Category: Weather

In the Empty City

City Square, the would-be bustling hub of Leeds, at prime shopping time and the place is deserted apart from some trees and the Black Prince.
Admin1 is rereading Dead Lions by Mick Herron. Admin2 is reading The Dark by Emma Haughton, a juvenile mystery/romance, wasted on the locked room/powder keg setting of an Antarctic research station in winter.
Today was the warmest day this year: 23.2 °C.
The next day was cloudy and cool. We ate pork, veg and rice with the newlyweds and scored 11 on the GSQ after a lot of guesswork and bet-hedging.

Hooray Hooray It’s a Halo Halo Day!

A sundog in the morning……and a halo in the afternoon.
Followed by buckets of rain.
Admin1 is rereading Cut Short by Leigh Russell. Admin2 is reading The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard, a gripping novel in which the perpetrator of a string of unsolved murders is reading a true-crime book written by a survivor of his depredations.

Mushroom Cloud

Ooh er! Saw this shape in the sky and couldn’t resist.
Admin1 is reading Survivor’s Guilt by Michael Wood, in which enough tears are shed to float the Titanic. An awful book, a histrionic soap opera with a terrible plot.
Admin2 is reading You Don’t Know Me by Imran Mahmood, a convincing piece of cultural appropriation from a fifty-something Pakistani barrister writing in the first-person voice of a London teenager of Nigerian descent.
Despite the clouds and rain and sudden burst of hail it was the sunniest day of the years so far: 8.449kWh

After the Flood

A day without a storm when there was enough rain for a couple of rainbows and the solar panels served up >2kWh for the first time this year.
And it’s Twosday: 22/2/22 and it’s 22.22 too.
Admin2 is reading The Good Doctor by Damon Galgut; a gloomy book about a failing hospital in the South African bundu; no wonder it was on the Booker shortlist.

Storm Franklin

Oh no, not another one!
It was a dark and stormy night and the morning saw broken branches everywhere and two trees up the road felled. Our sheltered weather station recorded a gust of 34 mph (there might have been worse ones — it is only working intermittently) and we are well on track for our rainiest month ever.
The wind died away and Orion shone down on us. Our family meal was a magnificent cheese pithivier and we scored a sad 8.5 on the GSQ.
Admin2 is reading Snap by Belinda Bauer, a light read about a thieving orphan searching for his mother’s murderer.

Hockney and Mockney

Admin2 has been appreciating the iPad drawings in David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020 (thx Admin1). Like Admin2, he also saw the same things over and over, and he also observed the sun projected by a pinhole camera of leaves. Today, for the first time this year, the solar panels generated over a kilowatt hour.
Admin1 is reading Body Breaker by MW Craven.

Clouds of the Day: Radiatus

This is a photo disguised as a chalk drawing. I’m grateful to David Hockney for pointing out that the Old Masters were also working from photos (using mirrors, lenses, camerae obscurae and the like; just not film or CCDs).
Admin1 is reading White Corridor by Christopher Fowler. Admin2 is reading Dead Ground by MW Craven.

Ghost Town

Distant skyscrapers dematerialising in the fog. Despite the mist and fog all day, the solar panels produced more energy than yesterday with its constant dazzling sunshine.
Admin1 is reading Dead Ground by MW Craven. Admin2 was reading The Incendium Plot by AD Swanston but gave up halfway through because it was boring and unpleasant. Radcliff is an Elizabethan lawyer with a bent finger but he ain’t no Shardlake, bro.
We scored 9.5 on the GSQ, which was not too bad considering.

More Morning Light

Apparently dawns are more impressive than sunsets because we view them with rested, dark-adapted eyes in clear air. And because we see the sunsets through telephone wires and rooftops. The other side of the sky, though, featured a rainbow without any rain.
Admin1 is rereading London Bridge Is Falling Down by Christopher Fowler. Admin2 is reading The Heron’s Cry by Ann Cleeves.

Good Morning

Same old view of the sun coming up through the back window. The sky was full of flocks of birds which flew away before they could be photographed.
We had roast lamb followed by two kinds of carrot cake and a banana cake for our New Year family meal and scored 11 on the GSQ. Now is the time to tot up our average score for the past year, which was … badum tish … 11.73921568: our best ever, cf last year and all the years before.
Admin1 is reading The Heron’s Cry by Ann Cleeves (thx Admin2). Admin2 is reading The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star by Vaseem Khan. Gotta get those books back to the library soon.