastic gardener. I don't know whether to blame Time, Dogs or Social Media for the fact that the garden has been sadly neglected in recent years.

We've had days and days of deep blue skies: the primroses, celandines and late daffodils are blooming their socks off, and down by the river there's a real carpet of wood anemones. I feel very fortunate that I can walk from the house to get my officially-allowed exercise with the hounds and wander through the woods. Rather busier than usual, since generally people don't like walking the steep hill down to the river and tend to drive to other places, whereas now we are all staying close to home. But not busy by any normal definition of the word.

Theo still struggles with walking on-lead *to* a walk. His impulse control is terrible, so he keeps being over-come by the urge to SMELL THE THING NOW!!! and yanking me along, which is how he managed to give me a slightly knackered knee in the first place. It's much easier if I can drive somewhere where he can zoom around like a lunatic for half an hour before a lead is required. Still, I managed a fairly long walk today and the knee feels still suitably bendy.

I managed to write both my official Worldbuilding Exchange story, and also an emergency pinch-hit. The pinch-hit was very much last minute and I feel I could probably have done better, but still, that's about two and a half thousand words this week. Admittedly the week does feel like it was about 100 years long at this point.

I went to the local butcher on Friday: they were well stocked up and I bought a chicken to roast over the weekend. The only difference was the tape on the floor and upside down crates preventing people from coming close enough to the counters to lean on them. (It has never occurred to me to lean on a counter at the butcher! That seems a really odd thing to do!) But the roads were quiet and empty, even the main road at Gunnislake Newbridge, which is usually busy since bridges across the Tamar are not very numerous. My Mum is being kept well supplied by her village shop: the shop itself has closed, since it's too small to let people inside safely, but they are doing a delivery system instead, apparently. The downside to it is that they aren't set up to take remote payments, so she has to keep passing them cheques at a distance.

May do some painting in a bit but now I am tired and feel like a nap. I do have a faint lurking sore throat, but none of the other symptoms, so probably this is some other bug going: hey, remember us? You used to think we were quite a nuisance!

Sunday evening, my car, who is elderly and sometimes likes to come up with intersting surprises, decided to drop a window into the door and leave it there, so I'd taken it down into Gunnislake to at least get the window jammed in the 'up' position while the garage searched for a second-hand spare part on Ebay (I love that they do this automatically now :-D)

So today I had to go pick it up, and since Pp has a horrible cold and the sun was shining brilliantly, I decided to walk in with the hounds, and the Shop on the Borderlands orders in a backpack to go to the post-office and the garage too. I went all the way in warm sunshine and didn't even need my waterproof coat.

Is it me, or is it a very early spring? The camellia bush in my garden is in full bloom, the snowdrops in the lanes are all out and the primroses and daffodils are well on the way to joining them.

Theo, full of the joys of spring, has suddenly discovered that humping is a thing he likes to do. I guess this means he is officially No Longer a Puppy. :-D Fortunately he doesn't have the nerve to try it on with Rosie, who would certainly hand him his floppy ears if he did.

Suddenly the skies are clear and very blue, and the ground thick with frost in the mornings. The areas in the shade don't melt at all, so a lot of our Northern side of the hill is now covered in long sparkling crystals of ice over all the grass that get longer every freezing night.

But at mid-day on the river, it's beautiful. The sun as it touches the icy grass releases streams of mist that flow across the river from the shady to the sunny side, and the river at high tide was so still it was almost a mirror.

( Read more... )

We did consider taking Theo with us, but in the end decided that it was a bit cold, and we would risk leaving him at home. The risk paid off, he only tore up a tissue before we got back!

33 degrees C today in Cornwall, and that is WAY too hot. We are not accustomed!

I refused to walk Rosie this morning, because it was already baking when I woke up. I'll take her for a late evening walk instead. By a stream, probably.

Did try doing a bit of outdoor painting on walk on Sunday, but had to give up because Rosie got bored and also there was a horsefly. I do hate horseflies!

Tried to finish it off later, but I didn't have a camera with me and so had to work from memory: I don't think I got the light quite right. Still, it's all practice.

( Read more... )

Yes, the boiler has died again! As usual, I am glad we have a gas fire and an electrically heated shower. I have sent an email to Artifice Plumbing, the nom de guerre of our current Boiler Man, and live in hope.

It's actually surprisingly warm for March, with primroses and daffodils everywhere, gardens full of flowering magnolias and camellias, the hedges full of flowering blackthorn and even the odd bluebell showing. Probably a good thing, considering the whole boiler thing.

Current Mood: chilly

We did have some snow today, though it was very much just slush. I've been slowly coming down with the cold that Pp already had and today I gave into it and just went to sleep on the sofa with small Gothmog curled up on my feet. Fankil came to inspect me: I didn't move but merely observed, and apparently that passed the inspection.

Am annoyed with myself : I took the car in to the garage because the dashboard dials had stopped working. It was booked in and I told them what the problem was when I phoned to book it in, but when it came to actually handing the keys over, the guy who does the work was busy with something and the garage's Dad was there and said 'does he know what it's in for' and I, overcome with cold and without a voice nodded and pushed the keys gormlessly at him.

Anyway, I tried phoning a couple of times later to double check they actually knew what it was in for and make sure they had my number, but only got voicemail. So tomorrow I shall have to try to extract car from garage, and I hope they will actually have done something about the problem, since a speedometer and a petrol gauge are pretty essential though the car itself is running nicely.

Here are some photos of New Cat Nenya.
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uuuurgh. Snf.

And I attempt to paint in the style of Claude Lorrain:

This is Cirdan and Lalwen in Hithlum. Because if there's one thing better than an obscure Tolkien character in an obscure Tolkien location, it's TWO of them!!!

The hot weather is over and although the sun is shining, the shadows are long, blue and starting to look just a little autumnal, and it's much more pleasant out now. I did a longish walk with Rosie this morning, down to Latchley and all around the lanes. The squirrels seem to have had most of the hazelnuts now, but it is an excellent blackberry-picking year, and I keep meaning to take a tub out with me so I can bring some home rather than just scrobbling them from the hedgerows and eating them there and then. I may even get my act together and pick some rowan berries, for rowan jelly, too.

Went over and visited my mother, who is... well, sort of resting, anyway, and looks much better. Pudding the cat has gone from reluctantly friendly (which happened briefly while my Mum was in hospital) back to WHO THE HELL ARE YOU. Mum is still taking 'old ladies' to the shops in her car and working at the charity shop. But she did cancel a long drive up to North Devon to meet a friend for lunch and opted to take it easy instead, which I suppose is good.

To Newquay this afternoon, to visit Pp's cousin Sarah, who was holding a charity tea. There was about a ton of (excellent) cake and scones, and my goodness it was hot. We met their cat, and their dog, but sadly not the stick-insects that apparently live in their rose-bushes, which were feeling shy.

It's been a good few years since we had a summer quite like this. I'm not complaining though. It makes a nice change from the sticky humidity we've had the last few years, to have blazing sun and starry skies at night. ( Read more... )

I went for a long walk over Dartmoor last weekend and must dig out the photos. Too hot for a long walk today, but in the shadow of the woods the bluebells are at their peak, and the sunny fields are white and golden with lady's smocks and buttercups.

The willow-trees are seeding, too, a million tiny fluff-seeds floating lazily through the air. When you are walking through the bluebell woods in sunlight, this is lovely thing to see, the seeds catching the light and turning golden.

We have been watching the Stranger Things TV series recently. It's very good! It's set in a 1980's small American town, and features 80's music, children playing D&D, plus some dark-ish horror fantasy elements, with really interesting writing and beautifully layered characterisation, (though as always with American series that feature some 'high school' children, I always wonder if the 'high school' bits are supposed to look quite as horrifyingly dystopian as they appear to my eyes...)

Anyway, the series uses tiny drifting dots of fluff and gloomy blue lighting to indicate that the characters have moved from the 'normal' world to the dark horror fantasy world, and I admit when I came out of the pet-shop the other day, having gone into the shop in sunlight with people all around, to find that dark blue clouds had rolled across the sky, the car park was now completely deserted, and tiny willow-fluffs were still blowing in vast numbers through the air, it did give me a moment's pause. :-D

A bit greyer today, but the sun has come back this week. I love it when the mist lies over the river.

( Read more... )

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Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 02:42 pm

Entries tagged with weather

Storm Darragh

Watercolour skies

Rain!

Storms and ebay

Frosty mornings & writings.

Storm Eunice

Wild Winds

Oof

Soon may the boilerman come

The weather continues fine

Spring still sproinging

Spring is sproinging.

Frosty day on the river.

OOF

I HAVE EMAILLED A PLUMBER

A shambling snotmonster writes

In which my ambition knows no bounds

Late night dog walk to avoid the heat

Bluebells & willow-seeds

Spring Springs...